hankyoreh

Blue House Office of National Security director Chung Eui-yong meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang on Mar. 5. (provided by Blue House)

As the dialogue phase that began during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics continues with the upcoming inter-Korean summit and the North Korea-US summit, more than half of respondents in a recent public opinion poll felt that North Korea’s attitude has changed.

The poll, which was carried out by Gallup Korea from Mar. 13 to 15 on 1,003 adults around South Korea, had a sample error of ±3.15 percentage points and a reliability level of 95%. When respondents in the poll, which was published on Mar. 16, were asked about North Korea’s attitude, 53% said it had changed and 34% said it had not. That was nearly double the percentage (28%) of respondents who thought that North Korea had changed when Gallup carried out a poll between Jan. 2 and 4, immediately after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un expressed his desire to engage in inter-Korean dialogue during his New Year’s address.

There was also a change of attitude about the prospects of North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons. During the January poll, 90% of respondents said that the North will not give up its nuclear weapons, but the percentage in this poll was 64%, a 26-point drop over the past two months. In contrast, the percentage who think that the North will give up its nuclear weapons rose 16 points, from 6% in January to 22% in this poll. The percentage of respondents who thought that North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons hovered between 7% and 11% in three Gallup polls in 2014.

The results of this poll represent a dramatic change, compared with the steady growth of negative sentiment toward North Korea since last year. This appears to reflect national hopes for peace that have been kindled by the rapid progress in inter-Korean dialogue during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and the approach of an inter-Korean summit and a North Korea-US summit aimed at achieving denuclearization.

In surveys of attitudes toward unification carried out every year since 2007 by the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University (consisting of interviews with 1,200 adults), the percentage of respondents who think that “North Korea is changing” has steadily declined since 2008, while the response that it is not changing has been on the rise. During last year’s survey (conducted between July 3 and 28), 68.0% of respondents thought that North Korea is not changing, compared to 31.9% who think it is.

“The announcements of the inter-Korean summit and the North Korea-US summit seem to have prompted South Koreans to take the optimistic view that a directional shift is occurring from war to peace,” said Jung Keun-sik, director of the institute, when asked about the change in South Koreans’ attitude toward the North.

This shift in public opinion has also affected the likeability of the leaders of Korea’s neighbors. When Gallup asked respondents whether they liked five neighboring leaders, the top-ranked leader, at 24%, was US President Donald Trump, who agreed to hold a summit with North Korea. Trump was followed by Chinese President Xi Jinping (19%), Russian President Vladimir Putin (13%), North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (10%) and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (5%). In a poll in Nov. 2017, the ranking was Xi (29%), Trump (25%), Putin (14%) and Abe (6%). The question about Kim was left out of that poll.

“Kim Jong-un’s likeability remains low. But none of the respondents objected to the fact that we were asking about Kim’s likeability as they did in 2013. The mood appears to be quite different from five years ago,” Gallup said.

In this poll, 74% of respondents gave a positive job assessment to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, which was three points higher than the poll in the previous week, carried out on Mar. 6 to 8.

By Lee Seung-jun, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]