South Korean president Moon Jae-in’s decision not to join other American allies in a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics came as no surprise.

Moon has been courting China’s support of his proposed declaration of peace with North Korea, which he hopes to finalize in the next five months before he leaves office. He had hoped to use the Olympics as a venue for the relevant countries to meet and build support for the declaration. That will not be a possibility now, without U.S. officials present. North Korea had already been banned by the Olympic Committee as punishment for its refusal to take part in the Tokyo Olympics. 

But Moon still finds benefits in having his country take part fully.

“We have not been asked by the U.S., or any other country regarding a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics, and the South Korean government is not considering one either,” Moon said.

He also singled out China’s importance to Korea’s economy: “Relations with China are very important on the economic front. Another factor is that South Korea requires China’s constructive efforts for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and for North Korea’s denuclearization.”

Even if the Olympic Games cannot serve Moon’s original goal of building momentum for the peace declaration—much as the 2018 Pyeongchang Games did for the series of South-North meetings that followed—sending South Korean representatives helps maintain China’s active engagement.

“I don’t think South Korea is likely to boycott because of the possibility that China holds the option to pull support on the peace agreement,” Daniel Rice, a senior editor at Foreign Brief, told me before the decision was announced. He did say that a peace declaration would be in China’s strategic interests in any case. “If they can pressure off of Kim and lower the risk of any radical action, it’s a win.”

China has previously used informal sanctions to punish countries for going against China’s interests. In 2016, China limited flights to Korea and waged a regulatory war against South Korean retail group Lotte’s operations in China in response to Korea’s plan to place the THAAD missile defense system on Korean territory. Moon made an agreement with China to limit future placements of American missile defense systems upon his 2017 inauguration and ended most of the sanctions.

Liu Xiaoming, China’s Special Representative on Korean Peninsula Affairs, tweeted that the countries that boycott the Olympics will “pay a price for their erroneous moves.” The Chinese state-run Global Times news outlet published a long article criticizing the U.S. for boycotting, which cited a Seoul Sinmun editorial against the boycott.

The Seoul Sinmun editorial, published December 7, said, “Although the Biden administration values alliances, the harsh reality is that South Korea’s national interests cannot be 100 percent aligned with the United States.”

“It is not desirable for us to have Northeast Asia to be drawn into the frame of a new cold war and be forced to pick a side due to the American decision,” the article continued. 

South Korea has resisted U.S. pressure to take harder stances against China on a number of issues. They have refused to join the “Clean Network” and ban Huawei from their telecom networks. In 2021, China was Korea’s number one trade partner for both exports and imports, accounting for over twenty percent of each, Korean government data shows. The United States is Korea’s second-leading trade partner, accounting for fifteen percent of Korea’s export value.

Moon’s decision not to boycott puts him on the wrong side of Korean public opinion. According to a poll conducted by Korea Society Opinion Institute, 50.9 percent of Korean adults believed Korea should join the boycott, while 33.1 percent did not. Support for a boycott is highest among supporters of the opposition People Power Party, at 72.1 percent, while only 36.9 percent of Moon’s own Democratic Party voters support a boycott.

Mitchell Blatt is a former editorial assistant at the National Interest. He is based in Korea where he covers foreign policy, Korean politics, elections, and culture. He has been published in USA Today, The South China Morning Post, The Daily Beast, The Korea Times, and Silkwinds magazine, among other outlets. Follow him on Facebook at @MitchBlattWriter.

Image: Reuters