Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (18 page)

4
. In a speech on June 30, 1984, entitled, “Building a Socialism with a Specifically Chinese Character,” Deng Xiaoping defined it as “a socialism that is tailored to Chinese conditions and has a specifically Chinese character.” Deng was
sketching
out an economic system that adhered to Marxism and would focus on developing what he called the “productive forces” in China. It would be a socialism that was adapted to the specific historical conditions and strategic needs of the Chinese people. Government policies would expand the economy through the incorporation of some market principles to offer a unique strain of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” An English translation of the speech can be found at
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/dengxp/vol3/text/c1220.html
(Deng 1984). A definition of the concept is also available from the Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party held in 2007 under “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” on the
People’s Daily Online
site at
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90002/92169/92211/6275043.html
.

5
. The streets of Beijing are indeed a continuous spectacle, and this is most apparent in this high-tech district, otherwise known as “China’s Silicon Valley.” The area has recently filled with metal and glass high-rises that house international software companies, high-tech businesses, and one of the most famous English language training centers in China. There are several multilevel plazas selling electronics and high-tech gadgets. The streets are lined with advertisements, and a new underground and pedestrian mall opened in the beginning of 2007. Down the wide avenue are two of China’s most prestigious academic institutions, Beijing University and Tsinghua University. This is a bustling district with a constant traffic of cars and pedestrians.

6
. Some of the booklets sold by bigger hospitals actually contain advertisements for pharmaceuticals on the front and back cover and inside the booklet itself.

7
. Anhui is one of the poorer rural provinces, where the sale of blood to unsanitary collectors led to the spread of the HIV virus. The government distribution of HIV medication has been haphazard due to the poor medical and bureaucratic infrastructures. Rural clinics provide only basic primary care and mostly serve as a dispensary for medicines. The boy’s mother told me that she distrusted the medical practitioners at the rural clinics after her son was diagnosed with leukemia. Rural families with financial resources travel to the closest urban hospital that can provide diagnosis and treatment for more serious diseases. See Adams, Erwin, and Le 2009; Anagnost 2006; Erwin 2006; Gao 2005; Li Dun 2004; Shao 2006; and Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan 2005 for discussions of the vulnerability of the medical system and compromised safety of the blood supply in hospitals.

8
. I am uncertain if the mother was referring to enrollment in a pilot community-based health insurance program, which would have been introduced around the time he was diagnosed, or a commercial insurance plan available through the school. The parents did not share these details with me. Currently, the medical insurance system remains a patchwork system where citizens can purchase private insurance to supplement a range of government coverage depending on household registration status.

9
. Media reports highlight the criminal activities of indigents and warn citizens to not encourage their solicitations on the streets. Warned to be wary, urban citizens are suspicious of any sort of appeals.

10
. See Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler 2005, for a history of family planning policies, including the one-child policy.

11
. See Hoffman 2006. Under the early socialist system, university graduates were assigned jobs on graduation. Students must now enter the labor market, and this entails the acquisition of a new skill set of “professionalism” that follows a neo-liberal prescription for self-development.

12
. Chengcheng’s blog can be found at
http://blog.sina.com.cn/dongpengchengxzs
.

13
. See the story at
http://finance.cctv.com/special/C19961/20071127/107110.shtml
; retrieved on December 26, 2007.

14
. The story did not specify as to the specific level of government office making this promise. It was likely to be local government, but whether they received funding from higher levels for this purpose is not mentioned.

15
.
Responsibilization
is a neologism that refers to a repertoire of programs and logics that espouses self-management, self-discipline, and increasing levels of individual responsibility in all matters of life as the government rolls back social welfare provisions. It is part of a neoliberal guiding principle to actively encourage individuals to be more involved in self-government through “the generalization of an ‘enterprise form’ to
all
forms of conduct” serving to redefine the role of government as one of securing the grounds for the rational, free individual to conduct the business of life (Burchell 1996). For further discussion of neoliberal notions of individual autonomy as a technique of government in advanced industrial Western societies, see Foucault 1988; Gordon 1991; and Miller and Rose 1990.

16
. The programming contains cooking tips, household cleaning advice, fashion advice, and purchasing advice for a myriad of commodities. The mission statement of the channel is:

2007 BTV Life Channel pays close attention to the people’s clothing, food, shelter, and travels, wholeheartedly serving as the people’s life consultant. Guiding on fashionable trends, elevating consumption tastes; life everywhere is wonderful, there is no place without entertainment; spreading the concept of public good, shouting out compassionate contribution, adhering to carry forward a compassionate spirit, promoting compassionate causes. We understand life, we happily serve, life channel, making life more beautiful. 2007, love life, love life channel.

See
www.btv.com.cn/btvweb/07btv7/node_2750.htm
.

17
. See Yan 2003. She borrows this phrase from Spivak 1988.

18
. The term
harmonious society
(
hexie shehui
) refers to policy guidelines endorsed by President Hu Jintao in 2006 for the establishment of a harmonious socialist
society by 2020. Issues such as rural infrastructure, health care, housing, education, employment, the environment, the urban–rural wealth gap, corruption, and legal reform are included in an agenda to address the growing social disparities, unfair land seizures for property development, and environmental degradation. This focus on socially sustainable growth comes after decades of intense economic development since the late 1970s. An English translation of the full text of the Communiqué of the Sixth Plenum of the Sixteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (2006) can be found at
www.chinese-embassy.org.uk/eng//zyxw/t279526.htm
.

19
. The refusal of international aid as an assertion of sovereignty may be clarified by Peter Redfield’s analysis of the political dilemmas of such work. Humanitarian aid organizations like Médecins san frontières operate in a state of “rupture” precipitated by natural and political disasters. “Their ethical position centers around an ‘ethic of refusal’ that resists the cleansing of moral failure on any part” (Redfield 2005: 336). According to Redfield, this tense stance reflects the group’s attempt to reach some accommodation between their humanitarian mission and their practice of political witnessing and action.

20
. I first encountered this analogy to asthma in Leehey 2010, where she uses Václav Havel’s mention of his friend with asthma to speak about the oppressive condition of censorship under the military dictatorship in Burma (Myanmar).

Chapter
Four

On Their Own

Becoming Cosmopolitan Subjects beyond College in South Korea

NANCY ABELMANN, SO JIN PARK, AND HYUNHEE KIM

We met Heejin, a student at Koryŏ University, one of South Korea’s top-tier private schools, in the summer of 2003 and again in summer 2004. Every time we met she sported a baseball cap and sweats. We were struck by her boyish voice, androgynous look, unselfconscious mannerisms, spontaneous laughter, and high energy. Heejin compared her carefree style with that of her best friend in high school who ended up at a women’s college and had transformed herself into a stylish and feminine woman who spent lots of money on shopping and body care. Heejin sketched a contrast between her friend’s narrow college life focused on consumption and her own more gregarious, masculine, and vital mode of being. Strolling with her across campus revealed her popularity and her social ease. Conversations shed light on her cosmopolitan interests in being comfortable in the world at large.

As a graduate of a special-purpose high school (with a focus on foreign languages), Heejin was upset that South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun had threatened—in the name of equality of opportunity—to repeal the policy of assigning extra points on the entrance exam to graduates of these competitive schools.
1
Heejin called it “a policy to undermine students with high standards” and spoke of her entitlement: “I worked twice as hard as others to enter that school and twice as hard to stay there.” For Heejin, successful entrance to Koryŏ University had particular meaning because her squarely
middle-class
parents had insisted that if she could not enter a top-tier coeducational college then she should attend a top-rated women’s school.
2
She had, thus, succeeded in avoiding a feminized space.

In 2003, we walked away from our meeting with Heejin with one phrase still ringing: “self-management” (
chagi kwalli
). We had been surprised to hear the phrase used so directly and to hear so many other students offering similar narratives of what it takes to succeed in a transformed South Korea. In this chapter we argue that college students inhabit new discourses of human development in the context of South Korea’s neoliberal turn and globalization. In addition to Heejin, we introduce three others from mid-tier colleges. While all four of these students aspire to and accept the burden of managing their personal formation for a changing world, we argue that the burden of self-development is borne variously, according to differences in the “brand capital” of the students’ universities, gender, and family background.

Contemporary college students in South Korea are envisioning human development, particularly their own maturation, in ways that are dramatically transformed in a time of globalization. These newly emerging subjectivities highlight personal ability, style, and responsibility and work to obscure escalating structural inequality in South Korea, reflecting neoliberal trends in South Korea and in the larger world. Although inequalities have long been framed in South Korea by discourses of personal effort and triumph over personal circumstances, what is new are ideas of self-styling beyond formal schooling and notions of personal character formation that extend beyond long-standing South Korean measures of effort and hard work. More specifically, the emergence of this shift must be understood in the temporal context of South Korea’s postauthoritarian liberalization (that is, the call for personal freedoms) and its IMF-era neoliberalization. These emergent subjectivities and structural inequality must be viewed through the lens of South Korea’s highly stratified higher education system in which college ranking is significantly correlated with real returns on educational capital (Seth 2002). Although education stratification is long-standing in South Korea, the rapid embrace of neoliberal restructuring and globalization by the education sector has accentuated differences in the brand capital of universities.
3
Central to that brand capital is globalization itself, namely universities’ differential ability to go global (for example, through opportunities
to
study abroad or English-language courses). Although students attending South Korea’s upper-tier colleges benefit from the prestige of their universities, those at lower-tier schools feel the burden of taking on the project of developing their human capital value on their own. However, this burden is borne in ways that are notably inflected by gender. Our research demonstrates that the feminine is imagined to be domestic (in both senses of that word): limited and limiting in direct contrast with masculine images of free circulation on a global stage.
4

We use neoliberal subjectivity to index personal characteristics and proclivities that embrace the pursuit of active, vital, and cosmopolitan lives. This constellation of attributes as neoliberal agrees with many scholars who argue that changed economic and political formations across the globe have led to powerful changes in ideas about desirable or required ways of being. More specifically, this literature examines the articulation of personal formation with, for example, the flexibilization of labor, the demise of job security, and the retrenchment of both state and corporate support for social welfare. For South Korea, these personal features distinguish this generation from earlier generations of college students. Today’s college students are committed to becoming vital—people who lead active and enjoyable lives, people who live hard and play hard and who aim to experience the world to its fullest. Students are aware, however, that these are more than just matters of style and pleasure. They realize that this new mode of being is a requirement for leading a productive life in a rapidly transforming and globalizing world. A feature of this discourse on human development is its explicit understanding of what it takes to succeed in the contemporary economy. That the
work
of embracing these new ideals can be onerous is, therefore, not unrecognized by students. At the time of our research, we noted a shared optimism among our interlocutors in their willingness to embrace this developmental narrative. In hindsight, some of this optimism may be waning as employment prospects grow ever bleaker and South Korea enters into an era of global fatigue, in which the call for the global has perhaps become so saturated as to lose all meaning.