Koreans, my own people, are probably the world champions at being more Catholic than the Pope (not quite in the literal sense – only around 10 per cent of them are Catholics).
Korea is not exactly a small country.
The combined population of North and South Koreas, which for nearly a millennium until 1945 used to be one country, is about 70 million today.
But it happens to be bang in the middle of a zone where the interests of the giants – China, Japan, Russia and the US – clash.
So we have become very adept at adopting the ideology of one of the big boys and being more orthodox about it than he is.
When we do communism (up in North Korea), we are more communist than the Russians.
When we practised Japanese-style state capitalism (in the South) between the 1960s and the 1980s, we were more state-capitalist than the Japanese.
Now that we have switched over to US-style capitalism, we lecture the Americans on the virtues of free trade and shame them by deregulating financial and labour markets left, right and centre.