Progressives blame Yoon Suk Yeol for North Korea's hostility. But the enmity goes back further.

[A STUDY OF KIM JONG-UN 9]

On the night of Sept. 19, 2018, at the Rungrado 1^st of May Stadium on Rungra Island in Pyongyang, then-President Moon Jae-in stood before 150,000 cheering North Koreans.

After watching a mass games performance, Moon took the stage at the introduction of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. His face was flushed with emotion. A smile spread across his face, reflecting both the elation of having personally steered the Korean Peninsula to what appeared to be the pinnacle of peace and the optimism that accompanied it.

Moon embraced the deafening cheers reverberating through the enormous stadium. His roughly seven-minute speech was interrupted by applause 12 times.

When he declared, "Kim Jong-un and I have pledged to make our beautiful land, from Mount Paektu to Mount Halla, a permanent home of peace free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threats, and pass it on to future generations," the stadium once again erupted in thunderous applause.

That night, North and South Korea appeared united, and Moon's dream seemed on the verge of becoming reality.

But the cheers of that day turned into insults just 11 months later.

"It is enough to make even a boiled cow's head burst into laughter."

This statement, made in August 2019 by a spokesperson for North Korea's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, a state agency that aimed to promote reunification, stunned both the Moon administration and the South Korean public. The statement went on to deride Moon as a "shameless person" and someone who was "laughable beyond measure."

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A day earlier, Moon had promoted the idea of a "peace economy" in his Liberation Day speech on Aug. 15. Pyongyang responded by mocking him, using South Korea-U.S. joint military exercises as a pretext. As a prolonged period of strained inter-Korean relations followed, the phrase "boiled cow's head" became an enduring label attached to assessments of the Moon administration's North Korea policy.

In retrospect, the episode also served as a chilling foreshadowing of Kim’s doctrine of severing ties with South Korea and redefining it as an enemy.

A hostile turn 

Some in South Korea's progressive camp argue that the hardline North Korea policy of the subsequent Yoon Suk Yeol administration laid the groundwork for Pyongyang's "hostile two-state" doctrine.

One typical view, articulated by Jeong Tae-heung, head of policy at a research institute affiliated with South Korea's left wing Progressive Party, is that "the United States has been strengthening its New Cold War strategy, and the Yoon administration followed suit by intensifying hostile policies toward North Korea," and that this "became the direct cause of North Korea's declaration of a hostile two-state relationship and the resulting escalation of war risks."

Given that Kim first unveiled the hostile two-state doctrine at a Workers' Party plenary meeting at the end of 2023 and that inter-Korean tensions remained elevated throughout the Yoon administration, the argument appears persuasive.

But was Kim's declaration of a "struggle against the enemy" really nothing more than a passive response to policy changes in Seoul?

Big data tells a very different story.

Language data showed that the watershed moment in the breakdown of inter-Korean relations occurred not under the Yoon administration, but during the Moon administration.

There was also a reason Kim later doubled down on the enmity, even after the inauguration of the current Lee Jae Myung administration, by declaring that South Korea was "the most hostile state" and by expressing a sense of betrayal in rhetoric suggesting that it made little difference whether Seoul was governed by — in the words of Kim’s powerful sister, Kim Yo-jong — those "claiming to be democrats" or those "wearing the mask of conservatives.

The turning point

To identify the precise turning point in Kim's South Korea policy, the JoongAng Ilbo analyzed a decade's worth of Rodong Sinmun content. As the ruling Workers' Party's official newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun is aimed primarily at the domestic audience.

In cooperation with Speechlog, an AI-based big data analytics firm, the newspaper conducted a comprehensive review of all 137,513 Rodong Sinmun articles published between January 2016 and January this year, encompassing roughly 18 million text entries.

The researchers divided the period into four phases. The first phase, spanning 2016 to 2017, was characterized by North Korea's singular focus on advancing its nuclear weapons program. The second phase, from 2018 to February 2019, coincided with a period of summit diplomacy involving North Korea, South Korea and the United States. The third phase, extending from the collapse of the Hanoi summit in February 2019 through 2022, was shaped by the breakdown in negotiations and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The fourth phase, covering 2023 to January 2026, saw North Korea's strategic importance rise rapidly as its ties with Russia deepened.

An examination of key symbolic terms showed that Pyongyang's effort to cut South Korea out began with the collapse of the February 2019 Hanoi summit.

Terms that had underpinned Kim's conciliatory approach during Phase 2 — including "peace and prosperity" (19 instances), "improvement of North-South relations" (14), "reconciliation" (14) and "exchange" (11) — disappeared entirely from the newspaper in Phase 3 following the Hanoi breakdown.

Even the formal title "President Moon Jae-in," which had appeared 18 times during Phase 2, vanished completely after Hanoi and was never used again.

The shift reflected North Korea's decision to channel the humiliation of Hanoi into anger toward South Korea.

Phase 3 was a period in which Pyongyang shut itself off from the outside world under slogans such as "self-reliance" and a "frontal breakthrough." Once the narrative of diplomatic success collapsed, Kim redefined South Korea from a negotiating partner into an object of hostility.

In that sense, the seeds of the hostile two-state doctrine formally declared in 2023 had already been planted in Hanoi years earlier.

A comparison of language patterns between Phase 2, when summit diplomacy was at its height, and Phase 3, when the shock of the breakdown set in, showed that Kim's discourse underwent "a rapid decline in references to external engagement and a sharp increase in messages focused on domestic governance and mobilizing the public."

Statistical indicators captured a dramatic shift in North Korea's policy toward South Korea from cooperation to animosity.

During the same period, the prevalence of words that had traditionally underpinned North Korea's rhetoric of ethnic unity also collapsed.

The share of the word "nation” in North Korea's overall text output plunged from 0.358 percent to 0.053 percent after the Hanoi summit — a sevenfold decline. In raw frequency terms, the word appeared 114 times during Phase 2 but only 38 times during Phase 3.

The word "reunification" also fell sharply, dropping from 54 appearances in Phase 2 to just 10 in Phase 3.

The terms that virtually disappeared were "fellow Koreans" and "North-South relations." Both words appeared frequently during Phase 2 — 59 and 43 times, respectively — but were used only once each throughout the entirety of Phase 3.

The fact that their share of overall coverage effectively converged toward zero suggests they had become taboo expressions that the Workers' Party no longer used when addressing the North Korean public.

The findings indicate that after the humiliation of Hanoi, Kim deliberately began erasing the ethnic-nationalist framework inherited from previous generations of leadership as he redirected the regime toward self-reliance and survival.

In other words, the very way Pyongyang viewed inter-Korean relations had begun to change fundamentally.

The shift in language directed at Moon personally was even more dramatic.

An analysis of reports mentioning Moon, measured against the frequency of hostile and conciliatory language, found that during Phase 2, when dialogue was underway, 75 percent of such reports reflected a conciliatory tone, compared with 16.7 percent hostile and 8.3 percent neutral.

Following the Hanoi collapse, however, North Korea not only dropped Moon's presidential title but also became extremely reluctant to mention him at all.

A disappearance of conciliatory language

Across the entirety of Phase 3, Moon was mentioned in only three reports. Of those, one was hostile, one conciliatory and one neutral.

Particularly noteworthy is the lone conciliatory report that appeared around the first anniversary of the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Reunification of the Korean Peninsula in April 2019.

The article suggests that between the collapse of the Hanoi summit in February of the same year and the trilateral meeting among the leaders of North Korea, South Korea and the United States at Panmunjom in June, Kim still held a faint hope that the situation could be reversed.

But when the Panmunjom meeting also ended without meaningful results, that final hope turned into yet another humiliation.

The vacuum left by the disappearance of conciliatory language was filled just two months later by the blunt insult that "even a boiled cow's head would burst into laughter."

Kim's growing inward focus was also evident in the language of governance.

During Phase 3 — North Korea's period of self-imposed isolation — the Rodong Sinmun saw an explosive increase in language emphasizing organizational mobilization and discipline.

The term "party cell secretary," referring to a grassroots Workers' Party organization and previously absent from coverage, appeared 232 times. References to "Comrade General Secretary " surged from five to 590, while mentions of the "party" rose from 274 to 975 and "revolution" from 100 to 362.

The sharp increase in such language was not merely a matter of propaganda slogans. It formed part of Kim's ideological defense campaign.

Indeed, North Korea enacted the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law in 2020 and the Youth Education Guarantee Act in 2021, effectively placing legal barriers against the spread of South Korean culture.

These legal measures closely mirrored the trend toward organizational reinforcement identified in the big data analysis.

BY YOON JI-WON [[email protected]]