Last weekend, I photographed a colorful parade that was held in one of the busiest shopping districts in Seoul. The prevalent mood was calm and friendly and the whole thing felt more like a party or a festival than a call for an end to the largest totalitarian dictatorship in the world.
There was a brass-band, a Chinese waist-drumming troupe and a hundreds, possibly thousands, of people holding banners. There were Koreans, Chinese, and a sprinkling of Westerners in the crowd. There were children in strollers, elderly people who looked to be in their eighties and every age in between. They were celebrating the withdrawal of 125 million people from the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliated organisations.
It was clearly not a patriotic march or an anti-China event. There was no aggression or anger shown. No effigies were burnt and there were no calls for revenge or retribution. In fact, recent South Korea-China tensions such as illegal Chinese fishing were not mentioned at all.
