Present-day Korea remains divided between the affluent, highly developed, western-oriented South and the poor, communist, isolationist North. According to this March 2007 Radio Free Asia report, school caning is commonplace in the South but unknown in the North.
It may be something of an embarrassment for anti-CP agitators in the West that in Korea it is the hugely successful, democratic "good guys" who have kept the cane, and the risible basket-case "bad guys" who abolished it.
In the South, an ill-prepared attempt was made to ban CP in 1998 but this caused consternation and was quickly revoked. Caning thus remains fully lawful.
70% of South Korean schools use CP, according to this Sep 2003 news report.
In a longstanding cultural tradition, parents ceremonially present their sons' and daughters' teachers with symbolic canes ("the stick of love") at the beginning of the school year, signifying a handing-over of responsibility for the students' discipline to the school, as shown in this May 2006 TV news report.
This June 2002 news item quotes central government rules governing the use of CP. For elementary and middle-school students, the cane is supposed to be up to 1 cm thick and only 50 cm long (which in my view is too short for an effective punishment cane). Elementary students may receive five strokes, middle school students ten.
The maximum number of strokes for high-school students is also ten, but this may be with a cane of 1.5 cm in diameter and 60 cm long (still unusually short by international standards).
Teachers challenged the imposition of these rules and it appears they are not being enforced by the authorities. Not only are bigger sticks used, but some teachers have been seen punching students with fists and hitting them around the head. In my personal view, it is regrettable that the powers-that-be seem to have made little effort to curb this kind of angry brutality, which gives all corporal punishment a bad name.
However, a survey in 2003 found that 70% of middle and high school students thought their teachers' use of corporal punishment was fair, but that it should be limited to severe cases of insubordination.
A more recent survey, reported in this Sep 2006 article, found large majorities of students, teachers and parents supporting CP. Overall, three quarters of respondents were opposed to a complete ban. Nevertheless, the small opposition Democratic Labour Party is actively campaigning for abolition, and the Education Ministry is said to be sympathetic in principle. The picture (right) shows a mock caning demonstration in August 2006 by the Youth Wing of the DLP.
Many Korean fictional films about schools and young people show caning scenes as a matter of course, suggesting that it is accepted as a cultural norm in education. The punishments are usually shown being administered in front of the class, but also sometimes outside the school, in full view of the general public.
Real-life CP episodes are nowadays sometimes captured by pupils on their cellphones, as in these video clips showing punishments of schoolgirls. These, together with some anecdotal evidence, tend to bear out the impression given in the fictional movies.
Mass punishments, in which many students are dealt with together, would appear to be quite common.
Punishment applied to the clothed posterior seems to be most usual, the student typically being required to hold an "all-fours" or "push-up" posture, hands on the floor with backside in the air, rather than bending over in the British tradition. Occasionally, though, he or she is kneeling on the floor or on a chair, or just standing upright facing the wall.
However, caning of the hands, the bare calves, the back, or the soles of the feet is also apparently not unusual, despite the rules mentioned above, which stipulate that boys should be disciplined on their buttocks and girls on their thighs. Sometimes the instrument deployed is more like a thick club or broomstick than anything that could be called a cane in the British sense, again contrary to the rules.
Anecdotal evidence tends to suggest that the caning of girls is not particularly unusual, and that they may even be as likely to be caned as boys, in sharp contrast to most other countries, east or west, where school CP is or was predominantly (and in a few cases, such as Singapore and New Zealand, exclusively) a male phenomenon.
EXTERNAL LINKS: (these will open in a new window) 
The anti-CP campaign GITEACPOC confirms that corporal punishment is lawful in South Korean schools. It also cites a 2005 survey finding that 94% of school students (ages not specified) had experienced some sort of "physical punishment" at school.
Other external links for Korea/School CP
SOUTH KOREA: School CP