Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (48 page)

A paradox of the team’s reports and their understanding of their own positioning was, therefore, the conflicting but cohabiting logics of singling out those who most merited “deserving” welfare citizenship (that is, the working poor), while also attempting to diversify this category. This paradox is symptomatic of what happens when former leftist student activists turn into liberal intellectuals. Although they did not fully adopt the official rhetoric of bureaucrats, social policy experts, civil activists, and mass media ideologues, the team members were also agents whose competing discourses and practices produced new subjects as deserving welfare citizenship.

As the ethnographer of this research team, I also participated in the structures of neoliberal governing. No less than other team members, I have a conflicting sense of self-identity and fragmented subjectivity surrounding the knowledge I am producing. June was the member who had worked the longest among us in the Public Work Program. Her despair about the complexity of the team’s situation still strikes me:

I asked you before if there are many people who will read your dissertation after you have completed it. I was thinking then of the problem of limited distribution and consumption for both our reports and dissertation-based books. I thought, if writing reports are fundamentally limited in terms of distribution, we had better not write them. [Interview with June, February 2000]

June
actively made meaning out of this experience in her personal career and feminist activism outside the city office, as did other team members such as Mimi, who joined a venture company in pursuit of going abroad to study NGO management.

We had attempted to apply anthropological knowledge to convey people’s social realities to policy makers more vividly than mere statistics. We learned about the limitations of using this approach as an ad hoc on-the-spot application of theory. Only the long process of dissertation writing helped me to sort out the complexity of the social context we had been working in. Only then was I able to fulfill our expectations of making prolific meaning of the team’s activities in tracing out the competing and fragmented liberal reasonings in this shift in South Korean governmentality. This could not have been accomplished by merely writing reports for immediate administrative impact.

Finally, the team’s activities were not directed at assigning or judging who was “responsible for” or who were “victims of” the acceleration of neoliberal governing in the Asian Debt Crisis. This makes sense if we appreciate it as a cultural production embedded in people’s historical experience, rather than as a set of economic policies realized by some conspiracy of ideologues.

During the 1990s, South Korean intellectuals shifted from a belief that tackling trivial things could be significant to a cynicism that it is “no use risking one’s life for something trivial.” Yet this shift is not clear-cut and remains highly contentious among the fragmented subjectivities of the Public Work Program workers described in this chapter. However, we find how liberal discourses, such as “freedom,” “rights,” “justice,” and “improvement,” are saturated in neoliberal welfare and labor subject formation in South Korea, Japan, and China. When recent South Korean history is remembered as deficient in freedom and in provision of well-being, projects to promote neo-liberal market freedom and welfare reform preempt and co-opt liberal democracy. Just as Japanese
freeter
youth come to desire freedom from life-long employment, ironically job security for this generation is already no longer an option available to them (see
Chapter Seven
by Arai,
Chapter Eight
by Inoue, and
Chapter Nine
by Lukacs in this volume). As Chinese workers are liberated from the socialist structures of the Maoist era, the state still heavily engineers the promotion of self-improvement (see
Chapter One
by Ren and
Chapter Six
by Yan in this volume). The trivial things are actually still key to wrestle with neoliberal hegemonic practices in our daily lives in the name of freedom and rights. In this context, are liberal ideas readily separable from
neoliberalism?
Let us think about the sources of tension and our own complicities in neoliberalism made possible by our own liberal habits of thinking and living.

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Parts of this chapter appeared, in an earlier version, in “The Dilemma of Progressive Intellectuals” in Jesook Song,
South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society
(Duke University Press, 2009).

1
. Of course, I am not arguing that macroinstitutions and state governments are exempt from such critical claims; rather, I wish to push us further by mobilizing analytically powerful paradigms in our daily politics.

2
. See Chen 2010 for a similar history in Taiwan. Those who were political dissents under the KMT joined the new government when the opposition party assumed power in 2000.

3
. The total population of South Korea is about 40 million, and the workforce population was about 10 million prior to the crisis. In one year, 1.5 million workers lost their jobs (U.N. Development Programme [UNDP] 1999: 40). The percentage change in real gross domestic product, or GDP, was
5
percent in 1997 and minus 5.8 percent in 1998. The percentage of population in poverty was 8.5 percent in 1996 and 1997 and 12 percent in 1998. The unemployment rate was 2.5 percent in 1997 and 7.3 percent in 1998, and the percentage of change in real wages between 1998 and 1999 was minus 10 percent (World Bank 2000; UNDP 1999).

4
. This sensibility is not unlike the one that pervades the Japanese education reform described by Andrea Arai (
Chapter 7
in this volume).

5
. The intellectuals who participated in the student movement or in the worker/peasant movement were named in various ways. Hagen Koo labels them “students-turned-workers” (2001: 104–125). Seung Kyung Kim uses a term “disguised workers” (1997: 132). Another colloquial term is “3-8-6
saedae
,” referring to a generation of youth who were then in their thirties, had gone to college in the 1980s, and had been born in the 1960s.

6
. See note 3 for the unemployment rate.

7
. This shift in South Korea parallels a similar process of middle-class self-making in China (see the essay by Hai Ren,
Chapter One
in this volume). The concept of population quality (
renkou suzhi
) in China came increasingly to operate as a form of social distinction in the discursive production of a middle class (Anagnost 2004: 190). See also Liao 2006.

8
. Hall 1984; Peck and Tickell 2002; and Peck and Theodore 2001 all show that Thatcher’s introduction of workfare and its continuation in Blair’s Third Way neoliberalism transferred to other nation-states.

9
. The movement was created for countering Japanese colonial dominance over the Korean economy by building Korean national wealth.

10
. Family breakdown (
kajŏnghaech’e
or
kajokhaech’e
) was a ubiquitous subject of discourse in the media, the academy, and government policy, indexing a widespread sense of moral deterioration of women as domestic caretakers. Song (2009) further makes a connection between this moralizing discourse and how the construction of deserving homelessness was gendered. Homeless women either became invisible to the public eye or were deemed as undeserving welfare recipients, while homeless men became recognized as deserving of benefits for rehabilitating their families through their normative male role as breadwinners.

11
. See Song 2011 for the history of people in the street or people without place to live in a broader sense.

12
. All names that appear in this chapter are pseudonyms.

13
. The Homeless Rehabilitation Center was built as a response to homelessness in the Seoul Train Station and was part of the Commission on Homeless Policy that was created by the new mayor’s attempt to establish a government–civil partnership for emergency social governing.

14
. It is significant to note that, by this period, most textile workers in the lighting industry were young unmarried female laborers who had come to Seoul from the rural, mostly agricultural, areas looking for employment to support family subsistence and a male sibling’s education (see Abelmann 2003; Kim 2000).

15
. See Song 2006 for an analysis of the discourse of family breakdown. See also Kim and Finch 2002.

16
. This is according to
The Homeless Rehabilitation Center Report
(1999). This is a different report from the one Mr. Ku used to criticize the city government.

17
. The cover page of
Salimtŏ
[Place of Revitalization]
Newsletter
(Fall 1999) features a picture of a homeless shelter hosting group marriage ceremonies for homeless people. The issue also published follow-up stories of each couple’s success.

18
. I met Reverend Kang through a mutual introduction by her colleague from the Protestant civil activist group advocating for a social safety net rooted in local communities where poor urban working-class people reside. Although I knew the city of Seoul supported four shelters for women and two shelters for families out of all 125 of its shelters, it was hard to find someone who could provide information on the concrete conditions of homeless women without going through a personal connection.

19
. Yearly leases (
chŏnse
) are the conventional term for rental contracts in South Korea. Monthly rent (
wŏlse
) is also possible, but it used to be very rare (Nelson 2000). In the crisis years, landlords who were also short of regular income began to rent their places with monthly contracts.

20
. The practice of asserting “proper process” (
chŏlch’a
) is, like “responsibility holder” (
ch’aegim sojae
), a bureaucratic trope, indexing the defensiveness of middle and lower officials in the City bureaucracy under a heavy workload: It is used to excuse or mask evasion of one’s responsibility and procrastination or rejection of orders from upper level, to accuse others, and to claim rights over a task.

21
.
Emi
is vernacular version of mother,
pyŏng
refers to disease in Korean.

22
. According to a senior staff member of a women’s shelter, “Governmental policy is targeted to homeless men. When the city provides a handout for homeless people during the traditional holidays, it is all items suitable for men, and not a thing for women. And when we request some essential support from the Welfare Ministry, we often hear a dismissive reply: ‘There are only a few homeless women, aren’t there?’
”

23
. The reference to cold as destructive to women’s reproduction is conventional folk wisdom in Korean traditional medicine (Kendall 1987).

24
. Although it is likely that social activists, such as Reverend Kang, may the state rhetoric for maneuvering around it, nonetheless they both believed and reproduced the regime of truth around the notion of “family breakdown” and rehabilitation. As in liberalism, neoliberalism, in its various forms in sedimented historic contexts, is empowered only when it earns explanatory power from ordinary people as well as experts who believe in these truths of social improvement, especially for preserving heteronormative family morals and norms. I articulate this further in a paper on family independent women (Song, in press).

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