In 1986, two years before Seoul, South Korea, hosted the Summer
Olympics, the filmmaker Kim Dong-won embedded himself with the people of
Sanggye-dong, a neighborhood of rickety, low-lying homes that had found
itself along the relay route of the Olympic torch. The Games were a
wildly ambitious venture for such a poor country, and a fit of
quick-build construction and “beautification” was under way. In
Sanggye-dong, dozens of households faced immediate eviction; the
government sent in men to drag them out. Kim’s short documentary of
their struggle, “The Sanggye-dong Olympics,” depicts the toll of what
the art historian Sohl Lee has called “the nation’s presumed
‘international début.’ ”

The 1988 Games took place in a time of social and political upheaval in
South Korea. Mass protests, especially on college campuses, had recently
forced the military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, to acknowledge the torture
of political prisoners and to allow a direct Presidential election to go
forward. Korean democracy activists, who otherwise considered the
financial cost of the Olympics unconscionable, reluctantly embraced the
Games for their effect on the regime. As a Times editorial from the
era
explained,
“Mr. Chun has cause now to be more reasonable. He desperately seeks
success for the Olympics in his country next year and the legitimacy the
games will confer.”

This month, South Korea will again host an
Olympics.
The nation is very different from what it was thirty years ago, but some
stories remain the same. In the lead-up to these Games—which will be
held in Pyeongchang, eighty miles east of Seoul—Gariwang Mountain, known
for its wild ginseng and old-growth yew, birch, and cherry trees, was
razed and carved out to accommodate a new ski course. When a
fleet of Hyundai bulldozers arrived to begin the work, in 2014,
environmentalists and residents of the area, most of them poor, held
demonstrations against the government of the President at the time, Park
Geun-hye. “In an instant, I lost my home, and got only ninety-two
hundred dollars in compensation,” Koh Chun-rang, a
seventy-seven-year-old resident, told a reporter at the time. Two years
later, Park was impeached, after revelations of widespread corruption in
her Administration provoked mass
protests.
Moon Jae-in, a member of the liberal Democratic Party and a human-rights
attorney, was elected to replace her. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was
elected President of the United States, and entered office as North
Korea accelerated its missile program. A South Korean Olympics was once
again invested with political meaning.

During the opening ceremonies this week, athletes from North and South
Korea will march behind the Unification Flag—a Twitter-blue silhouette
of the peninsula against a white field—and the folk tune “Arirang” will
play from the loudspeakers in place of either country’s national anthem.
Though the two Koreas are still technically at war, they will also
compete as one team in women’s ice hockey. These symbolic gestures are
the result of careful negotiations between the North and the South—the
Olympics were the impetus for the reëstablishment of a cross-border
phone line and bilateral talks after two years of rupture. In the past
few weeks, representatives have begun to broach such topics as family
reunions for those divided by the Thirty-eighth Parallel and a potential
resumption of South Korean tourism to the North. The U.S., meanwhile,
has agreed to delay joint military exercises with South Korea until
the Olympic and Paralympic Games conclude, and North Korea appears
to have refrained from conducting further missile tests.

Even before the recent Olympics talks, Moon was intent on pursuing a
“sunshine” policy with Pyongyang—for domestic and cross-border reasons.
The North Korean threat has long served as a bogeyman in South Korean
politics, enabling conservative South Korean leaders to demonize
opponents as “pro-Communist.” As a mainstream liberal, Moon hopes to
both sever this association and simultaneously assuage the kinds of
voters who’ve burned effigies of Kim Jong Un in Pyeongchang. Thus, while
advocating for a progressive domestic agenda—raising the minimum wage,
increasing child-care credits, and overseeing the investigation of former
politicians and business leaders—and playing nice in direct
communications with the North, Moon continues to abide some aspects of
America’s military-first strategy.

His use of the Olympics to revive communications with the North has
proved surprisingly controversial, however. In recent South Korean
polls, forty-two per cent of respondents objected to the combining of
the countries’ women’s ice-hockey teams, and Moon’s popularity has
fallen among younger voters. All this appeared to catch Moon off guard.
“In forming the joint women’s hockey team, I hoped to improve
South-North relations and promote a ‘peace Olympics,’ ” Moon told
reporters. “But I failed to take the athletes’ perspective into account
beforehand.” Gi-Wook Shin, a scholar of Korean nationalism, at Stanford,
told me that, twenty years ago, most Koreans would have cheered a
unified team. But now, he said, “A lot of people don’t have any
illusions about North Korea. A lot of people now believe that it’s just
a show and North Korea will never change—and that South Korea may be
paying too high a price, giving up the national flag or the national
anthem.” Shin noted that many senior members of Moon’s government were
the young democracy activists who tried to seize upon the 1988 Games.
“They’re thinking from the perspective they had in 1987,” he suggested.

In American press coverage of the “North Korean nuclear crisis,” Seoul’s
interests, if they appear at all, are secondary. Could the ice skaters,
skiers, curlers, and snowboarders on display in Pyeongchang serve to
elevate South Korea’s profile? In the nineteen-seventies, the country’s
strongman autocrat, Park Chung-hee, viewed competitive sports as a
nation-building strategy. According to the sociologist Eunha Koh,
“international sports events played an important role in integrating the
Korean people and advertising the regime’s legitimacy and potential to
the world.” In 1986, Chun Doo-hwan presided over the
Asian Games, in Seoul, a dress rehearsal for the Summer Olympics and a
magnet for much needed global capital. Today, South Korea is no longer a
developing nation, but every year it continues to devote hundreds of
millions of public dollars to élite sports—far in excess of most other
Asian and European states, and not even including the thirteen billion
dollars spent on this month’s Olympics. “Organizing sporting events is a
way to give exposure to the country,” Veerle De Bosscher, a
sports-policy professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, told me. “They
pay a lot of attention to international prestige and national pride.”

This is true, too, for North Korea, which has sent two dozen athletes,
and hundreds of official cheerleaders, to Pyeongchang. In 1989, a year
after boycotting the Seoul Olympics and two years after trying to
sabotage the games by bombing a Korean Air flight, Pyongyang convened
its own international sporting event: the World Festival of Youth and
Students. Twenty-two thousand left-wing idealists from nearly two
hundred countries arrived by boat and plane. Among them was Lim
Su-kyung, a fresh-faced college activist from Seoul who defied the ban
on travel to the North. In a white T-shirt and jeans, she marched alone
in the procession of nations, waving to a crowd of a hundred thousand in
Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium. The Kim regime—then headed by Kim Jong Un’s
grandfather, Kim Il Sung—dubbed her “a symbol of freedom, a flower
of reunification.”