I am curious about current political/economic/social/cultural relations do Korea and Taiwan share? There's obvious similarities between both governments and economic systems. Both enjoy relatively high standard of living as compared to most rest of Asia, and have similar incomes, GDP per capita, etc. Is there any websites or books I can read on this topic?

First i want to tell you that i am going to write at the view of korean as i am korean.

I'm sorry if i make a mistake of English. Plz forgive me.

What i know about the relationship between korea and Taiwan is that,
in the past, they had very strong relationship between each other.

As you know, according to the history of taiwan, they usually don't like Chinese.

we made a political relationship( i don't know the word, sorry) with Taiwanese at the first.

when China asked us to make a political relationship a few years after we made with

Taiwan. As we could see that the china would grow so fast, of course we said "yes".

The president at that time, may know that as soon as we decide to accept the suggestion,

Taiwanese would try to break the political relationship.

That's what happened i think.

As i'm not good at History, please notice that the story i ve written may have a lot of mistakes.



and both of us were used to be the colony of Japan.

They accepted so much culture of Japan which led them to kind of developed country.

so until now, they still like Japanese.

but for us, they were just thieves. What we got after independent was nothing at all but

the destroyed and stolen culture , a lot of dead bodies.



but i think the relationship has been developed very much.
I like Taiwanese~

koreans have no problem with taiwanese people.

but they seem to hate korean people.

When PRC breached the question of normalizing relationship with the ROK, the Taiwanese government was assured by the South Koreans that they would not abandon the Taiwanese. A few months later, ROK normalized relationship with mainland China, and all government relationship with Taiwan was cut off. This is probably the primary reason why relationship between Taiwan and Korean began to sour so quickly in the 90s. Of course, being the offenders, Korean public rarely knows this.

but so did other countries. Taiwanese doesn't have grudges against all those other nations.

Why don't we state the obvious reasons: Rivalry? Jealousies? Who really cares anyway? Koreans have a lot of other problems then to fret over this.

Little bit different in terms of emotions. Taiwan and South Korea shared a common thread of an enemy communist state, divided land, and even an ambition to reunify under our flag. The closure of diplomatic relations was considered traitorous, especially after the South Korean government had assured the Taiwanese that it would not happen. I can kind of understand the special bitterness.

Yeah, I also heard often times that the Taiwanese hate us for betraying them by normalizing relations with the PRC. Before that, ROK and Taiwan were very close ideological allies. A good example is how Syngman Rhee and Chang Kaishek worked together to start off the Anti-Communist League, perhaps the largest civic group in Korea that owns a few powerplants, as a pan-Asian anti-communist civic group.

a lot of it also has to do w/ the manner in which diplomatic ties between the ROK and ROC were broken. as mentioned earlier by other members, the ROK decision to cut diplomatic ties w/ the ROC in 1992 came rather abruptly. the ROC received no prior warnings and was caught off guard by the ROK's sudden decision to switch sides. it was common practice for countries that decided to break ties w/ the ROC to hand over control of our embassies to the PRC. normally, this process would take 10-15days for we needed time to coordinate the evacuation of ROC government personnelles and destroy classified information. however, what the ROK did differently was that they demanded we turn over our embassy one day after their announcement to break diplomatic ties with us.

^maybe it had something to do with PRC influence?

yeah, they simply went along with the CCP's efforts to humiliate the ROC...

During the Korean War, Chiang Kaishek wanted to send his army to help South Korea. Truman (or was it MacArthur?) was afraid that this might make China invade the Taiwanese island, so he prevented Chiang from sending his army.

What's ironic about the bad relationship between S. Korea and Taiwan during the 90s is that now Taiwan does lots of business in China.

Another thing that soured the relationship was that S. Korea prevented a deal between Taiwan and N. Korea. Taiwan wanted to find a place to dump the nuclear wastes. Thus, Taiwan and N. Korea made a business deal in which N. Korea would be paid for keeping the wastes. I don't think Taiwan's image of South Korea improved until the Korean dance group Clon went to Taiwan.

Clon? yeah i remember that duo...tonight is the night , funky music is the night, do u wanna funky music, everybody funky music yadda yadda yadda...aha good times