hankyoreh

Police fire water cannons at demonstrators from across a police wall at Gwanghwamun Square in central Seoul

South Korea has a rich history of social protest: the discontent of farmers in late 19th century; anti-imperial uprisings of nationalists and labor activists against Japan and, subsequently, the US Army Military Government of Korea in the first half of the 20th century; the mass labor and democratization movement of the 1980s, and the more recent anti-FTA protests or struggles of irregular and migrant workers under encroaching neoliberalism. Unfortunately, few people abroad are aware of this long and unique tradition of resistance against domination. Instead, the stereotypical image of Korean people that we often encountered when delivering lectures about the contemporary Korean society to the Polish students majoring in Korean Studies has been that of obedient citizens and workers tied up by the Confucian ethics which makes them blindly follow the orders of those in higher rank, be it in the workplace or in politics. The peaceful candlelight vigils were the only incidents of discontent that the students saw as emerging from the Korean society. Similarly, in the broadcast of the most popular audioblog about South Korea in Poland called “Zakorkowani”, the bringing up of the topic of protests in South Korea was accompanied by ironic laughter and all that the hosts were able to come up with were, once again, the candlelight vigils.

This cliché, which portrays Koreans as tame workers and citizens, seems to be reproduced by television dramas that tend to emphasize the humility of ‘normal’ people in the face of the power of chaebol families into which the main characters, dreaming of escaping their precarious lives, typically become miraculously integrated through some unexpected love affairs. There are only occasional instances of resistance portrayed in films such as Cart by Boo Ji-young. Other than that, the Korean society is typically represented as if composed of well-programmed robots who know their place: the pupils and students who are unconditionally accepting the exorbitant educational standards or the employees who are just fine with exploitation and humiliation from their bosses.

Unfortunately, the overall social attitude in South Korea towards protests has shifted in a way that is likely to reinforce rather than challenge such patronizing stereotypes. This shift can be seen when we look at what happened to student activism at one of the country’s top universities. Up until early 2000s, it had been alive and kicking at the Korea University and it culminated in the 2005 protests against the granting of a doctoral degree to the chairman of Samsung, Lee Kun-hee. Importantly, this unrest was as an expression of students’ discontent with the transformation of higher education and the university as an institution in the neoliberal era. This process had begun much earlier than the incident with Samsung‘s chairman and, therefore, the protests should be seen as a response to a long-term policy of running the university like a business in the free market; a trend which only intensified at the time when the protests erupted. This policy included, above all, raising tuition fees to maximize profits and taking a chaebol friendly course aimed at attracting investment in the infrastructure, which not only allowed for cutting the university’s expenditure but, arguably, could also justify further increases in tuition fees, thus generating even more profit. Though beneficial in terms of revenue, this strategy turned out to compromise the educational standards and the good name of one of the country’s most prestigious universities, as the Lee Kun-hee’s case laid bare.

However, the neoliberal university succeeded in squashing the above interpretation of the student protests. Instead, the more militant student protesters were expelled and painted by conservative media in highly negative colours as being linked to the Democratic Labour Party whose objective was to undermine capitalism and democracy in South Korea. Hence, the noble motivations of students to defend the education standards, for which nota bene they were asked to pay horrendously high tuition fees, were portrayed as driven by underlying communist sympathies. Moreover, depicting them as a violent bunch of trouble-makers whose organisation was highly hierarchical made the student movement look not as an exercise of democracy but more like a pro-North Korean group that threatens it.

This dominant interpretation of the protests as well as harsh punishments for the activists - the expulsion which de facto meant excommunication from higher education in South Korea - served as a warning for other students, even those less militant who agreed with the university that some activists went too far in terms of forms of the protest but, nevertheless, supported their causes and would have perhaps continued more peaceful expressions of discontent. Instead of this, protests died off and activism at the university was pacified for good to the extent that ever since candidates for student representatives who were perceived as potential protesters and trouble-makers have never been selected in elections anymore. In this way, more critically inclined students have been marginalized. As a result, the rich tradition of student activism at the Korea University, which goes back to the democratization movement in the 1980s, was defeated and buried by the neoliberal university and conservative discourses supporting it.

University, however, is just a microcosm of what is happening around it in the larger society and neoliberalism has arguably had a negative impact on the protest culture not just in higher education. In his book ‘We support discrimination - the self-portrait of twenty-year-olds who became monsters ’, Oh Chan Ho posits that in neoliberal Korea young people oppose social policies that help disadvantaged groups who face discrimination. In light of academic literature, this can be explained by a notion of a neoliberal ethic which promotes a conception of a person as a scaled down version of a corporation whose success or failure are determined solely by individual skills to self-manage personal assets and liabilities. Such view of a person as a self-authoring social monad arguably makes people prone to perceive social problems in individualistic terms; that is, as signs of failure to exercise self-enterprise and pro-activeness rather than systemic problems of labour markets. According to the arguments of an American sociologist Margaret Somers conveyed in her book ‘Genealogies of Citizenship: Knowledge, Markets, and the Right to Have Rights‘, similar discourse promoted by market fundamentalism in the US has led to the situation where the equal moral worth of individuals is no longer taken for granted but made conditional on their ability to prove the above-described ‘neoliberal habitus’. She illustrates this claim with an analysis of what happened to the people of New Orleans affected by Hurricane Catarina, arguing that these formally US citizens were turned into ‘rightless, stateless, and expandable population deemed unworthy of the mutual recognition due moral equal‘. In a similar fashion, neoliberal discourses in South Korea may be fueling the derogatory speech and aggressive attitudes towards the poor, the weak, the vulnerable, and the minorities that became more prevalent among online communities (e.g. Ilbe). As a consequence, their protests are deemed as unjustified; as a fight not for rights but for privileges.

Without idealizing the West and overlooking the negative portrayals of certain social protests in media as well as the cases of violent pacification of citizens’ or workers‘ rallies, a social protest is something that can be seen as highly attractive from the Western perspective in which it is conceived of as an integral part of a democratic process. Indeed, many countries have attracted positive interest among European researchers, activists, and public in general because of their noteworthy traditions of social protest. For example, there has been a long-lasting trend for European scholars to conduct social research in countries of Latin America or Southern Europe which have been perceived as the hotspots of anti-imperialist resistance and laboratories of progressive politics. Social movements originated in these countries are globally recognizable, attracting Western academics and activists who travel there in search of inspiration to transform their own societies.

South Korea, with its rich history of social movements and anti-imperialist traditions that continue nowadays, could potentially also be a place where much can be learnt from. In particular, the arguably unprecedented among the developed countries struggles of irregular workers in the face of increasing precariousness of lives and a unique repertoire of forms of social protests used by them, which go far beyond the candlelight vigils, could potentially make South Korea an inspiring place for scholars and activists in Western countries where the same pressures and challenges are more and more evident, though still to a lesser degree. While the French protests against new labor laws in June this year attracted worldwide attention and spurred much analysis by journalists, academics, and activists, similar, if not larger, protests in South Korea a few months earlier were barely discussed in Western media, apart from rather brief reports in specialized international online portals.

To change this, our goal should be to reclaim the history of social protests and social movements, and through this acknowledge that they are a part of a healthy functioning of a democracy. To do this, the first step should be to challenge the negative coloring of the word ‘protest’ and a ‘protester’ that prevails in the Korean society. A place to start could be our universities where the future political, civil society, and labor leaders are being formed.

By Paek Soo Gyoung and Radoslaw Polkowski

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

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