A question for native English speakers

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Today we watched a documentary about North Korea and a friend of mine and me started debating about the following sentence. The sentence isn't accurately quoted, 'cause i can't remember it, but's it's accurate enough.

Scene is about how the reporters are "silently" enforced to salute Kim Il Sung in front of his biggest monument;

...so we pledged to the great leader as any Korean would do.

Basically, his viewpoint is about the sentence being wrong, because he suggests that "as any Korean" implies that the reporters are also Korean. He is saying that this would be correct;

...so we pledged to the great leader like any Korean would do.

Mind you, he is studying languages college and his specialization is Croatian and English, and he's on the final year. My viewpoint is that the first sentence is indeed correct, because it doesn't speak about reporters being Koreans, it speaks about reporters having one similarity with Koreans (eg. the custom to bow down to Sung). For instance;

This aeroplane has tires like any car.

Meaning that aeroplane isn't a car, but the similarity is in the same tires.

Your final verdict?  :)
 
I don't know for sure, but in common Canadian useage both sentences would mean exactly the same thing.

"like and "as" are convergent terms - becomming interchangeable in everyday use.  So the meaning of both sentences, to me, is "...so we pledged to the great leader in the same manner expected of any Korean."

Americans/Aussies/Brits might have different answers though. English has no formal body to rule on "right" and "wrong" useage like French & other languages (e.g. L'academie franciase). Instead, "rules" are drawn from common useage. Since English is spoken by so many nations around the world, word choice tends to vary a GREAT deal.

In the event of a major dispute, most Canadian scholars refer to the Hansard (record of our Parliament) or Oxford Canadian English Dictionary.
 
I would probably have used "like" in that sentence instead of "as," simply to make it clearer.  When I first read the passage, I assumed the reporters were Korean.  That said, I don't think "as" is necessarily improper -- it is an accepted shortening of the phrase, "the same as."  See, e.g., "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
 
I think "any" might be the misleading word. Replace it with "a" and you remove the ambiguity, regardless of whether you use "as" or "like"
 
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