Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (44 page)

16
. See “Danseishi, OL Manga Pawā Zenkai, Honpōsani Kassai” (Male Magazines, OL Manga Full Power, Applause to the Wildness),
Nihon Keizai Shinbun, Yūkan
, May 13, 1996, p. 13; see also “Kore ga Osusume ‘Oshigoto Manga’—‘Shomuni’ no Sakusha ga Kataru” (Workplace Manga That We Recommend: Interview with the Author of “Shomuni,” Yasuda Hiroyuki), in
Josei Jishin
, November 24, 1998, p. 151.

17
. Interview with Takahashi Rumi, April 27, 2003, Tokyo, Japan.

18
. See for example: “98nen Ninkisha Rankingu TOP 50 ‘GTO’ Sorimachi & ‘Shomuni’ Esumi, Nidai Outlaw no Kyōtsūten?” [Top 50 Popularity Ranking in 1998: GTO’s Sorimachi and Shomuni’s Esumi: Commonalties Between the Two Outlaws], in
Nikkei Entāteinmento
, January 1999, pp. 48–49.

19
. Yasuda, the author of the original
manga
, had no experience working in the corporate world; thus the original portrays the company as a space of ultimate absurdity where the characters are all unfit losers and only luck prevents the company from drifting to the brink of bankruptcy.

20
.
http://web-japan.org/trends98/honbun/ntj980911.html
; accessed on January 15, 2011. Web Japan is sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). It aims to provide information on Japan in English.

21
.
Individualism
and
difference
were keywords in 1980s marketing, marking a shift from mass consumption to a diversification of consumer demands. A decade later, when individualism was discussed in relation to work, it acquired a new meaning. In the new context, individualism was not simply the opposite of a group-oriented social structure but rather a recognition that individuals could no longer rely on institutional guarantees and social solidarity. For an analogous discussion, see David Harvey’s (2005) description of how a discourse on individualism served Thatcherite economic reforms by dissolving all forms of social solidarity in 1980s Britain.

22
. Arlie Hochschild (1983) argues that women’s caring work in workplace contexts is a form of emotional labor defined as the management of feeling.

23
. Judith Farquhar’s (1999) analysis of the Chinese film
Zhao Le
(Looking for Fun) is instructive here. The film portrays a group of retired men who practice Beijing opera in search of fun. Marginalized from all forms of power in reform China, the retirees struggle to imagine a positive future for themselves in which their new role as guardians of Chinese heritage restores their sense of pride and usefulness.

24
. One of my informants told me that in recent years Chinatsu has become a gay icon. This does not simply illuminate the fluidity of Chinatsu’s gender identity, but it also reveals how struggles for recognition of one’s vision of a meaningful future open redemptive possibilities. It, however, goes beyond the scope of this chapter to elaborate on this discussion.

25
. However, I would like to note that this ideal often remains a political ideology in which opposition to neoliberalism becomes a discursive strategy to define Japanese identity in contrast to a ruthless West.

Chapter
Ten

Governmental Entanglements

The Ambiguities of Progressive Politics in Neoliberal Reform in South Korea

JESOOK SONG

Neoliberalism is a logic that operates through diverse social actors to engineer certain forms of social governing. It is not just an economic system in which state governments and macromonetary institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are the only actors in constructing a “regime of truth” about economic reason (Foucault 1976).
1
It also exists at the level of individuals pursuing a certain understanding of how to live their lives. The definition of
neoliberalism
that I am using in this chapter is therefore double sided. On the one hand I am referring to a liberal ethos of individual notions of freedom to pursue goals and enjoy autonomous lives without collective surveillance, intervention, or dependency on the state (Foucault 1991; Rose 1999). On the other hand, I am referring to state-led initiatives to restructure the South Korean economy, industry, and finance in the wake of the Asian Debt Crisis (1997–2001) and in response to transnational projects pushing for free-market policies and privatization of state services (Harvey 2005).

My particular focus in this chapter is the somewhat paradoxical position experienced by South Korean intellectuals as political actors implicated in this shift in the logic of government. Motivated by the core values of liberal democracies such as freedom, equality, independence, entrepreneurship, and rational decision making, these intellectuals nonetheless found themselves inadvertently participating in neoliberal logics that were shaping policies
with
which they were ideologically at odds. How could a political investment in liberal values and social justice lead to neoliberal policies scaling back government responsibility for vulnerable populations? The implementation of homeless policies during the Asian Debt Crisis reveals the paradoxical working out of neoliberal logics in South Korea.

Neoliberalism is a variant of advanced liberalism in response to existing liberalisms (Hindess 2004). The relationship between neoliberalism and prior liberal regimes is not necessarily oppositional but very likely resuscitating. Although it tends to be more centered on economic and market expansion, it nonetheless builds on the principles of democracy as much as earlier liberalisms. Socially conscious South Korean intellectuals may have helped to reproduce forms of neoliberal social governing by applying liberal ideas as strategies of intervention. Simultaneously occupying a position as state agents and state subjects, these intellectuals as critical thinkers and actors were caught between competing projects of how to govern society and the self after democratization. This fact alone requires me to locate the positions of activist intellectuals in the process of knowledge production. In their taking for granted their progressive and critical stance, they may fail to recognize their complicity as agents of the sort of neoliberal projects of which they might be otherwise critical. In agreeing to take an active role in civil society, they unwittingly enabled the state to download the responsibility for social governance to the civil society sphere and thereby facilitated the rollback of the state’s responsibility for social provision. Producing knowledge without reflecting on one’s own epistemological frameworks and daily practices reifies a dualistic divide between “us” and “them” in an unequal power relationship between oneself and those one studies—between those who see and write and those who are being seen and written about (Hall 1996).

A timeline of recent history demonstrates the complexly layered past that underlies this complex positioning of South Korean intellectuals. During the period from 1960 to 1987, South Korea was ruled by a developmental state under the leadership of a military dictatorship committed to maximizing economic development. This was followed in 1988 by a democratized state established in response to widespread social protest. Retaining a state-planned economy in line with the old military government, this new regime lasted only until 1997 with the establishment of a true liberal democracy in South Korea. The election in 1997 of President Kim Dae Jung, the former leader of the democratization movement (
minjuhwa undong
), was the most
significant
political development since the beginning of the military dictatorship in 1960. South Korean activists who had opposed the military government prior to 1997 now found new forms of political agency, but this time as actors within state government.
2

However, Kim’s presidency marked a new political beginning that was contemporaneous with the Asian Debt Crisis, which hit in 1997 and became the worst economic downturn in South Korea since the Korean War (1950–1953). Along with other Asian countries, such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and Thailand, Korea encountered the crisis as a consequence of an abrupt change in global financial markets. Foreign investors retreated from short-term and unhedged loans, fearing a currency hike after the collapse of assets and property-market bubbles. By signing the Standby Agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on December 3, 1997, as a condition for receiving IMF bailout funds, the South Korean government agreed to restructure its economic, financial, and government management systems along free-market lines. These measures contributed to the bankruptcy of many large companies and banks and led to large-scale unemployment.
3
Although the debt to the IMF was eventually repaid and the crisis was officially announced over in 2001, Kim’s administration and following regimes—the presidencies of Roh Moo Hyun (2003–2008) and Lee Myung Bak (2008–present)—have been responsible for scaling back the costs of government by privatizing public services and transferring financial responsibility from the central government to municipalities but without granting them the fiscal means to pay for them. For example, in 2008 the homeless policy granted welfare benefits to homeless people; however, the fiscal responsibility for providing these benefits was assigned to city-level governments, most of which are not financially capable of providing support, with the exception of the capital city Seoul, making this new entitlement impossible to implement.

The period since democratization in 1987 has therefore seen the formation of a vastly different political landscape in South Korea. South Korean society has shifted from an oppositional mobilization against an oppressive military regime to a society apparently in harmony with the ideals of liberal government. Social movements organized through labor activism against the policies of the national government and the corporations as well as middle-class consumer activism against free-market tyranny no longer obtained wholehearted support from the working poor, despite the negative consequences
that these policies pose for them. For intellectuals, once at the forefront of the political opposition, the liberalized political-cultural mood that followed democratization could be characterized by inertia, lethargy, escapism, and cynicism (Lee 2007). The radical ideals of collective social change have been displaced by the liberal pursuit of individual happiness.
4
Many less advantaged members of the population lost their faith in collective resistance as they saw resistance leaders acquiring the values and material goods symbolic of the capitalist practices these leaders had once claimed to abhor. One example could be found in the bitter experience of laid-off part-time workers of Korea Telecom, Inc., who were betrayed by the full-time workers’ union during the Asian Debt Crisis. Prior to the crisis, both groups of workers were united in their solidarity against company owners and in their opposition to the bourgeois class. However, after successful unionization, resulting in increased wages, many full-time workers were able to aspire to a middle-class lifestyle. With the massive layoffs following the economic crisis, the union ultimately betrayed the part-time workers by supporting only those laid-off workers who had been full-time (Lee 2003).

The magnitude of this shift in political sensibility can perhaps be best conveyed by the following literary passage excerpted from a short story entitled “Human Decency” by Chi-Yŏng Kong:

“
Things around us, things inside us, things that seem trivial—those are the things we’ll tackle first, all right
?” He said this with a smile on his face and a glow in his good-natured eyes. And then he fought those trivial things and went to jail, the sight of him dragged into court, gagged, in white traditional prison garb bringing us to tears . . . and he worked in a factory and married a factory girl with only a middle-school education. And here I was, five years later, going to see this man, a man now quoted as saying, “
There was no use risking one’s life for something trivial
,” a man who had inherited his father’s bus company, who fathered two daughters and then separated from the factory girl with the middle-school education, after which she was committed to a mental hospital.(Kong 1997: 68–69, my emphasis)

These trivial things and their changing value signal a fundamental shift in how one chooses to live one’s life. Collective struggles have given way to more individualized goals. Many one-time political activists had been
chased
by riot police and tortured in detention.
5
They had fought for the rights of laborers and peasants, and some of them had married people less educated and poorer than themselves to demonstrate their political commitment and class solidarity. However, many of them later became office workers or business people pursuing economic security. Having lost their passion for engaging in social movements, some also turned to mainstream politics, keeping company with the older generation of politicians that they had once criticized. Many of those who had married working-class or rural partners during the heyday of their activism later divorced them, finding them no longer compatible. The social, mental, and physical wounds of these castoff spouses illustrated in Kong’s story are therefore emblematic of this shift away from social responsibility toward more private goals.

A Political Landscape of South Korea during the Asian Debt Crisis and the Kim Dae Jung Government

The historical shifts sketched out in the previous section are important for understanding the specific conditions under which neoliberal logics have been shaping policies in the wake of the Asian Debt Crisis. As a response to massive unemployment, the Kim Dae Jung government implemented “productive welfarism,” resulting in a shift from welfare to workfare (Peck and Theodore 2001). This move intensified neoliberal social governing at the level of social policy and public discourse in terms of who would be eligible for government support. For the first time in its history, South Korea launched policies for dealing with the homeless as appropriate citizens of the welfare state; however, only those homeless men who were living on the streets temporarily as a direct consequence of the economic crisis were considered deserving of support. This was premised on the assumption that these men would resume their responsibilities as family breadwinners as soon as their employment situation was redressed (Song 2006; 2009). However, this assumed that the economic crisis was only a temporary aberration of South Korean economic growth. South Korea officially announced the end of the crisis in 2001 when it repaid the foreign debts to international financial institutes; however, as happened in post–economic recession Japan, the goal of lowering the unemployment rates to precrisis levels was nominally
achieved only because of the increase of public works programs and irregular employment.
6