Yoon Hee-sook: "Chinese Voting Rights, Not Reciprocity but Foolishness"

"Will You Keep Living as a Sucker to China?"

Former People Power Party lawmaker Yoon Hee-sook criticized the system that grants local election voting rights to foreigners who have held permanent residency for more than three years, calling it "suckerism" rather than the "reciprocity" claimed by some.

On the 27th, Yoon said on SBS's 'Kim Tae-hyun's Political Show,' "We opened (voting rights) during the Roh Moo-hyun administration, and 17 years have passed. We waited for others to follow, but no one did. Reciprocity means if I go first, you follow, but that's not the case," she said.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

The controversy over granting local election voting rights to foreigners arose when Kim Ki-hyun, leader of the People Power Party, announced plans to restrict voting rights for Chinese nationals. The reason was that China does not grant voting rights to Koreans, so granting them only here violates the principle of reciprocity.

Yoon said, "Only a few countries like Sweden and the Netherlands have granted voting rights to all foreigners. But looking at other countries, the US and Japan have not opened it, the UK has granted it to the Commonwealth, and the European Union (EU) has granted it to the EU. We opened it globally without any such conditions. This is suckerism, and now there is a need to reorganize this," she said.

She added, "This is not about taking away voting rights from China, but rather about revoking all foreign voting rights first, amending the election law to revoke them all, and then, like other advanced countries, granting them based on agreements with countries we trust," adding, "Especially with Japan, we should open voting rights to Korean residents in Japan and ourselves through agreements."

In response to the host's question about whether the People Power Party's restriction on Chinese voting rights is riding the wave of anti-China sentiment, she said, "Seeing this issue as a short-term opportunistic move is a very malicious interpretation. How we set our relations with the US, China, and Japan is a very important matter for our long-term destiny."

When the host remarked that "it feels like relations with China have grown distant under the current administration," Yoon responded, "There was an article in today's newspaper about this. From China's perspective, we are people in their hand," adding, "because former President Moon Jae-in came and said, 'You are a big country, we are a small country, but we will share the China Dream together,' didn't he?"

She said, "The China Dream is actually a world before the Opium War where China was at the center and small countries like ours paid tribute on the side," adding, "the moment our president says we will share the China Dream, we become suckers. We need to look inside ourselves and ask whether we will continue to live as suckers to China in the future."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.