Unification support falls in South Korea

SEOUL, May 13 (AFP): Ever more South Koreans prefer peaceful co-existence with the nuclear-armed North to reunification of the peninsula, a survey found on Monday.

Despite sharing a common language and ethnicity and centuries of history, North and South Korea have become radically different societies in recent decades.

Ruled with an iron grip by three generations of the Kim family, the North has turned itself into a nuclear power - at the cost of international isolation - while the South has embraced democracy and risen to become the world's 11th-largest economy.

The South's President Moon Jae-in regularly affirms unification as an eventual goal, but the picture in his country is far more nuanced, the survey by Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) showed.