One change I'm beginning to notice since the election of the conservative and pro-American Lee Myung-Bak as president last December: many who oppose the new president, one whatever grounds, incorporate a certain strident anti-Americanism into their discourse. This is logical, as South Korea's relationship with the U.S. is (and has, historically, long been) an emotionally-loaded hot-button on both the left and right.
This is nowhere more visible than the current outcry over something that was supposed to be a routine aspect of moving forward on a free trade agreement with the U.S. that was part of the president's platform: the resumption of imports of American beef. South Korea, like Japan, had placed a ban on American beef imports back in 2003 after the incident where an American cow had been detected with BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), more commonly called mad-cow disease.
Now that the government has moved to remove the import ban, many Koreans are in a panic over the possibility of infected U.S. beef unrestrictedly entering their markets and diets. It hasn't helped that there have recently been other issues with the U.S. beef supply (not directly related to mad-cow but definitely related to broader food-safety concerns), such as the authorities closing down that giant processor in California a few months back when it was discovered the place was allowing clearly sick cattle to proceed to slaughter, in contravention of law.
I'm of two minds regarding the Korean public's hue and cry over mad-cow. On the one hand, I regret that political opposition to the president and his policies, often quite legitimate, is being anchored to an issue with such flimsy scientific foundations as BSE, which is not clearly understood by any scientific community in the world, and given that no incontrovertible case of transmission of "mad-cow" from meat to human has ever been documented in the U.S. (although 3 cases of "new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease" have been found via autopsy – but that's out of a population of 300 million, and it's never been shown that BSE is the only possible source of vCJD).
Nevertheless, I do believe strongly that there are other very strong health and environmental reasons for attempting to reduce consumption and better regulate the world's beef supply – and U.S. beef industry practices are central to this. Factory farming of beef is neither environmentally sound, nor is it sustainable, and, likely, it will eventually be linked to all kinds of currently poorly-documented and little-understood health ills.
For these reasons, I tend to support the South Koreans' protests as being "right action for wrong reasons." Which is pretty common in politics, in general, in my opinion. Burning effigies of American cows – have at it!