Reflections | How North and South Korea’s potential reunification recalls China’s divided past

The historic meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea last month has raised hopes for nuclear disarmament, peace in northeast Asia and even the possible reunification of the Korean Peninsula, which has been divided for more than 70 years.

However, the present partition of the peninsula is not the first time that the Korean nation has been divided. For almost a millennium before the 10th century, the Korean people, despite a shared language and culture, were divided into different kingdoms and political entities. Unification came in the early 10th century and Korea existed as a unified state for almost a thousand years until its colonisation by Japan in 1910.

Japan’s brutal occupation of Korea ended with its defeat in 1945, at the end of the second world war, but the subsequent souring of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the ensuring cold war, meant that the peninsula was split into two ideologically incompatible countries along the 38th parallel, a state of affairs that more or less persists to the present day.

Korea’s giant neighbour China has also seen many periods of division over the millennia. A significant period of partition was the 300 years known as the period of the Five Barbarians and Sixteen Kingdoms (AD304-439) and the Northern and Southern Dynasties (AD420-589).