But, since the ’70s, South Korea has transformed itself from a poor autocracy into a first-world democracy that exports cars, electronics, and “Korean Wave” culture around the globe. Over the same period, North Korea has become more repressive, more impoverished, and more insular. Today, the average South Korean is about three inches taller than his Northern peer and speaks a very different form of Korean, expanded by contact with the wider world. While many parents and grandparents in South Korea still have brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, north of the thirty-eighth parallel, for many in their twenties and thirties, North Korea is simply another foreign country.
It remains political suicide in South Korea to bad-mouth unification (the major parties differ over how, not whether, to achieve it). But younger Koreans are increasingly questioning the wisdom of absorbing the bankrupt North. In May, during a trek through South Korea with six other reporters—sponsored by the East-West Center and the Korea Press Foundation—I visited Seoul’s Ewha Womans University, a kind of Korean Wellesley. It was exhibition day, and different clubs were out in full force, with students spinning prize wheels and blasting K-Pop through subwoofers that lined the walkways.
In a classroom inside a building that looked like something out of “Star Trek,” a panel of jean-clad students opened up to us about unification. One young woman said that North Korea and South Korea must unite because they were still “one nation.” Another contended that the two Korean governments should simply recognize each other and turn the 1953 armistice into a peace treaty. “One Korea,” she said, “is a romantic slogan.” Whether they supported unification or not, the students seemed far more preoccupied with the financial pressures ahead: landing a well-paying gig in South Korea’s hyper-competitive job market, so they could afford to live in Seoul and put future kids through after-hours private school, which is now practically de rigueur.
Their peers are similarly divided. A government survey conducted earlier this year found that, while 78 percent of Koreans 40 and older want unification, support drops to 64 percent for those aged 30-39, and 57 percent for the under-30 cohort. And, while 47 percent of those over 60 say they’re “very interested” in the unification issue, only 23 percent of 30-39-year-olds and 9 percent of 19-29-year-olds express similar enthusiasm.
This trend is not lost on South Korean officials. When we visited the Blue House (South Korea’s White House), Chun—the official quoted in WikiLeaks—remarked that younger Koreans have “been living in a divided land their entire lives, so they do not dream about unification every night and they are not ready to die for unification.” Kim Jung-ro, the unification ministry’s director of policy cooperation, told me that the younger generation’s ambivalence about unification was “one of our major concerns.”
The Unification Flag of Korea, which both North and South Korean Olympians will use to represent them in the games.
On Sunday, female  players from  and  joined one another for a training session before the upcoming Winter Olympics. Players from the two Koreas are to compete together as a united team for the events hosted in , South Korea, which are scheduled to start on February 9; Seoul's Unification Ministry said. The cross-border gesture is part of diplomatic efforts to ease tensions on the divided  and the team was approved by the .

The  selected Pyeongchang in 2011 to host the event, marking South Korea's first opportunity since the  in . The earlier event was marred by violence as North Korea had  several months prior, killing over 100 and boycotted the event. Inter-Korean relations have changed considerably in the ensuing thirty years, including the two sending unified teams for table tennis and youth football in other non-Olympic competitions.

The announcement that the two countries would compete together was a stated goal of South Korean President . Last year, he announced the proposal and the two nations went into discussion this month. After two weeks, they made the announcement to field a consolidated 35-strong team of ice hockey players and have joint skiing exercises with both team coaches involved.

According to Yonhap News Agency estimates, about 80% of South Koreans support dialogue, but the move to have a joint team has been controversial. Over 10,000 South Korean citizens sent a petition to South Korean President Moon opposing the union and a group of North Korean  held a protest at the South Korean  on January 24, tearing apart photos of the North Korean leader, . Public support for eventual reunification of the Korean peninsula has waned in recent years, with the younger generation more skeptical of the possibility.