
Which country do you prefer of both: South Korea or Japan?
Which language do you find more appealing and enjoying to learn for you? Which would you like to start with - Korean or japanese?

By Nikolas Busse, journalist at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
If you asked someone a year ago who would be best able to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, many would have guessed the West: North America, Europe, the developed industrial nations. In Germany, in particular, people are used to the fact that major crises only reach us in a greatly mitigated form, if at all. And in the spring of 2020 it looked as if it would have been the same again. Thanks to relatively fewer cases of infection and death, the Germans felt superior to many other countries, especially their neighbours in Europe.
That was hasty. Today, Germany is one of the ten countries with the highest total number of infections and deaths. On the global COVID-19 map, two continents in particular are deep red: America and Europe. Other regions to which we normally only travel with a well-stocked first-aid kit are in a better position. These include above all Africa and Asia, two continents that used to be counted as part of the "Third World". This was to be understood as a pecking order: here the stable West, there the backward emerging and developing countries.
This equation, whose roots go back to colonial times, no longer applies in the pandemic. The COVID-19 epidemic is the first major crisis in which circumstances are reversed. Western societies are struggling with their vulnerability, while things are more under control in the East. Two figures illustrate this. The country hardest hit by COVID-19 is the United States. By Monday, more than 520,000 deaths were recorded there. In Taiwan, located in the immediate vicinity of the outbreak in China, the figure was ten.
In Germany, there is surprisingly little interest in the reasons for this. The discussion usually ends with the statement that a democratic country can learn nothing from the rigid methods used by a dictatorship like China to combat the virus. However, the matter is not quite that simple.
There are probably many factors that influence the spread of COVID-19 around the world. In Africa, for example, a young population seems to have kept the death toll comparatively low. People lived more outdoors and travelled less in the world, is another theory. These are, of course, things that are difficult to replicate in modern societies like Germany's, which are part of the globalised world of work.
The situation is different in parts of Asia. There are developed societies in which people have a lifestyle that is similar to that of the West. Japan even has a population that is a little older than the German population. Nevertheless, in Asia, the most densely populated continent, there is, with a few exceptions, no diffuse infection, but more local outbreaks.
Some people are quick to come up with cultural explanations: people in Asia are more careful or stick to the rules. This is somewhat reminiscent of the old theory of "Asian values", according to which the West is individualistic and hedonistic, while the East is community-oriented and disciplined. But are the Germans not the ones who are considered particularly law-abiding? And can one really lump together all the countries in Asia, which are characterised by very different customs and practices?
One bitter lesson after a year of pandemic: the developing countries are in the West.
Something else is much more striking: Asia relied heavily on digital technology, be it GPS tracking, mobile phone apps, cameras or bank data, to enforce quarantines and track contacts. The use of big data unites countries as diverse as communist China, authoritarian Singapore and the democracies of Taiwan and South Korea.
Hạnh Dương
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