The injunction that “all politics is local” first appeared way back in the 1930s, and it has not gone out of fashion since. In recent days it has been invoked in a column in the Greenwich Sentinel, a splendid-sounding local publication serving “almost 16000 homes and businesses” in an affluent corner of Connecticut, and over at The Villager, which used it to highlight the point that even though Donald Trump may “garner the most headlines these days, it’s our local candidates and officeholders who will likely propel voters to the polls in November.”

In South Korea, the invocation is the same but the content looks somewhat different. Take last week, when a group of thirteen North Koreans (one manager and twelve staff) arrived in Seoul after fleeing en masse from a DPRK restaurant in Ningbo, China.