Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State 9781138831353, 9781315736617

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This book is a captivating and greatly needed addition to cultural policy studies. As the first English-­language book on Korean cultural policy, it aptly historicises the evolution of Korean cultural policy since the early twentieth century and clearly articulates diverse perspectives embedded in the national cultural policy. By rendering the tensions and negotiations among various theoretical and practical frameworks, in particular between state-­developmentalists and neoliberal globalists, surrounding major cultural policy issues, it clarifies the reasons why media scholars, cultural producers and policy makers refocus on cultural policy in the ever-­growing Korean cultural industries and the Korean Wave contexts. Without a doubt, this is timely and an indispensable chaperone for researchers and students who are interested in cultural policy studies, globalization studies, media studies and Korean studies. Dal Yong Jin, Simon Fraser University For those of us less familiar with Korean history, Hye-­Kyung Lee gives us a richly contextualised and accessible account of cultural policies since the era of Japanese colonial rule, explaining their evolution both in terms of South Korea’s own political dynamics since the 1940s and the nationally diffracted effects of globalization. At the same time, Lee has extensive familiarity with Anglophone discussions of cultural policy, and the book represents an incisive and original intervention in those discussions. In particular, it recasts or ‘provincialises’ prevailing conceptions of state-­culture-economy relations, and shows an admirable awareness of the broad range of fronts on which cultural policies have operated. Jeremy Ahearne, University of Warwick In this timely book Hye-­Kyung Lee examines the history of state patronage in South Korea during the twentieth century, culminating in the current era sometimes described as the Korean Wave. She considers trajectories of cultural policy and its institutions in the context of democratisation, globalisation, and evolving regional relations. Theoretically informed and rigorous, this study will be the benchmark for future research in the area. Michael Keane, Curtin University

Cultural Policy in South Korea

This is the first English-­language book on cultural policy in Korea, which critically historicises and analyses the contentious and dynamic development of the policy. It highlights that the evolution of cultural policy has been bound up with the complicated political, economic and social trajectory of Korea to a surprising degree. Investigating the content and context of the policy from the period of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) until the military authoritarian regime (1961–1988), the book discusses how culture, often co-­opted by the government, was mobilised to disseminate state agendas and define national identity. It then moves on to investigate the distinct characteristics of Korea’s contemporary cultural policy since the 1990s, particularly its energetic pursuit of democracy, a market economy of culture and outward cultural globalisation (the Korean Wave). This book helps readers to understand the continuous presence of the ‘strong state’ in Korean cultural policy and its implications for the cultural life of Koreans. It argues that this exceptionally active cultural policy sets an important condition not only for artistic creation, cultural consumption and cultural business in the country, but also for the nation’s ambitious endeavour to turn the success of its pop culture into a global phenomenon. Hye-­Kyung Lee is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at King’s College London, UK.

Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia Series Editor

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald Editorial Board

Gregory N. Evon, University of New South Wales Devleena Ghosh, University of Technology, Sydney Peter Horsfield, RMIT University, Melbourne Chris Hudson, RMIT University, Melbourne Michael Keane, Curtin University Tania Lewis, RMIT University, Melbourne Vera Mackie, University of Wollongong Kama Maclean, University of New South Wales Laikwan Pang, Chinese University of Hong Kong Gary Rawnsley, Aberystwyth University Ming-­yeh Rawnsley, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Jo Tacchi, Lancaster University Adrian Vickers, University of Sydney Jing Wang, MIT Ying Zhu, City University of New York The aim of this series is to publish original, high-­quality work by both new and established scholars in the West and the East, on all aspects of media, culture and social change in Asia. 54 The Beatles in Japan Carolyn S. Stevens 55 Sex Trafficking and the Media Perspectives from the United States and Thailand Meghan Sobel 56 Television in Transition in East Asia Ki-­Sung Kwak 57 North Korean Graphic Novels Seduction of the Innocent Martin Petersen 58 Cultural Policy in South Korea Making a New Patron State Hye-­Kyung Lee For a full list of available titles please visit: www.routledge.com/Media-­Cultureand-­Social-Change-­in-Asia-­Series/book-­series/SE0797

Cultural Policy in South Korea Making a New Patron State

Hye-­Kyung Lee

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Hye-­Kyung Lee The right of Hye-­Kyung Lee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-83135-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73661-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



Acknowledgements Notes on the Romanisation of Korean

1 Introduction: culture and the state

viii ix 1

2 The origins of cultural policy

20

3 Modernising country and nationalising culture

37

4 Democracy and cultural policy transformation

63

5 Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era

87

6 The Korean Wave inside out

118

7 Conclusion: past, present and future of the new patron state

146



151 167

References Index

Acknowledgements

I thank Nobuko Kawashima, Simone Wesner and the late Lorraine Lim for their support and friendship throughout this book project. Kiwon Hong, Yim Haksoon, Yeran Kim, Park Youngjeong, Kwon Shinyoung, Maria Rosa Perez Monclus and Yi-­Hsuan Lai provided constructive feedback on early versions of the chapters, helping me to reflect on my views and findings. Some of my initial ideas and thoughts were presented at Cultural Geography of the Hallyu Conference (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2014), Creative Economy Workshop (Doshisha University, 2014), Hallyu Conference (Charles University, 2014), Vereinigung für Koreaforschung Conference (University of Tübingen, 2014), International Conference on Cultural Policy Research (Seoul, 2016) and Asian Media Conglomerates Symposium (UCL, 2017). I am grateful to the organisers of these events for their invitation and the participants for helpful questions and comments. I am also indebted to the late Lee Jong-­In, Yoo Min-­Young, Kim Dong-­Ho, Kim Byongik, Park Gwang-­Moo, Lee Jong-­Duck and anonymous interviewees, who shared with me their experiences of and insights into Korean cultural policy and its historical development. However, any mistakes or errors are mine. Peter Sowden at Routledge has given me very generous support. Finally, I thank my family in the United Kingdom and South Korea, especially Joonhee and Jong-­Ihn not only for their love and encouragement but also for their sharp comments on the manuscript. This book is based on my research on cultural policy in South Korea during the past few years, which benefited from a research grant from the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2014-R44). A small part of the book draws from my existing writings: Progress without consensus: ‘instituting’ Arts Council in Korea (2012), International Journal of Cultural Policy, 18(3): 323–339; Cultural policy and the Korean Wave (2013) in Kim, Youna (ed.) The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global. London: Routledge, pp. 185–198; and Politics of the ‘creative industries’ discourse and its variants (2016), International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22(3): 438–455.

Notes on the Romanisation of Korean

Korean to English Romanisation follows the Revised Romanisation system. Korean names are addressed in the order of family name and given name. When the English names are available, I have used them. The titles of Korean language references are Romanised and their English translations are given. Most Korean-­ language journal articles that have been recently published have an English-­ language title and abstract. If this is the case, I have not provided Romanisation or my own English translation of the title.

1 Introduction Culture and the state

Why does Korean cultural policy matter? Cultural policy in contemporary South Korea (hereafter Korea) strives to be democratic, neoliberal, globalist and remarkably state-­driven. It presents an unusual case of state policy on culture that was successfully reoriented from authoritarian to democratic and has proliferated by vigorously embracing neoliberal and globalist agendas and turning them into national development projects. Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State aims to contemplate the complicated and even paradoxical construct of the policy and inquire how it has evolved into what it looks like today. Stressing that the policy is a product of the past and has been shaped by the factors that have determined the trajectory of Korean society itself, the book will start with an examination of its initial formation and institutionalisation within the country’s turbulent (geo) political and economic contexts. This will be followed by an analysis of how the policy has transformed and continued to expand, actively responding to the forces of democratisation, neoliberalisation and globalisation. Until the new millennium, Korean cultural policy had been unknown to the international community of cultural policy research. The research community’s lack of interest was plainly demonstrated by the fact that Yersu Kim’s Cultural Policy in the Republic of Korea, a report commissioned by UNESCO (1976), was the only English-­language writing on this topic till the early 2000s, at which time the policy began drawing both scholarly and media attention thanks to the transnational success of the country’s popular culture, or the so-­called ‘Korean Wave’ phenomenon (CNN 2010; The Economist 2010; Financial Times 2012; New York Times 2005). This phenomenon quickly made Korea a rising cultural powerhouse, the cultural policy of which would be worthy of serious investigation. This explains the recent surge of academic commentaries on it, mainly from the perspective of cultural industries growth and the Korean Wave (J.-E. Chung 2012; Jin 2014, 2016; Y. Kim 2013; Kwon and Kim 2014; H.-K. Lee 2013; Shim 2002, 2006). Here, the most highlighted is the Korean government’s strategic investment in the commercial cultural sector and its exports. Some scholars have also pointed out the paradox that cultural policy expansion has concurred with the country’s neoliberal economic reform and the intensification of cultural

2   Culture and the state globalisation, which are usually believed to diminish the power of the nation state and the scope of its cultural policy (J.-E. Chung 2012; Jin 2014, 2016). Overseas media, policy makers’ and cultural practitioners’ attention to Korean cultural policy is more pragmatically motivated. There are Japanese commentators who suggest that their government and cultural industries get useful inspirations from the active cultural policy making and cultural investments in Korea. For instance, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of Japan states: The Korean government has continuously funded exports of Korean content overseas for over 12 years, which [has resulted in] the recent successes of Korean TV dramas, films and K-­Pop [around] the world […] On the contrary, in Japan the only government support for the music industry is that for organising the Tokyo International Music Market. (South China Morning Post 2012) Meanwhile, it is widely known that Chinese policy makers are interested particularly in Korea’s ability to produce high-­quality cultural commodities and their usefulness in raising national soft power; for instance, a committee of China’s People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), one of the most important annual political events in China, spent a whole morning in March 2014 debating ‘why China can’t make a soap opera as good as South Korea’s’ (Telegraph 2016; Washington Post 2014). Yet another view is that the success of Korean pop culture is attributable to the country’s democracy and creative freedom and this is the real lesson China should learn from Korea (South China Morning Post 2014). For cultural policy communities in several Asian countries such as Thailand, which aspire to advance national cultural strategies, the Korean experience is portrayed as a useful reference point derived from a society geographically and culturally proximate (Nation 2016). After all, Korea’s impressive leap from one of the largest recipients of foreign aid in the 1950s to a globally noticed cultural production centre in a few decades seems to affirm the popular message that ‘if Korea can do it, any country can’ (Time 2010), encouraging its neighbours to consider culture as an important part of state affairs and an area for government investment. Whist regarding the active involvement of the state in culture as uniquely Korean, the current English-­language academic writings and media reports on cultural policy in Korea are likely to be skewed towards technical and administrative details of public support for commercial cultural industries. In contrast, commentaries on the country’s arts policy are rather scarce and, moreover, in-­ depth and contextualised investigation into its cultural policy in a broader sense – that is, the institutionalised relationship between the state and culture encompassing the arts, popular culture and ways of life – has been seldom attempted. This leaves many gaps in the emerging scholarly and media narrative of cultural policy in Korea. As the first English-­language book on Korean cultural policy, Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State is intended to tell a

Culture and the state   3 more holistic story of the policy, focusing on the centrality of the state and its negotiation with political and socio-­economic changes of the country. The book proposes that a better understanding of the policy would require an awareness of its historical origins and development and underlying ideas, values and practices that are often taken for granted and therefore rarely questioned.

‘New patron state’ in Korea The edited volume The Patron States: Government and the Arts in Europe, North America, and Japan (1987) was one of the earliest attempts to investigate, compile and compare cultural policies across industrial democracies (Cummings and Katz 1987). The book did not give a definition of ‘patron state’, but the coverage of twelve Western European and North American societies as well as Japan indicated that it referred to a democratic society where the post-­war ‘economic, political and social trends have combined to create strong pressures for government intervention in the field of culture’ (p. 9). Although the style of cultural policy was dissimilar among the surveyed countries, common features were found: the countries had post-­war cultural consensus guided by their cultural traditions and values, aspired to establish a structure for state support for arts and culture, and believed that culture should be autonomous from political pressures. The Patron States explored a set of themes, such as how the state subsidy affected cultural creation, how artistic autonomy could negotiate with state intervention, what kind of arts were qualified for public support, and how the complexity in culture-­state relationship could be understood. The book also commented on the emerging trend of cuts to cultural budgets since the mid-­ 1970s due to the economic retrenchment and the rise of a pro-­market mentality, which signalled the beginning of the end of the post-­war consensus on state cultural patronage in the West. When the above book was published thirty years ago, Korea was swept aside by the democratic movement that challenged the military regime that had continued since 1961 and the long tradition of authoritarian rule since the creation of the nation state in 1948. By that book’s implicit standard, Korea was not qualified to be a patron state. Although it had a system of well-­organised cultural subsidies introduced by the military government in the 1970s, its cultural policy was seriously deficient in key characteristics of the exiting patron states. In Korea, the nationalist and anti-­communist ideological consensus was imposed on the public, culture was coupled with politics, and there was little freedom of culture. However, the country’s cultural policy has dramatically changed throughout the past thirty years, vigorously corresponding with democratic, neoliberal and globalising forces. Whilst the democratic Korea did not, or could not, imitate existing patron states such as Western liberal democracies and Japan, it has established and expanded a statist cultural policy that is defined by cultural freedom and public cultural investment increasingly fuelled by a national economic agenda. This book interrogates the centrality of the state in contemporary cultural policy in Korea. Indeed, a few researchers have pointed this out by referring to

4   Culture and the state ‘developmental’, ‘developmental state’ or ‘developmentalism’ and have noted the historical persistence of the strong state in the affairs of culture (J.-E. Chung 2012; Jin 2014; C. Kim 2017). The notion of ‘developmental state’ was coined in the studies of Asian economic development and industrial policy and highlights the state’s strategic leadership in the economic catch-­up process in countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore (Johnson 1999; White 1988; Woo-­Cumings 1999).1 In Korea, the running of the developmental state was assisted by the government’s top-­down ideological imposition and harsh cultural control, which in turn were justified by the country’s spectacular economic performance. Thus, evaluating the developmental state is always a highly politicised and divisive topic as there are attempts to demystify the neoclassical economic thinking by pinpointing the effectiveness of state-­driven economic industrialisation on the one hand, and those who criticise the democracy deficiency and the exploitation of labour in the industrialisation process on the other hand.2 Removing the ideological, political and social baggage from the concept of developmental state and defining it rather neutrally as a state that plays a strategic role in economic development and prioritises economic goals over other public policy goals might be possible for economists and public policy researchers (e.g. H.-j. Kwon 2005). However, such conceptual neutralisation would not be a comfortable option for cultural policy commentators who are conscious of how much culture was supressed by and utilised for the authoritarian regime of the Korean developmental state (see Chapter 3). Instead of overstretching the analytical capacity of the notion of developmental (state), therefore, this book regards it as narrowly associated with the country’s state-­led economic management implemented by authoritarian governments from the 1960s to the late 1980s. This book defines contemporary Korea as a ‘new patron state’ that has developed a distinctive cultural policy, in which democratic, neoliberal and globalist agendas have been actively articulated within the statist policy framework. The new patron state in Korea not only defies ‘the myth of the powerless state’ in the era of neoliberalisation and globalisation (Weiss 1998), but it also appears to challenge the tendency in cultural policy studies to associate the strong state with either a fascist or communist cultural policy in the past (i.e. the danger of the state), or the legitimacy crisis of the post-­war cultural policies in Western welfare states (i.e. the failure and decline of the state). Apparently, understanding Korean contemporary cultural policy requires thinking beyond the binary view of state vs. market, state vs. civil society and national vs. global because it is underpinned by the intricate co-­workings between those supposedly opposing forces. The new patron state in Korea that has emerged since 1987 shows both similarity and dissimilarity with its equivalents in the existing patron states. Cultural control was replaced by cultural freedom; however, the top-­down and hands-­on approach to culture has continued. Culture is now perceived as an autonomous professional field; yet, it is still tightly coupled with state agendas while its institutional autonomy is weak. The forced cultural consensus was dispelled but cultural policy after the democratisation has failed to become ‘the

Culture and the state   5 politics of society’, where the rationale of cultural policy is debated within the broader context of social conditions and their changes and members of society develop a consensus on social meanings, values and functions of culture (Wesner 2010: 436). Instead, the Korean society quickly embraced an economic consensus of culture that justifies the government’s application of state-­led industrial strategies to the field of culture and, hence, eventually leads to the ‘post-­ culturalisation’ of cultural policy itself.

The centrality of the state In the book Bringing the State Back In, Theda Skocpol (1985: 4–7) points out that Western social scientists show proclivities for finding the locus of societal dynamics in social spheres and actions (such as civil society and social movement) or economic relations (e.g. capitalistic production and class struggles), while downplaying the ‘explanatory centrality of the state’ in their theoretical paradigms. Such preferences for ‘society-­centred theories’ of policy and politics are reflected in the inclination of the current cultural policy literature to hesitate about discussing the state and the overall lack of interest in it (Throsby 2002: 147). For example, the autonomy of culture is not only a normative belief shared by cultural practitioners but it also serves as a key analytical framework for cultural policy research. Jim McGuigan’s book Rethinking Cultural Policy exemplifies this approach by arguing that culture, an integral part of the public sphere where participants are engaged in reflexive communications with each other, is likely to be put in danger of being instrumentalised by the discourse of the state or ‘[to] talk of cultural policy’ (McGuigan 2004: 53). In this sense, cultural policy in itself would be an oxymoron where culture is destined to be undermined by state imperatives. Cultural policy scholars’ lack of enthusiasm about the state also seems to have been a result of their understanding of the cultural policy shift in recent decades, mainly from the perspective of neoliberalisation and globalisation. The prevailing proposition is that these shifts have eroded state power, leading to a rolling back of the state from cultural affairs, the de-­ statisation and privatisation of culture, de-­regulation, free trade of cultural products, and the marginalising roles of cultural policy. Scholars often show their interest in ‘network’ or ‘self-­governance’ based on reflexive communication as an alternative to both the state and the market (McGuigan 2004; Pratt 2005), implicating that bringing back the state would not be an option for contemporary cultural policy (research) and that the state is an unfashionable theme to explore. To better understand the real-­world dynamics of cultural policy, however, we should go beyond the views that regard the state as an unwanted and increasingly powerless bedfellow of culture. The proximity between culture and the state has been observed throughout cultural history in many societies, if not all, from Western liberal democracies to relatively new nation states in Asia and the Middle East: culture has been an inseparable part of the process of state building, the dissemination of state ideologies and its governance of the populace (Anderson 2006[1983]; Bennett 1995, 1998; Chun 1994; Cooke 2014;

6   Culture and the state Cummings and Katz 1987; Jones 2007; Kong 2000; Lindsay 1995; H. Yim 2002). More recently, those freshly erupting questions on cultural identities, values and norms in relation to the mass-­scale flow of workers within and the (im)migration into European countries make us urgently deliberate on the rapidly evolving nexus between culture, society and state policy. Between the conservative discourse of immigration and its destructive impact on national culture and the liberal critique of the rising racism and political populism, there exists a deep-­seated problem of the state – that is, whether and how it can effectively deal with neoliberal, global, post-­industrial and multicultural forces and their socio-­economic consequences (Sandel 2017). Bluntly put, culture and the state are so entangled that neatly dissociating the two is not an easy task. This is particularly true when it comes to newly democratised and industrialised societies, such as Korea. Moreover, although all nation states are affected by neoliberalisation and globalisation, their cultural policies show a recognisable diversity, which is a consequence of ‘orders of locality’ (Tomlinson 2000), and cannot be summarised simply as a retreat of the state; for example, we are witnessing the state’s headstrong belief in cultural values and continued commitment to cultural funding in Germany (Die Bundesregierung 2016; Wesner 2010) and the eye-­catching expansion of state cultural policy and cultural investment in China (Keane 2013). These examples demonstrate that the state does matter seriously in shaping and reshaping conditions of culture in a society, and a critique of neoliberalism and globalisation should not necessarily lead to the unquestioned conclusion that ‘the nation state is passé’ (Strange 2014[1996]; see Boyer and Drache 2000[1996] for a critique on such an argument).

Nation state and the expediency of culture In cultural policy studies, ‘the state’ has been a multifarious concept, which has not been explored but is treated as an untrendy topic to discuss. We can notice two overall tendencies in existing cultural policy writings’ comments on it. First, the understanding of the state tends to be divergent with three identifiable conceptualisations: nation state, organiser of (liberal) governance and coordinator of social actions. These are different branches of understanding of the state in relation to culture, rather than three competing ideas. This explains, for example, why the state in US cultural policy is described differently depending on contexts: between ‘a powerful nation state’ (when it comes to cultural trade negotiation with other states or supranational bodies such as the European Union) and ‘a passive coordinator of social actions’ (when it comes to the public provision of culture). The second observation is that, regardless of how the state is conceptualised, many writings are likely to notice a ‘decline’ – disempowerment, decentralisation and failure – of the state and its dwindled importance. This and the following two sections, however, will problematise the popular assumption that the state is weakening and will highlight the continued existence of culture-­state proximity and the crucial roles the state plays in shaping the cultural life of the public.

Culture and the state   7 The first interpretation of ‘the state’ in the cultural policy context is an organised political community contained in a geographical territory under one government, which claims sovereign control over its territory and the people within it and has agencies and resources for exerting such power. The state in this sense often refers to a nation state, though there are different formations of nationhood, for example, shared ethnicity and ancestral roots, shared culture and traditions (actual or imagined), or loyalty to and identification with the constitution and political arrangement of the state (Jessop 2016: 154–155). The building and maintenance of a nation state is a political project where its territory, polity and people are determined, maintained, justified and defended by the deployment of coercive and non-­coercive actions by the government. It is also a cultural project where various cultural elements from national culture (such as cultural heritage, tradition, arts and cultural memories) to civic culture (such as common values, ideals and virtues) are chosen, constructed and promoted. Cultural institutions and activities play indispensable roles in this process of state building and maintenance by offering symbols, aesthetic expressions and pedagogic apparatuses that facilitate citizens’ sense of belonging and loyalty to the nation state. As culture provides the ‘imagined boundaries’ to the nation state (Anderson 2006[1983]; Chun 1994), the dominant cultural discourse in society is likely to be inseparable from the discourse of nation and nation state. The history of Korean cultural policy demonstrates that the state’s political and economic agenda have defined the policy’s basic orientation. The country has had a range of different governments, from the Japanese colonial government (1910 to 1945), the US army military occupation government (1945 to 1948), the authoritarian governments of independent Korea (1948 to 1960 and 1961 to 1988) to democratically elected ones (since 1988). Yet, all of them have shown a propensity for the ‘statisation of culture’ to a varying extent by making sense of culture in terms of the ‘crisis’, ‘survival’ and ‘prosperity’ of the state: the failure of military rule by the coloniser and, thus, a crisis of state governance; the coloniser’s introduction of cultural rule which was followed by a totalitarian governance; building a new nation state after liberation; fighting communist threats and forming political consensus; revitalising the Korean nation; and, more recently, rebuilding the nation state after the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and aspiring to its long-­term survival in global economic competition. Clearly, culture has always been engaged in the ‘politics of national survival’ (Chun 1994), which occurs at the crisscrossing of internal and external environments that shape the fate of Korea; further, culture has been called to equip its people with a sense of cohesion, identity and belonging along with the virtues required for navigating the rapidly changing socio-­economic environments. The culture-­state symbiosis in Korean cultural policy discourse manifests the governments’ historical preoccupation with the expediency of culture (Yúdice 2003) as a transformative agent: culture transforms the nation’s political and socio-­economic conditions and shapes the ways of life and perspectives of its citizenry. According to Theda Skocpol (1985: 8), state structures and actions are conditioned by historically changing transnational contexts, which affect nation states

8   Culture and the state through geopolitical relations, the international communication of ideals and models of public policy, and transnational patterns of economic activities. Thus, states necessarily stand at ‘the intersections between domestic socio-­political orders and the transnational relations within which they must maneuver for survival and advantage in relation to other states’ (p. 8). Cultural policy is not merely embedded in transnational and geopolitical contexts as such, but also assists the state’s negotiations with those contexts and their changes. With the end of the Cold War, the international relations, or ‘name of the game’, between states are conditioned increasingly by global economic integration and competition for world market shares (Strange 2014[1996]: 9). A common expectation has been that state sovereignty diminishes in relation to the transnational scope of the global economy and the strengthening of global regulatory regimes, which results in changes in national policies and institutions, opening up of markets and free movement of capital in and out of the nation. Often, it is argued that state-­led cultural policy would be weakened by global forces that advocate deregulation and privatisation and assist transnational cultural companies in taking dominant roles in cultural production and distribution at a global scale (McChesney 2000). Similarly, cultural globalisation is thought to threaten local cultural expressions and impose a standardised global culture. In reality, nation states do not automatically submit to global market forces. For instance, their discontent and resistance made international cultural trade negotiations during the Uruguay Round (1986–1994) very intense and inconclusive. As a result, WTO member states were allowed to be selective in adopting free trade principles – market access and national treatment, and most-­favoured nation – to audiovisual services.3 Many nation states’ concern with free trade of culture assisted in the creation of the ‘UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions’ (2005), which asserts the sovereign right of the state to enforce cultural policy and offers a framework alternative to that of WTO (Voon 2006).4 While being under pressure from varying forces of market-­led globalisation and free trade, nation states and supranational bodies, such as the European Union and UNESCO, have attempted to negotiate with global market forces and have called for more active cultural policy. It should be stressed that the actual process of globalisation relies on nation state’s endorsement and implementation of relevant ideas and policies (Sassen 1999). Moreover, the problematic consequences of globalisation are situated and tackled within the territory of the nation state, implying that state actions and policies become ever more important. That is, globalisation that initially delegitimised the significance of the state ‘has provoked an almost opposite development, calling not for a weaker state but for a stronger one’ (Painter and Pierre 2005: 1). Within this context, Néstor Garcia Canclini (2014: 161–162) argues from a Latin American context that the maxim ‘the state should not intervene in culture’ has been useful for ‘opposing censorship, authoritarianism, and paternalism that stifle social creativity’ while at the same time the state has a ‘public responsibility’ to create an active cultural policy to overcome the commercial imperatives

Culture and the state   9 in global cultural industries and nurture diversity in cultural expressions. Canclini’s active cultural policy refers to something that would resist cultural globalisation and commercialism; but Korea’s approach is very different as it aspires to ‘actively manage’ globalisation and turn it into a ‘national(ist) project’ centred on increasing the nation’s cultural export and brand power. While the existing discussion on globalisation tends to adopt the perspective of the local and be concerned with the effects of inbound global forces, Korean cultural policy makers have radically re-­thought it and believe that the country’s outbound cultural strategies need to be enthusiastically mediated and supported by a strong state (S.-D. Kim 2013). In that sense, Korea presents a case that is not seen elsewhere, perhaps other than the United States, where cultural policy has radically departed from its traditional concerns with the protection of local culture and has fully embraced globalism. The strong attachment of culture to the state agenda in Korea implies that culture has not been fully separable from the discourse of the nation state and it is difficult to clearly demarcate between instrumental and intrinsic values of culture. According to Vestheim (1994), ‘the instrumental’ in a cultural policy context means ‘using cultural ventures and cultural investments as a means or instrument to attain goals other than cultural areas’ (p. 65). Yet, the history of Korean cultural policy demonstrates that culture is intrinsically instrumental and has assumed ideological, political, pedagogic and economic roles, which have justified both state support of and control over culture. Perhaps this is why the Korean cultural policy makers’ instrumental utilisation of culture, as part of their endeavour to propel the country’s leap to a knowledge-­based and creative economy, has been seldom questioned by local cultural policy researchers and cultural practitioners. The persisting coupling between culture and the state agenda raises serious questions pertaining to the lack of culture’s own voice and a potential ‘exhaustion’ of the instrumental policy in tandem with future shifts in the state’s key strategies.

Governance through culture The second interpretation of ‘the state’ in relation to culture is a potent organiser of governance, which establishes and maintains socio-­political orders within its territory and among its people. Culture is one of many objects governed by the state but, at the same time, it can operate as a means of governance. Referring to cultural institutions, such as public museums in the nineteenth century and cultural policy initiatives in the twentieth century, Tony Bennet (1995, 1998) and Toby Miller and George Yúdice (2002) propose that culture is an essential instrument for the ‘liberal’ state to manage its populace by shaping and transforming their ways of life at a distance (Dean 1999; Foucault 1991; Miller and Rose 1990). Culture as arts, museums and heritage has served as a means of generating knowledge, expertise, practice and space through and in which people can voluntarily improve their thoughts and behaviour as a desirable member of the citizenry. Hence, Miller and Yúdice (2002: 1) propose that cultural policy

10   Culture and the state refers to ‘the institutional supports that channel both aesthetic creativity and collective ways of life – a bridge between the two [artistic and anthropological] registers’. Meanwhile, Jeremy Ahearne (2009, 2014) draws our attention to liberal governance through ‘implicit cultural policy’ (or ‘government through culture’ in his new wording), which refers to the cultural effects produced by policies, practices and discourses beyond formal cultural policy and cultural institutions. He indicates that, in liberal democracies such as France, culture as aesthetic expression is so firmly believed to be a field of autonomy and professionalism that policy makers find it difficult to build a direct connection between aesthetic and anthropological registers. Such attempts, regardless of how much goodwill the policy makers have, are taken as an intrusion into cultural autonomy. This is clearly seen in the British debate on the so-­called ‘social impacts’ of arts, which was one of the top priorities of the New Labour cultural policy (1997–2010) and received heavy accusations from cultural policy commentators for instrumentalising culture (e.g. Belfiore 2002). Therefore, state policy and societal discussion around ways of life of citizenry and their common cultural values tend to take place at the margins of cultural policy at best (e.g. cultural diversity policy as one of many branches of cultural policy) or elsewhere in the form of implicit cultural policy, such as population and immigration policies. This is the case in the currently heated debates on European cultural values and norms and European societies’ efforts to acculturate immigrants and refugees from other continents: for example, Norway offers migrants ‘a lesson in how to treat women’ to help them to learn a new way of life (New York Times 2015). Yet, the intensity and visibility of those ongoing ‘cultural’ debates signals that the distinction between explicit and implicit cultural policies might not be able to be sustained. The idea of ‘liberal’ governance through culture, where the state is almost invisible as the task of governance is dispersed and decentralised among many non-­state professional organisations, private individuals and their practices, requires intense modification before application to societies beyond Western liberal democracies. This is because cultural governance would be bounded to and configured within the broader context of less (or non-)liberal politics (Connors 2016; Lindsay 1995; Tong and Hung 2012). Colonial cultural rule in Asian societies, such as Indonesia and Korea in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, is a good example of non-­liberal governance through culture. These societies witnessed the modern form of cultural institutions and practices such as museums, exhibitions, heritage preservation, and anthropological and archaeological research being introduced, carried out and normalised as integral parts of colonial governance (Jones 2007; Chapter 2 of this book). Such provision of culture and production of cultural knowledge was frequently in opposition to individual and artistic liberty, as it came with heavy policing, censorship and propaganda as well as both symbolic and physical violence towards cultures other than those selected, legitimised and advocated by the coloniser (Miller and Yúdice 2002: Chapter 3).

Culture and the state   11 Similarly, the authoritarian governments in independent Korea relied on coercive pedagogy where the public were instructed to reform themselves via culture to hold a ‘righteous’ historical perspective and to develop desirable work ethic and lifestyle for the rapid process of economic modernisation. Penalties were expected if the populace did not conform to the given template. Thus, governing through culture during this period was never an ‘action at a distance’ (Miller and Rose 1990), but rather the state’s ‘hands-­on management’ of the Korean populace as political subjects and a labour force. The state was an explicit source of truth and even a shaper of professional expertise. The relative weakness of civil forces implied that the social management of professional expertise in the cultural sector was dominated by the state rather than market mechanisms or self-­ organisation of the sector. This means that the culture-­state nexus took a form of statist co-­option, where cultural professionals and organisations were often voluntarily mobilised for inculcating in the public state ideologies. The democratisation of Korea delegitimised the statist cultural governance project and replaced it with freedom: freedom from the state’s ideological imposition for ordinary Koreans and creative freedom for cultural practitioners. State apparatus for censorship and propaganda were removed and cultural policy began attending to artistic creation and autonomy, public cultural access and enjoyment, and the economic potential of cultural industries. Yet, this does not mean a disappearance of governance through culture, which has been made ‘implicit’ and robustly remains an important part of the country’s cultural policy in its broad sense. What is crucial to consider, then, is the fact that the implicit cultural policy after democratisation has been closely tied to the country’s economic and social transition from an industrial to a neoliberal, post-­industrial society and is targeted at reinventing the Korean populace accordingly. In short, Koreans have been encouraged in and assisted with becoming the workforce needed by a new economy: workers who are innovative, creative, self-­initiating, risk-­taking, resilient and able to turn their ‘everyday’ imaginations into (potentially global) commercial opportunities. Unlike the top-­down and explicit governance via culture in the past, implicit cultural policy in contemporary Korea is carried out in a decentralised manner by a range of different ministries, their agencies and some private sector actors such as business conglomerates, actively making use of popular culture and online media platforms (see Chapter 6). The policy aims at a formation of a ‘neoliberal self ’ who is capable of self-­organising work and life so as to survive the contemporary socio-­economic environments (McGuigan 2015). However, it is still strongly guided and informed by state policy agendas, indicating its ‘not-­yet-fully liberal’ character.

State and coordination of social actions Understanding ‘the state’ from the perspective of mode of coordination is another way to ponder the state-­culture relationship. Theorising how social relations and activities are organised, scholars have identified three main modes of

12   Culture and the state coordination:5 ‘hierarchy’, ‘market’ and ‘network’ (Jessop 1999, 2016; Powell 1990; Thomson et al. 1991).6 A common assumption is that a particular mode tends to prevail in a specific area of social activities. For instance, hierarchy, which is dominant in the field of politics and policy, consists of its preferred institutional arrangements (politically informed decision making and use of government and public organisations), relationships between actors (hierarchical interaction) and policy options (legislation, planning, public subsidy and collective provision of services). The state is very closely associated with hierarchy to the degree that the term ‘state’ and ‘hierarchy’ are used interchangeably in the literature. The scholarly interest in different modes of coordination rose along with the recognition of growing concerns with the problems of state failure, legitimacy crisis and economic downturn in Western liberal democracies in the late 1960s and the 1970s (Jessop 1999, 2016: Chapter 7). One predominant response was to bring the market in to replace the hierarchical mode, as exponents of neoliberal policies argued. Another popular option proposed was self-­ organising networks, partnerships and collaboration among interdependent groups, which could hopefully tackle both market failures and government failures (Jessop 2016: 164). Cultural policy discussion in the West since the 1970s has not been free from this broader debate. Post-­war cultural policies in the existing patron states were keen to point out market failures in cultural provisions for society and the need for state intervention. Cultural economics offered important theoretical underpinnings for limiting the market mode when dealing with culture (e.g. Peacock and Rizzo 1994). While cultural economics writings were mainly concerned with the issue of efficiency (market failures),7 comparative cultural policy literature explained historical and political contexts where different countries gave more weight to different coordination modes for managing culture. Cummings and Katz (1987: 361) identified cultural policy modes of bureaucracy, expert panels and the market. Similarly, Chartrand and McCaughey (1989) proposed four models, that is, market facilitator, patron, architect and engineer, and Toepler and Zimmer (2002) pointed out distinct styles of cultural policy in different types of welfare regimes in Anglophone, Continental European and Scandinavian societies. The findings of these writers also hint that different modes can overlap and converge depending on local conditions and internationally popular discourse of cultural policy. The tendency of neoliberalisation can be understood in terms of the decline of hierarchy and the rise of the market as the coordination mode in public and non-­ economic sectors. When witnessing this tendency, a common view among cultural policy commentators seems to be that cultural policy has already experienced problems of the state and, thus, it is not worthwhile to revisit or rearticulate its roles. Such an approach is extended to the discussion on public policy in cultural industries too. For example, Pratt (2005) argues that network or self-­organisation would be a solution to the failures of the state and the market, the two traditional modes of coordination, and would potentially unlock the totality of social interaction in the cultural industries and facilitate a more

Culture and the state   13 open and democratic form of decision making. Network or ‘heterarchy of self-­ organisation’ (Jessop 2016: Chapter 7) would rely on horizontal organising principles of dialogue, negotiation, collaboration and reciprocity and involve diverse actors whose relationship is interdependent rather than hierarchical or contractual (Powell 1990). However, we should be reminded that the state plays key roles in shaping institutional environments for the market and network. One classic example is firms that operate within the context set by the judicial framework and public policies of a given time, which are coordinated by hierarchy (Polanyi 1944). Moreover, while being main actors in commerce coordinated primarily by transactional relations, firms rely on hierarchy for their internal organisation and management (Powell 1990; Williamson 1991). It is also observed that while the rising demand for network can be a result of the decentralisation of policy making and the privatisation of public sector functions, powerful policy networks can prosper under a corporatist style of governance (i.e. hierarchy mode) as seen in Scandinavian countries. As Bob Jessop (2016: 167) notes, state power can be exercised via not only hierarchy but also other coordination modes such as self-­organisation, thus organising liberal governance as mentioned in the previous section. He further argues that, facing failures of coordination modes in reality, the state is likely to be called on to operate as an addressee of last instance appeals to solve societal problems by taking responsibility for the overall balance among modes of governance, or conducting what he calls ‘collibration’ (172). This point looks salient and very timely given the fact that the global financial crisis and continuing economic recession have put the superiority of the market into serious question and the socio-­economic consequences of the neoliberal globalisation lead to more active state intervention. In the real world, how a society coordinates cultural provisions is not a simple matter of rational choice, but is conditioned decisively by the historically and socially specific institutional arrangement of cultural production, financing and regulation as well as the social perception of culture in a given country. It is within this context that Lindsay (1995: 657) comments on the unchallenged dominance of the state in cultural life in Southeast Asian societies: ‘why it is, for example, that governments in Southeast Asia so easily take on the role of national cultural arbiter and why this role is so easily accepted, even by artists themselves’. She continues, Understanding the culture of cultural management in Southeast Asia is not to promote an apologetic stance in the fact of negative aspects of governmental cultural control, but rather to suggest that a broader understanding of how the situation works may better prepare one to work for change within it. The dominant presence of the state and hierarchy mode in the field of culture in Southeast Asian societies and elsewhere can be understood in terms of not only less-­liberal, imposing public policy, but also the relatively strong capacity and resources of the state against the market and the civil society. As seen in the

14   Culture and the state Korean case, the state could operate as a catalyst for the emergence of network mode of cultural policy (via arm’s length cultural agencies) and for the expansion of cultural industries as an economic sector that is coordinated primarily by market forces.

State leadership and capacity As an organised political community that manoeuvres for survival and prosperity, a potent organiser of cultural governance and a powerful agency of coordination of social actions, the state in Korea has shown markedly strong leadership and capacity in cultural policy. Despite the democratic and neoliberal transformation of Korean society, the dominance and omnipresence of the state was treated as a norm of cultural policy making and was never seriously questioned until very recently when a political scandal involving the wrongdoings of President Park Geun-­Hye (2013–2017) and her allies in various policy areas, especially cultural policy, was uncovered (BBC 2017a, 2017b; see relevant parts of Chapter 4 and Chapter 7). On the one hand, the historical continuity of the strong state reflects Korean cultural policy’s heavy dependency on its own path, especially the top-­down and centralised approaches that were institutionalised during the authoritarian periods. On the other hand, it appears to manifest the centrality of the state in not only political dynamics, but also in social dynamics in contemporary Korea. This situation tends to cause a rupture within the policy itself, between its socio-­historical embeddedness and its attempt to emulate the culture­state relationship in the existing patron states in the West such as the United Kingdom. The rupture does not seem easily amendable (see Chapter 4). The new patron state that has emerged in Korea has demonstrated some impressive capacity. Here, state capacity is not limited to planning and designing cultural policy but also includes mobilising necessary resources and using effective bureaucracy to implement the policy. It encompasses many different things, or ‘the sum of competences, resources, and experience that governments and public agencies use’ to deliver a policy (Forest et al. 2015; Peters 2015).8 In short, state capacity means the ability to make the policy ‘actually happen’ and covers a series of activities from the creation of a new cultural discourse to the provision of a cultural investment. The capacity was initially institutionalised in the context of the centralised bureaucracy – which was characterised as generalist rather than specialist, autonomous from sectoral interests and pursuing state goals rather than sectoral goals – of the authoritarian regime. Since the 1990s, cultural policy scope has broadened from the arts to cultural industries and creative economy, and each area of the policy has gained more depth, resulting in a notably expansionist cultural policy and a comprehensive web of policy measures. The state’s cultural policy capacity can be categorised into three different types. The first is ‘discursive capacity’; that is, a capacity to invent and normalise a new discourse of culture and justification for state intervention in cultural affairs. The Korean authoritarian governments in the past monopolised the

Culture and the state   15 nation’s discourse of culture via coerce and co-­option within the cultural sector; then, policy makers in democratic Korea freshly conceptualised culture as an economic force and quickly popularised this new understanding. What we can see from the history of Korean cultural policy is that the discursive capacity relies on material conditions of policy making, such as the state’s coercive action or resource provision. The cultural sector, which has a learned understanding that a new discourse opens up new funding opportunities and brings out new programmes, is likely to opportunistically respond to discursive shifts in cultural policy. At the same time, strong discursive capacity of the state is relational to the lack of firm consensus on the meanings and values of culture in Korean society. This explains why the shift in the official cultural discourse from ‘national culture’ to ‘content industries’ and then to ‘creative economy’ quickly generated curiosity and interest but not substantial critique and resistance. Korean cultural policy has also shown robust ‘implementational capacity’ that refers to its ability to provide legal, infrastructural, financial and other arrangements so government plans and decisions are ‘really carried out’ and have an effect. The dense bureaucracy, organisation and techniques of policy making and its top-­down style, all of which developed under the authoritarian rule, outlived the rule and came to be utilised by democratic cultural policy. In particular, the government’s ability to mobilise cultural funding has been aptly demonstrated by the upward trajectory of its cultural spending and its leadership in leveraging private investments for cultural industries. The severe neoliberal reforms after the financial crisis in 1997 never reversed the trend of spending growth in cultural policy. This has concurred with the launch of new laws, plans, agencies and programmes, implying that the government has played significant pioneering roles. To a certain degree, the state in Korean contemporary cultural policy has elements of what Mariana Mazzucato (2014: 7) calls an ‘entrepreneurial state’ in the sense that public sector initiatives facilitate the development of private sector activities and ‘make things happen that otherwise would not have’. Yet, it should be noted that the success of the entrepreneurial state in the country’s cultural industries policy has deepened the tendency of commodification of culture and the post-­culturalisation of the policy itself by assimilating it to industrial policy. Last, we have witnessed an emergence of ‘reflexive capacity’ in Korean cultural policy: an ability and scope to negotiate with cultural activists and embrace democratic agendas, to recognise the limitations of state-­driven cultural policy, to support the institutional autonomy of culture, and to coordinate different interests in the cultural sector. This capacity, which looks like Jessop’s idea of ‘collibration’, is still emergent but has seriously suffered from party politics and politically charged debates in cultural policy (see Chapters 4 and 7). The policy’s uncompromising belief in economic expediency of cultural industries hints at another grave limitation of its reflexive capacity; that is, its reluctance and inability to make sense of and describe popular culture and media beyond economic and industrial frameworks.

16   Culture and the state

The trajectory of Korean cultural policy Considering the contextual embeddedness of Korean cultural policy and the current missing gaps in the narrative of the policy in the available literature, the following chapters take a historical and thematic approach to comprehend how Korea has become a new patron state and what challenges it is facing. Chapter 2 looks into the origins of the country’s cultural policy, especially the emergence of ‘modern’ cultural policy and its evolution during the colonial (1910–1945) and post-­colonial period. The chapter shows that the modern form of cultural policy was introduced and developed by the Japanese for the purpose of ‘enlightening’ and mobilising Koreans via culture. The policy development corresponded with the overall change in the governance of Korea as a colonial state: its focus shifted from social education and the production of cultural knowledge to fostering a totalitarian civic spirit and public support for Japan’s war efforts. Many of the cultural laws and the institutions and practices of colonial cultural policy were inherited by not only the American army military occupation government (1945–1948), but also the governments of independent Korea so as to serve as a basis of the country’s contemporary cultural policy. Artists and intellectuals wished to create a new national culture in post-­liberation Korea, but the decolonisation of cultural policy did not occur amidst the intensifying ideological conflicts and the forceful imposition of political unity. Chapter 3 examines the institutionalisation of cultural policy under the authoritarian developmental regime of Park Chung-­Hee (1961–1979). It highlights that cultural policy development was an essential part of the state’s ‘modernisation’ project that had heavy political and economic dimensions: controlled democracy and speedy economic catch-­up. The expansion of cultural policy and increase in public cultural funding was legitimised by the role played by ‘national culture’ in the political and economic survival of the nation. Through culture, Koreans were encouraged to hold a sound perspective of history, nation and the state and to develop a productive work ethic suitable for the modernisation project. Unlike the existing literature that regards the economic reasoning of culture in Korea and elsewhere as a recent phenomenon (cf. Kong 2000), the chapter sheds light on the firm connection between cultural policy and industrialisation in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the period, statist and top-­down attempts to govern Koreans via culture proliferated, and this came with policy makers’ extremely strong control over culture. The relationship between the state and the cultural sector was defined as statist co-­option, where the government heavily intervened in the creation of cultural associations and relied on them for both cultural governance and control. The cultural sector broadly conformed to the authoritarian cultural policy in return for resources, power and legitimacy. The three decades since the late 1980s saw significant transformations of Korean society that can be summed up as democratisation, neoliberalisation and globalisation. Conventional wisdom says that these forces should have weakened the state-­dominated cultural policy by decentralising state power and curtailing

Culture and the state   17 its capacity. Instead of its decline or reduction, however, the country’s statist cultural policy has reconfigured and grown further. Although different commentators might suggest dissimilar periodisations, the general understanding is that the active democratisation process began in late 1980s, the economic neoliberalisation gained currency with the arrival of the civilian president Kim Young-­Sam in 1993 and globalisation was also made a key agenda of Kim’s government (1993–1998) at the same time. Cultural policy responded to these changes by not only adjusting itself but also operating as a catalyst for the changes to varying degrees. Chapter 4 examines the complexities in the democratic transformation of Korean cultural policy since the late 1980s. The first half of the chapter discusses how progressive artists and cultural activists effectively challenged the authoritarian cultural policy: by developing politically conscious aesthetics, actively partaking in the democratic movement and breaking the state monopoly of the ‘national culture’ discourse, which eventually led to a demise of ‘the national’ in the country’s cultural policy lexicon. Under heavy pressure from democratic forces, Korean cultural policy was depoliticised and reoriented towards freedom, promotion and enjoyment of culture. The government showed persistent leadership and capacity throughout this process. However, cultural policy ‘after democratisation’ has been paradoxical in many senses: the demise of the progressive arts movement and its absorption by cultural policy; the reduction of the meaning of democracy to the institutional autonomy of culture; the rise of party politics and the re-­politicisation of cultural policy; and the tendency that the institutional autonomy depends on the government’s reflexive capacity, which has proved to be quite weak. Chapter 5 intends to complicate and, at the same time, advance our existing understanding of doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era by exploring why and how Korea’s statist cultural industries policy has flourished amidst the severe neoliberal reform in the country. This chapter discusses how the triumph of the economic consensus of culture, which is firmly nested in the nation’s new economy discourse, has propelled the assimilation of state-­led cultural policy to state-­led industrial policy. The Korean governments since the mid-­1990s have played ‘entrepreneurial’ roles and innovated the nation’s cultural industries policy, especially in the areas of cultural investment, mobilising private money, infrastructure provision, skills development and export support. This process has involved state-­driven cultural campaigns in the form of implicit but still top-­ down cultural governance: the campaigns aimed at transforming Koreans to a knowledge-­driven, creative and innovative post-­cultural workforce. It also necessitates the commodification of culture led by the government’s discursive experiments that dis-­embed culture and re-­imagine it as content, cultural archetype and story, which work as a key production factor and are traded at the marketplace. With Korea’s aspiration to upgrade itself into a creative economy, its cultural industries policy has been converging with state programmes for start-­ups and export businesses. This results in the post-­culturalisation of the policy and the loss of its own foothold as a branch of ‘cultural’ policy.

18   Culture and the state Chapter 6 explores the Korean Wave from the inside out. The new patron state in Korea is a unique case where the national cultural policy radically departed from its long-­held concern with cultural protection against Western influences and international free trade and fully embraced the idea of cultural globalisation. It has transformed globalisation into a ‘national project’ that is closely supported and monitored by the government. This chapter analyses how the Korean Wave, which was born as a cultural consumption phenomenon abroad, has been captured and incorporated into statist cultural policy. As the country’s external cultural strategy, its focus is on using the cool image of pop culture for nation branding, export of Korean goods and services, diplomacy and the development of local economies, indicating the post-­cultural tendency of the policy. As an internally oriented implicit cultural policy, the Korean Wave provides public policy makers in varying fields with new symbolic resources – globally popular stars and idols and trendy audiovisual genres such as web-­ drama – for governance through culture devised to help Koreans nurture a new ethic suitable for dealing with the consequences of neoliberal post-­ industrialisation. It also serves as a frame of mind where young Koreans can relate to the world and develop global ambition. Finally, Chapter 7 consists of short concluding remarks on the past, present and future of Korea’s new patron state.

Notes 1 In the case of Korea, the main emphasis has been the roles played by the government in planning and resource mobilisation, investment coordination, implementation of export-­driven industrial strategies, active use of public enterprises and well-­organised bureaucracy that was relatively autonomous from private sectors’ interests (Amsden 1989; Westphal 1990; White 1988). 2 The debate intensified when the country went through the economic crisis that unfolded in tandem with the Asian financial crisis in 1997, with the developmental approach becoming subject to critique and scrutiny by both advocates of neoliberalism and politically progressive commentators. Since the financial crisis, which was followed by the intense neoliberal economic reform, there have been questions on whether the developmental state still exists, has been replaced by a neoliberal state, or has been hybridised with the latter. Another set of questions arising are about the efficacy of the developmental approach that basically was an industrialisation strategy, as a model of national economic development in the post-­industrial era. See Hill et al. (2012) and Weiss (1998), and also Linda Weiss, Ben Fine and Chang Kyung-­Sup, Kim Yun Tae, David Hundt’s writings on this topic. 3 As the WTO itself acknowledges, ‘Audiovisual services is one of the sectors where the number of WTO members with commitments is the lowest’ and ‘The sector is also characterized by a high number of exemptions to most-­favoured nation (MFN) treatment (i.e. non-­discrimination)’. www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/audiovisual_e/ audiovisual_e.htm (accessed on 1 January 2017). 4 The global discontent with free trade of culture triggered the creation of the ‘UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions’ (2005), which asserts the sovereign right of the state to make a cultural policy and offers a framework alternative to that of WTO. The convention’s Article 2.2 (‘principle of sovereignty’) promulgates, ‘States have, in accordance with the Charter of the

Culture and the state   19 United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to adopt measures and policies to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions within their territory’. It is not clearly known how individual signatory states actually resist market-­driven cultural globalisation, but many countries demonstrate keenness to boost their domestic cultural sector, often implicitly discriminating against foreign products. 5 The literature on this topic uses the terms ‘coordination’ and ‘governance’ interchangeably, which is demonstrated by Jessop’s (1999) definition of governance as ‘any form of coordination of interdependent social relations – ranging from simple dyadic interactions to complex social division of labour’. However, I prefer using the term ‘coordination’ because ‘governance’ has multifarious denotations. First, as Jessop points out, its narrow meaning is a particular type of coordination mode, which is ‘network’. He uses the phrase ‘from government to governance’ to illustrate the tendency of the decline of ‘hierarchy’ and the rise of ‘network’ and the partnership-­based coordination mode. Second, the above meaning of governance could be understood in terms of ‘governmentality’ in liberal governance via culture, where the state imperatives are invisible and hidden and various non-­state professional organisations and practices operate as a means of managing the populace (Bennett 1995, 1998; Dean 1999; Jessop 2016: Chapter 7). So, when discussing the mode of coordination of social actions (or the broad meaning of governance), this book uses the term ‘coordination’. 6 Jim McGuigan’s (2004) three discourses of cultural policy (stating, marketising and communicating) resonate with the three modes of coordination. While governance scholars often acknowledge the mixed economy of governance and the co-­existence of different modes in the field of policy making, McGuigan emphasises rather exclusive discursive effects of these modes. 7 Bruno Frey (1999), one of the key contributors to cultural economics, points out that many writings on state cultural policy and subsidy focus on market failures and the externalities of cultural goods and services while not discussing what kinds of states they talk about. He argues that the effect of a state cultural subsidy (or the use of the state mode of coordination) depends on the type of state (e.g. centralised vs. decentralised; and democratic vs. dictatorial.) 8 Forest et al. (2015) focus on ‘policy capacity’, which I think is a narrowed understanding of state capacity. In this book I use the terms ‘state capacity’, ‘state policy capacity’ and ‘policy capacity’ interchangeably. This is because the academic discussion on state capacity concentrates on the state’s potency of initiating, implementing and resourcing its public policy, and, therefore, conceptually and empirically separating policy capacity from state capacity is not easy (cf. Painter and Pierre 2005). For example, Theda Skocpol (1985) discusses state capacity in terms of setting a policy goal and implementing it. General underpinnings of state capacity include the state’s sovereign integrity, stable administrative-­military control of a given territory, capable officials and availability of financial resources. She also points out the unevenness of state capacity across different policy areas. Meanwhile, Weiss’s (1998) concern with state capacity focuses on industrial policy; that is, its ability to make an effective industrial policy while being insulated from social interests, but developing effective linkages with industry actors. There is no clear distinction between state capacity and policy capacity here.

2 The origins of cultural policy

Historical embeddedness of cultural policy Cultural policy is not only ‘shaped, mediated, and channelled by the history, tradition, and institutional arrangements’ (Toepler and Zimmer 2002: 32) but it also evolves in line with political, economic and social changes of any given country. Inasmuch as Korea’s contemporary cultural policy is a new development, it is also a product of the past and a consequence of the complex interactions among historical, political and socio-­economic factors that have determined the trajectory of Korean society itself. For those who are interested in Korean cultural policy, therefore, it is imperative to understand that the policy took its initial orientation and shape in the country’s turbulent historical and geopolitical circumstances: Japanese colonial rule for thirty-­five years (1910–1945), American military occupation for three years after the liberation (1945–1948), the establishment of a new nation state in the South (1948), the ideological conflict between two Koreas and the Korean War (1950–1953), and Syngham Rhee’s authoritarian regime (1948–1960). Throughout the period, the overall tendency was that cultural policy was understood from the perspective of state governance and, consequently, its emphasis was on managing the populace through culture as well as controlling culture. In particular, the cultural policy of colonial Korea had an enduring influence. Whilst not having a cultural ministry or coherent policy structure, the Japanese coloniser introduced a ‘modern’ cultural policy that can be described as the state’s systematic management of culture from heritage to film. It was underpinned by the government’s didactic understanding of culture as a force of enlightenment, education and public mobilisation. The policy interconnected culture as arts, mass culture and heritage (‘aesthetics register’), and culture as a way of life (‘anthropological register’), forming a framework to govern the populace via culture (Miller and Yúdice 2002). What this shows is that instrumentalism was the backbone of Korean cultural policy from its inception and the policy hardly distinguished ‘intrinsic’ from ‘instrumental’ functions of culture. The colonial cultural policy was inventive and had notable capacity in control, research, provision of cultural services and co-­option with the cultural sector. Its institutions and organisations were inherited by the US army military

The origins of cultural policy   21 government, which occupied the South for three years after the end of colonial period. The Americans’ lack of basic knowledge of Korean culture and their concern with tackling communist threats explain why they depended on the existing institutions and laws of colonial Korea. This was in stark contrast with the prevalence of the ‘national culture’ discourse in the post-­liberation period. Yet, what is more intriguing is the fact that some key aspects of colonial cultural policy continued in independent Korea. Cultural policy in the 1950s relied on the rubrics of its colonial predecessor without showing era-­defining development. Moreover, this was followed by a re-­appreciation of strategies and practices of colonial management of culture by Korea’s military government in the 1960s and 1970s, which is credited for having established the basic institutions of Korea’s contemporary cultural policy. The historical embeddedness of cultural policy raises many questions, especially why the Korean government and cultural sector failed to embark on an immediate process of decolonisation of cultural policy when the country was liberated and why they were not able to build a new cultural policy after the birth of a new nation state in the South. The continued effect of the colonial cultural policy even after the liberation could be described as ‘colonisation of consciousness’ (C. Choi 1993: 79), meaning that the coloniser’s worldviews, practices, values and norms penetrated into the thoughts and beliefs of the colonised to such a degree that these were seen as natural and taken-­for-granted scripts to follow. However problematic the colonial cultural policy was, it was the only modern, systematic cultural policy Koreans had experienced and become familiarised with. Seemingly, this deterred them from thinking beyond the existing cultural laws, institutions and practices and actively looking for alternatives. Policy makers and cultural practitioners might have found it hard to draw a clear-­cut line between colonialism and cultural modernity and to remove the former while advancing the latter. Another equally important factor was the cultural Cold War, which was waged intensely during the occupation period and afterwards, intercepted and interrupted decolonisation movements. As Kuan-­ Hsing Chen (2010: 122) notes from the East Asian historical context, the replacement of the colonial system with the Cold-­War structure prohibited Koreans from undertaking critical reflection on their colonial past and making efforts to overcome colonial legacies. The complicated geopolitics surrounding the Korean peninsula and the conflict between the two Koreas made the government in the South prioritise the formation of anti-­communist national consensus over the agenda of decolonisation. The country’s economic hardships, too, exacerbated its lack of capacity to make a new cultural policy.

Cultural policy under colonial rule This chapter suggests that, within the Korean context, cultural policy in its modern sense was a product of colonialism. As hinted by the ongoing debate in Korea regarding colonisation versus modernisation (Y. Cho 2012; Shin and Robinson 1999), neatly defining the entangled relationship between ‘the

22   The origins of cultural policy colonial’ and ‘the modern’ – for example, whether colonisation engendered or deterred modernisation, or whether it ambivalently entailed modernity – is a contentious task. Taking part in this debate is beyond the intention and scope of this chapter but it can be pointed out that modern cultural policy in Korea was invented as part of colonial governance. The policy covered a vast range of areas including social education, production of cultural knowledge, regulation of cultural content and propagating government agendas. Its implementation was broadly divided between the government-­general’s education directorate and police directorate, which respectively focused on the promotion of heritage and art and the regulation of popular culture such as film, theatre, popular music, newspaper and publication. Across both domains, state intervention and control intensified greatly from the late 1930s as the coloniser tried to mobilise cultural institutions and organisations to disseminate state ideologies and encourage Koreans’ support for the Japanese war effort. ‘Blessing’ Koreans with culture When discussing colonial cultural policy, it is interesting to consider the notion of ‘cultural rule (文化統治)’. This notion, which is interpreted as ‘cultural governance’ or ‘cultural policy’, was coined and advocated by Saito Makoto who was the governor-­general of Korea from 1919 to 1927. Importantly, his meaning of cultural rule was much wider than our conventional understanding of cultural policy. What he actually referred to was ‘cultural’ or ‘civil’ governance of the Korean populace, which emphasised ‘the maintenance of public peace, the spread of education, the promotion of local rule, the development of industry and transportation, and the improvement of health’ (Caprio 2009: 126). This was Japan’s response to the Korean independence movement that culminated in mass demonstrations on 1 March 1919, which urgently put in question its existing military rule. Cultural rule emphasised the importance of civilisation, enlightenment and the rationalisation of life (J.-W. Lee 2000). This implied that it touched on all aspects of Korean people’s life and, thus, encompassed many different policy domains such as education, religion, policing, public health and rural governance. Although cultural rule was about taking a cultural approach to governance beyond narrowly defined cultural policy, it seems to be a useful framework in which colonial cultural policy can be understood. Policy makers intended to ‘enlighten’ Koreans by bathing them ‘in the blessing of culture’ such as public education, museums, libraries, exhibitions, lectures and film screenings, and ‘[e]xposing them to culture – even their own’ (Caprio 2009: 112 and 115). Such a task of ‘cultural advancement’ was managed and carried out mainly by the government’s education directorate. It intended to edify Koreans and assist them to appreciate colonial cultural experiences as part of the civilisation and modernisation process. Although the government’s policies on museum and heritage began before the 1920s, they can be seen as examples that embodied the ideal of cultural rule. In a way, the evolution of cultural policy of this type was in parallel with the emergence of modern cultural institutions such as public museums in

The origins of cultural policy   23 Britain, which served as a means of liberal governance via culture, against the background of the increasing call for social reform, social order and public education in the nineteenth century (Bennett 1995, 1998). However, the fundamental difference was that cultural policy in colonial Korea was embedded in repressive politics and accompanied physical and symbolic violence to the country’s indigenous and popular culture (H.-Y. Yim 1992). According to Benedict Anderson (2006[1983]: 178–185), the museum is one of the key institutions of power, through which colonial states imagined the legitimacy of its ancestry, and some of the content and techniques of imagination were ‘inherited’ by post-­liberation states. Indeed, the Government-­General Museum, the first modern public museum in Korea,1 was one of the most crucial organs of colonial cultural policy. The museum, which was under direct management of the government-­general’s education directorate, was a focal point of the coloniser’s production and dissemination of knowledge of its subjects and their history. It played key roles in heritage investigation, research, publication, exhibition and education. Symbolising the modernity of the Korean society under Japanese rule, the museum (and its branches) and its exhibitions were intended to spread the knowledge of Korean culture, which would ultimately contribute to effective governance of Korea. The collection of the Government-­General Museum was generated by archaeological and heritage research, which was carried out by government-­commissioned scholars, primarily from Japan, across the country throughout the colonial period. In fact, heritage research by Japanese scholars began even before Korea’s annexation to Japan in 1910. Since the annexation, the colonial government commissioned heritage research projects to survey heritage sites and cultural properties across the country and to use research findings as ‘an evidence speaking cultural dimensions of [Japanese] governance of Korea’ (Terauchi Masatake cited in S.-J. Lee 2009: 72). Whereas the research produced a vast amount of knowledge on Korea’s past, it was guided by the contemporary agenda, that is, the need to generate historical and archaeological narratives that could be utilised to demonstrate the ‘passive’ nature of Korean history, Japanese influence on ancient Korea and, hence, the legitimacy of the colonial rule (J.-W. Lee 2000, 2007; S.-J. Lee 2009). The state-­driven heritage research and survey during the early period led to the government-­general regulation (1916) on heritage protection, which classified different types of heritage, mandated their registration and restricted their relocation and modification (S.-J. Lee. 2009: Chapter 3). This was the beginning of modern, systematic heritage policy in Korea and was followed by a decree on the protection of Korean treasure, cultural heritage and natural heritage (1933) that required government designation of important heritage items so they could be efficiently managed and protected. The decree served as a predecessor of Korea’s heritage policy in future decades and was in effect until 1962. The development of heritage policy in colonial Korea both facilitated and was supported by the heritage protection movement at the local levels, which was a public-­private initiative operating within the government framework of heritage protection and social education (J.-W. Lee 2000: 85–87).

24   The origins of cultural policy However, it should be noted that the heritage and museum policies co-­existed with physical and symbolic violence to Korean tradition and heritage. For example, there was consistent grave-­digging and looting of cultural artefacts – an immoral and inconceivable behaviour to Koreans – for trade and research, many of which were transferred to Japan throughout the colonial period. Whilst the Korean way of life was seriously interrupted and threatened, the government­general enthusiastically carried out anthropological research focused on Korean customs, institutions, culture, folklore and religion for the purpose of accumulation of a better knowledge of its colonial subjects. This resulted in the publication of a large number of research reports, plainly demonstrating the roles played by the coloniser as a key producer and disseminator of cultural knowledge of Korea. The coloniser also left a remarkable footprint on Korean art policy by creating and institutionalising a state-­organised large-­scale exhibition of art – the ‘Joseon (Korean) Art Exhibition’ – which in practice continued until the 1980s. Modelled after the Imperial Fine Arts Exhibition in Japan, the Joseon Art Exhibition was born as an annual mega-­event combining a country-­wide competition and exhibition. It was organised and promoted centrally by the education directorate from 1922 to 1944. Its influence and prestige meant that it attracted many Korean artists. In addition, a substantial number of Japanese art professors and artists took part as reviewers and entrants, resulting broadly in the assimilation of Korean art into the Japanese style (J.-H. Lee 2006). The exhibition stressed ‘local colour’ (meaning Korean-­ness) from the late 1920s and encouraged motifs such as traditional architecture, seasonal customs and rural landscapes. Yet, this manifested the marginal status of Korean artists within the Japan-­centred hierarchy of the art world (H. Kim 2004). As one of the most important state cultural events in Korea, the Joseon Art Exhibition functioned as both public education and entertainment, attracting huge audiences and producing star artists. It was also a space where the modern relationship between artists and their audiences was formed with the mediation of state cultural policy. The audiences were expected to enjoy and appreciate the best selection of art in the country to be uplifted to civilisation and benefit from cultural advancement taking place under the Japanese rule. The intensification of cultural policy As mentioned earlier, colonial cultural policy shifted significantly when the Second Sino-­Japanese War (1937–1945) broke out as the government utilised culture to advocate state ideologies and boost Koreans’ loyalty to Japan. For example, the Government-­General Museum, via its curation, highlighted ‘naseonilche (Japan and Korea are one body)’ and ‘ilseondongjo (Japan and Korea share the same ancestry)’, and organised exhibitions of war propaganda artworks. Something similar happened with the Joseon Art Exhibition: it began propagating the above themes and encouraging artworks that called for Koreans’ participation in the Japanese war efforts. Yet, the government-­general’s

The origins of cultural policy   25 endeavour to mobilise culture as a means of control and propaganda was more visible in its policies on film and theatre, which were private businesses. In the case of film, there was no coherent policy before the 1920s as it was a newly emerging medium for public amusement; yet, the coloniser regulated the cinema, giving power to the police to cease any film screenings that were thought to harm public safety and order. In the mid-­1920s, film censorship was introduced to suppress the potential screening of politically sensitive films, in particular, films made by leftist artists. At the same time, the government created its own film unit to produce and exhibit films intended to assist its colonial policies. The 1930s saw the arrival of the idea of protecting domestic film (including Japanese films) and thus the film policy incorporated regulation of foreign imports. This was because the policy was a copy of the Japanese film policy, where protectionism gained currency, and the colonial government wanted to prevent Koreans from being freely exposed to cultures from abroad. A key moment was the enactment of the Joseon (Korean) Motion Picture Decree (1940), which was characterised by strict regulations regarding production, distribution, registration of film workers, strengthened censorship, a screen quota for ‘state-­policy film’ (gugchaegyeonghwa or propaganda film) and restrictions on film import and export (J.-H. Cho 2005). It was part of the coloniser’s strategy to reinforce cultural policy in response to the emerging need for mass mobilisation during the war (D.-H. Lee 1965; Y. Park 1993). It should be noticed that government tightly controlled the industry by co-­ opting with industry associations such as the Korea Film Workers Association (1939) and the Korea Film Producers Association (1940). In theory, these organisations were private entities whose main goal was to serve their members’ collective interests. In reality, however, they were created and operated under heavy guidance of the government. This explains why the Korean Film Workers Association introduced the registration of film workers to control them, and the Korean Film Producers Association created a production company specialised in ‘state-­policy film’ (1941) (J.-H. Cho 2005). Similarly, the Korean Film Distributors Association (1942) was born to centralise film distribution. By collaborating with this association, the government, which by that time had noticed the increasing size of film audiences and the medium’s significant cultural effects, organised tours of short films and current affairs films across the country to ‘educate’ the public and disseminate state ideologies widely. The reinforcement of theatre policy followed similar steps. Theatre censorship was formalised in the 1920s but active theatre policy was implemented in the early 1940s. As in the film policy, what happened was a shift from passive regulation to active control and mobilisation (Y. Park 2004: 224). Under the government’s direct guidance and support, the Korean Theatre Association (1940) was created to advance the art of drama ‘to contribute to the state via hardworking (Jigyeokbonggong)’ and ‘to return gratitude to the state via drama (yeongeukboguk)’ (D.-H. Lee 1965: 255; Y. Park 1993; M.-Y. Yoo 2001: 284–287). Although the association was a private organisation, it worked as an

26   The origins of cultural policy arm of the government in controlling the sector. Theatre companies which were not members of the association were disbanded, and individual theatre workers were controlled through the association’s registration system: the association issued a registration certificate to 500 theatre workers in 16 companies, banning non-­members from performing on stage (D.-H. Lee 1965; Y. Park 2004). Later, it even introduced a qualification exam that allowed only those who passed it to work in the theatre. In a similar way, Korean Entertainment Association was set up in 1941. Under the government’s supervision, the two associations merged to become Korean Theatre Culture Association (1942) and promoted a new genre of drama, ‘citizen drama (gugminyeongeuk or propaganda drama)’ that emphasised the totalitarian civic spirit and morality (J.-s. Kim 2004; Y. Park 1993). This was done by organising government-­sponsored theatre competitions to encourage the production of ‘citizen drama’. In short, both film and theatre policies in the 1940s witnessed a strengthened attachment of culture to state governance. This was facilitated by the invention of a new artistic genre which specialised in propaganda of state policy agendas and the government’s active uses of the associations of professional cultural workers as its instruments. Such methods of state cultural control and mobilisation, as well as the didactic understanding of culture, formed repertoires of cultural policy strategies that were explored by the authoritarian military regime of independent Korea in later decades in the conjuncture between authoritarian politics and Cold War.

Cultural policy during US occupation The three years after independence was a politically turbulent period. Although Korea was liberated on 15 August 1945, it did not become a new nation as it was put under military occupation by the United States and the Soviet Union: the southern part, which later became South Korea, was ruled by the United States for almost three years from 8 September 1945 till 15 August 1948. The US army military government was the only legitimate ruler in the South and the existing nationwide political organisations were not acknowledged. Its policy operated predominantly within the intensifying Cold War in the Korean peninsula: the primary concerns were to keep the territory away from ideological influences of the communist Soviet Union, prevent political instability, and create a modern nation state that would be supportive of US foreign policies. To better control the territory, the occupier maintained the existing laws, bureaucracy, police and army, which made decolonisation an unachievable task. Thus it is unsurprising that the government relied on the existing cultural infrastructure and organisations initially established and managed by the Japanese. It declared that all Japanese personnel in its cultural department and within cultural institutions under its administration had been replaced by Koreans as of October 1945, however, the basic infrastructure and organisations were still operating under heavy legacies from the colonial period (US Army Military Government in Korea 1946a: 1234–1235). An example showing this is the fact that the Government-­General

The origins of cultural policy   27 Museum and the Government-­General Library were automatically transformed into Korea’s new national museum and national library in 1945. The US military government had little knowledge of Korean culture and no clear plan for cultural policy to the extent that ‘culture was an afterthought of an afterthought’ (Armstrong 2003: 73). Although the government had no coherent cultural policy as such, its actions on cultural activities and artists could still be called a cultural policy. Broadly, the policy could be grouped into two categories: explicit cultural policy mainly about heritage; implicit policy aimed at fighting anti-­communism. Throughout the occupation period, the ‘explicit’ cultural policy was limited to cultural heritage and museums as they were regarded as containers of national culture of Korea and therefore an important facilitator of nation building. The government’s focus was to run the national museum (previously Government-­General Museum) and put in place a basic guideline for dealing with heritage: preserving and protecting historical, cultural and religious objects and installations; and locating and registering all historical, cultural and religious objects and real estates (United States Army Military Government in Korea 1946a: 1230–1231). Yet, Americans’ lack of cultural sensitivity and respect for Korean culture, too, were noticed: for instance, American soldiers looted heritage objects stored in Gyeongbokgung Palace, and the American army violently demolished art gallery facilities in Seogjojeon, Deogsugung Palace, in order to create an office for the US-­USSR Joint Commission (J.-W. Kim 2001[1992]: 84–93). Similarly the occupier had little interest in repatriating cultural properties that had been looted and transferred to Japan as they did not want to arouse anti-­American sentiment in Japan (J.-I. Ahn 2006). Meanwhile, arts support policy was non-­existent. Policy makers held some pedagogic view of the arts: for example, they expected the arts to play instructive roles by making Korean people ‘feel proud of the national glorious past, or feel sorry for the national errors or miseries’ while showing them ‘the actual realities of the present time’ so that they could reflect on their daily life (United States Army Military Government in Korea 1946b: 1258–1259). However, there was little endeavour to encourage creation and distribution of contemporary arts such as fine art. It is interesting to compare this situation with the US occupier’s art policy in West Germany in post-­1945 years. In West Germany, the Americans who initially had little interest in fine art changed their attitude in a response to the proactive art policy in the Soviet Zone. Fighting a ‘cultural Cold War’,2 they began ‘forming art appreciation groups, organizing and sponsoring art exhibitions, offering art prizes, and editing art books’ (Goldstein 2005: 766). The officers of the occupation government in West Germany also supported local artists and helped them to connect to American art networks. In Korea, however, government support for art was lacking and was limited to holding a government-­sponsored large-­scale exhibition and sponsoring a few exhibitions which were related to political propaganda (J.-I. Ahn 2006). It was evident that ‘civilising’ Koreans via arts and financially helping artists were not the Americans’ priority, and this also demonstrated their low esteem of local artists and lack of interest in contemporary arts in Korea.3

28   The origins of cultural policy Meanwhile, fighting the cultural Cold War in Korea necessitated an ‘implicit’ cultural policy tackling socialist artists and their activities. Here, it is interesting to consider that the most important keyword of the occupation government’s comments on culture was ‘freedom’. It emphasised that while Japan ‘administered’ the intellectual life of the Korean people, its cultural policy aimed to ‘free the cultural and religious institutions from governmental control’ (United States Army Military Government in Korea 1946a: 1231). Facing the rising ideological competition with the Soviet Union that occupied the North, Americans interpreted freedom as keeping Koreans free from communist cultural influences and curbing activities of socialist artists and intellectuals. Despite the lack of coherent cultural policy as such, the government expected its culture-­related actions to contribute to the purpose of the occupation.4 Emulating the approach taken by the Japanese, its public information department was responsible for regulating culture. Conscious of communist influences, it placed tight control on the press (the colonial Newspaper Act; and the Military Government Order No. 88), which led to the closure and temporary closure of several newspapers. Film policy also demonstrated that all aspects of film business were under government intervention. Government Orders No. 68 and 115, which replaced the Joseon (Korean) Motion Picture Decree, were in fact similar to the decree in terms of their overt intention to tightly regulate the film industry: they imposed film censorship and required film production, distribution and exhibition to obtain permission, with an exception for film screened by the government itself and its agencies, generating a multitude of complaints from film professionals in the country (W.-S. Lee 2005). The immediate consequence was the decline of leftist film, the dominance of Hollywood film, and the government’s active production and screening of news and propaganda films. Leftist artists and cultural organisations were not only stifled by the government but were also a target of white terror by right-­wing political groups. For example, their art exhibitions, events and theatre lectures were attacked by those groups. In fact, preventing white terrors was one of the occupier’s main justifications for the limiting of freedom of expression during this period. It was within this context that the local newspaper Chosun Ilbo (4 February 1947), in its editorial titled ‘Cultural policy under the military occupation’, criticised the government’s control over newspapers and theatres, arguing that it was archaic to ideologically control the arts to prevent potential political terror and that such terror should not be blamed on the arts. The preventative measures focused on suppressing socialist artists, writers and film makers, many of whom eventually chose to move to the North (Armstrong 2003). In June 1948, the government observed that ‘political activity in the theater has died out until it no longer exists’, yet they maintained ‘strict censorship of political thought in the theatre […] censorship involves moral, social, and political influences with the accent on political’ (United States Army Military Government in Korea 1948: 1300–1301). Similarly, it found that the leftist publications disappeared during this period. Cultural policy under the US military occupation did not fit into the typical description of US cultural policy, such as non-­intervention, small government

The origins of cultural policy   29 and promotion of liberty. Rather, it was a mixture of a passive explicit policy and active implicit policy guided by the US foreign policies. It did not have a scope to develop cultural visions and ambitions as it was a response to immediate task of managing cultural heritage and national cultural institutions as well as preventing potential social unrest and communist subversion in the territory (Armstrong 2003).

‘National culture’ discourse in post-­colonial Korea It is unsurprising that the discourse of culture in post-­liberation Korea was preoccupied with the idea of ‘national culture (minjogmunhwa)’. The prevailing understanding, which was shared across the political spectrum, was that Korea was a unitary nation with the same blood, ancestry, history, culture and fate (S.-D. Han 2008; G.-W. Shin 2006). Within this framework of ethnic nationalism, culture was far more than arts and popular culture as it encompassed tradition, heritage, belief, language, spirit and a whole way of life of the nation. Koreans viewed national culture as a prerequisite for their nationhood: it was an essential condition for the existence and survival of Korea as a nation, and its development was crucial for national prosperity. Regardless of the political orientations of artists and intellectuals, a strong consensus was that the building of a national culture was indispensable for the construction of a new nation state of Korea and this should be a key agenda for its new government. Not only writers and artists but also politicians were eager to comment on culture – especially national culture. As the writer Kim Nam-­Cheon observed in 1946, all political parties and groups declared democracy and cultural development as their key slogan (cited in S.-D. Han 2008: 121). Similarly, another writer, Kim Yong-­Jun (1947: 128) witnessed all of the political parties mentioning the issue of culture in their core policies, pointing to the abundance of cultural discourse in the post-­ liberation years. The dominant idea was that national culture would be built on the nation’s existing traditions and heritage. Instead of unconditional acceptance of everything of old Korea, however, it was argued that beneficial traditions and heritage should be chosen against the criteria of contemporary Koreans’ emotions, spirit and living conditions; for example, problematic culture, such as feudal traditions, a lack of scientific thinking and the old Confucian system of social hierarchy should be overcome. Hence, rigorous analysis and assessment of the Korean society’s existing culture against its contemporary agenda was to be an important task. Distancing culture from parochial and self-­centred nationalism, commentators argued for a reconciliation of the particularity of national culture and the universality of ‘world culture’ (S.-D. Han 2008).5 Korean artists and intellectuals broadly believed that the country’s national culture had potential to contribute to the advancement of world culture and it should be open to interactions with cultures from other societies. In this sense, cultural protectionism was regarded as somewhat harmful for the advancement of national culture. Similarly, overemphasising the uniqueness of Korean culture would make it

30   The origins of cultural policy narrow and inward-­looking. From this perspective, the writer Kim Yong-­Jun (1947: 130) argued that true culture would go beyond the state and nation and contribute to humanity: I would declare that culture can transcend time, the state and nation if it has truthfulness in it, regardless which nation creates it and which society and which age it was generated. It will have unceasing illumination for all humanities. Interestingly, such an open perspective of national culture can be compared with its narrow interpretation imposed by the military governments of Park Chung-­ Hee (1961–1979) and Chun Do-­Hwan (1980–1988), which emphasised the culture of the past and suspected Western cultures of detrimental effects on the people in Korea (see Chapter 3). The constructivist perception of national culture was popular across writers and artists regardless of their ideological positions but leftist intellectuals and artists were more vocal. They were keen to stress that building a national culture was integral to transforming Korea from a feudal to civil society where freedom and democracy would be guaranteed (W.-J. Lee 1946: 126). They thought that ‘the new culture of Koreans should not be a socialist or proletariat culture but it should be a democratic national culture which is anti-­imperialist and anti-­feudal’ (Korean Communist Central Committee 1946).6 In fact, communists’ embrace of nationalism was not entirely unexpected given the prevailing nationalist sentiment among Korean people who had suffered from the colonial rule for the past thirty-­five years. A popular view was that Korea was not ready for a socialist revolution and its immediate future would be better defined with a bourgeois revolution against feudalism and the formation of a civil society. As for the narrow meaning of culture that included literature, arts, education and philosophy, it was argued that national culture would be the people’s culture rather than the culture for particular social classes, and it should be widely accessible to the public. In comparison with leftists, those on the right were likely to hold more abstract views of culture – as an expression of the ‘national spirit’ – that were relatively less critical of traditional culture and Japanese colonial legacies (e.g. H.-G. Lee 1949). The cultural proposals that were submitted to the US-­USSR Joint Commission in 1947 by the rightist Committee for the Establishment of Provisional Government (Imjeongsuribdaechaekhyeobuihoe) and the socialist Democratic National Front (Minjujuuiminjogjeonseon) demonstrated both commonalities and differences between their approaches to culture. The former’s proposal can be summarised as follows: Basic principles: ‘helping Koreans embody moral obligation of nation building and promoting citizenship’; ‘strengthening the base for the development of national culture’; ‘advancing Korean culture by understanding and refining its existing culture and digesting Western culture’; ‘establishing a state plan on cultural development’.

The origins of cultural policy   31 Proposed actions: ‘setting an organisation for public enlightenment’; ‘organised training of youth’; ‘organised training of females’; ‘enhancing libraries, museums and cultural heritage organisations’; establishing ‘national cultural centre (art gallery, literature centre, concert hall and theatre)’; ‘creating national theatre’; ‘nationalising film production’; and ‘creating arts prizes’. (Saehanminbosa 1947: 38–39) The socialist Democratic National Front’s cultural policy proposal was as follows: Basic principles: ‘Developing national culture via democracy by removing Japanese legacies and responding to the building of democracy in Korea’; ‘creating new Korean national culture by studying the country’s unique culture and appreciating advanced culture and science in foreign countries’. Proposed actions: creating a policy for decolonisation; creating a policy for research on Korean traditional culture (cultural heritage, music, art and theatre) and its dissemination; setting up an organisation dedicated to translation of foreign publications beneficial for Koreans; ‘freedom of democratic cultural activities’; ‘creating science academy, arts academy and national theatre’ and ‘national-­level arts prizes’; creating ‘cultural clubs in workplaces and agricultural areas’; and ‘popularising culture’. (Saehanminbosa 1947: 119) Both proposals shared a nationalist view of culture and demanded an expansion of cultural infrastructure, the creation of national theatre, the development of research institutes in the arts and culture, importing useful foreign cultures, and the introduction of national arts rewards/competitions. Meanwhile, the former aspired to enlighten Koreans via culture and advance professional arts whilst the latter was more concerned with providing the public with cultural freedom and spaces for cultural production and enjoyment. In the lexicon of contemporary cultural policy, perhaps their approaches could be described as close to ‘democratisation of culture’ (distributing professional arts widely) and ‘cultural democracy’ (giving the public power to choose, create and enjoy their own culture), respectively. However, the turbulent geopolitics in the Korean peninsula and the economic hardship after the Korean War prevented the country from seeking an opportunity to translate the above ideas of cultural policy to actual cultural policy.

Slow development of cultural policy Despite the popularity of the discourse of national culture, surprisingly insufficient efforts were made on decolonisation in the field of culture. Post-­liberation Korea’s cultural decolonisation took place mainly in the form of the restoration of the Korean language and Korean names that had been forcefully Japanised. In general, cultural commentators looked more interested in overcoming unworthy traditions than removing colonial legacies. Socialist intellectuals actively called

32   The origins of cultural policy for the ‘immediate removal of Japanese legacies’ and ‘self-­criticism’ of artists who co-­opted with the coloniser. Yet, it was not very clear how this could be implemented and the idea of cultural decolonisation appeared vague, lacking concrete strategies and actions. One way to decolonise might have been to replace colonial laws on culture with new ones; however, this did not happen until the late 1950s. The colonial cultural laws were allowed to remain in effect even until the 1960s as long as they did not challenge the constitutional law of independent Korea, and the country’s law-­making process was extremely slow (B.-B. Lee 2011: 258–259). Another way of decolonisation would have been artists’ and intellectuals’ own critical reflections on the cultural sector’s relationship with the coloniser and various cultural activities that served colonial governance and Japan’s war efforts. However, this was never realised either. In short, the investigation and punishment of those who co-­opted was proposed and debated fiercely but was not fulfilled amidst the strong resistance from political, social and cultural elites, who accused such a proposal of being ‘divisive’ and even ‘communist’ (J.-G. Kang 2002). As the American occupier and later the South Korean government saw the formation of anti-­communist ideological consensus as a more urgent agenda, some of those who had collaborated with the Japanese quickly reinvented themselves as pro-­American and anti-­communist nationalists. This trend was observed in the cultural sector as well, in which many artists and intellectuals were not completely free from the potential accusation of being ‘pro-­Japanese’. Thus, the cultural sector across literature, theatre and music saw uninterrupted activities of Korean personnel who collaborated with the coloniser to varying extents. After the creation of the Republic of Korea in 1948, the discourse of national culture incorporated emerging concerns with usefulness of culture in promoting the country abroad and fighting with communist threats whilst cultural decolonisation remained a signifier with very little significance in reality. Independent Korea was rather passive about developing cultural policy due to its inevitable lack of resources and dealing with urgent political and economic challenges. Bearing this in mind, we can consider two key features of the policy. The first is that the cultural discourse became imbued with anti-­communism. Culture was seen as inseparable from politics, crucial for promoting and advancing the nation’s spirit (H.-M. Hong 1950) and useful for anti-­communist propaganda and education (H.-G. Lee 1949). Such a view strengthened with artists and writers’ participation in the Korean War as reporters, propagandists and entertainers. The continuation of the complicated geopolitics of the Korean peninsula after the war meant that anti-­communist advocacy preoccupied the country’s cultural policy throughout the 1950s. For example, the Public Information Office within the government was directly involved in producing and distributing propaganda materials such as news films. These films, along with news films supplied by the United States Information Service, enjoyed obligatory screening in all cinemas. Local cultural centres were another place where propaganda news and other materials were disseminated. As the renowned writer Park Jong-­Hwa indicated, the country’s cultural policy was entrenched in the ‘cultural war’ between two

The origins of cultural policy   33 ideological blocks led by the United States and the Soviet Union (C.-B. Lee 1960; J.-H. Park 1960). As later chapters will note, the ‘cultural war’ did not cease, having continued throughout the history of Korean cultural policy. The war was frequently commented on by conservative artists and their associations as an excuse for the cultural sector’s co-­option with the authoritarian regime (see Chapter 3). In the 2000s, the tension between conservative and progressive sections of the cultural sector was captured by right-­wing media as a cultural war. The war was also waged by the two recent conservative governments which wanted to ‘restore the balance of cultural power’ that had supposedly been skewed to ‘progressive’ artists after democratisation and tried to exclude some of those from public cultural funding (H.-K. Lee 2012; also see Chapter 4). The second key feature of cultural policy in the 1950s was that it remained minimal despite the cultural sector’s high hopes and expectations. The period saw an enactment of a series of laws such as the National Theater Act (1950), the Culture Protection Act (1952) and the Copyright Act (1957); however, neither the government nor the public were interested in cultural policy, facing the Korean War and then the political and economic tasks of rebuilding the country afterwards. The cultural sector’s wish to have a dedicated cultural ministry within the government was not realised while cultural policy making was carried out by two different ministries: the Ministry of Culture and Education and the Public Information Office, following the division between cultural promotion (arts and heritage) and control (popular culture) during the colonial and occupation periods. The absence of ‘new’ cultural policy was aptly exemplified by the introduction of the government-­organised annual Korea Art Exhibition, which was a successor of the Joseon Art Exhibition directly managed by the colonial government. Similarly, the continued use of Bumingwan, the multipurpose hall created by the colonial government, as the National Theater of Korea, demonstrates not only the Korean government’s limited resources but also its lack of interest in cultural decolonisation.7 Of course, there were a number of policy makers and commentators who wished to create an overarching cultural policy framework that would cover the broader cultural sector by enacting a comprehensive law on cultural protection. For instance, the writer Lee Eo-­Ryeong, who served as a cultural minister in the early 1990s, hoped that a law on cultural protection would have a wide scope, encompassing arts and cultural heritage, and would serve as a foundation for developing a coherent cultural policy (E.-R. Lee 1956). However, this wish did not come true. The Cultural Protection Act (1952) was narrowly concerned with creating a national academy of arts and a national academy of sciences, modelled after those academies in France and Japan, to promote arts and scientific research activities. The title of the law was very misleading as it provided protection to only those who were selected as academicians. It should be pointed out that when the law was discussed and enacted, the key question raised by artists was not about the boundary and meaning of ‘cultural protection’. The majority of artists did not demand the state’s systematic support (protection) for arts and culture; seemingly, their main concern was who would

34   The origins of cultural policy be eligible to elect or be elected as academicians. The law required initial academicians to be elected by artists themselves, existing academicians and the government. The problem was that it allowed only ‘qualified artists’ a voting right and the right to be elected as an academician. In order to be qualified, artists should have either a university education (or an equivalent educational qualification) plus a minimum experience of three years of art practice, or have a minimum experience of ten years. The qualified artists (‘munhwain’, meaning ‘person of culture’) should register with the government and get a certificate, which was a practice reminiscent of the registrations of film and theatre workers during the colonial period. Many artists thought that such a simplistic definition of ‘munhwain’ and the crude registration system were hurting artistic autonomy and, therefore, contested by refusing registration. Instead of embarking on a serious deliberation on the culture-­state relationship and state cultural protection, however, the debate did not move beyond the criteria for being qualified as ‘munhwain’. And then, the debate ceased when the revision of the law years later allowed new members of academy to be selected simply by its existing academicians (C.-B. Lee 1960; E.-R. Lee 1956). The Cultural Protection Act was intended to guarantee freedom of arts and academic research and stipulated that the arts academy would represent artists, review key issues on research and development of the arts, advise the government, and make proposals to the government regarding the production of arts and related research. However, the enactment of this law did not lead to a bigger debate on cultural policy and state arts subsidy. The arts academy itself remained a gathering of privileged artists rather than a policy making or advisory body whilst its potentially bigger roles in the country’s cultural policy were not considered. Unfortunately, the whole debate on the law and its implementation appeared to hint at the lack of ambition of Korean artists and cultural practitioners to imagine the meaning of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural protection’ beyond the policy framework given by the government.

Conclusion Cultural policy in Korea took its initial shape within the broad context of colonisation and the anti-­communist Cold War. The policy’s instrumental and governmental orientation, linking together the anthropological and aesthetic registers of culture, expected culture to serve colonial rule, mobilisation of Koreans for the Japanese war efforts and, later, the advocacy of anti-­communist national sentiment. Overall, cultural pedagogy and cultural control required a structure of top-­ down cultural policy whose main mode was hierarchy, regulation and control. This involved an introduction, institutionalisation and normalisation of a series of practices: the policy’s dual scope (heritage protection versus regulation on popular culture), the registration of artists and cultural producers, the formation of their national associations and federations, the close co-­option between these organisations and the government, government-­organised annual competitions/ prizes and so forth.

The origins of cultural policy   35 The proliferation of the discourse of ‘national culture’ in post-­colonial Korea showed how seriously Koreans regarded culture as an integral part of the nation building project and how deeply the idea of culture was ingrained in the discourse of nation state. Notable here was the open and forward-­looking attitudes taken by those who wished to create a national culture by selectively appreciating the country’s existing culture and interacting with cultures from other societies. The hope was that Korean culture could demonstrate universality and ultimately contribute to humanity. However, the complicated geopolitics of the Korean peninsula and the Korean War meant that the country could not afford an opportunity to explore this idea further or create a new cultural policy inspired by it. The absence of meaningful decolonisation in the field of culture after independence implied that the physical infrastructure for cultural provision, organisational structure of the cultural sector, cultural policy practices and the relationship between the government and the cultural sector, which were shaped during the colonial period, lived long after liberation. Then, the practices and strategies of colonial cultural policy greatly inspired the authoritarian, developmental cultural policy in the 1960s and 1970s under president Park Chung-­Hee (1961–1979). This was a ‘political inheriting’ of colonial cultural policy in the new nation state of South Korea (Anderson 2006[1983]: 178).

Notes 1 The first modern museum in Korea was the Royal Museum (Jesilbagmulgwan), but it did not have a coherent collection and exhibition policy. Although it was a royal museum, its collection was made up of artwork, ceramics and craft items that were newly purchased for the purpose of exhibition. In this sense, the Government-­General Museum can be seen as the first modern public museum that had clear functions in curation, exhibition, research and publication. The museum was born initially as an art gallery, which was a part of the ‘Korean Products and Industries Promotion Fair’ held in 1915 to commemorate the achievement of the colonial governance for the first five years (S.-J. Lee 2009: 285–289). The art gallery, in the Gyeongbokgung Palace, was then transformed into the Government-­General Museum and placed under the education directorate’s direct supervision and management. 2 See Saunders (1999) on the cultural Cold War and Armstrong (2003) on the cultural Cold War in the Korean peninsula. 3 The government thought that ‘the passive non-­cooperative attitude’ prevailed in the cultural sector from the time of Japanese rule and, therefore, Koreans needed ‘outside guidance and encouragement – enlightened, forward-­looking, and tolerant would be the most constructive approach’ (United States Army Military Government in Korea 1946a: 1232–1233, 1947: 1262–1263). Apparently, the government did not consider Korean artists as competent agents of social change. 4 These actions pursued three objectives: first, serving for the overall goal of the occupation; second, removing Japanese legacies in education, developing a new education system and advancing traditional culture; and third, helping Koreans’ participation in international cultural organisations and their international cultural exchange (J.-I. Ahn 2006: 10–11). Another objective was enhancing Koreans’ understanding of the history, institutions, culture and achievements of the United States. Yet, the first objective was the prime one, meaning that US cultural policy in Korea was subsumed to its foreign policy agenda.

36   The origins of cultural policy 5 It seems that the discourse of national culture in the post-­liberation years was influenced by the neo-­nationalism that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s (S.-D. Han 2008; Y.-H. Chung 1992; J.-W. Lee 1991). Neo-­nationalism was advocated by the work of nationalist historians who endeavoured to go beyond the political and ideological divisions between the left and the right and aspired to create a unified democratic nation state in the Korean peninsula. Its view of culture was nationalistic but it was against unconditional inheritance of the country’s traditional culture and heritage. Selective inheritance of tradition and embracing useful cultures from abroad were emphasised. In that sense, such a discourse of national culture demonstrated ‘national internationalism’ and ‘international nationalism’ (J.-W. Lee 1991: 28). 6 Seemingly, there were two broadly different streams of ideas of national culture in the socialist camp: while some socialist intellectuals and writers were sympathetic towards the idea of ‘national’ culture considering the country’s specific historical and social circumstances, some believed that the culture to be built should be a ‘proletarian’ culture. The Korean Communist Party’s proposal shows that the former gained currency and the Party called for the creation of democratic national culture. 7 See S. M. Park (2010) for further linkage between Korean and Japanese cultural policies.

3 Modernising country and nationalising culture

Culture and the modernisation project Korean cultural policy under Park Chung-­Hee’s (1961–1979) leadership in the 1960s and 1970s was a very complicated political and socio-­cultural phenomenon that occupies a rather awkward location in the country’s narrative of cultural policy. On the one hand, it can be quickly summarised as repressive cultural control inspired by colonial cultural policy of the 1940s. The government tightly connected the anthropological understanding of culture (as a way of life) and the narrow meaning of it (as arts, heritage and popular culture), inventing top-­down and explicit cultural programmes and campaigns. Policy makers’ endeavour to articulate the connection resulted in an abundance of cultural discourse throughout the period. On the other hand, Park’s cultural policy was the very beginning of contemporary cultural policy in Korea: this period saw the introduction of the basic structure, institutions and organisations for cultural policy and the notable increase in state capacity, especially in the areas such as cultural legislation, administration, planning, funding, survey and cultural provision. In this regard, despite being undemocratic and oppressive, his cultural policy set an important historical condition for the emergence of a new patron state in Korea. We should note that the institutionalisation and expansion of cultural policy was guided by Park Chung-­Hee’s grand narrative of ‘modernisation’. It was within this narrative that the relationship between the state, economy and culture was configured and culture was actively imagined from the perspective of political and economic agendas of the state. ‘Modernisation of the fatherland’ was proposed by Park as the nation’s historic mission, which every member of society was obliged to contribute to (G.-W. Shin 2006: Chapter 5). Being a ‘modern’ nation not only referred to industrialisation but it also implicated socio­political advancement of a nation. According to the modernisation theory that developed in Western academia against the backdrop of the Cold War and the birth of new nation states in the 1950s and 1960s, the transition from a traditional to industrial society was a global process and all societies were either modern or in the process of becoming modern (Choung 2016; Huntington 1971). It was strongly believed that this process would involve the replacement of

38   Modernising country and nationalising culture tradition by modernity, leading to political, social and economic progress towards Western institutions, ideas and practices. In this sense, modernisation was described as evolutionary (Rostow 1959) and was thought to eventually homogenise different societies. Yet, Korea’s modernisation showed a significant deviation from the assumption that it would be a straightforward Westernisation project. The country’s politics did not move towards a Western style of democracy; and its rapid industrialisation and economic growth (from 1963 to 1976, Korean GDP increased at the rate of approximately 10 per cent per year) were very tightly led by the authoritarian state (Mason et al. 1980). As such, modernisation in Korea was experienced as a particular, rather than universal, and localised process. After all, what Korean policy makers did was to transform the Western discourse of ‘modernisation’ to a top-­down national project. Their grand narrative of modernisation called for a parallel development of politics and economy, but it was a cultural project too. The government and its supporters envisaged a modern nation as an ‘affluent society’ characterised by self-­ reliant security against ‘an incessant communist threat’, localised democracy developed on the foundation of ‘our own historic reality and culture and tradition’, and flourishing ‘national culture’ (Moon and Jun 2011; C.-H. Park 1979: 16). Cultural policy development – both cultural promotion and control – was an essential part of this project. Indeed, policy makers argued that creating a positive ‘national culture’, which would help Koreans develop a sense of forwardness, independence, unity and obligation, would be a pre-­requisite for successful modernisation (Choung 2016). In spite of its frequent use of the liberal rhetoric of ‘jaju (independence)’ and ‘jajo (self-­help)’, the government relied on top-­down campaigns to reform the populace via culture so as to nurture obedient political subjects, ‘healthy’ citizenry and a productive workforce. Within the hegemonic discourse of modernisation and national culture, the didactic uses of culture in enlightening and edifying the public constituted the core of cultural policy. This accompanied the government’s heavy regulation and control of the cultural sector, in which artistic freedom existed mainly as rhetoric. The idea that freedom should be regulated and come after fulfilling responsibility not only defined Korean-­style democracy but also determined the relationship between the government and the cultural sector. The following two sections will explain how the relationship between politics, economy and culture was elaborated within the framework of state-­driven modernisation project by looking into this project’s two core components: localised democracy; and speedy economic catch-­up. The next section will focus on the state-­led development of cultural policy, paying particular attention to the government’s growing implementational and discursive capacity as well as its tight control of culture. Then, the final section will investigate the context, process and operation of the statist co-­option between the government and the cultural sector.

Modernising country and nationalising culture   39

Koreanised democracy and culture The beginning of the 1960s was a politically dynamic period as the dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, the nation’s first president, was ended in 1960 by the 4.19 democratic revolution. The short period of democracy from the revolution in April 1960 to Park Chung-­Hee’s coup in May 1961 saw some substantial changes in cultural policy, which can be summed up as liberalisation: the abolishment of film censorship; the replacement of government approval of newspapers by registration; the removal of the government power to cease and close newspapers; and the removal of the suppressive rule that required government permission for creating social organisations and organising public demonstrations. However, the liberal period was too brief and the cultural sector could not embark on meaningful discussion on cultural policy whilst policy makers were preoccupied with urgent political and economic issues. The year-­long democracy was ended by Park Chung-­Hee’s military coup on 16 May 1961, and the liberalised cultural policy was reversed immediately. Park proposed ‘modernisation of the fatherland’ as the state’s highest goal and the government’s prime objective. He believed that modernising the nation would necessitate liberating Koreans from the legacy of traditional society, achieving economic self-­reliance, establishing a ‘healthy’ democracy, and growing the country’s military defence capacity (C.-H. Park 2005[1962]: 100–103). This had far-­reaching implications for the country’s politics. Accusing the freedom and democracy enjoyed by Koreans after the 4.19 revolution of having led the country into chaos, he argued that healthy democracy should be a localised democracy, which is responsive to the country’s specific conditions. It was proposed that, instead of imitating Western-­style democracy, ‘Koreanised’ democracy would take a form of ‘controlled democracy’ underpinned by national solidarity, anti-­communist consensus, self-­reliance, self-­regulated freedom and a strong sense of obligation (Oneulgwa naeil 1966a; C-­H. Park 2005[1962]). For Park and his supporters, the Korean people were as victims of negative legacies from the past and harmful influences of foreign culture and therefore an object of enlightenment and education. Such justification of the government’s top-­down approach had been in constant contradiction with its rhetoric of liberal governance emphasising the virtue of self-­initiation. The 1970s witnessed that the political campaign was intensified and relied increasingly on nationalistic sentiment. This was the response of the Park Chung-­Hee regime to the crisis it faced in domestic and international circumstances: from student protests, the increasing dissatisfaction of the lower classes, negative effects of the international energy crisis, the increasing tension with North Korea, the trend of gradual withdrawal of American military forces in Korea, to the rise of communism in some parts of Asia (Gu 1976; W. Kim 2012; G.-W. Shin 2006; C.-W. Yang 1972). Believing that the consolidation of national unity and the stabilisation of his rule would be the best solutions to the crisis, Park Chung-­Hee made a further case for controlled democracy in the form of the ‘October Reform (Siworyusin)’ (1972). The reform, which he called ‘great

40   Modernising country and nationalising culture spiritual and institutional changes in the 1970s’, made his presidency virtually permanent and gave him the right to appoint one third of parliamentary members (C.-H. Park 1979: 14). President Park and his supporters tried to delegitimise democracy itself by pointing out its inadequacy for developing societies as well as its crisis in the West. For them, democracy was a product of industrialisation and, consequently, it would neither be possible nor desirable for developing countries like Korea to fully accommodate a democratic political system. They argued that developing countries would benefit from a political system which is more flexible than democracy so that their governments could quickly make decisions and tackle problems. ‘For Korea to overcome its problems and survive as a nation’, Park said, ‘it needs an efficient form of a democratic system’ (C.-H. Park 1979: 45). The supporters of the government also drew attention to the legitimacy crisis of Western welfare states in order to justify Korea’s authoritarian regime. Selectively referring to the discussion on this topic in the United States and Western Europe, they accused democracy of being unproductive, time-­wasting, inefficient and power-­decentralising (Gu 1976). Blame was placed especially on the increasing demand for social welfare and the challenges of trade unions and social groups to government policy for the supposed decline of Western democracy. Relying on the above reasoning, the idea of localised democracy favoured strong leadership of political elites, ideological consensus, collective over individual interests, and social order. Clearly, the government was not permissive of alternative ideas or challenges. In his report on Korean cultural policy commissioned by UNESCO, Yersu Kim (1976: 14) aptly summarised the implications of the October Reform for cultural policy as follows: cultural policy must be so designed as to foster those developments which could contribute to the maximization of national potential. Since a cultural policy must operate in the realm of values and attitudes, its primary objective must consist in achieving a broad consensus concerning national goals. In negative terms, those elements in cultural development need to be weeded out which are seen to be undermining the effective marshalling of national potential (emphasis added). The proliferation of the cultural discourse during this period should be understood in such a context. Government political campaign was to be actively mediated by culture, or so-­called ‘jeongsin munhwa (精神文化)’. While ‘munhwa’ means ‘culture’, the concept of ‘jeongsin’ is difficult to translate into English as it refers to the mental, spiritual, psychological and immaterial depending on the context. ‘Jeongsin munhwa’ was broadly defined as culture driven by spiritual and intellectual endeavours as opposed to material culture focusing on industry and business. This idea reflected the common understanding in Korea that the nation’s modernisation was led by two forces: economic construction (material progress) and the advancement of ‘jeongsin culture’ (spiritual progress). It was

Modernising country and nationalising culture   41 also a conceptual amalgamation of national culture and social pedagogy: hence, its connotations were wide-­ranging from cultural heritage to anti-­communist national consensus. It was policy makers’ interest in ‘jeongsin munhwa’ that led to the government’s systematic support for the academic discipline of ‘national studies’. National studies was one of the biggest beneficiaries of public cultural funding until 1978 when the Korean Jeongsin Munhwa Research Institute – which became the Academy of Korean Studies in 2005 – was set up for the purpose of establishing ‘self-­reliant perspectives’ of national history, raising the ‘national spirit’ and advancing ‘national culture’. Very suspicious of the negative effects of Western thoughts and values on Korean people, policy makers believed that the country’s own culture and tradition, as a key source for its ‘jeongsin munhwa’, should be studied and creatively inherited, as Lee Seon-­Geun, the first director of Jeongsin Munwha Research Institute, stated: we should revive traditional culture by newly evaluating it and freshly discovering its value and, based on this, we should develop self-­reliant jeongsin munhwa. When stable and self-­reliant jeongsin munhwa provides values that citizens need, it will be possible for them to critically assess foreign culture and creatively transform it. Also there will be coherent social order and citizens will voluntarily follow the social order. (S.-G. Lee 1979: 34) The government’s official discourse of culture was powerful and hegemonic; it secured consent from many scholars, artists and cultural commentators who voluntarily assumed leading roles in spreading state ideologies. For instance, the idea of ‘jeongsin munhwa’ was warmly embraced by the nationwide Korea Federation of Cultural and Arts Organisations (Yechong), which willingly acknowledged that making contributions to the nation’s ‘jeongsin munhwa’ was one of its key missions (Gwak 1969). Although there were intellectuals and artists who dared to contest the government and its policies, they were supressed in the name of national unity and security (Choung 2016). The belief that culture and the arts would help to modernise and reform the spirit and morality of Korean people was widespread among those who were involved in making and commenting on cultural policy, either it be a policy for cultural heritage or for contemporary literature.

Culture-­economy nexus Very often, cultural policy researchers suggest that talking about the values and roles of culture from the economic perspective is a product of neoliberalisation, a dominant trend in cultural policies in the existing patron states since the 1980s, and the popular ‘creative industries’ discourse. In Korea, however, there was an abundance of discussion of the culture-­economy nexus throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The nexus was tirelessly contemplated by policy makers within the

42   Modernising country and nationalising culture overall framework of modernisation as the nation’s development and survival strategy. Despite the connection remaining discursive, how it emerged and affected cultural policy is worthy of investigation. From an economic perspective, a modernised country would be ‘an affluent society based on mass production and mass consumption, in which there emerges the slogan that consumption is a virtue’ (Oneulgwa naeil 1966b). The government regarded industrialisation as ‘the most important of all in the course of our movement for national modernization’ (C.-H. Park (1970[1968]: 344). It expected that the first five-­year economic development plan (1961–1966) would lay the foundation for economic development, the second (1966–1971) would help the country to achieve industrialisation, and then the country would enter ‘the age of mass production and mass consumption’ by the end of the 1970s. This meant that ‘Korea will have achieved modernization in 35 years since its liberation from Japanese occupation in 1945’ (C.-H. Park 1970[1966]: 323). Apparently, such an expectation corresponded with Walt Whitman Rostow’s (1959) theory on the stages of economic growth (from the traditional society, pre-­conditions for take-­off, the take-­off, the mature stage and the mass-­ consumption-led industrial economy), which was influential and popular in Korea at that time. Yet, Korea established its own route for economic modernisation by creating a ‘developmental state’, where the government implemented statist management of the nation’s capitalist economy (Amsden 1989; Johnson 1999; Westphal 1990; Woo-­Cumings 1999; White 1988). As mentioned in Chapter 1, the developmental state in Korea put forward economic catch-­up as its ultimate goal and actively controlled market forces. Nothing was allowed to disrupt this process of the state-­led economic development (Y. Kim 1976: 15). From a cultural perspective, the key to this endeavour was to arouse ‘developmental psychology’ in Koreans (G.-W. Shin 2006: Chapter 5). Within this broader context, top-­down cultural campaigns were organised and implemented to propagate and permeate state economic agenda to the whole society and to ‘improve’ Koreans’ thoughts and way of life (C.-H. Park 2005[1962]; H. Yim 2002). Koreans had to positively and willingly respond to the task of modernisation by becoming a productive workforce wholeheartedly dedicated to ‘production’, ‘export’ and ‘construction’. Here, Park Chung-­Hee’s culturalist view of economy might be worth mentioning. It was West Germany’s experience of economic development that greatly inspired him. He was deeply impressed by socio-­ cultural factors that were believed to have facilitated the post-­war economic boom in West Germany, from the German people’s thrifty lifestyle to their commitment to work. He hoped that Korea would be able to imitate the Miracle of the Rhine that was ‘a result of twenty years’ diligence, economy, patience and unity’ (C.-H. Park 1970[1964]: 19; 2005[1962]). If the Protestant ethic was a key cultural determinant for the development of capitalist economy in the West such as Germany (Weber 2004[1930]), its equivalence in Korea was a ‘developmental’ and ‘productive’ ethic that was increasingly fused with nationalist sentiment in the 1970s (G.-W. Shin 2006: Chapter 5). In order to encourage the developmental ethic and create a ‘social mood of productive thinking and productive behaviour’

Modernising country and nationalising culture   43 (Oneulgwa naeil 1966b: 11), the government pursued society-­wide cultural reform projects that aimed to inculcate in the public the mind-­sets and attitudes suitable for an industrial society. The activities of the Ministry of Culture and Public Information were crucial in this process as the ministry’s first minister, Hong Jong-­Cheol, noted: Main policies of Ministry of Culture and Public Information aim to achieve the modernisation of the fatherland in its genuine sense by the rationalisation of [Koreans’] life and thinking in line with our rapid economic development with an annual growth rate of more than 10% and also by the advancement of jeongsin munhwa that corresponds with the current time. (J.-C. Hong 1968: 8) One notable example is the ‘second economy movement (je 2 ui gyeongje undong)’ in late 1960s. The ‘second economy’, a notion coined by the president himself, was rather abstractly defined as ‘the spiritual posture’ of Koreans and their ‘firm conviction and philosophical foundation on which [they] can carry out the modernization movement in the correct direction’ (C.-H. Park 1970[1968]: 343, 346). The rationale was that as the nation’s economic development seriously depended on its existing cultural and social conditions, it was pertinent for Korean people to identify and eradicate the values and attitudes impeding development, or ‘undesirable tendency in our daily living’ (C.-H. Park 1970[1968]: 347) such as: self-­interest and lack of concern with the country and neighbours, over-­ consumption, making fake medicine and drinks, over-­consumption of electricity, over-­spending of foreign currency of outbound tourists, government officials taking bribes, mis-­use of public money, over-­consumption of stationery, inefficient work attitude, negative attitude, the lack of understanding of modernisation and its basic goals … all these mental and psychological [jeongsin] elements that reverse the modernisation. (Chosun Ilbo 1968a, emphasis added) In a nutshell, the second economy movement was about the modernisation of the mind and the rationalisation of social life: Korean people were urged to have a sound and healthy way of living and adopt virtues such as frugality, the spirit of self-­help, positive business and work ethic, and a rational lifestyle. What policy makers believed was that culture in its anthropological and sociological sense (‘the second economy’) was a crucial basis of the economy (‘the first economy’) and would also work as a solution to the latter’s problems. The cultural sector was involved in the discussion of the ‘second economy’, though its understanding was not unitary as this idea was extremely inclusive and ambiguous. ‘Building of the second economy and the questions for the arts sector’, a seminar held by the Korea Federation of Cultural and Arts Organisations (Yechong), offered an interesting opportunity to witness how participating

44   Modernising country and nationalising culture artists and writers divergently interpreted ‘second economy’ (Chosun Ilbo 1968b). Kim Dong-­Li the writer defined it as ‘the building of an economy that encompasses culture and the arts’, which would be achieved via international cultural exchange and artistic thematisation of the connections between arts, economy and construction. The poet Cho Yeon-­Hyeon understood it as ‘an enhancement of Koreans’ mental capacity in response to economic progress’, which would require an active cultural policy focusing on support for individual artists. Meanwhile, other participants held different views such as that the second economy was about ‘improving artistic standard’ and ‘state support for it’ and that ‘the idea of economy (meaning making people live well) already included elements of culture’. Although there was no clear consensus, the then cultural minister Hong Jong-­Cheol called for a ‘second economy movement’ to assist the country’s second five-­year economic development plan for the period from 1967 to 1971 (J.-C. Hong 1969). Fusing two registers of culture (aesthetic and anthropological), he proposed: We will mobilise all media for public information, such as film, broadcasting and publication that our ministry controls and will collaborate with other ministries to promote the second economy movement including rationalising citizens’ life such as reforming their eating habit, advocating a habit of saving and healthy consumption and encouraging their respect of laws, in order to aim at the success of the government’s Second Economic Development 5-Year Plan […] encouraging citizens to voluntarily and actively take part [in government policies] and be equipped with a productive attitude […]. (J.-C. Hong 1969: 45–46) His other concerns were cultivating a sense of trust and optimism in Korean society, propagating anti-­communism domestically, and promoting the country abroad. Similarly, the next cultural minister Yun Ju-­Yeong asserted that ‘cultural policy should be implemented in close interaction with the state development policy’ (1971: 229). Evidently, the perceived functions of culture in the country’s economic endeavour were a powerful justification for state intervention in cultural affairs. However, the economy-­culture nexus was not always consistent. Some criticised Korean society for being culturally ‘not-­yet-modern’ (traditional, irrational, unproductive, passive and dependent) and therefore lagging behind in its achievements in the economic field (J.-Y. Yun 1971). Meanwhile, there were those who believed otherwise – the rapid process of the country’s economic transformation was causing various socio-­cultural problems such as income inequality, the increasing gap between cities and rural areas, the lack of trust in society and even pollution. The argument went further, saying that the Korean society became pathetic, negatively affected by materialism, profit-­orientation, egoism, self-­interest and individualism, or by-­products of capitalistic economic development. Still, what was common in these views was the culturalist

Modernising country and nationalising culture   45 perspective that understood the nation’s economic development as tied to its cultural advancement. The idea of the second economy soon lost its popularity, perhaps because of the elusiveness in its meaning. The efforts to connect culture to economy, however, continued and strengthened with the launch of the New Village Saemaul Movement, a top-­down ‘pan-­national movement’ that started in 1969 and continued throughout the next decade, which advocated ‘diligence’, ‘self-­help’ and ‘cooperation’ as three principles for modernisation of the whole nation (C.-H. Park 1979: Chapter 3). Cultural policy ardently championed this campaign and its spirit via various propaganda efforts and tried to cascade the government agenda to public cultural organisations as well as individual artists. Nevertheless, culture itself was seldom regarded as an economic sector and the culture-­economy nexus remained discursive. Instead, culture and the arts in general were believed to suffer from market failures and be in need of state subsidy (D.-H. Kim 2015), which was aptly demonstrated by the statement of the cultural ministry and Korean Culture and Arts Foundation in their co-­ publication on national cultural renaissance: in the future, there will be an age when cultural and arts activities would become economic activities. Until then, however, there should be […] active and large-­scale support for them. (MCPI and KCAF 1978: 5) Indeed, the foundation realised that writers hardly survived on their earnings from writing alone and urgently prioritised assistance for literary publishers’ payments to writers over other policy measures for the promotion of literature. Another example was that, despite the government’s attempts to boost the film industry, it remained a cottage business while a significant part of revenue came from importing and exhibiting Hollywood films until the 1980s. In the meantime, broadcasting was never thought to be a commercial business and was closely supervised by the government which saw it as an object of ideological control and propaganda.

Consolidating statist cultural policy In addition to the exceptionally strong discursive capacity, Park Chung-­Hee’s authoritarian cultural policy demonstrated its impressive implementational and administrative capacity that made the policy ‘actually happen’ and became a crucial constituent of Korea’s new patron state in later decades. During the 1960s and 1970s, the basic structure, institutions and organisations of Korea’s contemporary cultural policy were established and state cultural subsidy was introduced and expanded. This development was a complex phenomenon that included creating a coherent centralised structure for cultural policy, localising the Western idea of arm’s length cultural funding, re-­appreciating some of the strategies of colonial cultural governance, introducing ‘planning’ to cultural policy and quickly mobilising financial resources for culture.

46   Modernising country and nationalising culture One of the first cultural policy initiatives was the creation of the Ministry of Public Information in 1961 to propagate state ideologies and policy agenda. This means that, throughout the 1960s, cultural policy making was divided between two ministries: the policy for film, performance (including the national theatre) and entertainment was the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Information whilst the arts and heritage policy was looked after by the Ministry of Culture and Education. This broad division was rooted in the colonial cultural policy as well as that of the US army military government and showed how Koreans understood culture. The structure of the cultural policy became more coherent and comprehensive when the two ministries were combined and relaunched in 1968 as the Ministry of Culture and Public Information, which was the country’s first separate cultural ministry. Its creation signalled further integration between culture and propaganda and therefore intensified politicisation of cultural policy. A conventional narrative would be that only after the country had achieved a certain degree of economic catch-­up around the late 1960s, could the government find resources to build cultural policy capacity. However, a more careful observation would be that the reinforcement of political and economic campaigns at that time required a more active cultural policy as a means of public education and mobilisation and, thus, a more coherent structure for its making and implementing. This is evinced by the emphasis by the first minister of the newly created cultural ministry on ‘national spirit’, ‘healthy and lively mass entertainment’ and ‘anti-­communist education activities’ as well as the ministry’s contribution to economic development through the promotion of government campaigns (J.-C. Hong 1969). Yet, a bigger moment came with President Park’s speech in 1971, in which an announcement was made that the government would provide increased support for the continuation and advancement of traditional culture, developing culture and the arts and, consequently, achieving the country’s ‘cultural renaissance’ (MCPI 1979: 225). One of the most distinct characteristics of Park Chung-­Hee’s authoritarian rule was its eagerness and capacity to generate and popularise cultural discourse. The idea of ‘cultural renaissance’,1 a new addition to the existing vocabulary of Korean cultural policy, indicated the government’s view that Korean culture had been in decline and under threat of colonial and foreign forces and its revival would be a key to the nation’s development. It was also a manifestation of the Park government’s ‘cultural vision’ of a modern, industrialised nation state: similar to the process of modernisation in the West, where enlightenment and intellectual advancement fuelled industrialisation, the modernisation of Korea would be achieved only when its national spirit is enhanced through cultural renaissance. Within this discourse, culture and arts, economic development and the strengthening of national power complement each other […]. When there is a flourishment of brilliant culture and the arts, it will further promote national spirit that drives state development, resulting in a progress of the nation state. (MCPI 1973a: 22)

Modernising country and nationalising culture   47 What followed the president’s announcement was an excellent example of the Korean government’s increased administrative and implementational capacity. The Culture and Arts Promotion Act was enacted in 1972 and paved a way for a substantial change in cultural policy by creating a systematic state subsidy that aimed to ‘support operations and activities that promote culture and the arts’ and, thus, ‘contribute to the renaissance of national culture via inheriting Korean traditional culture and arts and creating new culture’. Under the virtue of this law focusing on literature, visual art, music, performance and publication, a public cultural funding agency, Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, was set up in 1973. For the first time in Korean history, state cultural subsidy was institutionalised and put into a coherent structure. The creation and operation of the foundation shows how Korean policy makers tried to gain inspiration from exiting patron states such as France, Britain and the United States but radically localised the Western institution of arm’s length cultural funding. As part of their search for useful models of state cultural subsidy, the parliament research bureau translated and published a summary of a Japanese version of a French cultural policy book written by a French diplomat. In addition, UNESCO’s cultural policy report series was consulted (D.-H. Kim 2015). The government also examined the organisation and operation of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the federal arts funding agency in the United States, and gathered relevant information through a US-­based Korean cultural centre (D.-H. Kim 2015; J.-I. Lee 2013). Policy makers looked westward because they could not find adequate examples in Asian countries such as Japan and Taiwan. On the surface, the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation looked like an independent arts council such as the Arts Council of Great Britain and the NEA, having art-­form specific departments and relying on peer reviews. In reality, however, it was an organ of the cultural ministry and its independence was not seriously demanded by the arts sector or encouraged by policy makers. Some commentators called for autonomy of the cultural sector but their voice had never been mainstream. Clearly, the foundation’s core activities were in line with the ‘Five-­Year Plan for the Renaissance of Culture and Arts’ (1974–1978), the government’s massive scale of cultural planning. It hardly represented the arts sector’s bottom-­up opinions, nor was it able to develop a professionally driven arts subsidy policy. Its attachment to the government was so tight that it viewed itself as the implementer of the government’s cultural plan (KCAF 1985: 79). Notably, the Five-­Year Plan for the Renaissance of Culture and Arts was an imitation of the country’s five-­year economic development plan and its application to cultural affairs. As Yersu Kim (1976: 18) notes, the success of economic development gave the government confidence that ‘the economic development plans of the 1960s could serve as the model for a long-­range cultural development plan’. The plan involved the prime minister as its leader and mobilised key institutions in the fields of culture and education – the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, Cultural Heritage Administrative Office, National Academy of Arts, national cultural institutions, Korea Federation of Cultural and Arts Organisations

48   Modernising country and nationalising culture (Yechong), local cultural centres, schools and research institutes and so forth. In short, it was a nationwide cultural movement, where a vast range of cultural and educational institutions came to work towards the goal of the nation’s cultural revival. Considering the timing of its announcement on 17 October 1973, the first anniversary of Park’s October Reform, and its conveyance of state ideologies, we can conclude that the plan was about culturally legitimising the regime as well as cultural promotion. What is interesting here is that the plan was actively supported by the cultural sector that benefited from public subsidy from the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation and shared the nationalistic understanding of culture (Choung 2016; D.-H. Kim 2015; J.-I. Lee 2013; M.-Y. Yoo 2013). The Park government statised culture and centralised cultural policy by incorporating local cultural centres that were local voluntary organisations and were an important regional cultural infrastructure, to its top-­down cultural policy structure. The relationship between the centres and the government is a good example that shows the typical process of the cultural sector’s co-­option with the government, which will be discussed in depth in the last section of this chapter. When the government signalled its intention to support local culture after Park’s coup in early 1960s, the centres quickly came together to establish an association (Korean Cultural Center Association) in 1962 to promote their work and strengthen their visibility. This was followed by the enactment of the Local Cultural Promotion Act (1965) that introduced the government support for the centres. Such policy development encouraged more centres to be created, quickly increasing their number in a decade since 1962 (Korean Cultural Center Association 1974: 86). The government supported the centres’ facilities and provided financing as it recognised their usefulness in expanding state cultural policy capacity across the country. In positively responding to the systematic support from the state, cultural centres willingly redefined their main tasks. Now, their first responsibility was ‘to propagate the state and local authority policies and achievement’. The second was ‘to develop, disseminate and promote local culture’ and the third was ‘international exchange with foreign cultural institutions’ (p. 87). The centres fused cultural promotion and public propaganda by advocating the state agendas and engaging local residents in various top-­down public mobilisation campaigns that aimed to spread a productive ethic and rationalised lifestyle: for example, ‘correctly hanging the national flag’, ‘being punctual’, ‘improving diet’, ‘improving housing’, ‘family planning’ and, of course, the New Village Movement (p. 89). They were also a key partner of the government on the cultural renaissance project. Beyond relying on the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation and local cultural centres to provide cultural provision and support, the government directly organised numerous ‘national festivals (competitions)’. Those festivals, which reinforced the state’s cultural authority, were an important part of the cultural sector’s annual calendar. Take, for example, the state-­run annual Korean Art Exhibition (1949–1981), a successor of the Joseon Art Exhibition (1922–1944) institutionalised by the Japanese coloniser. The Korean Art Exhibition, which was also reminiscent of the French Salon exhibition in the eighteenth and

Modernising country and nationalising culture   49 nineteenth centuries, was the most prestigious and powerful art event in Korea during this period. Wining prizes at the exhibition meant fame and an elevation of status in the art world, and the winners’ art works were put on a regional touring exhibition. Moreover, there was a national festival (competition) in most art forms and these festivals were run by the government as state-­level cultural events: the national theatre festival, national dance festival, national music festival, national traditional craft festival, national folklore competition and many others. Although these events relied on expert opinion and peer review, they played an integral part in statist cultural policy and were an institutionalised manifestation of cultural power and authority held by the state. Also, the fact that many regional folk songs, dances and festivals were ‘discovered’ and ‘restored’ via the government-­organised annual national folklore competition shows how deeply state cultural policy was engaged with (re)constructing the country’s cultural tradition and history.

The nationalisation of culture The 1960s and 1970s were an age of the grand narrative of ‘culture’ and policy makers enthusiastically commented on it from the perspective of national survival and prosperity. While ‘jeongsin muhwa (spiritual culture)’ and ‘cultural renaissance’ were high concepts where culture – often in its broad sense as a way of life – was imagined within the context of the Koreanised democracy and rapid industrialisation, the notion ‘national culture’ provided a national framework of mind with which the roles and effects of specific types of culture such as heritage, arts and popular culture were articulated and understood. ‘National’ was an overloaded signifier with multiple meanings: Korean, as opposed to foreign (Western); being rooted in the country’s history and tradition; and a cultural genre characterised by specific focus and themes that were regarded as nationally meaningful and significant. Interestingly, ‘the national’ did not contradict ‘the modern’ in the government’s view: the national spirit was understood as a crucial instrument for the development of a capitalist economy, and modernisation was regarded as a national project. Cultural policy during this period highlighted the importance of heritage, history and tradition; yet it was never a policy on the past. This is because the policy was conscious of contemporary political, economic and geopolitical affairs and therefore notably ‘forward-­ looking’ (Chun 1994: 50). The government believed that national culture was a container of the nation’s hopes and aspirations and Korean people should ‘discover wisdom for the future in the ancient path of history’ (C.-H. Park 1979: 14 and 31). As discussed earlier, the forward-­looking understanding of national culture was demanded more in the 1970s. Ironically, the country’s policy on heritage, a core domain of national culture, had been heavily influenced by Japan. We should be reminded that the very idea of systematic heritage listing and protection was invented and normalised during the colonial period. It was not until the early 1960s, seventeen years after liberation, that the coloniser’s decree on the preservation of Korean treasure, old

50   Modernising country and nationalising culture architecture, landscape and rare items was replaced by the Cultural Heritage Protection Act (1962). However, the new law was modelled on Japan’s law of the same title (1950) and it was even observed that Korean policy makers translated the Japanese law to prepare the first draft of the Korean version (J.-L. Lee 2005: 58–59). Seemingly, the idea of ‘the national’ did not necessarily contradict ‘the colonial’ under conditions where the country did not have policy capacity to formulate a new heritage law from scratch and borrowing one from the former coloniser was the easiest and most pragmatic option. As Frantz Fanon (1963) comments on colonialism, another reason for such imitation might have been the continuity of knowledge, expertise and viewpoints from the colonial period, which was mediated by local elites and bureaucrats who were educated and gained professional experience under the Japanese rule. Looking closely at the development of cultural heritage policy during this period will help us to better understand the meanings and implications of ‘national’. At the beginning of the Park Chung-­Hee regime, cultural heritage policy narrowly focused on heritage protection. Then, it increased its scope from late 1960s with the announcement of the ‘5-Year Plan for Cultural Heritage Development’ (1969–1974) and the surge of public spending on heritage by thirty times from 1969 to 1979 (MCPI 1979: Chapter 6). The domain of the policy was quickly broadened to include a wide range of heritage research and discovery, especially nationwide surveys on folklore, distinguished landscapes and sites, material cultural heritage and so on (J.-H. Jeon: 1998: 90). The growth of heritage policy was a clear signal that the country’s cultural policy was taking off from the initial stage to enter a period of expansion. It was also in line with the intensification of government’s campaign for controlled democracy and productive politics. The policy’s focus shifted from discovery, conservation and maintenance of individual heritage sites to comprehensive schemes on restoration, ‘purification’ and re-­invention of the nation’s cultural heritage in order to cultivate national spirit and a righteous historical perspective. Policy makers expected the nation’s cultural heritage to reflect ‘the calling of our time era and the vision of the nation’s development’ (MCPI 1979: 290) and help ‘[r]ectifying a distorted view of national history’ (Y. Kim 1976: 19). That is, the forward-­ looking national culture and heritage were to be able to transcend time and address issues faced by the contemporary Korea. The policy prioritised select cultural heritage, especially ‘patriotic (hogug, or protecting the nation) heritage’ that referred to heritage related to the patriotic endeavours of ancestors and past generations against foreign invaders. This chimed with the government’s promotion of the spirit of ‘jaju’ (meaning national and political independence), which would create ‘solidarity’ and ‘total unity’ among Koreans and foster their ‘collective consciousness’ (C.-H. Park 1979: 21 and 62). Policy makers believed that the historical tribulations were where Koreans could learn about many martyrs who were examples of ‘[d]evotion to the state and patriotism’ and develop capacity to overcome a national crisis (p. 62). The heritage policy was greatly interested in identifying military heroes and creating new buildings, statues, shrines and memorial halls to collectively

Modernising country and nationalising culture   51 commemorate them. For instance, the ‘purification’ of the shrine of General Yi Sun-­Sin was the first large-­scale heritage purification project (1966–1975), which involved the restoration of his shrine and family house, the construction of a memorial hall, and the purification of the grave and its surroundings. This was followed by similar projects focusing on various military heritage sites across the country. Another key project was the development of the ancient Gyeongju city (1972–1980), the capital of the Shilla Kingdom, which the regime regarded as a golden age of Korean culture and thus a source of exemplary national culture. This project triggered large-­scale development of historical cultural centres in other regions. The reign of King Se-­Jong, Joseon dynasty, was viewed as another golden era of the nation’s cultural achievement: the government purified his grave, restored related sites and constructed a memorial hall. The government focused on these historical eras since these were relevant to the nation’s contemporary agenda of revival and unification of the nation: If we consider the unification of Korea in the tenth century by the Kingdom Silla as a historical turning point, then the reign of King Sejong under the Yi Dynasty, during which Korean civilization flourished, should be thought of as the time when our nation was greatly regenerated. Thus, at last, for the first time in hundreds of years, our generation has the opportunity to brush aside the tragic misfortunes in our history, to provide, once again, for our nation’s unification and regeneration. (C.-H. Park 1979: 15) The above articulation of national culture informed the ambitious Five-­Year Plan for the Renaissance of Culture and the Arts (1974–1978). According to the Culture and Arts Promotion Monthly, a house journal of the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, the plan concentrated on supporting traditional culture and nationalising contemporary arts (Munyejinheung 1974a: 10–15), reflecting Park Chung-­Hee’s belief that national revival was the ‘historical mission’ of his time (Moon and Jun 2011:123). The plan included publishing a ten-­volume series on the history of Korean thoughts, a series of Korean history books and a complete database of Korean studies in order to advance ‘Korean thoughts’, raise the understanding of the nation’s history and promote national pride. It included a nationwide survey of classical literature, their recording into micro-­film and translation into contemporary Korean as well as giving support to Korean studies. The Five Year Plan also intended to facilitate the preservation and continuity of Korean traditional arts and craft by giving artists and craft makers financial protection, recording their activities and skills, increasing traditional arts education at schools, increasing the timeslot for traditional music on broadcasting, expanding schools and training institutions dedicated to traditional arts and crafts, and modernising traditional musical instruments and performance. In addition, as commented before, heritage research, maintenance and purification were another key area for cultural investment. Over the five-­year period, the

52   Modernising country and nationalising culture plan’s spending on traditional culture and heritage took approximately 70 per cent of all expenditure. Meanwhile, the spending on arts (literature, visual art, music, theatre and dance) (12.2 per cent) and popular culture (film and publication) (7.7 per cent) was relatively small, though it brought some notable financial benefits to these sectors (MCPI 1979: 228). At the same time, nearly all art forms were encouraged to develop a ‘national’ genre. Across different art forms from music to literature, this genre was committed to addressing national history, spirit and sentiment. For example, developing ‘national literature’ that embodied the spirit and pride of the Korean nation was a key concern of the government, and the Five-­Year Plan supported the publication of literature series containing works themed with the nation’s capacity, economic development, modernisation and the New Village Movement. The Korean Culture and Arts Foundation’s summary of the plan noted on literature as follows: There has so far been little advancement of national literature that depicts the capability of our nation who have created a great history or deals with the spirit of Korean citizens who have created a new history such as economic development and New Village Movement. […] Our cultural promotion policy will focus on the facilitation and generation of a new standard of literature that addresses the ability of the Korean nation to wisely overcome the difficult environment we are in and depicts contemporary Koreans. (KCAF 1974: 12–13) Similarly, ‘national record painting’ that referred to paintings that portrayed the nation’s military victories, economic advancement and cultural heritage, were commissioned and created with a public subsidy (1973–1979) (MCPI 1979: 510). For instance, during the first half of 1974, a total of twenty paintings on military victories were commissioned to established artists and thirty paintings themed with the county’s economic construction and the New Village Movement were already created and exhibited (Munyejinheung 1974b: 12). In the case of economy-­themed paintings that envisioned Korea as a promising industrial society, various features and symbols of the nation’s economic development focusing on heavy industries in the 1970s were chosen as subject matters: nuclear power generation, chemical, petrochemical, steel, mining, automobile, electronic, textile, agricultural and construction industries (MCPI 1973b). According to the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation’s survey on cultural funding, however, the surveyed artists were divided over the question of whether or not the national record painting project was appropriate, with only 27.5 per cent of artists thinking that the project produced meaningful outcomes (KCAF 1976: 65). Yet, there were few complaints from the cultural sector against the state’s mobilisation of culture, and many established artists and writers worked on state-­initiated and funded projects such as national literature and national record painting. This hinted that although Park’s cultural policy was extremely repressive, its cultural vision and discourse were shared by artists and intellectuals to a substantial degree, inducing their co-­option and collaboration.

Modernising country and nationalising culture   53

Regulating and controlling popular culture The Park Chung-­Hee government’s policy on popular culture was a mix of a conservative suspicion of its damaging effects on national culture and an instrumental concern with its utilities (Oh 1998). Mass-­produced cultural commodities, as popular amusement for the general public, were regarded as an important factor affecting the nation’s ‘jeongsin munhwa’. While perceiving the public as passive recipients of cultural content and an object of enlightenment, the government tightly regulated cultural industries and censored their products. Notably, the new cultural laws such as Public Performance Act (1961), Motion Picture Act (1962) and Recorded Music Act (1967) were more concerned with cultural control than cultural promotion. The Public Performance Act (1961) guaranteed ‘freedom of arts’ but it required various regulations including censorship ‘to nurture healthy public entertainment’ in the pursuit of: protecting the fundamental virtues of the constitutional law, national security and social order; nurturing self-­reliance of Korean nation; creative advancement of national culture; guiding children and youth; purity of family life; and advancement of public and social ethics. The Recorded Music Act (1967) also aimed to ‘advance national arts’ and ‘purify citizens’ emotional life’ by enhancing the quality of recorded music and banning uses of recorded music that would disorder the nation’s constitution, damage the reputation of the nation or harm public morals. While imposing such strict censorship, the government encouraged particular kinds of popular cultural content that would promote the virtues of self-­help, self-­reliance, national solidarity, public order, anti-­communism and a righteous lifestyle. The government’s control over cultural industries and demand for their positive ideological contributions were intensified especially after the October Reform in 1972. It persistently and systematically advocated ‘healthy’ cultural activities and products by providing policy directives, guidelines, funding, prizes and other types of financial incentives. Such an institutionalisation of the production of healthy – safe, conforming and non-­challenging – content was an effective means of putting culture under government control and disseminating a developmental and productive ethic. In the case of pop music, the government policy was coherently repressive. Making and distribution of pop music was a for-­profit enterprise so there was no concern with institutionally supporting the music industry. Thus, the main policy tool was content regulation carried out by ‘independent’ censorship committees that operated under heavy influence of the government. The censorship consisted of pre-­censoring and post-­censoring: content that passed the former could be produced, but it should pass the latter to be distributed. According to the Ministry of Culture and Public Information (1979: 268–269), out of 22,758 domestic songs (lyrics) reviewed between May 1975 and April 1979 by the Arts and Culture Ethics Committee (1966–1976) and the Public Performance Ethics

54   Modernising country and nationalising culture Committee (1976–1996), 210 lyrics were rejected and 4,654 were asked to revise for the reasons such as ‘childishness’, ‘decadence’, ‘sexual nature’, ‘low quality’, ‘encouraging dissatisfaction’, ‘nihilism’ and so on (Munyejinheung 1975). Similarly, many songs were rejected or required to be amended due to their decadent melody, Japanese influence or low-­quality singing style. Out of 10,222 overseas songs, 207 were also rejected due to their ‘unhealthy’, ‘anti-­social’, ‘anti-­war’ and ‘sexual’ messages. This explains why many songs by John Lennon and Bob Dylan were banned, including Lennon’s Revolution, We’re All Waters, Power to the People, Give Peace a Chance and Some Time in New York City and Dylan’s Masters of War, A Hard Rain’s A-­Gonna Fall, With God on our Side, When the Ship Comes In and Blowin’ in the Wind (Munyejinheung 1975). The censors also intended to supress the rising youth culture in Korea under the influence of the Western counter culture, which they regarded as poisonous and anti-­cultural. In the meantime, the government encouraged the creation and performance of ‘healthy’ pop songs that were in line with state ideologies and campaigns. Record music companies had to insert a ‘healthy’ song in every album whilst the government itself commissioned such songs, setting up a campaign organisation, supporting and encouraging choirs at school and work units, and holding singing competitions (H.-S. Kim 2012: 189–192). State control was felt more strongly in broadcasting. Although it was a mixed economy consisting of the state-­own broadcaster (later public broadcaster) and commercial ones that were quickly growing, their programmes were heavily censored by an ‘independent’ broadcasting ethics committee. The committee operated within the parameters set by the government focusing on nationalism, national culture, guiding minors, public order, protecting family life and so on. The censorship was all-­encompassing: from banning a total of 1,172 songs and 1,493 commercials to suspending actors 165 times and scriptwriters 7 times between 1962 and 1979 (MCPI 1979: 209). Popular programmes such as drama and entertainment shows were viewed suspiciously while those that focused on education, children and propaganda were encouraged. Like other areas, government control over broadcasting strengthened in the 1970s. TV programmes, especially entertainment programmes, had to be made ‘healthier’ to help restore social order and ‘purify’ national sentiment. Nihilistic music was replaced by bright and lively music, and sexually provocative or ‘wasteful’ elements were removed (H.-S. Kim 2012: 184). Drama characters that lacked self-­control or demonstrated unproductive attributes were also banned (pp. 184–185). It should be noted that the government had partial rights to schedule programmes and was deeply involved in the reform of broadcasting programmes (p. 185). Compared with the policy concerning pop music or broadcasting, film policy showed more complexity. On the surface, the government pursued two objectives: the regulation of film as culture and the promotion of film as an industry. A closer look, however, would show that the policy measures aimed at the growth of film as an industry were not free from political intentions. The Motion Picture Act (1962), the first film law in post-­liberation Korea, provided a strong ground for state control over film production, exhibition, import and export. Moreover, it was instrumental

Modernising country and nationalising culture   55 in the government’s forceful restructuring of the film industry throughout the period, which aptly reflected the power imbalance between the government and business/social sectors at that time. The restructuring was justified by the purpose of increasing domestic production capacity; however, there was overt political motivation to tame the industry and suppress voices of dissent. The first round of the forced restructuring was soon after Park’s coup in 1961: the government reorganised seventy-­two small and medium sized production companies into sixteen larger companies. While it was naïvely argued that the restructuring would facilitate the development of a Hollywood-­style film industry driven by a small number of big studios, the immediate outcome of the policy was the suppression of independent producers and their diverse voices. As the above law introduced the criteria to qualify production companies that could register (in terms of facilities, human resource and the number of films produced in the previous year), the following year saw a drastic restructuring of the industry: twenty-­one production companies merged into six companies. In 1967, there was another round of forceful mergers and reorganisation among twenty-­five production companies, which reduced their number to twelve. Throughout the 1970s, the number of registered production companies was between twelve and twenty-­three (J.-Y. Park 2005: 251). As film workers strongly criticised the criteria for a production company as non-­realistic, however, the policy gradually loosened over time. The government also directly coordinated the film production sector and controlled the number of productions via a production quota that was introduced in 1965 when the number of productions increased exponentially. Two years later, setting the production quota became the industry’s self-­regulation as the responsibility was transferred to the Korean Film Producers Association. One consequence of this policy was preventing independent producers from making films. Another consequence was the creation of propaganda films: 40 per cent of each production company’s production allowance was allocated to anti-­ communist or other propaganda films. Without doubt, these were at the cost of limited diversity and creativity. Throughout the period, the government was cautious about film import as foreign films were seen as a potentially powerful medium for diffusing ‘unhealthy’ Western viewpoints and lifestyles. Regulations on film import were legitimised also in terms of protection of domestic production: the government linked film import with film production and later with film export, allowing only qualified producers or later film exporters to import foreign films (J.-Y. Park 2005: 221). In addition to the screen quota that was introduced in 1966, foreign companies were banned from directly distributing films in Korea, which lasted for the following two decades. Although the policy to regulate film import and boost domestic industry was not always effective as there were unintended consequences (e.g. producers creating low-­quality domestic films to be given a quota of film import), it showed policy makers’ continuous concern with balancing domestic and foreign films in the market for varying reasons. Seemingly, the dominant mechanism of control import was shifted from political and cultural to economic over time.

56   Modernising country and nationalising culture A significant change to film policy was the creation of the Film Promotion Corporation in 1973 as this institutionalised state film funding. The corporation began providing financial support and investment to the production and distribution sectors of the film industry; however, its role was ultimately defined by the government. As in arts funding, state film funding came with tightened control. Film censorship was strengthened as the government wanted to filter out any films that challenged state ideologies. From 1973 on, it announced a ‘film directive’ every year, heavily influencing the operation of the industry with emphasis on the removal of corruption, the ‘creative’ development of Korean traditional culture and arts, and selective import of foreign films that could be useful in raising the spirit of the October Reform (J.-Y. Park 2005: 226–227). In its response to the intensifying film policy, the Film Promotion Corporation actively produced so-­called ‘state-­policy films’, the high-­budget films that were intended to evoke nationalistic, patriotic and collective sentiments by dealing mainly with the Korean War, anti-­communism and the New Village Movement. Apparently, that was an emulation of ‘state-­policy film’ promoted by the Japanese coloniser thirty years ago and one of many pieces of evidence showing the Park government’s keen appreciation and inheritance of techniques of colonial cultural policy (see Chapter 2). When the film directive for 1976 requested each registered production company to produce a high-­budget state-­policy film every year, the responsibility of producing this genre of film was transferred to the private studios. Those who produced ‘excellent’ state-­policy films would be selected and rewarded with the right to import foreign films, which was a lucrative business. Production companies conformed to the directive mainly to gain the right to film import, resulting in an abundance of propaganda films regardless of their artistic merits and commercial prospects. In short, film policy was an exemplary case that shows the comprehensiveness of Park’s cultural policy, where the government pursued both cultural promotion and control that were underpinned by cultural, political and economic logics.

Organisation of cultural sector and its co-­option One of the key strategies of cultural policy that the Park government inherited from the Japanese coloniser and institutionalised was the statist co-­option with cultural associations. This was not unique to cultural policy because the presence of the government was strongly felt in all professional fields in Korea, and even the rapidly expanding business sector was heavily regulated and guided by the government. The government’s dealing with the cultural sector was oriented towards working with ‘organised’ artists and cultural practitioners. On the top of the cultural sector’s own tradition of forming national associations, the government’s active co-­opt with the sector resulted in the proliferation of the large-­ scale and influential ‘peak organisations’ in the sector,2 notably, the Korea Federation of Cultural and Arts Organisations (Yechong). The existence of peak organisations that represent interests of a professional field and co-­work with the

Modernising country and nationalising culture   57 government is a key characteristic of corporatism. According to Schmitter (1974), corporatism is: a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, non-­competitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports. (pp. 93–94) He discusses two different types of corporatism: societal corporatism and statist corporatism. In contrast to ‘societal corporatism’ in the Nordic countries, Korea practiced ‘statist corporatism’, in which a significant power imbalance between the government and social organisations resulted in the top-­down style of co-­ option (Moon and Jun 2011). In this context, social and professional associations were often seen as ‘working at the periphery of the government’ and even ‘serving governmental purposes’. The role of cultural peak organisations in Korea was closer to propagating the government agenda and assisting its policy rather than actively negotiating with the government to maximise their sector’s advantages. Such a relationship with the government was observed in all other social and professional sectors, implying that the Western understanding of professional autonomy hardly resonated with Korea’s reality. It is interesting to note that, as White and Wade (1988) found in the context of Korea’s industrial policy, the government actively created or consciously mediated the creation of pseudo-­civil, non-­governmental associations to control an industry or a sector. Actually, this was how the biggest cultural peak organisation Yechong was created. Meanwhile, the right to freely form social organisations was highly restricted and only those who were selected by the government were invited to participate in policy making. This was the way of social control of professional expertise (Rueschemeyer 1983) in Korea under the authoritarian rule. In fact, the Korean cultural sector’s propensity to organise itself by forming nationwide associations and federations harked back to the colonial period, when leftist artists organised themselves to promote politically conscious arts while the nationalist (or non-­socialist) established their own groups to promote a so-­ called culturalist agenda that prioritised education and capacity building over direct engagement with the independence movement. Towards the later phase of colonial rule, as Chapter 2 notes, the Japanese coloniser actively facilitated the creation of cultural associations for the purpose of co-­option with and mobilisation of the cultural sector. In the post-­liberation years, there were severe contestations between the two ideologically different camps of artists, and this continued as Korea was divided and put into the US and USSR occupation. In the South, a nationwide cultural federation, the National Federation of Cultural

58   Modernising country and nationalising culture and Arts Organisations (Jeongungmunhwadanchechongyeonhapoe or Munchong), an umbrella organisation covering several art-­form associations, was created in 1947 to compete with a popular leftist cultural federation. As the Republic of Korea was born in 1948, Munchong became the country’s singular cultural federation, which consisted of ten art-­form associations (architecture, Korean traditional music, dance, literature, art, photography, theatre, entertainment, film and music). The federation kept a close and supportive relationship with the government throughout the 1950s, especially during the war time when its artists take part in reporting the war, helping the government’s anti-­communist campaign and entertaining the army. When Park Chung-­Hee came to power in May 1961, Munchong promptly and fully endorsed his military coup. With the sponsorship of the Ministry of Culture and Education, it held a ‘Military revolution arts festival’ consisting of various events in order to celebrate Park’s coup in three theaters in Seoul for three days from 28 to 30 June 1961 (Chosun Ilbo 1961a). The festival included Western music, traditional music and dance performances as well as a poetry recital, and was open to the public. On the first day of the festival, approximately 700 participants held a demonstration in support for Park Chung-­Hee. Furthermore, the next month saw Munchong organising a mass demonstration entitled ‘Artist demonstration for the realisation of military revolution’, in which its 1,300 members took part to show its support for Park’s government (Chosun Ilbo 1961b). In 1962, this cultural federation was transformed to a new federation, Yechong, which was a consequence of the Park government’s attempt to reorganise the country’s social sectors. After Park’s coup in 1961, social organisations were required to ‘voluntarily’ disband for the sake of nation rebuilding and social reform. Then, January 1962 saw some social organisations allowed to be formed, resulting in the reformulation of many formerly existing organisations and the birth of new ones in varying areas. The main aim was to regulate social sectors and create peak organisations that would be willing to collaborate with the government. This type of restructuring and reorganisation took place in almost all sectors and it was part of the government’s strategy to domesticate social and private organisations. It was the context where Munchong was ‘voluntarily’ disbanded and reborn as Yechong (Hangungmunhwayesuldanchechongyeonhapoe or Korea Federation of Cultural and Arts Organisations) in 1962. What is also worth commenting on is the omnipresence of the government, especially the Ministry of Public Information, in the entire process of the creation of the new federation Yechong. The ministry played coordinating roles by inviting related artists (the list of artists was decided by the ministry and the arts sector), initiating the meetings among representatives of each art form to discuss the establishment of new art-­form associations, and supervising the following steps (H.-Y. Cheon 1990; K.-H. Kim 1963). Under government financial support and encouragement, ten art-­form associations were newly born and united into a new federation, Yechong. Its launch took place in the parliamentary hall on 5 January 1962 and, two years later, the president gave it 20 million won (approx.

Modernising country and nationalising culture   59 USD 93,525) for building its headquarters, which clearly symbolised the proximity between the arts and politics in the country. In addition, Yechong’s operation was under heavy influence of the Ministry of Public Information; and it actively responded to the government agenda, from the controversial normalisation of diplomatic relation with Japan to Park Chung-­Hee’s October Reform, by issuing official statements of support. As Gwak Jong-­Won, the then chairman of the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, states, the government-­Yechong co-­ option was situated within the ‘cultural Cold War’ and was conditioned by state agenda: Yechong was born out of not only the wills of artists themselves but also the state’s urgent need for it. It has its raison d’être as long as Korea is divided and anti-­communist struggles constitute a condition of world history. It has a national significance and responsibility to further develop to become a bigger, stronger, friendly and unitary organisation. (Gwak 1975: 66) At the heart of the unwritten agreement between the government and cultural peak organisations, especially Yechong, was that the latter would contribute to the former’s agenda and, in return, would be given financial resources and other benefits. An early example is that artists and cultural practitioners could not be engaged with overseas performances without a recommendation of an art-­form association, which was affiliated with Yechong. Some officials of the Ministry of Public Information did not allow artists without such a recommendation to perform on national broadcasting or at national cultural venues (K.-H. Kim 1963: 184). Another more enduring example is that some of the federation’s chairs were invited to become an unelected member of parliament of the ruling (conservative) party. As such, the relationship between the authoritarian government and the cultural sector does not easily fit into the simplistic narrative that the latter was suppressed by the former. Many influential individuals in the cultural sector assisted the authoritarian rule and their support was incentivised by the institutionalised rewards and guarantee of power. Beyond the binary thinking of the state vs. civil society or that of subjugation vs. resistance, the exact nature of cultural practitioners’ co-­option with the government is yet to be unpicked by further research. Meanwhile, its legacy is still found in the continuing existence of the same peak organisations and their habitual reliance on government funding. The underdevelopment of middle class patronage for arts and the relatively limited role played by the market (except popular cultural forms such as film), too, explain the continuity of the cultural sector’s tendency of dependence on and collaboration with the government. The structure of cultural co-­option included Yechong’s regional and local branches, meaning that the national network of the federation often play roles as an arm of the government until the 1980s. While calling for more cultural resources for regions and promoting local arts programmes, the branches of Yechong willingly propagated the government agenda and closely worked

60   Modernising country and nationalising culture together with local authorities. The 1970s saw their active participation in the advocacy of government initiatives, particularly the New Village Movement. For example, the Daegu branch organised various New Village Movement-­themed activities such as festivals, a photography competition, a fundraising art exhibition, a theatre festival, a literature night and so on (Daegu Yechong 2012). It also held a series of anti-­communist and national security gatherings in the mid-­ 1970s. The circumstances were similar in other branches. The Chungbuk branch held an anti-­North Korea protest under the encouragement of the National Security Agency, when Choi Eun-­Hee, the famous actress, was kidnapped by North Korea (Chungbuk Yechong 2012). The Busan branch’s activities included anti-­communist fundraising, a series of anti-­communist and anti-­Japan gatherings, and activities themed with the New Village Movement. It held annual New Village Movement assemblies and organised local artists’ gatherings in support of national solidarity, where the city’s 400 artists announced a statement saying that they would orient their arts creation activities towards the rediscovery of the national cultural tradition, make efforts to build a culturally healthy city and promote the spirit of the New Village Movement (Busan Yechong 2012). Of course, there were writers, artists and critics who were suspicious of Yechong’s co-­option with the government. They proposed that the federation be abolished and cultural associations withdraw their membership from the federation (K.-H. Kim 1963). Some argued that Yechong should be depoliticised and remain an association for representing the interests of artists and networking between them (Yeo 1968: 126). Yet, it was not until the 1980s when the problem of Yechong became a topic for broader debate. Interestingly, it was the chairman of the Korean Culture and Arts Promotion Foundation who began the debate by pointing out this federation’s uselessness in 1980 (S.-S. Shin 1980). Many artists and commentators agreed that the federation, overly concerned with co-­opting with the government, played a small role in terms of advocating the arts and benefiting artists. They called for the federation’s change or disbandment. In response, Lee Bong-­Rae the then chairman of the federation indicated that ‘the revival of Yechong depends on the government’ and justified its existence in highly political terms: We would not need this federation if there was no conflict between South and North Koreas. If there is a peace talk on reunification between two Koreas, the federation should represent the arts and cultural sector [in the South] and take part, shouldn’t it? (Cited in S.-S. Shin 1980: 241; also see T.-J. Lee 1980: 207) Yechong’s supportive relationship with the government was also defended based on the existence of ‘national security’ issues and the arts sector’s financial reliance on it (S.-S. Shin 1980). Despite many artists questioning the federation’s purpose and use, it continued to prosper and maintain its proximity with the government. For instance, when General Chun Doo-­Hwan seized power in 1980 following the assassination of Park Chung-­Hee in 1979, the federation quickly

Modernising country and nationalising culture   61 announced its support for Chun (H.-Y. Cheon 1990)3 and organised a gathering to back his politically driven anti-­corruption (‘purifying society’) campaign (Chosun Ilbo 1980). The statist cultural co-­option was an essential element of authoritarian governance that lasted till the late 1980s. In the following years, the co-­option became a target of heavy criticism and was regarded as a main problem the nation’s democratic cultural policy should put an end to. Indeed, arts policy discussion in the 2000s focused on the need for redefining the state-­culture relationship by instituting arm’s length principle. Still, the historical legacy was felt strongly as the role of large cultural associations, as key partners of policy makers, remained crucial. The democratisation brought about the diversification of cultural sector associations by facilitating the creation of progressive arts and cultural activist organisations and putting the existing peak organisations such as Yechong in increasing competition with progressive ones. With the rise of party politics in the 2000s, a new tendency emerged where some of cultural peak organisations were associated with a particular government, testing government capacity in balancing interests of different sections of the cultural sector and working with multiple peak organisations.

Conclusion The complicated entanglement between culture and the nation state in Korea during Park Chung-­Hee’s regime meant that the idea of culture itself was embedded profoundly in the national project of modernisation. The mission of culture in the survival of the nation state via political stability and economic development – two of the most crucial components of the modernisation project – was imagined more specifically through the idea of ‘jeongsin munhwa’ and ‘national culture’. It was within this context that cultural policy advocated the importance of promoting traditional culture and heritage and creating new ‘healthy’ types of contemporary culture. The government paid great attention to the utilities of culture in mobilising the Korean populace and promoting their productive ethic. Governance through culture in this period was far from liberal as Koreans were given no freedom to choose and no alternatives were available. Here, the discursive capacity of the government should be noted: it created an impressively coherent and overarching frame of mind – the views on democracy, industrialisation, modernisation and (national) culture – which Koreans should learn, accommodate and internalise. The extreme degree of the concentration of power in the government, and the consequent power imbalance between the government and social sectors meant that the cultural ministry was able to quickly implement authoritarian cultural policy without any significant resistance from the cultural sector. While there were voices of discontent, artists financially benefited from and positively responded to the newly introduced public cultural funding. Indeed, cultural policy was a social phenomenon, where many artists, writers and intellectuals co-­operated with the government and helped to culturally legitimise the regime’s

62   Modernising country and nationalising culture political and economic endeavours. The complex structure of the policy was run systematically by generalist bureaucrats whose work was coordinated by the mode of hierarchy. They did not necessarily have cultural knowledge, however, they were able to internalise cultural expertise and extend their capacity by collaborating with artists and cultural practitioners, especially those affiliated with Yechong. The government’s monopoly of cultural discourse, well-­organised bureaucracy and the increased cultural budget meant that the cultural ministry had robust implementational capacity, putting in place its plans and schemes to achieve its policy goals, and setting a template of exceptionally productive cultural policy of Korea.

Notes 1 It is interesting to know that there was a parallel development of cultural policy of this kind in Taiwan. The Kuomindang government in Taiwan launched a national ‘cultural renaissance movement’ from the mid-­1960s to the mid-­1970s. Allen Chun (1994) provides an excellent analysis of this cultural campaign, especially how and why it was anchored in traditional Chinese culture and how a national frame of mind was constructed via this movement. He argues that the movement was part of a broader project by the Kuomindang government to realise its vision of the nation state, which was imagined as being constituted with one people, one culture, one family and one nation. 2 Peak organisation is a large-­scale, influential association that represents the interests of its members. Peak organisations influence public policy by advocating their causes and agenda, lobbying the government and public sector actors, and taking part in the policy making process. They are different from common – smaller scale – interest groups as they have more and institutionalised access to and power to affect policy making. As commented in Chapter 1, the more corporatist policy making is, the more crucial roles are played by peak organisations. This can be seen as an example of the entanglement of the two different coordination modes of hierarchy (corporatism) and network. As I note in this chapter, however there was a power imbalance between the government and cultural peak organisations such as various cultural associations under the umbrella of Yechong, meaning that their roles as peak organisations were severely limited. 3 H.-Y. Cheon (1990) reports that the federation’s statement (19 August 1980) says ‘We believe in General Chun’s sincere personality and grand vision of culture and expect national schemes for cultural renaissance to proceed under his leadership’. It is also reported that, following the statement, Seo Jeong-­Ju, a renowned poet, gave a speech arguing that General Chun should be chosen to be the country’s new president, and another renowned poet, Kim Chun-­Su, was among the fifteen founders of General Chun’s Democratic Justice Party and later became the party’s MP.

4 Democracy and cultural policy transformation

Culture and democracy Does cultural policy contribute to the democratisation of society and is democracy necessary for cultural policy development? The colonial origins of cultural policy in Korea and its institutionalisation by the authoritarian regime of Park Chung-­Hee remind us that ‘[n]either cultures nor cultural policies are by themselves democratic by definition’ (Vestheim 2012: 495). The extremely proactive cultural policy in fascist Japan and Germany during the Second World War is another piece of evidence that democracy and cultural policy are two separate phenomena. As the evolution of Korean cultural policy since the late 1980s demonstrates, however, they can be closely interconnected and mutually affecting. Democracy, as a political principle and system, shapes cultural policy’s purpose and means whilst constructive response of cultural policy to forces of democratisation helps to further the socio-­political advancement of a society. It is from this perspective that Chapter 4 looks into the intense and dynamic interactions between the democratisation of Korea and the transformation of its cultural policy. Cultural policy scholars in the existing patron states frequently make sense of the culture-­democracy relationship in the frameworks of ‘democratising culture’ and ‘cultural democracy’, which are two competing ideals of cultural policy (Evrard 1997). These notions emerged in Europe in the 1970s, where cultural policy that had focused on promoting and disseminating high arts was accused of elitism. The dissemination-­centric approach was conceptualised as ‘democratising culture’, that is, giving people access to professionally made cultural goods and services (mainly high arts), regardless of their socio-­economic, geographical or physical circumstances. Meanwhile, ‘cultural democracy’ meant something very different: giving people power to decide their own cultural pursuits and exploring a wider meaning of culture, inclusive of popular, commercial, folk and amateur cultures. The idea of cultural democracy was supportive of the view that culture is ordinary and a dynamic process of meaning-­making (Williams 1989[1958]). Its emphasis on the virtue of people’s self-­willed choice and the denial of a universal value of particular kinds of culture appeared to resonate with the newly emerging trends of postmodernism and consumerism (Evrard

64   Democracy and cultural policy transformation 1997). However, cultural democracy entailed grave concerns with politics of legitimation (whose culture is legitimate and who has cultural authority?) and the political economy of cultural production (who owns and has access to the means of cultural production and distribution?), setting itself clearly apart from either the postmodern or consumerist approach to culture (Mulgan and Worpole 1986). Generally speaking, cultural policies in the existing patron states in the West since the 1970s have tried to incorporate some elements of cultural democracy although they are still influenced by the principle of democratising culture. However, the recent boom of economically motivated policies in cultural industries manifests the triumph of postmodern and consumerist interpretations of culture over cultural political concerns that are core constituents of the idea of cultural democracy. As mentioned, the discourse of democratising culture and cultural democracy is rooted in Western liberal societies where political democracy and civil liberties formed a fundamental backdrop for cultural policy development. Consequently, the discourse entails a tendency of culturalised projection of the culture-­democracy relationship; that is, democracy is taken as a cultural matter whereas relatively little attention is paid to its political life beyond cultural politics. Hence, it is not very surprising that the existing cultural policy literature seldom shows enthusiasm about discussing artists’ struggle for freedom of expression and cultural activists’ engagement with political movements although these are one of the most critical agendas for cultural policy discussion in newly democratised societies or those in transition: for example, the artists’ struggle with political or religious censorship in Poland, Turkey and Indonesia to name a few.1 Given this, Korea provides an interesting case showing the complicated trajectory of democratic transformation of cultural policy, in which the implication of democracy has gradually shifted from political to cultural. This chapter highlights the two driving forces behind the policy transformation: cultural activism that was an essential part of the country’s democratic movement itself; and cultural policy’s constructive response to the forces of democratisation. The activism merged culture and progressive politics, broke the government monopoly over cultural discourse, especially the discourse of ‘national culture’, and put forward an alternative imagination of culture. In the meantime, Korean governments since the late 1980s were capable of and willing to embrace some of the democratic agendas and embarked on a fundamental transformation of the nation’s cultural policy. This concurred with their continuation of the tradition of statist cultural policy and expansion of state capacity in public cultural provision and funding. Importantly, the process of the democratic shift of cultural policy has been complicated, contentious and even paradoxical. The first paradox is that, as of the middle of the 1990s, cultural activism lost its efficacy. The activism effectively delegitimised and challenged the authoritarian cultural policy; however, it hardly generated a new template for state cultural policy nor a new consensus on meanings, values and functions of culture in Korean society. In a similar vein, it struggled but eventually failed to accommodate a new spirit of consumer society

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   65 that was booming in the 1990s. Being under pressure from cultural activism and trying to correspond to democratic forces, the government took initiatives of cultural policy transformation and developed an interventionist cultural policy dedicated to cultural promotion as opposed to control. Cultural promotion without social consensus, however, implied that that there would be a serious ‘void’ in Koreans’ understanding of culture and cultural policy, which was ultimately filled by the globally popular discourse of a new economy and culture’s economic expediency (see Chapter 5). The next paradox is that the meaning of democracy within the cultural policy context changed over time, from political to cultural. Until the mid-­1990s, democracy was understood in terms of tackling the authoritarian regime, fighting for artistic freedom, challenging the official discourse of culture and actively seeking an alternative. Around the turn of the new millennium, however, it came to be somewhat narrowly interpreted as ‘institutional autonomy’ of culture, which refers to expert-­led cultural policy making exemplified by the creation of arm’s length organisations such as a film council and arts council. Autonomy, an important principle of democracy, can be discussed at three different levels: autonomy of the state (as opposed to intrusion or intervention of other states or supranational bodies), autonomy of the individual (as opposed to state intrusion and oppression) and institutional autonomy (sectoral and professional autonomy from political and market imperatives) (Blomgren 2012). Historically, Korea had moments when autonomy at each of these levels was vigorously sought after and fought for in one way or another, and all of those endeavours had serious implications for cultural policy. Since the democratisation, institutional autonomy became a major theme of cultural policy discourse and noticeable efforts were made in this area. However, such autonomy has turned out to be rather fragile and ironically depend on the government’s commitment and capacity to support it. Last, the chapter finds that cultural policy, especially arts policy that was ‘depoliticised’ through the process of democratisation, has been ‘re-­politicised’. This is due to the emergence of party politics – which itself was a consequence of democratisation – and the large-­scale backlash from conservative media, cultural practitioners and politicians that repeatedly evoked the ‘culture war’. Under two recent conservative presidents from the late 2000s, especially the backward-­ looking perception of culture held by President Park Geun-­Hye (2013–2017), the tendency to re-­politicise cultural policy intensified and culminated in an unprecedented crisis of cultural policy. It has been observed that the post-­ democratisation symptoms such as the rising divisive politics and the trend of re-­politicisation of culture are setting new conditions for the country’s democratic cultural policy. The following two sections of this chapter will discuss the historical process of the democratic transformation of Korean cultural policy since the late 1980s by focusing on the roles played by cultural activists and the government, and their constructive negotiations. This will be followed by an analysis of the politics of Arts Council Korea, which was ambitiously launched as a manifestation

66   Democracy and cultural policy transformation of democratic cultural policy but has been continuously subject to the post-­ democratisation divisive politics.

Democratic movement and the de-­nationalisation of culture The decade from 1987 onwards was an age of great democratic transformation for Koreans. The restoration of presidential elections in 1987, the election of a civilian president from the ruling party in 1992 and that of an oppositional leader in 1997 marked an era-­defining transformation of the country’s political landscape and thus the context for cultural policy. What was most notable was that the bottom-­up democratic movement encouraged the emergence of numerous progressive cultural organisations and associations. This brought about an important structural change in the cultural sector and disrupted its co-­option with the government. Although the gatherings of progressive artists, especially in performing arts and literature, existed in the 1970s, it was the following decade that saw an unprecedented proliferation of cultural activist groups, collectives, committees and associations at a regional and national scale (Sung 2012).2 If the cultural resistance in the previous decade was led by well-­known writers and intellectuals who stood against the authoritarian rule, that of the 1980s was underpinned by emerging networks of self-­organised activists in many art forms and their close interactions with democratic and labour movements (C.-N. Kim 1989; M.-W. Lee 2010). For example, it was such expansion of cultural activism that gave birth to the Korea People’s Artists Federation (Minyechong) which was set up in 1988, aiming to inject political progressivism to cultural practice and incorporate cultural perspectives into the democratic movement. As its inaugural statement noted, this federation proposed an arts movement that would promote politically conscious and socially participatory arts and would contest state cultural control: we have gathered to respond to the call of our time to overcome foreign forces, aspire national reunification and create arts that are based on the life of people [….] artists themselves should create conditions to produce freer arts and contribute to the public in sincere and honest manners, and should correct the government’s problematic arts policy […] In order to secure autonomy, we should nurture solidarity among artists and oppose any supervision or regulation by [political] power. We will establish democratic principles and practice them so we can enhance our capacity for the arts movement. (Minyechong’s inaugural statement 1988 cited in G.-L. Shin 1989: 177) Progressive artists and cultural practitioners resisted the military regime and its scheme to maintain the existing rule by enthusiastically participating in the democratic and labour movement. They were ardently supportive of the struggles of workers, farmers and the urban poor and were vocal about geopolitical issues such as inter-­Korean relations and nuclear disarmament of the Korean

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   67 peninsula. They endeavoured to generate politically opinionated artwork that vividly expressed the ‘desire for formal innovations merged with the pursuit of publicness, sociality and democratic participation’ (S. Lee 2012). Its creation was situated at the juncture of political activism and aesthetic innovations and captured the dynamic interplay between arts and politics during the period of democratisation. The participatory and collective art forms that progressive artists preferred included outdoor performances and large-­scale paintings for outdoor display. These were an essential feature of public demonstrations and protests and gained a certain degree of popularity, for example, among university students and members of labour unions. One of the biggest contributions made by progressive artists and cultural practitioners to the country’s cultural policy development was their effective de-­ legitimisation of the official discourse of ‘national culture’ that had dominated Koreans’ perception of culture since the 1960s (see Chapter 3). The irony was that they challenged the official discourse by advocating the very idea of ‘national’ and diversifying its meanings. Their strategy was highly discursive – imagining and articulating the same thing differently and completely changing its referents. This was not, of course, the first time that the statist understanding of national culture was critically interrupted by artists. In the 1970s, progressive artists and writers explored alternative interpretations and practices of national culture through re-­appreciation and reinvention of the country’s traditional literature, folk theatre and mask dance that were deemed as conveying people-­ centred and collective aesthetics. In doing so, they competed with the government for the discursive ownership of ‘national culture’ (W. Kim 2012). However, their voices were not heard widely outside their circles, leaving the government’s hegemonic narrative of culture to dominate the cultural policy and media discussion. The second half of the next decade brought with it a substantial change in circumstances as the alternative idea of national culture gained a lot of visibility and popular support. Many progressive cultural and arts organisations, including Minyechong (its word-­to-word English translation is ‘Federation of Korean National Artists’), defined their identity, pursuit and ideal by the term ‘national’ and explored new significances and expressions of ‘national culture’. The national culture championed by these organisations and artists repudiated the official discourse, which accentuated the nation’s heritage and tradition discovered, restored and reconstructed through the filter of nationalism, patriotism and relevance to state governance. The new idea was that national culture is to be situated within the Korean nation’s social, political and geopolitical realities and resonate with the contemporary life of Korean people. Inspired by the nation’s grass-­root cultural expressions and sensibilities as well as realist aesthetics, the artists were keen on reviving the tradition of the country’s folk culture and engaged in artistic innovations with popular forms of culture. For them, national culture was a culture of political resistance and social engagement that would tackle state cultural control, elitism of cultural establishments, Western (American) cultural hegemony, and vulgar commercial entertainment

68   Democracy and cultural policy transformation exemplified by the term 3S (sports, screen and sex). The fierce film activism that protested against the direct distribution of American films by Hollywood studios was situated within this broader narrative of national culture. National culture also meant the culture of the Korean nation, and the nation’s reunification was a popular theme of the progressive artwork. Here, it is interesting to find the similarity between the official cultural discourse of the military regime and the cultural activism’s new understanding of national culture. Both were overtly ‘forward-­looking’ in the sense that they reflected heavy concerns with contemporary socio-­political agendas and actively envisioned an ideal future of the Korean society. In short, the culture discourse – either official or alternative – was closely tied to the idea of nation, society and the (democratic) nation state. Culture was not conceptually separable from politics, and progress artists’ call for cultural autonomy was also deeply connected to their participation in political activism. Another similarity between the official and alternative discourses was that ‘national’ was a unifying and totalising concept that was based upon ethnic nationalism and did not allow other categories of collective identity of Koreans, deterring individualistic or consumerist perception of culture. With the progress of democratisation and the retreat of cultural activism from the middle of the 1990s, however, the political and ideological connotations of ‘national culture’ became weakened to the extent that this notion eventually became an insignificant signifier. The state’s top-­down and imposing discourse of national culture could not sustain as the society became liberalised and diversified. The alternative discourse also lost its popularity as ‘the national’ – as a normative category of collective cultural identity, ideological imperative, and particular set of aesthetics and themes – could not survive the increasingly consumerist cultural landscape of the society. The overall consequence was that the idea of ‘national culture’ became depoliticised and finally lost its prescriptive parameters while getting more neutral and descriptive qualities, referring to the culture of ethnic Koreans. Gradually, it became marginalised and disappeared from the country’s cultural policy discussion by the turn of the new millennium. This meant that a substantial void was created in the policy’s understanding of culture. The decline of ‘the national’ in both cultural policy and cultural activism was an important historical event, which signalled the end of repressive cultural policy, the diversification of cultural identity of Koreans, cultural activism’s newly found interest in cultural consumption, and the triumph of cultural consumerism. The convoluted relations between these political and socio-­cultural phenomena are still to be unpacked but the very concept of ‘national culture’ had already become too unexciting a topic for researchers to comment on, thus resulting in a dearth of writings on this significant event.

Cultural activism and the pursuit of freedom Another crucial contribution made by cultural activism to the democratic transformation of the country’s cultural policy was its tireless pursuit of freedom and

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   69 challenge to the authoritarian cultural control. Progressive artists and cultural activists took freedom as a basic principle of democracy and being free as their first ‘duty’ (Williams 1989[1978]). They were highly suspicious of the existing cultural policy and demanded the abolishment or amendment of repressive cultural laws such as the Public Performance Act, Recorded Music Act and Motion Picture Act, which had been used to severely curtail freedom of expression (see Chapter 3). In many areas, government control over culture was seriously tackled. An abundant volume of politically themed artwork was produced, performed and exhibited often within the context of public demonstrations. Challenging films that dealt with taboo subject matters such as the Gwangju Democratic Movement and labour union activism were produced, for example, Oh! Dreamland (1989) and The Night before the Strike (1990), which merged politics and culture while boldly confronting film censorship. At the same time, independent journalism was taken as a critical pre-­condition of the nation’s democratisation. The focal point was the public protest against the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), the public broadcaster: the KBS’s subjugation to government control and the political bias in its programmes triggered a popular and powerful resistance movement of ‘license fee refusal’ in the mid-­1980s, which set a norm of a ‘license fee freeze’ that has continued to the present day. Progressive artists and cultural activists objected to the long tradition of the cultural sector’s co-­option with the government, especially the role played by Yechong in supporting the authoritarian regime. They demanded Yechong’s apology and more transparency in cultural policy and cultural funding. Facing the blossoming of progressive arts and cultural activities, the conservative Yechong and its associated artists pleaded for the principle of ‘arts for arts’ sake’ in the name of ‘pure arts’, the arts that are disconnected and freed from political and commercial considerations. In Korean society, which suffered from violent ideological conflicts and their long-­lasting painful legacies, resorting to apolitical arts was a way for artists to shield themselves from being associated with unwanted ideological debates and becoming objects of suppression by undemocratic governments. As the country’s cultural history shows, however, the reality was much more complicated and this concept was self-­contradictory as it frequently functioned as an excuse for the artist’s not questioning the authoritarian rule and complying with its cultural control. Progressive artists and activists did not think that the idea of artistic autonomy conflicted with the engagement of the arts with socio-­political issues. For them, freedom of expression would eventually help Korean people to be free from authoritarian rule, better understand the country’s (geo)political conditions, and envisage alternatives. Furthermore, they wanted to directly involve people in the creation of culture and the arts while contending with the government’s view that saw them as an object of education and enlightenment. In this pursuit of people-­centred aesthetics, the relationship between cultural producers and audiences was freshly imagined. The existing, strict distinction between creators and audiences was questioned and, at the same time, the rising commercialism in cultural industries was problematised. To put it simply, what they were

70   Democracy and cultural policy transformation proposing was a new, idealised understanding of culture – as a set of open, participatory and democratic meaning-­making practices which are relevant to the lives of ordinary people: In general, culture and arts are holistic, dynamic and progressive expressions of life. If the arts ignore the true nature of life and ‘paralyse and tranquilise people’s awareness’, they are no longer arts. Arts should embrace both ‘universality’ of human life and ‘particularity’ of our history. They are no longer arts, if they distinguish ‘creators’ from ‘audience’, and become an object for ‘trade, alienation or hedonism’. They should be collaborative arts, the arts for a unified world where there are ‘voluntary self-­expression’ and ‘natural exchanges’ [of creative expressions]. (G.-L. Shin 1989: 179) In some regards, such an approach resembled the idea of cultural democracy developed in Western Europe; take, for example, the ‘community arts movement’ in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. This arts movement challenged existing cultural establishments and cultural policy that prioritised artistic excellence in high art forms whilst seeking ways to connect arts to community, gender, LGBT and black activism (Mulgan and Worpole 1986). It generated popular, collective and accessible forms of art and provided creative inputs to activism in varying areas. As in the British community arts movement, one of the key issues for Korea’s cultural activism in the late 1980s and early 1990s was about ‘agent’ (C.-N. Kim 1989): who should be the agents of the progressive arts and culture? While some organisations viewed themselves as professional cultural enablers who assisted the democratic endeavours, there were those who believed that participatory arts would be meaningful only when produced and practiced by working people themselves such as factory workers, farmers and the urban poor. This led to a proliferation of cultural groups set up within the framework of labour unions in particular. The groups’ activities such as music-­making and performance, which themselves were seen as healthy and lively aesthetic expression, were expected to help to empower union members and inject excitement and a sense of deep engagement to the labour movement. However, the democratisation and the rise of consumer society in the middle of the 1990s resulted in cultural activism’s quick loss of its influence. At first, progressive artists and activists attempted to find new inspirations and energy in the then rapidly expanding cultural and media consumption. As explained elsewhere (H.-K. Lee 2013), the 1990s witnessed the emerging alliance between cultural activism and consumer culture: activists’ call for putting an end to censorship was supported by cultural consumers who aspired to access their chosen songs and films without state control. A well-­known example was the abolition of music censorship in 1996. The central figure was the singer Chung Tae-­Chun, who was popular and famous for his socially and politically engaging songs and campaigned for years against the censorship that banned many of his songs. He eventually took the music censorship to the constitutional court. Such

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   71 an effort was supplemented by the activities of ardent fans of the hugely popular boy group, Seo Tae-­Ji and Boys: the fans fiercely contested the censorship over a song of this group, unfailingly showing policy makers consumer power. In the same year, the constitutional court decided that film censorship was a violation of the country’s constitutional law that guarantees freedom of expression and bans censorship, favouring a progressive film production company that brought the case to the court a few years earlier. The democratic mood of society, the rise of consumerism and the burgeoning of cultural fandom provided cultural producers with a fertile environment where they were strongly motivated to explore new ideas, themes, motifs and expressions, pushing the existing political, social, cultural and moral boundaries. Facing the rapidly shifting socio-­cultural landscape of Korean society, progressive artists and cultural practitioners tried to revamp their roles by focusing on the ‘consumer’ (‘suyongja’; its English translation is ‘people who receive and use media and culture’). They wanted to engage consumers in their cultural events, attract them by creatively using new technologies and affordable recording devices, and interact with them via their websites. Ultimately, they wished to facilitate a new kind of progressive cultural movement by fostering ‘active consumers’ (e.g. B.-S. Kim 1995). However, cultural activism’s turn to consumption did not succeed. The happy conjuncture of progressivism and consumerism in the 1990s was mediated by their common pursuit of ‘freedom’ but it turned out to be a temporary phenomenon. Agenda-­based progressive arts hardly chimed with ‘freedom to choose’, an important principle of the marketplace that gives consumers sovereignty and cultural authority. After all, there was a fundamental gap between a progressive arts movement that pursued collective aesthetics and explored social meanings of culture, and cultural consumption that celebrated individualism and decentralisation of cultural authority. Consumer tastes became increasingly sophisticated, favouring commercially oriented, trendy products. The decline of the influential singing group Noraereul Channeun Saramdeul (People who are seeking songs), which was known for its active participation in the democratic movement and gained a substantial following in late 1980s and early 1990s, aptly exemplifies the failure of progressive artists to adapt to the burgeoning consumer society. As the artists were not able to develop innovative approaches that combined cultural progressivism and consumerism, the decline of state-­endorsed official culture was quickly followed by a rapid expansion of commercial pop culture. The cultural activism in the 1980s and the early 1990s was an era-­defining phenomenon, which successfully challenged the authoritarian cultural policy and its cultural discourse. The activism separated culture from the statist ideological imperatives and created a space where culture could be envisioned alternatively. However, its attempts to develop both political and popular cultural expressions and to establish new relationships with audiences failed to leave a lasting footprint on the country’s discourse of culture and cultural policy. Despite the appeal of its outputs to an audience consisting mainly of trade union members, university students and activists in many areas, it hardly affected the everyday cultural

72   Democracy and cultural policy transformation life of ordinary Koreans who, especially young generations, began enjoying and celebrating ‘cultural freedom’ in the form of pop culture consumption. At the same time, its tight binding of aesthetics to politics meant that its artistic innovations and achievements could hardly transcend the given era to become new currents in contemporary arts and culture in the country.

Cultural policy transformation and government capacity The focus of Korean cultural policy shifted from cultural control to promotion in response to the democratic shift in the country’s politics and the forces of cultural activism. In fact, there was some visible progress even before 1987: the arrival of a new breed of cultural policy rhetoric including cultural enjoyment and democratising of culture and the continuous expansion of the nation’s cultural infrastructure (mainly building of national cultural venues and regional arts centres). Another notable development was the de-­statisation of government-­ organised national arts festivals (competitions) that were important state cultural events: for instance, the transfer of ownership of the Korean Art Exhibition, Korean Music Festival, Korean Theater Festival and Korean Traditional Music Festival from the cultural ministry to the Korean Arts and Culture Foundation and the Korean Broadcasting System (Arts Council Korea 2008).3 However, various art forms remained objects of strict censorship and policy makers frequently discussed culture from the perspective of governance and nation building. For instance, the idea of the ‘autonomy (self-­reliance) of the Korean nation’ as opposed to the Western style of democracy and individualism was repeatedly referred to in those years. What happened in 1987 strongly signalled that there would be a substantial paradigm shift in cultural policy. Facing the society-­wide democratic movement, the ex-­general Roh Tae-­Woo, the leader of the ruling conservative party, issued a statement in June 1987 declaring that he would support a revision of the country’s constitutional law to restore presidential elections; a few months later, he found himself being elected as the new president. His statement that ‘the government cannot control and should not control the press’ hinted at the changing attitude of Korean policy makers towards culture and media (Seo 1988). This shift necessitated the loosening of censorship, increased freedom of expression and the withdrawal of state initiatives aimed at public mobilisation and ideological control: for example, the country witnessed the lifting of the restriction on the publisher registration system (1987) and the abolition of censorship on scripts of theatre plays (1988). Another noticeable development was the removal of the ban on public access to publications from communist countries and North Korea (1988). The new approach to cultural policy was furthered by the civilian Kim Young-­Sam’s administration (1993–1998). As noted earlier, the abolishment of the censorship on music (1996) and film (1996) was a result of the continuous negotiation between state authority and the democratic movement. This came with the rise of the cultural policy agenda of promoting cultural activities that would help to facilitate the feeling of sameness between the two

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   73 Koreas, reflecting the mood of the period and resonating with cultural activists’ call for pro-­unification endeavours. Facing the end of the Cold War and the rapidly changing geopolitics, cultural policy makers were trying to accommodate some aspects of the democratic movement and cultural activism, especially the agenda of Korean reunification and the fostering of a shared national cultural identity across both Koreas (H.-S. Yim 2002). If the increased freedom of expression was a product of cultural activism and policy makers’ constructive response to the spirit of the times, it was the areas of ‘cultural enjoyment (hyangsu)’, cultural investment and cultural infrastructure that showed the Korean government’s growing capacity and proactive approaches (G.-M. Park. 2010: Chapter 8). Acknowledging that ‘democracy and cultural policy are inseparable’, President Roh Tae-­Woo stated in his ‘message on cultural policy’ in as early as 1990: So far, culture and arts have been treated as secondary to urgent issues of politics and economy. […] the government now declares ‘the right to cultural enjoyment’ which means distributing culture among all people and ‘the right to cultural participation’ that refers to everyone freely creating culture. […] My basic principle for individuals’ creative arts and cultural activities is to support without intervention. (T.-W. Roh 1990) He anticipated that ‘culturalism’ would develop in the age of ‘information and post-­industrial’ transformation and expected culture – as ‘power that governs internal dimensions of human mind’ – to help Koreans self-­enlighten themselves (T.-W. Roh 1990). It is very interesting to know that, like his predecessors, he broadly understood the role of culture in the context of social transformation and governance of the populace. What distinguished his cultural policy, however, was that the idea of culturalism was expressed primarily in terms of the promotion of ‘right to cultural enjoyment’ and ‘participation’, moving the policy closer to those in the existing patron states. In this sense, the establishment of the separate ‘Cultural Ministry’ in 1990 and the appointment of Lee Eo-­Ryeong as its minister was a very important event that signalled a fundamental reorientation of cultural policy and an increase in cultural budget (B.-L. Lee 2004). The newly created ministry focused on culture and the arts, shedding the responsibilities of government propaganda which had been an essential pillar of Korean cultural policy for the past four decades. The new minister Lee, as a widely known ‘culturalist’ or ‘advocate of culture’, vigorously pursued the depoliticisation of cultural policy and enthusiastically put forward the agenda of public accessibility to culture. Cultural access became a new, powerful theme of Korean cultural policy although there was no society-­wide discussion on how these goals could be interpreted and put into practice. Looking into the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation’s spending would be an easy way to examine the change of cultural policy in the early 1990s, as this arts funding agency was operating as an arm of the ministry. Until the end of the

74   Democracy and cultural policy transformation 1980s, its funding had benefited mainly the national arts competitions and regional touring of their winning performances and artworks (Arts Council Korea 2008: 324–325). The support for arts production was another key area but was secondary in terms of the size of expenditure. Then, the 1990s saw the foundation’s funding gradually diversify to assist various activities, giving attention to not only arts production but also public access, arts education and research in each art form. Cultural policy’s increasing concern with access and participation under the overarching theme of ‘cultural enjoyment’ was also a response to the policy’s preoccupation thus far with cultural infrastructure expansion and support for producers. At the same time, it can be regarded as a consequence of the rise of a consumer society, which caused a substantial reorientation in the understanding of culture on the side of both government cultural policy and cultural activism towards ‘consumers’ and their enjoyment. The democratic development of state cultural policy concurred with an important shift in cultural activism in the 1990s: the activists resorted to the professionalisation of their work, collaboration with cultural establishments and the government, and getting access to public cultural infrastructure and public cultural funding (An 2010; Joongang Ilbo 1993; B.-S. Kim 1995; M.-W. Lee 2010). This change was symbolised by the transformation of Minyechong, the national federation of progressive artists, to a registered organisation in 1993 and its quick expansion via creation of regional and local branches. By doing so, it became an influential peak organisation in the cultural sector at both central and local levels, and a regular client of the Korean Culture and Arts Promotion Foundation from 1993. Although the foundation’s funding for Yechong, the conservative cultural federation, was much bigger, its regular financial support for Minyechong hinted at a possibility of collaboration between cultural activism and cultural policy, the phenomenon that fast developed under the two liberal governments from 1998 to 2008. The trajectory of Minyechong shows how cultural activism was accommodated or even replaced by cultural policy: the federation became institutionalised and recognised as a key partner of cultural policy makers, receiving increased public funding and becoming very enthusiastic about initiating cultural policy discussion (M.-W. Lee 2010). It is within this context that some cultural critics lament the demise of the progressive arts movement and call for a new kind of cultural activism that will intentionally marginalise itself from the mainstream agenda of cultural policy (e.g. D.-Y. Lee 2010). It should be contemplated that the democratisation and liberalisation of Korean society did not mean a withdrawal of the state from cultural affairs. On the contrary, the government’s capacity grew over time despite the rhetoric of ‘support but not intervene’ initially proposed by President Roh Tae-­Woo (1988–1993) and firmly endorsed and advocated by President Kim Dae-­Jung (1998–2003) and his successor President Roh Moo-­Hyun (2003–2008). In addition to the strengthening of existing financial and implementational capacity in planning, resource mobilisation and infrastructure provision, the government developed a reflexive capacity to accommodate alternative ideas and critiques of its policy, share policy making with cultural practitioners to a certain degree and

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   75 coordinate different interests in the cultural sector. Yet, the democratisation of cultural policy could not lead to an emergence of a new overarching narrative of culture that would be powerful and persuasive enough to fill the discursive gap created by the removal of the statist and didactic understanding of culture of the past. After all, society-­wide cultural discussion and debate still was not a feature of Korean cultural policy.

Institutional autonomy of culture and the ‘culture war’ With the increased freedom of expression and the replacement of cultural activism by cultural policy, the meaning of democracy was gradually narrowed from fighting for political and cultural freedom to ‘institutional autonomy’ of culture in the form of expert-­led policy making. The discussion focused mainly on arts policy and subsidy. Given the historical entanglement between culture and politics, Korean artists and cultural practitioners’ strong aspiration for sectoral autonomy was more than understandable. There were calls for institutional autonomy in the late 1990s under the liberal Kim Dae-­Jung government (1998–2003) but it was the liberal Roh Moo-­Hyun government (2003–2008) that made the greatest efforts to reformulate the nation’s arts funding structure by establishing a British-­style arts council. The emerging understanding across the arts sector and the cultural ministry was that the sector had been too susceptible to political pressure in the past decades and creating an autonomous arts funding structure would be the best way to secure the sector’s independence of political imperatives. Professional autonomy or self-­regulation is one of many ways of socially managing expert knowledge (Rueschemeyer 1983). Within the context of existing patron states in Western Europe and North America, autonomy of arts can be perceived as a modern phenomenon and a product of historical processes involving the decline of arts patronage by traditional establishments, the emergence of middle classes as new patrons and the rise of market forces against which the modern idea of ‘artist’ was formulated. The processes also involved the legitimisation of arts as a means of civilisation and social education, the refinement and professionalisation of arts practices, and the development of arts worlds that have their own values, norms and ways of recognition. Alluding to the coordination mode of ‘self-­organisation’ as opposed to those of ‘hierarchy’ and ‘the market’ (see Chapter 1), institutional autonomy of arts is underpinned by the assumption that arts policy and funding decisions are best executed by artists and arts experts themselves who have a good knowledge of their field. In general, cultural policy in existing patron states has preferred institutional autonomy over the system relying on decision making by politicians or members of the public (Blomgren 2012). Yet, the reality is more complicated as the policy entails hybridisation, negotiation and conflict between the logic of the arts world and that of politics (Vestheim 2012). As witnessed in Germany and Nordic countries, institutional autonomy of culture may exist in the context of corporatism, implying that the mode of self-­organisation could work together with that of

76   Democracy and cultural policy transformation hierarchy. On the other hand, social control of professional expertise by experts themselves may contradict the principle of democracy that the public or their elected representatives make key decisions in the policy. Another point to make is that the arts council model of cultural policy reflects a distinct way of governing society in the United Kingdom. It was the country’s long tradition of liberalism which led to a broad consensus that an intermediary arts council in arts policy and funding would minimise the risk of government exerting political influences. The consensus-­based arts council is also seen as limiting the scope of party politics in arts policy. Historically, decision making in the British arts council relied considerably on the networks and shared understanding among cultural and political elites. Members of its governing body did not and still do not represent art forms or expert areas, however, they are expected to seek the common good for the sector and serve the public benefit. Ironically, the above characteristics of the British arts council have been criticised for being ‘non-­democratic’ and ‘elitist’. It is because, as the cultural critic Raymond Williams pointed out in the late 1970s, the consensus-­based arts council does not have democratic mechanisms such as election, representation and accountability (Williams 1979). In a similar vein, Gray (2012) views the arts council model of arts policy making as ‘democratic elitism’, which is characterised by limited public participation and the concentration of cultural authority and power into a few hands, noting that such a model reflects the distribution of power in society. Indeed, some British commentators believe that the government’s direct dealing with arts funding would be more democratic as it is led by the democratically elected politicians such as the cultural minister who is a member of parliament and accountable to the public. This was a key rationale behind the Welsh Assembly’s unsuccessful attempt in 2004 to abolish the Welsh Arts Council and place cultural funding under the cultural ministry’s control (Arts Professional 2004). Nevertheless, the fact that the pursuit of professional autonomy in public cultural funding could conflict with the basic forms of democracy, such as people’s direct or representative participation in decision making, was never a point for discussion in Korea. This was because Koreans viewed the arts council as a buffer from political intervention rather than an organisation bestowed with public funding and responsibilities. However, such belief has been greatly challenged since the inception of Arts Council Korea. Under the strong initiative of the cultural ministry, the Korean Film Council was born in 1999 and Arts Council Korea in 2005 to replace the film and arts agencies that were established by Park Chung-­Hee’s authoritarian government in the 1970s. In the case of arts funding, the main problem was the extent of government’s direct influence on the Korean Culture and Arts Promotion Foundation. There were additional concerns about the lack of transparency and professionalism, the favouritism that preferred arts associations under Yechong, and the scale of pre-­allocation of the foundation’s budget for the ministry’s own projects. Arts practitioners and experts were involved in the foundation’s peer review process but their roles remained peripheral. The arts sector’s dissatisfaction was noticed in the

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   77 1990s, leading to the Parliamentary Select Committee for Culture and Tourism’s suggestion in 2001 of the foundation’s reform (Arts Council Korea 2008: 6). Then, the actual impetus to transform the foundation to an arts council came from the Roh Moo-­Hyun government (2003–2008), which thought the arts council model would be in line with the zeitgeist of the times and its principles of ‘autonomy’, ‘decentralisation’ and ‘participation’. In 2003, there were numerous debates on expert-­led arts policy that were often initiated by the government itself, progressive artists’ organisations such as Minyechong, and cultural campaigning groups. However, the conservative section of the arts community was suspicious of this move since it regarded the proposed arts council system as possibly prioritising progressive artists in terms of providing resource and power. That is, the diversification of the government’s policy partners would advantage progressive artists and therefore threaten the existing funding and power structure. Conservative artists who regarded the creation of an arts council as a fundamental restructuring of the arts community even gathered to express a serious sense of crisis and dissatisfaction (Sindonga 2003). Such a response evidently indicated a ‘re-­politicisation’ of arts policy, an unexpected symptom of cultural policy after democratisation. Party politics that was rejuvenated by democracy and replaced the authoritarian politics was extended to arts funding to become a new feature of Korean arts politics in the 2000s. At the same time, the tendency of re-­ politicisation can be seen as an evidence of the continued lack of professional autonomy of the arts community and the broader cultural sector. The country’s film policy faced a similar challenge. That is, the Korea Film Council was created in 1999 as an arm’s length autonomous organisation but severely suffered from ceaseless disputes on how power and financial resources should be distributed between conservative and progressive sections in the industry (S.-J. Han 2010). The suspicion held by conservative artists focused on the liberal government’s appointments of cultural activists to key positions in several major cultural institutions and the committee that was to oversee the process of the Korean Cultural and Arts Foundation’s transformation into Arts Council Korea. For instance, a national forum of professors in Korean traditional music made a formal announcement protesting against the government’s appointment of a Minyechong-­related individual as head of the National Gugak Centre. In a similar vein, one hundred theatre professionals issued a statement, accusing the Roh government of favouring progressive artists and Minyechong. In the statement, the theatre professionals opposed the creation of Arts Council Korea as they thought the council would be filled with progressive artists: The government has not only put Minyechong-­related people in the positions of head, director-­general and board members of the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation but also announced a draft bill that will transform the foundation to Arts Council Korea. The arts community and all other observers are worried as this move might have a hidden intention to allow a particular group of people to dominate private arts activities via arts funding

78   Democracy and cultural policy transformation in spite of the goodwill on the surface to increase artists’ participation [in arts policy]. (Kang et al. 19 September 2003) Facing a serious lack of consensus within the arts sector itself, it was the cultural ministry led by Lee Chang-­Dong, a well-­known film director, that actively organised discussions and persuaded the conservative associations to join the plea for an independent arts council. Its endeavour was supported by the rising voices that urgently called for a creation of an arts council and argued that an artist-­led arts policy was with ‘the spirit of our time’ and essential for securing ‘continuity, professionalism, autonomy, transparency and timeliness’ (e.g. S.-C. Han et al. 2003). Eventually, almost all major cultural federations and associations, including those conservative ones such as Yechong, came together and published a joint statement that ‘welcomed the transformation of the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation to Arts Council Korea for the sake of autonomy of culture and the arts’ (Yechong et al. 2003). They stated, It is clear that transforming the government-­led Korean Culture and Arts Foundation to the private sector led Arts Council Korea will drive the establishment of new arts policy, beyond the simple revision of law [Culture and Arts Promotion Act]. […] The Arts Council Korea would be an arm’s length body that will minimise government intervention and will be guaranteed independence and autonomy from the government. […The Council] will be an institution that is centred on private artists, is based on horizontal relationships, and makes decisions according to democratic and autonomous principles… (Yechong et al. 2003) What was impressive about the process leading towards the creation of the council was the cultural ministry’s capacity to confidently engage with the arts sector, steering the discussion throughout, and successfully negotiating with both conservative and progressive groups (H.-K. Lee 2012). However, the other side of the Korean government’s increased capacity of ‘collibration’ (Jessop 2016: 172) was the existing and potential schism in the arts sector and the sector’s relatively weak capacity vis-­à-vis that of the government. In retrospect, this clearly signalled the inherent fragility of institutional autonomy of arts and the unexpected irony that the autonomy would depend on capable government and its support.

Politics of Arts Council Korea The experience of Arts Council Korea reveals the complicated dynamics in developing democratic cultural policy in Korea, where the statist tradition of the policy prevails and the ‘culture war’ is unexpectedly invigorated by party politics. The council was born in August 2005 with a mission of ‘subsidising

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   79 projects and activities that promote arts and culture’. Being set up as a ‘foundation’, it ran the Culture and Arts Promotion Fund on behalf of the government and was put under the cultural ministry’s supervision. Yet, commentators usually called the council ‘private’ to emphasise its separation from the government. The shared expectation was that the council would be autonomous and distinctive: it would be independent of government intervention and its roles would not duplicate those of the cultural ministry. The underlined belief was that having the council’s governing body (which is also called ‘the council’) filled with artists and arts experts was crucial for securing its autonomy and professionalism. To minimise government intervention, candidates for council membership were self-­appointed and then shortlisted by an independent select committee based on well-­defined and quantified criteria before the ministry made the final selection. The eleven council members elected their chair among themselves to ensure that the chair would be free from the ‘hierarchy’ that had so far determined the relation between the cultural ministry and the council’s predecessor. In short, the council ambitiously aspired to become a model of ‘self-­organisation’ and ‘self-­ governance’ based on consensus and trust. As discussed in detail elsewhere (H.-K. Lee 2012), however, Arts Council Korea’s independence, in reality, has been seriously tested within the broader policy environment where the government continue to exert control over arts subsidies. There are three factors that shaped the relationship between the government and the council. First, the council as a public institution was subjected to tight budgetary control and monitoring by the government. This also means that the council had to consult closely not only with the cultural ministry but also with the Ministry of Planning and Finance until its spending plan was approved by parliament. Throughout the process, the ministries could drastically adjust the initial budget and add new projects against the council’s will. Fundamentally, the cultural ministry wanted Arts Council Korea to work firmly ‘within the arm’s length and never let it go beyond it’ (B. Kim 2015). Second, the rising trend of an ‘audit culture’ worked adversely for the council. The council became subject to various audit and assessment exercises, such as audits by the parliament, the Board of Audit and Investigation, and the cultural ministry as well as an annual evaluation by the ministry. Furthermore, its management efficiency became a target of annual assessment and close monitoring by the Ministry of Planning and Finance. The third factor was the enactment of the Act on the Management of Public Institutions (2007) that newly designated the council as a ‘quasi-­governmental’ organisation. Accordingly, government control over the council quickly intensified. Now, the chairperson had to be directly appointed by and enter into performance contracts with the cultural ministry. Also, the Ministry of Planning and Finance began appointing the council’s internal auditor and was given the right to recommend or request the council chair’s dismissal if the chair’s management performance was unsatisfactory. The council showed dissatisfaction and anxiety about the law’s effects, saying that ‘the law possibly hampers the autonomy and independence of the council’ (Arts Council Korea 2008: 20). It could not,

80   Democracy and cultural policy transformation however, reverse the tide. Within the complex relationships between the council, cultural and planning ministries, parliament and the audit body, the original meaning of ‘autonomous body’ was seriously eroded. Soon, the council members reached a conclusion that ‘there was no transfer of power and responsibility [from the government to the council], or de-­statisation of them’ (Arts Council Korea 2008: prologue). When Arts Council Korea was created, the widely prevailing brief was that, unlike its predecessor, it should have capacity for ‘policy making’.4 However, confusion still existed around the scope and level of policy that the council could make: whether it should actively produce arts policy for the nation or be confined to the distribution of arts funding. Initially, the council made ambitious efforts to foster its agenda setting and policy making ability by systematically engaging artists in policy discussions through numerous council and sub-­council meetings. Despite the council’s wish to build policy making capacity, again, the broader policy environment determined by the government continuously shaped the council’s priorities. For example, the alteration in the council’s income sources, resulted by government-­level decision making, led to substantial shifts in its priorities: the shrinking of the Culture and Arts Promotion Fund5 and the provision of lottery money led to an increase in pressure for the council to focus more on the issue of public cultural access and enjoyment. Similarly, the cultural ministry’s decision in 2008 to devolve a third of the council’s budget to regional and municipal arts foundations reshaped the council’s responsibility by encouraging it to explore new roles as a national coordinator of regionally based arts foundations and to expand international projects. In contrast to its initial ambition to become the nation’s arts policy maker, Arts Council Korea’s emphasis on its non-­governmental nature resulted in focus on narrowly defined ‘private arts’. The council not only showed little interest in policies for national arts organisations directly financed by the government but also argued that the funding for national arts festivals/competitions should be re-­statised. It was also reluctant to be involved in cultural politics where different opinions and interests clashed and had to be reconciled. This was apparent from the persistent demand of the council that the cultural ministry should be directly responsible for funding the two largest cultural federations, Yechong and Minyechong, the old and new partners of the ministry. In other words, the council called on the government to look after a substantial and the most difficult part of policy making such as negotiating with peak organisations and balancing their interests. This proposal, which was not accepted by the government, manifested the council’s self-­perception as playing only a limited role in the nation’s arts policy. Meanwhile, it is doubtful that the council was genuinely consensus-­based, with the debate frequently focusing on soliciting council members across different art forms and political stances. As noted earlier, the conservative associations and their umbrella organisation Yechong were concerned that the key positions would be taken by progressive artists and experts, making the issue of appointment the focal point of cultural politics. The absence of a consensus was also revealed by the council members’ inclination to highlight day-­to-day

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   81 funding decisions rather than policy decisions at a macro level, as well as their lack of confidence in the expertise of the council’s professional staff in coordinating grant decisions (H.-K. Lee 2012). It was also observed that the council members were keen to secure grants for their art form community or the projects they were directly involved in. Despite the uses of formalised procedures and criteria devised to guarantee maximum fairness and transparency in its operation, the council was not free from complaints and accusations that its funding decisions were biased and influenced by vested interests of the council members. The lack of consensus in the arts sector and within the Arts Council Korea itself explains why the council became an easy target of the rising party politics. The trend of ‘re-­politicisation’ of the arts policy was intensified by conservative media and commentators who believed that they were in a ‘culture war’ with the ‘leftist’, ‘pro-­North Korean’ and ‘anti-­American’ artists. The Cold-­War rhetoric used by those conservatives – for example, the conservative media’s depiction of progressive artists’ appointment in key positions as ‘an invasion of the North Korean army’ – was a proof that this war was a recurrence of the culture war of the old times (Shindonga 2006). The crisis of the Arts Council Korea was deepened when the new cultural minister appointed by Lee Myung-­Bak’s conservative government (2008–2013) showed his sympathy to the views of the right-­wing media and conservative artists. Amidst the government’s efforts to ‘restore’ the balance of power by appointing conservatives in key positions, the minister forced the heads of fifteen organisations including the Arts Council Korea to resign or dismissed them, escalating the existing division and tension in the arts sector. Overall, progressive artists were actively involved in the process of making and operating the council during the council’s early years, and benefited from its funding. Still, the council attempted to keep a collaborative relationship with both Yechong and Minyechong by providing the same level of annual grants to them from 2005 to 2008. This was a political rather than an artistic decision. Artists from the progressive camp were relatively younger, proactive and seemingly more accomplished in arts management so they were in a better position to prosper in the new policy environment that emphasised goal-­oriented and evidence-­based policy making. Some conservative arts professionals could not quickly adapt to the shifting environment and might have felt that they were unfairly excluded and disadvantaged by the new system. Hence they were sympathetic to the conservative government’s effort to ‘restore the balance’ and the right-­wing media’s support for it. Such political schism in the arts sector was a reflection of the weak sectoral consensus, without which the arts council model of expert-­driven policy making cannot be fully institutionalised and properly function.

Cultural policy crisis after democratisation More recently, the country’s arts policy, if not the cultural policy as a whole, was thrown into an unprecedented crisis. This crisis appears to be an extension of Korean society’s divisive politics, a notable symptom of the post-­democratisation

82   Democracy and cultural policy transformation era. Under the conservative government led by Park Geun-­Hye (2013–2017), who has recently been impeached for abuse of power and corruption, the institutional autonomy of arts faced a fundamental challenge as the Park government secretly produced and implemented an extensive ‘blacklist’ of artists. The existence of the blacklist was revealed while prosecutors were investigating the president, her confidant and their allies’ wrongdoings and unlawful meddling in a range of public policies for their private interests (BBC 2017a, 2017b).6 It was produced by the president’s aides and adopted by the cultural ministry and agencies under its purview including Arts Council Korea. The affected were approximately 9,500 artists who either had signed petitions related to the Sewol Ferry accident and/or had supported oppositional candidates for Seoul mayoral and national presidential elections (Hankook Ilbo 2016). Censorship was carried out mainly in the form of ‘exclusion’ of the blacklisted artists from public subsidy. There were a total of 444 cases of exclusion and the majority (417 cases) were with individual artists and arts projects (Kyunghyang Shinmun 2017). What is ironic is that, despite some suspicion, the arts community could not easily notice the cultural ministry’s systematic application of the blacklist because freedom of expression was taken for granted as one of the most valuable fruits of the country’s successful democratisation. In many aspects, the blacklist can be seen as a manifestation of the reactivated ‘culture war’ that had conditioned the Korean arts sector since the post-­liberation years. The crisis is effortlessly demonstrated by the fact that the cultural minister was arrested and so was his replacement, who used to work as Park Geun-­Hye’s aide, due to their involvement in the implementation and production of the blacklist respectively. The cultural ministry was the most seriously affected and fatally delegitimised among several ministries connected to the Park scandal. Instead of resisting the requests of the president and her aides for ‘exclusion’ of certain artists, the ministry and its agencies, such as the Arts Council Korea and Korean Film Council, conformed to them by excluding the affected artists and film makers from their funding or activities. Similarly, the internationally renowned Busan Film Festival suffered from political pressures from the Busan Metropolitan City government to cancel its screening of a film dealing with the Sewol ferry accident, including an audit, a sudden cut to the film council’s funding as well as the politically charged prosecution of the festival’s head. The Park Geun-­Hye scandal and the use of blacklist shocked Korean society and have been much talked about in the media. However, what is most notable from the perspective of cultural policy is how weak the institutional autonomy of the arts had been and, also, how much the arm’s length councils had been deficient in self-­ confidence. In this regard, the following two comments by the Arts Council Korea are quite telling. Over the past two years, the council denied the existence of censorship and defended its funding decision by stressing its autonomy. For instance, its press release ‘Our position on the accusation of unfair dealing with subsidy’ (2015) said:

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   83 The Arts Council is an artist-­centred autonomous institution and stands firm with the principle of ‘support but without intervention’. Yet, we believe considering social consensus on our subsidy [for politically sensitive art works] is our duty as long as we spend taxpayers’ money. (Arts Council Korea 12 September 2015, emphasis added) When the scandal unfolded and the blacklist was reported by the media, many artists showed their anger towards policy makers.7 It was only at such a moment that the council admitted its co-­option with the cultural ministry and published an official apology on 23 February 2017, highlighting its lack of autonomy: As an institution serving for citizens and artists, we should have resisted [the government’s] illegitimate intervention but we could not. It is true that we, as an organisation that is not autonomous, did not have power and courage. Many members of staff tried to tackle and minimise the exclusion [of those on the blacklist from its funding] in multiple ways, however, it was not enough to fundamentally stop the external intervention. (Arts Council Korea 23 February 2017, emphasis added) In a similar context, the director of the National Gugak Centre acknowledged the use of the blacklist and stated that she could not find any other option: ‘As an organisation under the cultural ministry, we cannot help but following if there is a directive from the ministry. It is true that there was the trend of [implementation of the blacklist] at that time’ (Dong-­A Ilbo 2017). For the same reason, the film council is facing heavy criticism. In a way, the crisis is an unexpected and unfortunate event caused by an exogenous factor to cultural policy: that is, the lack of competence and the abuse of power of the president as well as her backward-­looking view of culture (for example, she tried to revive some of old notions from the 1970s such as ‘jeongsin munhwa’) (see Chapter 3). However, the cultural ministry and its agencies’ silent conformation to the top-­down demand for censorship reveals something more fundamental, urging researchers and policy makers to seriously reflect on the discrepancy between the belief that has underlined Korean cultural policy after democratisation and the actual making of the policy that occurs within the tensely politicised environment. The failure of the arm’s length system points to the continued lack of consensus within the cultural sector and the absence of reflexive capacity on the side of the government. Although public spending on culture was increasing and policy initiatives were abundant or even excessive, policy makers lost much of their capacity to buttress institutional autonomy of the cultural sector and to strike an intricate balance among different interests within the sector. In this context, the emerging gap between the government’s implementational and reflexive capacity was aggravated by Park Guen-­Hye’s attempt to amalgamate culture and politics in a crude manner. This is deeply problematic because the increased reflexive capacity of the government was a vital consequence of the country’s democratisation and, in turn, was a key to the country’s cultural policy development thus far.

84   Democracy and cultural policy transformation

Conclusion Making cultural policy democratic has been a complicated and paradoxical process where multiple forces and actors interact, compromise and conflict. Of course, the transformation was part of the overall – successful – democratic shift in Korean politics and society. The roles played by cultural activism in this process should be duly acknowledged: it repudiated and delegitimised state cultural control, broke the government monopoly of the cultural discourse and problematised ‘the national’ that had been the most important prescriptive parameter in Koreans’ understanding of culture in the past decades. In this regard, the movement opened an important discursive arena where the persistent linkage between culture and the state – that is, culture as a means of the nation state’s survival and governance of its populace – was contested vigorously. The period of democratisation also witnessed the emerging alliance between cultural activism and cultural consumerism in their common quest for ‘freedom’ – freedom of expression and freedom of consumption. Yet, the activism failed to create society-­wide understanding of culture or to leave a visible mark on ordinary Koreans’ everyday cultural life that was defined increasingly by their consumption of popular culture and media. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that the invalidation of the top-­down nationalist cultural discourse left a ‘discursive vacuum’. The vacuum was hardly filled by the alternative cultural discourse of progressive artists or the newly emerging idea of ‘cultural enjoyment’. Can an active cultural policy survive without a powerful narrative of culture? The Korean experience shows that it cannot. Freedom of expression, cultural enjoyment (public accessibility) and institutional autonomy of arts, the three different interpretations of democracy in the Korean cultural policy context could not engender a powerful, new narrative of culture. As the next chapter explains, thus, the discursive vacuum was eventually filled by the emerging idea of ‘new economy’ that signalled a bold economic turn in not only the country’s cultural policy but also Korean society’s fundamental approach to culture. The democratic transformation of cultural policy was also a product of the Korean government’s increased capacity and willingness, often under the pressure from democratic social and cultural forces, to constructively respond to the defining mood of the period. The democratisation did not result in a withdrawal of the state or a weakening of state leadership and capacity in cultural policy; on the contrary, the policy development during and after democratisation was substantially driven by the government’s continued commitment to cultural investment and its capacity to accommodate democratic agendas. The cultural ministry’s reflexive capacity to work with activists and coordinate different interests in the sector was crucial in further democratising its policy and supporting the institutional autonomy of cultural funding. The diversification of political forces and the increasing political cleavages in cultural policy mean that the policy makers’ reflexive capacity becomes even more important for a balanced development of cultural policy.

Democracy and cultural policy transformation   85 The current crisis of Korean cultural policy implies that this is a suitable time for us to freshly contemplate the broader contexts for cultural policy making. One way to do so is to imagine cultural policy as ‘the politics of society’, in which the very rationale and substance of cultural policy are debated within the context of socio-­political conditions and their changes (Wesner 2010: 436). Making cultural policy the politics of society would also require the engagement of the public, social groups and media in discussing values of arts and culture in contemporary Korea and deliberating goals of state cultural policy. This would need to involve acknowledging the fact that popular and divisive politics is forming a new socio-­political condition for cultural policy. To address this challenge, Korean cultural policy would need to move beyond its conventional concern with cultural enjoyment and institutional autonomy of culture, actively seeking further meanings of democracy in the era of post-­democratisation.

Notes 1 According to Spiegel International (2016), ‘[Poland’s] public television and radio network, along with a number of partially state-­owned enterprises, were forced to strictly adhere to the party line. Museums, theaters and film producers will now only receive government subsidies if they produce “national content” ’. The rising political and religious censorship in Turkey under the current president Tayyip Erdoğan has been widely reported. The Guardian (2016) reports that: [d]uring Turkey’s current three-­month state of emergency the government has the authority to rule by decree and has ordered the closure of 102 media outlets, including 45 newspapers, 16 TV channels, three news agencies, 23 radio stations, 15 magazines and 29 publishing houses. Meanwhile Jones (2007) finds that political democratisation and decentralisation in Indonesia has been followed by the growing debate on public morality and pressure on freedom of expression, mainly driven by Islamic groups. 2 Most notable were six groups working in the wider cultural field: minjungmunhwaundonghyeobuihoe (culture in general), minjueonlonundonghyeobuihoe (journalism), hangugchulpanundonghyeobuihoe (publishing), mingyohyeob (education), jayusilcheonmuninhyeobuihoe (literature) and minjogmisulhyeobuihoe (art). 3 The government-­hosted arts competitions such as the Korean Theater Festival, Korean Music Festival, Korean Dance Festival and Korean Art Exhibition were transferred to the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation. Meanwhile the Korean Music Festival and the Korean Traditional Music (gugak) Festival were transferred to the Korean Broadcasting System. Later, the responsibility for holding national arts festivals (competitions) was further ‘privatised’ as it was transferred from the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation to the relevant art-­form associations under Yechong. 4 According to the Culture and Arts Promotion Law, the Arts Council Korea’s mission is to ‘support projects and activities that promote culture and the arts’ and the main role of the Council members is to ‘review and decide items about setting, changing and implementing basic plans to support projects and activities that promote culture and the arts’. 5 The Culture and Arts Promotion Fund relied on a levy on tickets for cultural venues but the constitutional court ruled in 2003 that the levy, as a stealth tax, was illegal. As it was consequently abolished, the fund has continued to reduce.

86   Democracy and cultural policy transformation 6 They intervened in the appointment of key positions (such as cultural minster and the head of Korea Creative Content Agency), created new policy initiatives in sports, Korean Wave and creative economy in particular, and raised funds from big corporations for private gains under the guise of public interests. 7 The conservative Yechong joined the voice, demanding an institutionalisation of the participation of private cultural arts organisations in cultural policy making, a transfer of some part of policy making to the private sector, an introduction of private-­public co-­governance of cultural policy, and nurturing of cultural bureaucrats’ knowledge of culture and the arts (Yechong 2016).

5 Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era

Understanding Korea’s cultural industries policy Contemporary Korea is widely known for its energetic policy for ‘cultural industries’. Chapter 5 aims to investigate the policy’s initial development and rapid growth, which have been deeply situated in the neoliberal transformation of Korean society since the 1990s. It challenges the prevailing, West-­centric view in cultural policy studies that sees the rise of cultural industries policies in Asian societies, including Korea, as a result of their adoption of the internationally popular ‘creative industries’ discourse originated in the British and Western contexts. More importantly, the studies’ conventional, narrow understanding of neoliberalisation of culture as the state giving way to the market will be contested by the chapter’s finding that the Korean government has played leading, entrepreneurial roles in developing a market economy of culture by actively utilising its discursive, administrative and financial capacity. It is true that the British notion of creative industries has been widely commented on and has encouraged the emergence of creative industries policies across continents and countries (Cunningham 2009; Flew 2012; Kong et al. 2006 and many other writings). However, its border-­crossing vogue should be seen as a consequence, rather than a cause, of the global phenomenon, where the culture­economy relationship is reimagined amidst nation states’ search for novel economic strategies in the time of post-­industrial neoliberalisation and globalisation (Yúdice 2003). In fact, the formulation and prompt development of state policy for commercial cultural industries in Korea has been the nation’s own initiative rather than a policy imitation. Korean policy makers gained inspiration from the United States and Japan, two of the existing patron states. The lucrative film business of Hollywood served as an initial reference point; and the Japanese idea of ‘content’ industries and ‘one-­source-multiple-­use’ strategies of Japanese cultural businesses were also influential. Still, the exceptionally active cultural industries policy is Korea’s own invention as it drew few lessons from either the United States or Japan, where the state plays rather limited roles as a market facilitator. It is crucial to understand that the Korean government’s commitment to cultural investment and unceasing expansion of cultural industries policy are

88   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era concurrent with the neoliberal socio-­economic transformation of the country. The coexistence of robust state forces and neoliberal market forces presents a puzzle to cultural policy researchers whose conventional understanding of neoliberal cultural policy tends to be summarised as the withdrawal of the state, the reduction of government cultural expenditure, the substitution of public funding with private sponsorship, the penetration of business logic to the non-­profit cultural sector and a shift in the cultural policy rationale from cultural towards non-­ cultural goals (Hesmondhalgh et al. 2015; McGuigan 2004). This chapter proposes that our analysis of Korean cultural industries policy needs more subtlety and should go beyond a simple assessment that regards it either as a straightforward case of neoliberal cultural policy or a reversal of it. Instead, the chapter explores the intricate dynamics of the policy by discussing the embedded nature of neoliberal reform in Korea as a background for its arrival and the ‘entrepreneurial’ roles the state has played during its development. Criticising the mainstream economic view that sees the state as a static bureaucratic organisation whose function is (or should be) limited to correcting market failures, Mariana Mazzucato (2014: 5) proposes a new understanding of the state: the ‘entrepreneurial state’ that provides visions, encourages the courage of private businesses, mobilise resources and ‘make things happen that otherwise would not have’. In line of Joseph A. Schumpeter’s idea of entrepreneur (1989[1949]) and Karl Polanyi’s finding (2001[1944]) that the state shapes the market, Mazzucato holds that the state can be ‘a key partner of the private sector – and often a more daring one, willing to take the risks that business won’t’ and encourages private sector actors to ‘work dynamically with it in its search for growth and technological change’ (p. 5). Her examples of the entrepreneurial state relate mainly to the technology and R&D sectors in the United States, which ironically has been the heartland of neoliberalism, as well as countries in Europe and Asia.1 In many ways, the idea of the entrepreneurial state is relevant to understanding the functions of cultural industries policy in Korea. As the following sections of this chapter will show in detail, the Korean government has ambitiously created a dense web of policy measures from law making and establishing agencies to devising new ways of cultural investment in order to set favourable conditions for cultural business and export. Yet, it should be pointed out that insomuch as the entrepreneurial state in Korean cultural industries policy is located in the broader context of neoliberal reform of the country, its consequences are convoluted. The policy is characterised by strong leadership and capacity of the government and public agencies in planning, setting targets, mobilising public resources, leveraging private investment, identifying priority areas for investment, expanding soft and hard infrastructure, and guiding skills development (J.-E. Chung 2012; Jin 2014, 2016; Kwon and Kim 2014). It is also observed that there has been a growing interaction and partnership between the state and market forces, which cannot be simply summarised as marketisation: while being in firm control over cultural industries policy, the government proactively utilises market forces as a means of resource mobilisation and distribution. What is problematic, however, is that

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   89 the policy is propelled primarily by ‘economic’ motivations and drives a fundamental commodification of culture in society. Korea’s experience vividly demonstrates that creating social and policy environments facilitative to cultural trade and business necessitates a radical reinvention of culture itself. In short, culture has become what Karl Polanyi (2001[1944]: Chapter 6) calls a ‘fictitious commodity’. As Polanyi notes, turning previously non-­commodities such as land, labour and money to fictitious commodities was essential for the initial development of a market economy in England and the state played key roles in such a process. Similarly, in order to establish pro-­business attitudes in the cultural sector, grow cultural markets and nurture cultural producers’ global ambition, Korean cultural industries policy has endeavoured to transform culture into a fictitious commodity via a series of bold intellectual experiments that dis-­ embed culture from historical and social contexts and reduce its meaning. In the same vein, the policy’s systematic application of industrial strategies to culture results in its assimilation to industry policy and a consequent ‘post-­ culturalisation’ of the policy itself. The policy has gone far beyond the usual parameters of cultural policy and has exhibited a fixation on the economic function of popular culture and media. Cultural and social significance of commercial cultural products and activities are hardly recognised by the policy as talking about value and meaning is perceived as relevant only for the arts and non-­profit culture. Hence it is not really surprising to see the increasing alignment of cultural industries policy to the state’s economic development strategy, a trend that was accelerated under the conservative Park Geun-­Hye government’s (2013–2017) ‘creative economy’ policy. The ‘post-­cultural’ cultural industries policy seeks deepening convergence of culture with ICT, R&D, start-­ups and export businesses, inevitably undermining its own foothold as a branch of ‘cultural’ policy. The next section will explain why and how Korean cultural industries policy has been situated in the neoliberal transformation of Korean society. This will be followed by discussion on the new formation of culture-­economy linkage mediated by technology, the Korean government’s discursive and implementational capacity underpinning the rise of the entrepreneurial state and commodification of culture, and finally the politics of the newly emerging ‘creative economy’ policy.

Neoliberalisation and its paradoxes It seems at first glance paradoxical that neoliberalisation has been an important overarching context for the development of state-­led, active cultural industries policy in Korea. According to David Harvey, neoliberalisation can be seen as economic and social change led by the belief that ‘human well-­being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade’ (Harvey 2007: 22). This belief is grounded on the work of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Freedman in the 1950s and

90   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era 1960s, which largely was a response to Keynesianism in the West and socialism in the Eastern bloc (Harvey 2005; Looney 2001). It gained currency in Latin America, the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1970s and the 1980s. Then it diffused into Asian countries including Korea in the 1990s, often under pressures from international economic organisations or powerful trade partners, such as the United States, leading to ‘institutional reforms and discursive adjustments’ in those countries (Harvey 2007; Hill et al. 2012; Steger and Roy 2010). However, such reforms and adjustments have taken various shapes, in which a degree of inconsistency and internal conflict is unavoidable. This is because they occur within a specific local context where policy makers choose, advocate and implement neoliberal ideas by combining them with some elements of the existing framework of economic governance. Hence, hybridity and inconsistency are integral features of neoliberalisation (McGuigan 2015), which is better seen as ‘a long-­term tendency and not about a teleological destination’ (Hall 2011: 708). This explains why there is geographical and sectoral diversity in its process. For example, scholars have noted that there are visible gaps between what the neoliberal ideology postulates and what has actually materialised in East Asian societies (Hill et al. 2012). In short, what we find in Korea is ‘embedded neoliberalisation’ that has been contextualised by local forces. In order to better understand why the Korean government developed a fully fledged state-­led cultural industries policy in the era of neoliberal reform, it is necessary to look into the nature of the reform (H.-K. Lee 2016). The reform began with the transition from the military to civilian rule with an election of President Kim Young-­Sam (1993–1998), who ardently put forward a doctrine of ‘new economy’ as an alternative to the state-­dominated economy and the society’s inward-­looking proclivity. The doctrine conveyed neoliberal messages, particularly the ideas of deregulation and globalisation, both of which were proposed as a new normal. His government pursued the internationalisation of the Korean economy and severely criticised the state’s regulation over business and financial sectors, putting the fundamental feature of the country’s developmental state into question. However, the rapid process of deregulation of the financial sector and foreign borrowing, the abandonment of investment coordination and the mismanagement of the exchange rate resulted in a national economic crisis that broke out in 1997 in tandem with the Asian financial crisis of the same year (Chang 1998). The irony was that the crisis acted as a critical moment for neoliberal reform to firmly consolidate itself. This was because a consensus was quickly formed among policy makers and media that the crisis was caused by the inefficiency of government-­dominated economic management. Therefore, solutions had to be found in market-­centred approaches, which were portrayed as global standards and norms and often packaged as part of the civilian government’s democratic agenda. The next president, Kim Dae-­Jung (1998–2003), a very influential oppositional leader, tried to rebuild the country in the post-­crisis years by introducing a Korean version of ‘third-­way’ politics aimed at ‘simultaneous development of democracy and a market economy’ (Lim 2009: 146). If the British New Labour

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   91 government’s third-­way politics is seen as ‘neoliberalism in a social democratic shell’ (McGuigan 2017), what the Kim Dae-­Jung government pursued could be described as ‘neoliberalism in a democratic shell’. While advocating progressive politics focusing on democracy, peace and human rights, it implemented pro-­ market economic policies under severe pressure from the International Monetary Fund that demanded a series of structural reforms that intended to reduce government control over the business sectors, integrate the Korean economy to international financial markets, fully open Korean markets to foreign firms, and greatly enhance labour flexibility (Crotty and Lee 2005; Lim 2009; Lim and Jang 2006). Koreans painfully witnessed its immediate effects: the end of lifetime employment, redundancies, casualisation of labour, rising job insecurity as well as surging social problems such homelessness, family breakdown, suicide and so on (Lim and Jang 2006; Song 2006). The long-­term consequences of the reform included lowered social mobility, aggravated inequalities, the individualisation of risk, and the fundamental changes in Korean people’s perception of work, life, society and money. The reform entailed destruction not only of existing institutional frameworks and powers but also of labour relations, social relations, way of life and way of thought (Harvey 2007). As such, it accompanied a diffusion of a ‘neoliberal structure of feeling’ among Koreans (McGuigan 2015: 22). However, the reform that was embedded in the local conditions has shown paradoxes and inconsistencies. One important reason was that its main concern was economic governance – especially chaebol (big conglomerates) reform, deregulation, financialisation and the formation of a flexible labour market (Chang 1998, Y.-T. Kim 2005, Lim and Jang 2006). This means that many other areas of state policy could find new rationales for policy expansion and public investment, often linked to the increasing necessity to tackle the social and economic problems caused by the reform. A good example is the country’s so-­called ‘welfare paradox’, that is, the upturn in welfare provision from the 1990s in spite of the popularity of neoliberal ideology.2 Some scholars think that this was moving the country towards a socially inclusive welfare regime (H.-j. Kwon 2005). But others are more sceptical, arguing that the welfare expansion was meant to soften the social consequences of the economic crisis in 1997 and the subsequent economic restructuring but its scope was limited (S. Kwon and Holliday 2007).3 More recently, various welfare schemes have been introduced by the two consecutive conservative governments but the demand for further provisions escalates in line with the deepening of socio-­economic problems, demographic shifts and changing lifestyles. While there are progressive commentators who call for a building of a ‘welfare state’, the Korean governments since the 2000s have been reluctant to create a coherent long-­term vision for the country’s public welfare policy. Yet, they have continuously made incremental but quite substantial changes to it in order to ease the harsh economic and living conditions of contemporary Korea. As of 2017, it is clear that both conservative and liberal parties in Korea are in a broad consensus that there should be extended welfare provision for the less well-­off such as the poor, the elderly as well as the younger generation. In a sense, the welfare paradox is not a real paradox as it is

92   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era part of the government endeavour to manage and sustain the process of the market-­driven and post-­industrial socio-­economic transition of the country. Similarly, the concurrence of the neoliberal reform of Korean society and the remarkable growth of cultural policy appears to be paradoxical but this might not be a paradox. One important factor behind the policy expansion is the democratisation of Korean society and the policy’s new focus on cultural creation and public accessibility, the active promotion of which has required many new initiatives and boosted resource provisions. Another equally crucial factor is the government’s re-­conceptualisation of cultural industries as a new strategic economic sector. While the economic reform was centred on traditional industries where chaebols played key roles, the emergent ones such as IT, R&D and cultural industries were thought to be a ‘legitimate’ area for state-­led industrial policy and public investment. As part of its efforts to develop a new, knowledge-­driven economy, the Korean government rapidly expanded cultural industries policy by willingly assuming entrepreneurial roles. The development of cultural industries has been propelled by the government’s advocacy of the industries as the next big thing and its dedicated support. The state facilitating the market economy of culture is not something unusual or paradoxical given that the emergence of the capitalist economy itself was a product of state intervention and regulations (Polanyi 2001[1944]) and Korea’s export-­oriented economy fast grew under the strong leadership of the state and its active policy making during the industrialisation period. While benefiting from public investment and other forms of assistance, the cultural industries served as a symbol of a knowledge- driven economy and helped Koreans in making sense of the nation’s economic transformation. As such, the emergence of the entrepreneurial state in cultural policy in Korea was motivated by the unprecedented economic imagination of culture, an essential feature of neoliberal Korea. This sheds light on Korea’s embedded neoliberalisation, where there is inconsistency across sectors, and the crucial roles played by the state in shaping contexts for the market economy of culture.

Culture and new economy From the very beginning, Korean cultural industries policy was guided by the discourse of new economy and the nation’s economic strategy. One of the most memorable moments in its history was in 1994 when the Presidential Advisory Board on Science and Technology produced a report for President Kim Young-­ Sam (1993–1998). The key point of this report was the exciting monetary potential of cultural industries, exemplified by the overall earnings of the Hollywood film Jurassic Park exceeding that of exporting 1.5 million Hyundai cars (Shim 2006: 32). The comparison greatly impressed the president as well as the public. Policy makers and the media quickly became fascinated with the economic prospects of the audiovisual industries, and comparison of the film and car industries, the symbols of ‘new’ and ‘old economies’ respectively, became a new fashion. For instance, the Bank of Korea translated the economic effects (job creation, value-­added and multiplier effects) of the popular domestic films Shiri

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   93 (1999), Joint Security Area (2000), Friend (2001), Marrying the Mafia (2002) and Memories of Murder (2003) to the production of 3,119, 2,964, 4,860, 2,932 and 2,798 Hyundai cars respectively (Weekly Kyunghyang 2004). It also estimated that two local blockbuster films Silmido (2003) and Taegukgi (2004) together induced the economic impacts equivalent to the production of 22,000 Hyundai cars. Whilst everyone knew that the Korean film industry could not become as lucrative as Hollywood, the message was clear enough: ‘a film can be equivalent to an established company’ in terms of their economic value generation (Weekly Kyunghyang 2004). Under Kim Dae-­Jung’s liberal government (1998–2003), the economic imagination of culture was nested firmly into a discourse of ‘knowledge economy’, the nation’s new economic narrative. The discourse was championed by the president himself against the backdrop that the myth of ‘the miracle of Han river’ was busted by the 1997 economic crisis and the state-­led economic governance was severely discredited. It proposed post-­industrial solutions to the nation’s economic hardship and provided Koreans with a sense of direction of the social and economic shift they were experiencing after the crisis. Policy makers grew certain that post-­ industrialisation and globalisation were new inevitabilities and building a knowledge-­driven economy would be the only option for Korea to ‘rebuild the nation’ and ensure its long-­term economic survival. Despite the vague signification of ‘knowledge’ (it could mean formal and informal knowledge), what it actually referred to was technology- and information-­oriented industries, which became the focus of government policy measures in this area. While traditional economic sectors were subject to neoliberal restructuring and reform, knowledge-­based industries including cultural industries were taken as growth areas that deserved state support and investment. At the same time, the discourse of knowledge economy had strong social elements and, thus, potential ramifications for every citizen. Policy makers, including President Kim Dae-­Jung himself, regarded ‘knowledge’ as a new defining character of not merely the country’s economy but also society as a whole. Kim had a strong belief in the connection between democracy and the knowledge economy: that is, a new economy that is fuelled by information and technology could develop only in a democratic society where ‘freedom of information and ‘creativity’ would be guaranteed (D.-J. Kim 1994). He called for a ‘knowledge-­ based society’, where every citizen as a ‘knowledge worker’ would benefit from the country’s democratisation and contribute to a post-­industrial transformation of the national economy. The high-­profile ‘knowledge worker’ (‘new intellectual’ in the Korean wording4) campaign that was initiated in 1998 by the president was a noticeable example. In this campaign, everyone was encouraged to become a knowledge worker who could create added value, injecting knowledge and innovative ideas to their existing jobs and businesses. The fact that a comedian-turned-film director was designated by the government as an exemplary knowledge worker (‘new intellectual No. 1’) demonstrated that cultural industries were rendered as an area where the production and application of new knowledge would prevail.

94   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era Similar to ‘creatives’ in Western societies, knowledge workers in Korea were supposed to internalise and express virtues such as passion and self-­initiation. Instead of autonomy, freedom and individualism, however, the campaign’s emphasis was on knowledge workers’ contribution to economic value and productivity, and their desire to learn new knowledge, such as the English language and IT skills, and obligation towards society and the state: New intellectuals should have a will to create added value and enhance productivity in their workplace, and also should collect and process new knowledge and information, based on which they can continuously study in order to improve the expertise in the given area. For this purpose, notetaking should be their everyday habit. In addition, they should learn new technologies such as computer and the Internet, which facilitate information gathering and processing. New intellectuals should have a strong will to break the existing customs and keep bringing out changes, and should show the virtues of endurance, persistence and risk-­taking. They also should demonstrate a tendency to share their information and knowledge with others, and should be equipped with a sense of obligation and ethics towards society and the state. (G.-H. Yun 1999) The campaign aimed to propagate the idea of a knowledge-­based society and encourage ordinary Koreans to willingly take part in the process of the country’s transformation. If Park Chung-­Hee’s top-­down cultural campaign in the 1960s and 1970s intended to create a ‘productive’, ‘self-­reliant’ and ‘hardworking’ workforce required for the nation’s industrialisation (see Chapter 3), the knowledge worker campaign aimed to urgently reinvent Koreans into a new type of labour force, equipped with the right sort of knowledge and attitude relevant to post-­industrial work and workplace. The so-­called ‘seven principles of new intellectuals’ vividly showed policy makers’ understanding of the attributes of knowledge workers: ‘don’t be complacent’, ‘go beyond stereotypical thinking’, ‘explore your own expert area’, ‘love knowledge’, ‘share knowledge’, ‘have a habit of keeping a record’ and ‘put your ideas into practice’ (S.-T. Hong 1999). As such, the campaign was about influencing the economic and social life of Koreans and shaping their ethic beyond narrowly highlighting technology-­based and cultural industries. It exemplified the Korean-­style ‘governance at distance’ (Miller and Rose 1990), which reflected the country’s strong tradition of the state’s hands-­on management of the way of life of its people, particularly in the time of significant socio-­economic change. The cultural ministry was eager to build connections between culture, knowledge and information and advocated culture as an overarching conceptual framework, in which Koreans could better grasp the nature of post-­industrial shift that they were witnessing: We use the terms ‘information society’, ‘knowledge-­based society’, ‘knowledge information society’ in order to describe the social phenomenon of

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   95 today. These are different terms but their meanings are more or less same. […] Culture is a notion that embraces the above ideas or a foundation for them, and is recognised as central to the building of a knowledge-­based society. (MCT 2002: 3) It was the attachment of culture to new economy that legitimised and gave rise to the economic reasoning of culture. When President Kim Young-­Sam (1993–1998) introduced the idea of ‘cultural industries’ in 1994, it was new and unfamiliar for most people in the country. By the end of 1990s, however, the economic utility of these industries was widely accepted whilst Korean society spent little time on discussion of their cultural and social roles. The cultural ministry of the Kim Dae-­Jung government (1998–2003) rightly pointed out its discursive leadership and the consequential, quick formation of economic consensus of culture: The biggest achievement of the government has been its establishment of consensus among citizens on the promotion of cultural industries. The recognition of economic values of culture has become mainstream and the understanding that cultural industries are a new growth industry which will feed the next generation has been widely spread. Hence, citizens’ recognition of the importance of cultural industries has been increased and therefore the government policy has prioritised the promotion of these industries. (MCT 2002: 22, emphasis added) The 2003 Cultural Industries White Book, published by the cultural ministry of the liberal Roh Moo-­Hyun government (2003–2008), effortlessly showed how much the economic reasoning of culture was intertwined with state economic goals and how compellingly it justified state investment in cultural industries: Cultural industries are new industries that have limitless potential to help Korea achieve a national average income of USD 20,000. However, they are lacking financial resource. As they are still on their road to industrialisation, they cannot produce competitive cultural content or compete in the global market without the government’s continual investment. Only if financial resource [meaning public spending] for cultural industries is provided and there is continuous investment, their markets will expand, their export will increase, and they will enhance their competitiveness, leading to a virtuous cycle. […] In order to for Korea to escape from the ‘vicious trap of national average income of USD 10,000s, there should be support for each industry but government spending on cultural industries in particular, which can produce maximum [economic] effect with minimum investment, should continue to increase’. (MCT 2003: 17 and 19–20)

96   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era Such thinking was so robust that it was hardly affected by the changes of government since the 1990s. It showed considerable depoliticising and neutralising power, and proliferated across different governments. This was in stark contrast to the heavy operation of party politics around arts policy and funding, which alludes to the ‘culture war’ (see Chapter 4). The economic consensus set a new, prescriptive discursive framework within which the goals, targets and rhetoric of Korea’s cultural industries policy were devised and understood. Evidently, seeing culture as an industry was an indispensable part of Korea’s envisioning of a new, post-­industrial economy. It was this viewpoint that quickly filled the discursive vacuum in the country’s cultural policy, which was created by the disappearance of the statist and didactic understanding of ‘national culture’.

Culture and technology The nexus between culture and new economy was expected to be mediated by technology and, again, this process was supported by the government and public sector actors. A good example is the fact that the initial fund for Korea Culture and Content Agency (KOCCA) came from the IMT-­2000 fund that was built on contributions by telecom companies for the purpose of supporting R&D in IT industries (J.-y. Lee 2012: 131). Very quickly, an unquestionable view was established that technologies – information and digital technologies in particular – would serve as a catalyst for the incorporation of culture to a new economy. In 2003, the government selected ten strategic industries for the nation’s future: digital TV/broadcasting, display, intelligent robots, next-­generation cars, next-­ generation semi-­conductors, next-­generation mobile communications, smart home network, digital contents/software solution, next-­generation batteries, and bio medicine/organ. Seeing cultural elements existing across some of these sectors and already converging with IT, the cultural ministry confidently pointed out the cost effectiveness of cultural industries by arguing that they could ‘generate wealth more quickly’ than other new industries that would take more investment and time to produce visible economic outcomes (MCT 2003: 20). Here, it is useful to deliberate on the concept of ‘culture technology’ (CT), which substantially determined the orientation of the country’s cultural industries policy since the early 2000s. It was coined in the mid-­1990s by Wohn Kwangyun, a Korean computer science professor based at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and referred roughly to technology that could be used to enhance creative expressions and advance cultural industries (J.-K. Kim 2013; H. Yim 2010). As early as 2001, this concept was taken up by policy makers. In the process of making culture technology a national agenda, there was the strong presence of the president and the country’s key economic and science policy makers. The crucial moment came in 2001when the National Economic Advisory Council led by President Kim Dae-­Jung designated CT (culture technology) as a driving force for twenty-­first century economic progress, along with IT, BT (bio technology), NT (nano technology) and ET (environmental technology).5 The council saw a deep tie between CT and IT,

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   97 which was already very advanced, and CT’s high applicability and growth potential. Successful examples of culture-­technology combinations found in the United States and Japanese cultural and media industries – rather than ‘creative industries’ in the United Kingdom or Western Europe – served as key references for policy makers. The attention of the National Economic Advisory Council and, thus, the president to culture technology greatly affected cultural policy. Not only did it encourage the cultural ministry to kick-­start devising relevant programmes, but the council itself also specified potential policy areas such as ‘digitalising cultural heritage’, ‘formulating a comprehensive policy for cultural industries’ and ‘developing CT-­related skills’, all of which immediately became main threads of the country’s cultural industries policy. In terms of spending, the president and the council’s interest meant that the cultural ministry could secure a budget for CT as it began to attract the government’s R&D funding.6 Similarly, the National Strategic Technology Forum, organised by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Evaluation and Planning, selected CT as a national strategic technology in 2003. Also In 2005, CT, along with nano technology, cognitive science and robot technology, was nominated by the National Science and Technology Commission as the most promising technology for the twenty first century. CT’s recognition as a future industry had two significant implications for cultural industries policy. The first is that cultural policy makers could persuasively demand more resource for the cultural sector, pointing out that, although culture was to be the nation’s flagship industry, public investment in this was far smaller than the R&D investment in other strategic industries such as IT or bio technology. The second is that, as CT itself began to be seen as a future industry, there was inherent tension within the cultural ministry’s CT-­ related policy regarding whether the policy should take a culture-­centred or technology-­centred approach. The cultural ministry initially did not think CT was an industry by itself and expected it to be facilitative to cultural industries development. However, the focus shifted to exploiting CT itself as an important part of the new economy and subsequently the policy paid more attention to R&D in CT (G.-C. Kim 2015). This accompanied a gradual escalation in the ministry’s spending in CT (R&D, infrastructure and skills development). As the new Ministry of Science, ITC and Future Planning (created in 2013) became the main policy maker in some R&D areas in CT, however, the cultural ministry began re-­focusing technologies more directly related to cultural industries and businesses. Overall, the conscious attachment of culture to technology and the popularity of the idea of culture technology assisted culture to quickly secure a prestigious status equal to cutting-­edge sciences and technologies, convincingly justify state cultural investment and be an essential part of the Korean society’s envisioning of new economy. While championing the pragmatism and economism in the Korean approach to culture, however, the coupling between culture and technology paved a way for culture’s further subjugation to national economic strategy in coming years and, consequently, the post-­culturalisation of cultural industries policy itself.

98   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era

Expansionist cultural industries policy Despite the frequent references to ‘small government’ and ‘decentralisation’, Korean governments consistently expanded a state-­led policy in cultural industries. In 1994, the cultural ministry extended its remit to support cultural industries by setting up the Cultural Industries Directorate, which was a result of President Kim Young-­Sam’s request to the ministry to ‘find a way to effectively utilise culture to generate economic value added’ (MCT 2004: 3). However, it was in 1999 when an important legal foundation was laid by the Framework Act on the Promotion of Cultural Industries that stipulated that ‘the state and local authorities are obliged to make and implement policy to promote cultural industries’ defined as ‘industries that are related to the production, distribution and consumption of cultural commodity’.7 More laws concerning specific cultural industries were enacted, including Online Digital Content Industries Development Act (2002) and its replacement Content Industries Development Act (2010), Promotion of the Motion Pictures and Video Products Act (2006), Game Industry Promotion Act (2006) and Music Industry Promotion Act (2006). It should be pointed out that the laws typically demanded a strong state in cultural industries development by calling for active roles of the government and public sector actors in the area of planning,8 resource mobilisation, enhancement of production capacity, provision of infrastructure, skills development, overseas promotion and industry research and so on. Another important development that underpinned cultural industries policy was the launch of the Cultural Industries Fund in 1999, which was a result of the 12th National Economy Plan Adjustment Meeting.9 This meeting was concerned with knowledge-­based economic development (especially culture, tourism, design and information and the communication industries) and decided that the government should set up a Cultural Industries Fund and contribute a total of 250 billion won (USD 220 million) to it for five years beginning in 1999. As the following sections will show, this fund had two immediate and significant effects. The first was that it paved the way for state investment for the broader cultural industries, adopting the inclusive definition of cultural industries of the Framework Act on the Promotion of Cultural Industries, from comics and animation to character industries. The second was that it introduced new methods of state cultural investment such as public-­private investment funds, which will be discussed in detail in a later section of this chapter. It might be helpful to look into the case of the animation industry to get a better idea of the comprehensiveness of the Korean cultural industries policy. Animation was never a serious concern of cultural policy makers before, not to mention the absence of dedicated public funding for this cultural form. The growth of the industry somehow overlaps with the development of state policy on it, indicating the latter’s crucial impacts on the former. According to the 2002 Cultural Industries White Book, 160 animation projects (teams) out of an estimated total of approximately 200 projects in the industry applied for Korea Culture and Content Agency (KOCCA)’s funding, which highlighted the penetration of

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   99 public funding in the field in a short period (MCT 2002). Animation policy took place in various forms that can be categorised into TV regulation (animation quota), (pre)production funding, export support, loans/investment, skills development and infrastructure provision. First, the animation quota, which was introduced in 1998 and revised in 2004 and 2012, required terrestrial broadcasters and other broadcasters to screen domestic animation (and original animation in the case of terrestrial broadcasters) up to a certain percentage of the total broadcasting hours.10 Second, pre-­ production and production funding came from primarily KOCCA (and the Korean Film Council) with a focus on pilot productions and full production of animation that had commercial and export potential. Public funding was also available for short animation, including arthouse animations and works created by university students. Third, export support was an important core thread of the policy from the very beginning, and was quite wide-­ranging: support for making local versions, translation and dubbing, securing broadcasting time in key markets such as China, support for animation companies’ participation in international showcases and festivals, organising events for potential investors, production of advertising materials such as catalogues and documentary films, assisting special exhibitions focusing on Korean animation, provision of market research and legal advice, investment in internationally co-­produced animations, and even directly hosting international forums on the animation industry. Fourth, the government, via the Cultural Industries Fund and later the Motae Fund (fund of funds, see pp. 107–8), provided animation companies with loans and investments while consciously leveraging private money. Finally, the government and KOCCA invested in the creation of both soft and hard infrastructure for the industry: these included setting up an animation academy, funding two international animation festivals in Seoul and Chuncheon, supporting industry associations’ activities and directly running an animation production studio, which later was replaced by an industry-­university co-­creation scheme. Having seen the vast range of support schemes, it is not surprising that the growth of the policy corresponded with that of the industry. While the industry had been driven by outsourced works for foreign studios in the past, the revenue of original productions began exceeding that of outsourced productions in 2007. In 2008, original productions began to outweigh outsourced works in terms of export as well, and this trend has continued to strengthen. In short, the industry’s capacity to create original works has notably increased since the 2000s. Responding to the laws concerning cultural industries promotion, which demanded an entrepreneurial state, the Korean government normally sets very ambitious targets as part of its five-­year plans for cultural industries as a whole and specific industries. This was the case for the animation sector as well. For example, its five-­year plan for the animation industry announced in 2006 aimed to achieve the following in five years: 500 billion won (USD 538 million) of revenue from domestic animation production; 1 trillion won (USD 1.1 billion) of domestic market size; and USD 300 million of exports; reshaping the industry towards original production; expanding overseas markets; and so on (MCT

100   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era 2006: 325). Although the industry was reshaped by 2010, some of the targets were not met: as of 2010, exports were only approximately USD 97 million while the revenue was over 514 billion won (USD 453 million) (MCST 2012a: 320–321).11 Such mismatch between policy targets and achievement was also visible in the cultural ministry’s strategy for cultural/content industries as a whole as seen from the gap between the five-­year targets set in 2005 and the actual achievement in 2010: a revenue of 94 trillion won (the actual revenue of 72.1 trillion won or USD 64 billion); overseas sales of USD 6 billion (USD 3.23 billion); and employment of 960,000 people (581,276 people) (MCT 2005: 19; MCST 2011: 59–67). Still, planning and targeting are crucial components of Korean cultural policy making as they guide the government’s investment and support programmes, manifest its ambition and capacity, and generate a strong sense of direction among those who are involved.

Turning culture into a fictitious commodity The growth of cultural industries policy in Korea took place in tandem with these industries’ rebranding and re-­identification as ‘content industries’. As noted in the introduction part of this chapter, such a rebranding was a bold intellectual exercise that aimed to turn culture into a ‘fictitious commodity’ and boost the market economy of culture. In his analysis of the development of the capitalist economy in England, Karl Polanyi (2001[1944]: Chapter 6) points out that this process necessitated the transformation of labour, land and money that were not produced for sale and profit-­making into fictitious commodities and essential factors of capitalist production. This involved their dis-­embedding from natural environments, social relations and use values and being treated as commodities that are sold and bought at the marketplace. Bob Jessop (2007) applies Polanyi’s perspective to discuss ‘knowledge’ in the knowledge economy, as a fictitious commodity. That is, knowledge, the production of which has historically occurred outside the market, is dis-­embedded from its social contexts, is situated in the market environment, becomes a subject of commodification, and is treated as a key input in the production process. Jessop observes that, in the post-­ industrial knowledge economy, ‘the primary code governing its [knowledge’s] use is profitable/unprofitable rather than true/false, sacred/profane, health/ disease, et cetera’ (p. 120). Something similar is witnessed in Korea’s cultural industries policy. The government has shown a strong discursive leadership in radically reinventing culture as a commodity by dissociating it from social relations and historical contexts and reducing it to ‘content’, ‘digital cultural archetype’ and ‘story’, and developing marketplaces for their trade. The primary code governing the use of culture here is economic value generation rather than aesthetic quality, social representation, cultural identity or creative expression. The idea of content – defined as ‘data or information of symbol, text, voice, sound and screen image’ – is at the heart of this conceptual exercise. This idea formally entered the cultural policy lexicon in 2003 when the Framework Act on the Promotion of Cultural

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   101 Industries was revised. The revised law stated that cultural industries included ‘digital cultural content industry’ that referred to ‘the industry consisting of services related to the collection, process, development, production, storage, search and distribution of digital cultural content’. In addition to the meaning of ‘content’ as mentioned above, the law provided a set of further definitions of ‘content’: • • • •

digital content: digitised content, which is effective in terms of preservation and usage digital cultural content: digital content that embodies cultural elements and creates added economic values multimedia content: content that has new expression and storage function as a result of organic combination of different media public content: cultural content owned, produced and managed by national/ public museums and galleries (this category was added when the law was revised in 2006).

Over time, the focus shifted from ‘cultural’ to ‘content’ industries. This resulted in the conversion of the cultural ministry’s Cultural Industries Directorate to Cultural Content Industries Directorate and renaming of the ministry’s annual Cultural Industries White Book as Content Industries White Book in 2008. In the following year, the Korea Culture and Content Agency (KOCCA) became Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), integrating government agencies in broadcasting and games. Considering that ‘content’ is a postmodern understanding of culture, it is puzzling to see this idea being advocated and neatly ‘managed’ by cultural industries policy that emulates the country’s state-­led economic development strategy, a core constituent of the ‘modernisation’ project (see Chapter 3). In the discourse of content industries, culture is to be deconstructed into digitally flexible data and information (‘content’) and then modified, mixed and processed to become marketable commodities. Such a conceptual experiment dissociates culture from historical, aesthetic and social contexts and neutralises it. Content is value-­neutral and would be neither politically progressive nor reactionary, and neither conforming nor challenging. This idea also adopts a logic of industrial production: cultural industries produce sellable and exportable commodities by collecting, buying, assembling and processing content as a key input in the production process. Consequently, little space is allowed for considering cultural production as an expression of artistic vision or a construction of social messages. While assigning potential monetary value to culture, the discourse of content abolishes cultural hierarchy as well as putting an end to any potential debates regarding artistic merits and non-­monetary values of cultural commodities. Sharing ‘content industries’ as an umbrella identity, various cultural services and activities have become equally legitimised as long as they have economic and export potential (and thus are eligible for public support). The arts community in Korea

102   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era was initially wary of the commodifying effects of the content industries discourse, however, it eventually accepted that the discourse would serve as a fresh justification for public subsidy for the arts – as the ‘base’ of content industries. Furthermore, media, public intellectuals and the broader society in Korea quickly embraced culture’s rebranding as content with little reservation or suspicion. The ‘Digitalisation of cultural archetype’ project A good example of the de-­contextualising character of the content industries policy is ‘Digitalisation of cultural archetype’ (2002–2010), one of the core projects of KOCCA until 2010. ‘Cultural archetype’ referred to basic forms of culture and cultural heritage and the expectation was that they were and should be ‘commercially exploitable’ (MCT 2002). Believing that Korean cultural businesses were in need of distinct subject matters, the government and KOCCA wanted to identify, collect, develop and digitalise cultural archetypes to generate a huge pool of attractive subject matters for cultural creation. The prevailing thought was that, in order for Korea to win the global cultural competition and catch up with global cultural powers such as the United States and Japan, the nation’s traditional cultural heritage should be explored and exploited as raw materials for cultural content creation and should serve as a ‘new resource for the knowledge economy of the twenty-­first century’ (MCT 2007: 141): [T]here has been no case of Korean cultural content that is successful globally. In order to secure global competitiveness, [the content industries] require not only production capacity but also distinct motifs, pre-­production capacity and creativity. In this perspective, the ‘Digitalisation of cultural archetype’ project is a state project aiming to provide a basis for content creation. It digitalises our 5,000-year history, which is a treasure chest for creativity and competitiveness and is a potential resource, and provides motifs for content production so Korean content industries can enhance their competitiveness in the global cultural content markets. (MCT 2003: 100–101) Between 2002 and 2010, KOCCA invested in 237 projects that produced approximately 30,000 digitalised ‘cultural archetypes’ in the form of pictures, artworks, designs, stories, moving images, information and so on (KOCCA Focus 2012). Policy makers held a very bold idea: they wanted the ‘Digitalisation of cultural architype’ project to cover the entire Korean history as well as varied forms of culture such as religion, music, architecture, rituals and military history. Taking a step further, they showed interest in exploring and digitalising the East Asian cultural archetype so that domestic cultural producers could create regionally appealing cultural products, though only few projects were actually carried out in that category (J.-y. Lee 2012). The cultural ministry and KOCCA were extremely ambitious and wanted to create a market of digitalised cultural archetypes. To encourage active ‘e-­commerce’ of digitalised cultural content, KOCCA

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   103 set up a website (www.culturecontent.com) that was meant to function as a centralised online marketplace for business-­to-business content transactions between digitalised content providers and cultural producers searching for new ideas and subject matters (MCT 2007: 130–136). From the project’s viewpoint, history was reconsidered as a reservoir of cultural archetypes and a flexible resource that could be disassembled into cultural contents and re-­assembled into an abundance of sellable products. This postmodern thinking challenged the existing scholarship of history and culture by encouraging rather hasty commodification of relevant knowledge and expertise. It also signalled cultural businesses’ potential crossover with academic disciplines of Korean studies, history, literature and language. The impact of the project and the content industries discourse was widely felt to the extent that it motivated Korean language and literature departments at many universities to rebrand themselves so their research and teaching profile could be aligned with cultural content development and, therefore, attract more students and public funding. Some of them changed their name to ‘cultural content’ or ‘digital creative writing’ departments while others transformed their curriculum to incorporate digital storytelling and cultural content (Weekly Chosun 2007). Through the digitalisation of cultural archetype project, related research activities, supportive media commentaries, and KOCCA’s funding for cultural contents departments at university and their curricula, the commercialised perception of culture permeated Korean academia and society so deeply that its reversal appeared to be inconceivable. Despite the injection of a large sum of public money, however, this project did not succeed and, thus, was discontinued in 2010 when the parliament and the Board of Audit and Investigation criticised its commercial underperformance. A member of the Parliament Committee of Culture, Sports and Tourism pointed out that the cost of the project (63.54 billion won or USD 56 million from 2002 to 2010) exceeded its benefit (0.74 billion won or USD 0.65 million) accrued via transactions of the digitalised content in the market place (Digital Times 2010). Similarly, the Board of Audit and Investigation, the nation’s audit authority, decided that the project was ‘an inefficient use of government budget’ (KOCCA Focus 2012: 7). The cultural ministry and KOCCA could not defend their investment, as the entire project had been conceived on the economic utility of digitalised cultural content and there was little consideration of non-­commercial benefits of digitalising historical materials. Interestingly, KOCCA’s own evaluation of the project revealed that cultural businesses preferred factual resources which were not processed or remade (KOCCA Focus: 14–16). They also demanded historical accuracy scrutinised by experts, disapproving of the project’s postmodern approach to history and expert knowledge. Inventing ‘story industry’ However, the failure of the cultural archetype project hardly deterred policy makers from their efforts to turn culture into a fictitious commodity. Around

104   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era 2010, their attention quickly shifted to ‘story’, which was thought to be the most basic form of marketable cultural content that can be utilised across multiple platforms from TV dramas to games sellable overseas. Again, it was the cultural ministry who strongly advocated this idea by launching a high-­profile ‘Korea Story Competition’ in 2009 with a guarantee that prize winners would receive comprehensive support from KOCCA in terms of further development of their story, business plan, production, investment, marketing, domestic and overseas pitching and export (MCST 2012a: 81–88). To put it simply, the so-­called ‘story industry’ was invented by policy makers whose discursive capacity was firmly supported by their robust implementational capacity such as the provision of a physical space called ‘story creation centre’ and training and support programmes. Quickly, story competitions became a new norm for local cultural policy too. Numerous local governments began holding their own story competitions based on motifs of local history, culture, tradition, food and so forth, hoping the collected stories would feed into local branding and cultural production. According to the national story competition, a story should be original and written in prose that has a narrative structure, with 10 per cent accounting for dialogues that express/highlight main characters. Its overtly commercial motivation is easily revealed by the criteria for winning the competition, which include originality, standard of writing, ‘commercial potential’ and ‘export potential’.12 In order to promote the ‘story industry’, Korean policy makers have been keen to offer training and workshops in story creation, story translation and local story-­telling. The intense policy intervention in this newly emerging industry is typical of Korean cultural policy, which is driven by centralised planning, resource provision and quick launch of relevant programmes including support and skills development. Notably, the ‘story industry’ policy is conscious of global audiences and has elements of nation branding as seen from the publicly funded ‘Hopeful and positive story development’ project (2010). This project commissioned established story creators working in various cultural industries to produce ‘hopeful’ and ‘positive’ stories to compensate for the negative image of the nation that might have been caused by internationally popular Korean film and drama in thriller, crime and violence genres, such as the film Old Boy (2003). It reminds us of similar projects in the 1970s where established artists and writers were commissioned by the government to create national record paintings and national literature depicting the country’s economic progress and modernisation efforts (see Chapter 3). Its intention was to promote and showcase Korea as a forward-­ looking and progressive post-­industrial society, in which individual creativity, passion and cutting-­edge technologies fuel economic growth, as seen from the themes that it proposed: a successful female inventor, self-­made CEOs, a medical company that achieved both domestic and international success, a patent-­rich company, a 3D visual specialist firm, a famous local bakery, a traditional sweet-­maker, and an inventor-­CEO (MCST 2011: 66–67). Taking a further step, policy makers stressed that everyone can create stories and be a part of the booming content industries. Their desire to boost the story industry is aptly manifested by the latest project in this policy area, ‘Storyum’,

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   105 that is, a website set up by the cultural ministry and KOCCA in December 2016 to match story creators and buyers to facilitate their monetary transactions (Joonganing Ilbo 2016). The ministry invites anyone who is interested to present their story freshly defined as: a creation that arranges characters, events, backgrounds and so on to trigger emotional responses of audience, which takes a form of prose that has not yet developed into certain art forms such as game, film and novel. The Korea Story Competition considers proses consisting of beginning-­developmentclimax-­ending, which amount to approximately 60 pages of A4 papers and is not limited to particular formats such as scenario and script. (MCST 2016b) The cultural ministry hopes that this website will develop into a one-­stop online platform of ‘story trade’ by providing a template for contract, carrying out surveys on the ‘story industry’ and building a database of case studies. It offers an incentive to potential story creators by requiring Great Content Korea Fund, one of the public-­private funds under its support, to invest in stories registered on Storyum (MCST 2016b). How much this marketplace will be commercially successful seems debatable. It is because the current top-­down and centralised approach does not recognise dynamic ecology of cultural industries where exciting stories, motifs and themes are made and remade across various individual and collective creative processes in and out of straightforward contractual relations and the copyright framework. Obviously, such processes are not something that can be easily managed and centralised by a single, publicly managed online marketplace. The state-­led commodification of culture has resulted in a multitude of policy initiatives, creating new opportunities of public funding and support for the cultural sector, although at the expense of reflexive and humanistic appreciation of culture, history and tradition. At the same time, the centralised approach to cultural archetype and story demonstrates the government’s ample – perhaps excessive – discursive and implementational capacity, which might not always result in meaningful outcome in both commercial and cultural terms.

Mobilising public investment The expansion of cultural industries policy has been firmly underpinned by the continuous increase in the government’s spending on these industries. The spending was rather minimal until the middle of the 1990s but quickly grew around the turn of the new millennium. Between 1998 and 1999, the budget sharply increased by several times from 16.8 billion won (USD 14 million) (2.2 per cent of the ministry’s budget) to 100 billion won (USD 88 million) (11.7 per cent of the ministry’s budget) (see Table 5.1). It was due to the creation of the Cultural Industries Fund in 1999 with 50 billion won (USD 44 million) to support pre-­production, production, distribution, the upgrading of infrastructure and export via loans and investment. Policy makers’ belief was that there were

106   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era significant gaps between the financial resources the industries could raise from private sources and the investment they actually needed in order to grow and prosper in the competitive global cultural market. It was within such a context that the liberal Roh Moo-­Hyun government even thought that cultural industries would require 10 per cent of their total investment to be raised from the public sector, which meant that public support should radically increase by a factor of six to seven (MCT 2003: 19). The cultural ministry’s budget – excluding endowment funds – was on an upward trajectory; it went over 1 per cent of the government budget from 2000 to 2007 and has been just under 1 per cent since then. The prevailing economic rationale of culture has not affected the powerful belief held by policy makers that cultural industries suffer from market failures and lack an adequate level of financial resources. One example that shows policy makers’ consensual belief in the need for public support for these industries is the Film Development Fund set up in 2007 as a compensation for the slashed screen quota (see Chapter 6). There were questions over whether the levy on film ticket sales (3 per cent of the ticket price), which fed into the fund, was a stealth tax and thus against the constitutional law. After the constitutional court ruled that the levy was legal, it was extended to 2021 from its original expiry date of 2014 without serious opposition or debate. The introduction of the film levy and its continuation apparently contradicts the fact that an arts levy on tickets for cultural venues (including cinemas), which had been raised for the Culture and Arts Promotion Fund since the 1970s, was abolished in 2003 because it – as a stealth tax – was ruled to be against the constitutional law (see Chapter 4). In addition, the conservative Lee Myung-­Bak government’s (2008–2013) evaluation of Roh’s cultural policy is an example demonstrating the victory of economic consensus against party politics (MCST 2008: 15–19). The Lee government stated that the primary problem of Roh’s cultural policy was ‘the insufficient investment’ in cultural industries, especially in comparison with the huge public spending on information and communication industries. The weakness of the policy, it argued, also included the overemphasis on producers, the limited provision of market information, and the lack of infrastructure and support for pre-­production and planning. The Lee government announced that it would make cultural industries policy more proactive, prioritising investment, export and global competitiveness. Indeed, privatisation and de-­statisation of culture were not its agenda, and the country’s cultural expenditure as a whole was enlarged greatly by Lee’s pro-­business regime. Public spending on cultural industries continued to grow to 339.7 billion won (USD 229 million) in 2010 and 500.7 billion won (USD 472 million) in 2015. The change of government from liberal to conservative in 2008 did not make any significant difference. The new conservative government led by Park Geun-­ Hye (2013–2017) defined itself as a ‘market-­friendly’ government and was keen on deregulation. Yet, it did not doubt that market failures occur in cultural industries and state support is essential for their further development and heightened economic competence, as a new engine of the nation’s economy. The following table shows the cultural ministry’s budget over time.

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   107 Table 5.1  The trend of government cultural budget Year

Government budget (A) Billion won*

Ministry budget (B) Billion won**

B/A (%)

Ministry budget for cultural industries (C) Billion won***

C/B (%)

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

47,626.2 56,717.3 62,962.6 71,400.6 80,762.9 88,485.0 94,919.9 106,096.3 116,119.8 115,132.3 120,139.4 135,215.6 146,962.5 156,517.7 174,985.2 196,871.2 201,283.4 209,930.2 223,138.3 236,225.3 247,203.2 258,585.6

301.2 383.8 459.1 653.1 757.4 856.3 1,170.7 1,243.1 1,398.5 1,486.4 1,567.5 1,585.6 1,738.5 1,425.0 1,513.6 1,735.0 1,876.2 1,960.3 2,093.3 2,287.6 2,320.8 2,554.6

0.63 0.68 0.73 0.91 0.94 0.97 1.23 1.17 1.20 1.29 1.30 1.17 1.18 0.91 0.86 0.88 0.93 0.93 0.94 0.97 0.93 0.99

5.4 15.2 18.9 13.2 16.8 100.0 178.7 147.4 195.8 189.0 172.5 191.1 225.3 197.7 206.6 298.4 339.7 362.7 398.6 410.5 408.4 500.7

1.8 4.0 4.1 2.0 2.2 11.7 15.3 11.9 14.0 12.7 11.0 12.1 12.9 13.9 13.6 17.2 18 18.5 18 18 17.6 19.6

Source: MCST 2016a: 35. * The government budget refers to the yearly budget, excluding special budget. ** The ministry budget includes both yearly and special budgets and excludes endowment funds. *** This combines ministry budgets for content industries and media industries. The content industries budget refers to yearly budget allocated to content and copyright bureaus.

Leveraging private money via financial instruments Another area where the Korean government has shown impressive policy capacity is the mobilisation of private investment via public-­private funds and the consequent increase of the scale of cultural financing. Here, we can observe the active operation of an entrepreneurial state which pioneered new methods of financing cultural industries and has encouraged the participation of private sector investors. The use of financial instruments is not unique to Korea cultural industries policy. In fact, they have long been used in supporting cultural industries in France: for example, the IFCIC (a special lending institution focused on film and cultural industries) which provides 50 per cent loan guarantee13 and SOFICAs (private funds specialised in financing film and TV productions) that receive tax benefits.14 More recently, the European Union has decided to support the broader cultural and creative sector, including the arts, via loan guarantee.15 In comparison with these schemes, the Korean approach is distinguished by direct involvement of the government and public sector actors and, therefore, their capacity to mobilise funds in a consistent manner and channel them to prioritised areas.

108   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era It was after the creation of the Cultural Industries Fund in 1999 that financial instruments such as loans and investment funds began to be actively used for state cultural funding. Between 1999 and 2006, the initial fund of 50 billion won (USD 44 million) grew to 190.5 billion won (USD 205 million) and was invested in cultural industries primarily in the form of loans (via commercial banks) and investments (via public-­private investment funds). Quickly, its focus was shifted to public-­private investment funds while loans were replaced by ‘competition guarantee’. Currently, public-­private funds are the main method of government investment in cultural industries. Initially, the cultural ministry itself had directly collaborated with private investment funds to create dozens of public-­private funds using money from the Cultural Industries Fund and the Film Promotion Fund. These public-­private funds were managed by commercial fund managers and invested in cultural industries, especially film, animation and games. In 2006, the Cultural Industries Fund was transferred from the cultural ministry to the Small and Medium Business Administration (SMBA); consequently, the fund was incorporated into SMBA’s Motae Fund (fund of funds). Motae Fund is a large public fund managed by a professional company and invested in various investment funds in the field of start-­up, communications, multimedia, cultural industries, local businesses and the health industry.16 The new arrangement meant a further assimilation of the cultural industries policy to industrial policy. It also signalled the post-­culturalisation trend of cultural investment and its increasing financialisation. The money from the Cultural Industries Fund and the Film Promotion Fund has fed into cultural and film accounts under the Motae Fund that invest in a number of funds running typically four to seven years, managed by professional fund managers. Their investment decisions usually focus on market potential of the project or the company, and this has resulted in a visible tendency of most funds being invested in film and games, because these sectors are deemed as more profitable. According to the cultural ministry’s 2015 management plan of cultural accounts of the Motae Fund, a total of fifty-­eight public-­private investment funds had been leveraged by the Motae Fund’s cultural and film accounts since 2006, resulting in approximately 1.24 trillion won or USD 1 billion (approx. 1.16 trillion won by the cultural accounts and 79 billion won by the film accounts) (MCST 2015a). While more than 1,000 businesses or projects were financed in this way, the film industry was the biggest beneficiary: as of 2015, more than half of the investment went to this industry. Subsequently, the majority of film production in Korean relied on financing leveraged by the Motae Fund cultural and film accounts (MCST 2015a).17 Witnessing the large share of public-­private investment funds pouring into most profitable industries such as film, the ministry developed funds dedicated to support specific sections of the industries, such as production at infant stages as well as production intended for export. For example, the Great Content Korea Fund (2014) focused on early stages of production as well as targeted areas such as games and animation/comics/character industries. Nonetheless, most funds are more interested in film, games and commercial theatrical performance such as musicals, which have enjoyed a boom in recent years.

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   109 The Korean government’s financial commitment is consistent. It has injected 100 to 200 billion won (USD 95–190 million) to the Motae Fund every year to increase the size of the cultural and film accounts under the Fund. It is also noted that this type of cultural financing model has spread across the country; provincial and municipal governments and regionally based publicly funded content agencies (regional versions of KOCCA) bank on film and other cultural businesses in their area by setting up public-­private investment funds, emulating the central government’s approach. Examples include the Gyonggi Province’s Audiovisual Fund (2010), Seoul Metropolitan Government’s Cultural Content Fund (2011) as well as Daegu City’s Cultural Industries Fund (2009). Another example is Asia Cultural Fund (2012) and Asia Cultural Fund 2 (2015) raised by the Gwangju Asia Hub City project to fund regionally based cultural companies and their projects. More recently, the increasing commercial orientation of the investment funds has coincided with the participation of new actors such as the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP), public institutions and public banks. This is largely attributed to the Park Geun-­Hye government’s (2013–2017) ardent advocacy of ‘creative economy’ and a number of attention-­grabbing successes of local films financed via the Motae Fund. With the surging interest in the Korean Wave phenomenon, the cultural ministry also raised the Global Content Fund (2011, 123.6 billion won or USD 107 million; 2015, 100 billion won or USD 85 million with MSIP) and the Global Digital Content Fund (2015, 190 billion won or USD 162 million). The latter is dedicated to culture-­ITC convergence, next-­generation broadcasting, start-­ups, export as well as digital content industries (computer graphics, digital animation, virtual reality, holograms, 4D, ITC technologies, etc.), further blurring the boundary between culture and technology. In addition, the cultural ministry created, via the Motae Fund, a TV drama fund (2016, 50 billion won or USD 41.3 million) to boost the Korean Wave and will launch a Korea-­China Cultural Co-­Development Fund (200 billion won or USD 166 million) soon (Seoul Shinmun 2016). The active participation of public banks and institutions who are new to cultural financing should be noted as well.18 For example, the Cultural Proliferation Fund (2016, 100 billion won or USD 83 million) was launched by Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) and Korea Development Bank. This public-­private fund is dedicated to high-­budget drama series, popular entertainment programmes, channels and platforms contributing to the Korean Wave, web-­drama, web-­movie, 1-person media and so on. By the same token, Korean Export Bank created the Cultural Content and Health Care Fund (2016, 160 billion won or USD 132.5 million) to invest in export businesses which deal with cultural content and health care. This combination looks odd but it aptly shows how President Park Geun-­Hye’s understanding of ‘creative economy’ encompassed these very different fields. Meanwhile, MSIP, in collaboration with the cultural ministry and the Small and Medium Business Administration, launched the Digital Content Fund (2016, 75 billion won or USD 62 million) focusing on computer graphics, special effects and culture-­ITC convergence. KOBACO

110   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era (government agency selling advertising on behalf of broadcasters) and IBK Bank investment fund (2016, 40 billion won or USD 33 million) is for audiovisual content – such as TV drama series and web contents – produced by small- and medium-­sized businesses to boost the Korean Wave. The actual assessment of the performance of public-­private investment funds, in practice, is likely to oscillate between their potential high profitability and the overall low return. Although there are some impressive examples of high return, the overall return rate of the 476 expired investment funds supported by the Motae Fund is lower than 1.0 (0.97), that is to say, the return is smaller than the amount of investment.19 Perhaps, this can be taken as evidence demonstrating the crucial role of the entrepreneurial state in leveraging private money for cultural financing, which would not be realised without the government’s persistent push. Yet, the government and public bodies have not exerted their full capacity to channel the funds to less profitable areas; instead, they themselves have preferred to mobilise funds dedicated to commercially promising areas such as ‘global content’, ‘export’ and ‘Korean Wave’ whilst facilitating increasing fusion between culture, ITC, SME, start-­up and cultural technologies. This tendency both triggered and was driven by the involvement of science, technology and economic policy makers such as MSIP and public banks. Finally, a shift in public-­private funds from project investment to equity investment has been witnessed. This might be interpreted as a reflection of the ongoing trend of financialisation of the Korean economy and an assimilation of cultural financing to venture capital financing that has developed in science, technology and R&D. Thus the shift can be viewed as a new feature of the ‘post-­ cultural’ cultural industries policy that integrates itself with economic and innovation policy. At the same time, more research is required to make sense of the implication of the rise of equity investment: if it is a new mode of cultural financing of the entrepreneurial state, or a sign that shows state forces are put under the increasing influence of financial capital.

Creative economy and its pitfalls The latest development in Korea’s cultural industries policy was its attachment to President Park Geun-­Hye’s (2013–2017) creative economy policy that highlighted the importance of science and technology-­based industries and businesses. When the president first introduced the notion of ‘creative economy’, many Koreans struggled to understand what it meant. In Anglophone and European countries, the idea of ‘creative economy’ is part of the broader ‘creative industries’ discourse that by and large highlights a particular set of industries – that is, arts, media, advertising, design and software – despite the existence of varying classification and mapping models such as the British DCMS, WIPO, UNCTAD and European Union models (Flew 2012; Throsby 2008). In these models, ‘creative economy’ is understood as economic transactions involving production, distribution and consumption of the outputs of creative industries. In Korea, however, ‘creative economy’ was taken straightforwardly as

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   111 ‘post-­cultural’ since it ambitiously referred to an entire national economy fuelled by creativity. This was intriguing to policy makers, not to mention media commentators and the public alike. It is because the notion ‘creative’ or ‘creativity’, thus far, had been firmly tied to arts and culture and, hence, to the domain of the cultural ministry. According to Park Geun-­Hye, creative economy referred to ‘a new paradigm for economic development based on imagination, creativity, science and technology [… and it] focuses on creating jobs by converging science and technology to the existing industries’ (Yonhap 2012). However, it was still an ambiguous notion, and its meaning differed depending on different policy makers. For example, ‘a converged and advanced economy grounded on fair competition in the market’, ‘changing from an economy focusing on catching-­up with technology to an advanced economy’, ‘creating something new using brain power’, ‘changing the nation’s economic paradigm’, ‘developing new ideas to new businesses and merging new technology with the existing industries’, and ‘thinking new by converging ITC to the existing industries’. (Hankook Ilbo 2013) A wide range of actors representing varied interests and policy priorities, such as science, technology, software, car, food, agriculture, retail and many others, quickly joined the definitional debate, arguing for the creative potential of their fields and demanding their share in the new economy. Such an immediate impact of the creative economy discourse should be understood within the context where the Korean government’s discursive capacity is firmly underpinned by its capacity in resource mobilisation. Thus the common assumption was that the new policy discourse would bring about substantial institutional changes, creation of a new support system and public investment in the select industries. This encouraged many sections of Korean society to take part in this debate, leading to heterogeneous imaginations of creative economy. Soon, however, it became apparent that the government adopted ‘creative’ as the main descriptor of Korea’s national economy with an intention to support science and technology, software, R&D and start-­up business. This was clearly signalled by the Korean name (Ministry of Future, Creativity and Science) of the newly established Ministry of Science, ITC and Future Planning (MSIP), which was the lead ministry in this new policy area. Park Geun-­Hye’s creative economy policy was preoccupied with stimulating and funding science, technology and R&D sectors as a new engine of the national economy. In many aspects, it was reminiscent of the knowledge economy policy at the end of the 1990s when the government provided discursive and financial support to technology-­based industries, resulting in a dot-­com and IT venture boom. Policy makers were heavily influenced by the book The Start-­up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (Senor and Singer 2009), which was about Israel’s spectacular success in developing R&D and technology start-­ups. The book’s

112   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era translator, who was an IT expert, became a deputy minister for Science, ITC and Future Planning, shaping the country’s creative economy debate. The book also made Korean policy makers and business leaders take ‘Israel’ as a model of a ‘creative nation’. With President Park herself showing great interest in the Israeli case, policy makers and business leaders tried to find lessons from Israel and began to set up funds imitating Israel’s venture capital funding strategies targeted at R&D sectors. As mentioned elsewhere (H.-K. Lee 2016), MSIP’s announcement of its initial investment demonstrated that state investment and support would focus on the aforementioned sectors. As the phrase ‘creative economy’ has become the key reference of the country’s economic policy discussion, its interpretations had substantial ideological implications. Conservative and pro-­market commentators understood creative economy in terms of economic growth (prioritised over wealth redistribution and welfare provision) led by deregulation and privatisation and believed that such economy should be business-­friendly and less regulated (Dong-­A Ilbo 2013; Joongang Ilbo 2013b). Yet, the business sector itself was divided with different sections having their own ideas about who would be the key actor in a creative economy; for example, SMEs in the field of R&D or chaebols (big conglomerates). The debate reflects Korean society’s ambivalent attitudes to chaebols’ roles in economic development, which has been one of the most controversial topics for public and scholarly debate on the country’s economic reform since 1997. As commented on below, the Park government tried to find a middle way by involving and relying on chaebols in stimulating, incubating and investing in start-­up businesses and SMEs. The Korean discourse of creative economy pays little attention to non-­ economic issues. Despite its rhetoric of using creativity to address social problems, the Ministry of Science, ITC and Future Planning (MSIP)’s ‘Creative Economy Action Plan’ (2013) demonstrates that its key concern is facilitating venture capital investment in R&D and technology start-­ups, deregulating the stock market and M&A, and facilitating the convergence between ITC and existing industries. The plan understands cultural industries from the same perspective and shows interest in activities with strong commercial and export potentials. With this regard, OECD Economics Department Working Paper Fostering a Creative Economy to Drive Korean Growth (Jones and Kim 2014) provides an interesting example showing how the idea of ‘creative economy’ can enter the terrain of ideological debate on the nation’s economic governance and can be captured by free market advocates. The report narrowly focuses on economic policy by arguing that upgrading Korean economy to a creative one would necessitate a range of neoliberal measures such as product market deregulation, international free trade, labour market flexibility and an expansion of venture capital financing. It holds that labour productivity could increase via creativity and innovation that would generate a high return on financers’ investment. To help channel investment to more ‘creative’ (profitable) firms, the report also calls for more labour flexibility in start-­up sectors. Witnessing the market/finance-­centric interpretations of ‘creative economy’ and a potential new wave of market-­oriented policies in its name, the critics of

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   113 the government tried to intervene in the debate by presenting an alternative vision of a creative economy: a ‘welfare society’ guaranteeing social equality, more job security and lifelong learning. They proposed adequate living conditions and a decent level of social security as preconditions for a creative economy (S.-Y. Lee 2013): A welfare state accumulates a high level of human capital and social capital via universal welfare provision and the democratisation of economy. In such a welfare state, everyone can find a job which they want to do and can always take risk because there is a support system which support them to recover when they fail. Everyone can pursue their dream and have a second life [e.g. learn new skills and find a new job]. Creativity will develop everywhere in such a country. After all, welfare state makes creative economy possible. This is ‘the shift in [economic] paradigm’ that President Park was talking about. These critics argued that it would be impossible to build a creative economy if the government does not address socio-­economic problems caused by the neoliberal reform, provide stronger social welfare, and implement ‘economic democracy’, which refers to more justice and equality in wealth redistribution. As the government clarified its interpretation of creative economy by introducing policy measures concerning R&D and tech start-­ups, however, the definitional debate came to cease and the competing interpretations of a creative economy quickly disappeared. Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider that the UK-­based RSA has recently proposed a ‘universal basic income’ within the framework of ‘creative state’ and ‘creative citizens’ (Painter and Thoung 2015), putting forward an alternative and democratic understanding of ‘creativity’. As seen in the Korean case, we hardly know if such an interpretation and the newly forging nexus between creativity and social welfare can gain impetus and effectively contest the mainstream policy discourse of creative industries in the United Kingdom. In some sense, however, it is unsurprising to see those emerging attempts to re-­ appreciate ‘creativity’ from the perspective of social well-­being and welfare provision in either Korea or the United Kingdom, given the dominance of the ‘creative’ economy (industries) as the main descriptor of the post-­industrial economy today that is characterised by stagnating living conditions, job instability and deepening social inequality. In practice, Korea’s creative economy policy under Park Geun-­Hye’s leadership took a form of public-­private support for creative start-­ups, ventures and SMEs. At the heart of the policy, there are seventeen ‘Creative Economy Innovation Centers’, the non-­governmental and non-­profit foundations that were quickly set up in 2014 and 2015 across the country with financial support from the central government, seventeen local governments and seventeen business conglomerates. Despite being public-­private partnerships, they are under heavy influence of the central government. Their main aim is to become hubs of creative business by supporting regionally based creative enterprises from ideation,

114   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era product development to the marketing and export. In addition to the provision of incubation, mentoring, legal and financial advice and other types of assistance, the centres have raised funds from the local governments and participating conglomerates to offer investments and loans to creative start-­ups and ventures. While the centres were set up to boost small start-­ups, another flagship project, ‘Creative Economy Town’, targets a broader range of people (‘citizens’), urging them to incorporate their everyday creativity into the creative economy policy framework and to actively look for entrepreneurial opportunities. According to the project’s website, Creative Economy Town is a platform for commercialisation of ideas. It helps to develop citizens’ ideas and turn them into businesses. It collects diverse ideas of citizens, offers online mentoring and connects citizens to support services that assist conversion of the ideas to businesses. Somehow, this project reminds us of the knowledge worker campaign in the 1990s in that it encourages Koreans to equip themselves with creativity and imagination and to be enthusiastic about turning their creativity into a business opportunity. Unlike the previous campaign that addressed the virtue of bringing innovative solutions to existing jobs and workplaces, however, the new project’s post-­industrial message is clearly concerned with developing the mind-­sets and skills required for start-­up business entrepreneurs who operate beyond the walls of existing factories and offices and exploit creativity in their everyday life. When President Park first came up with the idea of creative economy, the cultural ministry was puzzled because of Park’s post-­cultural understanding of ‘creative’ and ‘creativity’. Having sensed that the creative economy policy would lead to a recurrence of the boom in technology-­based ventures and start-­ups, cultural policy makers have tried to ensure culture’s place at the core of this new economy by adopting a ‘post-­cultural’ strategy that strengthens the convergence between culture, technology and export. The consequence has been a rapid growth of programmes that combine culture, ITC, digital technologies and the Korean Wave. This is supported by the increasing public-­private investment funds dedicated to culture-­ITC and technology start-­ups and attracts diverse public sector actors, from MSIP to public banks. The key developments that intersect creative economy and cultural industries include the creation of ‘Culture and Creation Convergence Centre’ (incubating creative content businesses), Culture and Creation Venture Complex (a hub of cultural SMEs and start-­ups), K-­Culture Valley (the latest version of the Hallyu World project; also see Chapter 6), Culture and Creation Academy, and Korean Wave performance halls, which exemplify the growing tendency of fusion among cultural, tourism and economic policies. A more recent example that demonstrates such a tendency is the announcement in September 2016 made by the cultural ministry, MSIP and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy that they would invest 15.3 trillion won (USD 12.7 billion) to support ‘future industries’, including cultural infrastructure

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   115 focusing on the Korean Wave (1.75 trillion won or USD 1.45 billion) and global content industries (4.78 trillion won or USD 3.96 billion) along with smart cars, Internet of things, drone technology, robot technology, energy industry, pharmaceutical industry and so on (Kookmin Ilbo 2016). Evidently, associating culture with the ‘creative economy’ and advanced technologies has come with new sources of public funding, support from the government and the refreshed public attention to the cultural sector. Ultimately, however, this is a double-­edged sword as it reduces ‘culture’ in cultural industries policy and intensifies the post-­ culturalisation of the policy. The escalating economic expectation on culture and culture’s association with creative economy mean that it becomes very hard for both cultural policy makers and the cultural sector to reclaim their discursive ownership of ‘creativity’ and bring it back to the domain of culture.

Conclusion How can we sum up the Korean experience of doing cultural industries policy in the age of neoliberalism? Unlike those familiar narratives of neoliberal cultural policy in the form of the shrinking of state power, privatisation of cultural institutions and government spending cuts, the Korean case is distinguished by the powerful economic doctrine of culture and the emergence of what Maria Mazzucato (2014) calls ‘entrepreneurial state’ in cultural industries policy. As such, the ‘embedded neoliberalisation’ of culture in Korea has been conditioned by the increasing coalition between market and state forces. At the deepening conjuncture between the intensifying global economic competition and the rapid post-­industrial transformation of Korean society, cultural industries policy robustly regards culture as one of the nation’s strategic industries, reflecting and affirming Korea’s headstrong tradition of discoursing culture within the context of (re)building and the long-­term survival of the nation. This results in a radical economic version of cultural democracy – that is, any types of cultural and media activities are equally valuable and worth public support as long as they can generate wealth and export and, hence, can contribute to the nation’s post-­ industrial economic success. Creating an entrepreneurial state in cultural industries policy was possible thanks to the Korean government’s impressive legislative, administrative and financial capacity that can ‘make the policy actually happen’ and set a context that facilitates cultural industries development. It has been a discursive project too, where the meaning of culture has been continuously modified and deconstructed so it can be more comfortably identified and acknowledged as a commodity and export item. This project is hegemonic in the sense that the economic discourse of culture quickly gained the consent of the media, cultural sector, academia, and business sectors as well as the general public and that it has overcome party politics and political schism in Korean society. ‘Culture’ in cultural policy has now become a fictitious commodity; any alternative and challenging imaginations of culture, beyond the framework of market transaction and export, are likely to be discouraged and ignored. The policy has become further

116   Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era post-­culturalised with its attachment to the ‘creative economy’ policy under Park Geun-­Hye’s leadership. To conclude, the Korean experience of neoliberalisation of culture can be summarised as an intense commodification of culture and advancement of a market economy of culture ‘within’ the strong statist policy framework, where the government’s active investment in cultural industries, an important national economic project, is taken for granted and never questioned.

Notes   1 Mazzucato’s emphasis is the state’s capacity to make things happen by taking long-­ term visions of technological development and making bold, entrepreneurial investments that the private sector would not dare to provide due to the uncertainty and high risk. For example, she points out that the development of many advanced technologies that made possible Apple’s creation of the iPhone were funded by the US government (Mazzucato 2014: Chapter 5). Another example is the state investment in technologies related to green energy.   2 For example, the expansion of the National Health Insurance (2000), the introduction of means-­tested National Basic Livelihood Security (2000), the expansion of National Pension Scheme (1999), the expansion of Unemployment Benefits (1998).   3 For example, the means-­tested National Basic Livelihood Security and unemployment benefits, which began in the late 1990s, were unable to provide a reliable social safety net to the marginalised groups who suffer from poverty, low income and job instability.   4 Policy makers chose the term ‘intellectual’ instead of the term ‘worker’ or ‘labourer’ as they were worried that the latter would have connotations of leftist politics, which was a taboo in the country.   5 See the Report to the National Economic Advisory Council (2002) at Cheungwadae (Blue House) Archive http://15cwd.pa.go.kr/korean/data/know_policy/ecodip/view. php?f_nseq_tot=46102 (accessed on 15 August 2016).   6 According to the Report to the National Economic Advisory Council (2002), as of 2002, 26.3 per cent of the government R&D budget was allocated to the chosen industries: Bio Tech, Nano Tech, Environment Tech, IT and CT. See http://15cwd.pa.go. kr/korean/data/know_policy/ecodip/view.php?f_nseq_tot=46102 (accessed on 15 August 2016).   7 Cultural commodities referred to ‘tangible and intangible goods, service and their combination that embody cultural elements and generate added economic value’, ranging from media, traditional craft and traditional costume to food.   8 The laws also required the government to create a long/medium-­term basic plan for the relevant area as well as plans specific to sectors or periods. The following are examples of long-­term plans for cultural industries development: Cultural Industries Development Five-­year Plan (1999), Cultural Industries Vision 21 (2001), Content Korea Vision 21 (2001), C-­Korea (2005), Content Industries Promotion Basic Plan (2011, 2014) and so on.   9 MCT (2003) 2003 Cultural Industries White Book, p. 12. Also see: http://theme. archives.go.kr/next/chronology/archiveDetail.do?flag=1&page=6&evntId=00507523 22&sort=year (accessed on 25 August 2016). 10 In 1998, the government introduced an animation broadcasting quota, requiring terrestrial and cable TV channels to allocate a certain percentage of the total animation broadcasting time to domestic animations (the quota increased over time to 45 per cent in 2002). Then, the revision of the Broadcasting Act in 2004 meant that for an original domestic animation, the quota of 1 per cent is applied to the total broadcasting time of terrestrial TV, with a domestic animation quota between 30 per cent and

Doing cultural policy in the neoliberal era   117 50 per cent of the total animation time in the case of cable TV. Another revision of the Broadcasting Act in 2012 extended the domestic animation quota to animation channels and comprehensive channels on cable TV (a quota between 0.3 per cent and 1 per cent depending on the channel’s revenue in the previous year) (see MCT 2002; MCST 2013a). 11 Throughout the chapter, average exchange rates (Korean won to US dollar) that are year-­specific are used. 12 http://story.kocca.kr/story/main.do (accessed on 25 August 2016). 13 www.ifcic.fr/ (accessed on 1 August 2017). 14 www.cnc.fr/web/fr/sofica (accessed on 1 August 2017). 15 https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/creative-­europe/cross-­sector/guarantee-­facility_en (accessed on 1 August 2017). 16 For details of the arrangement and management of the Motae Fund, see www.k-­vic. co.kr/contents.do?contentsNo=83&menuNo=359 (accessed on 25 August 2016). 17 We can also note that as of the first half of 2012, 25 (50 per cent) films out of the total 50 films screened had investment via the Motae Fund. www.etnews.com/201208160513 (accessed on 25 August 2016). 18 Yonhap News (30 May 2016) KBS-­KDB launching a 100 billion won fund … to facilitate Korean Wave content (www.yonhapnews.co.kr/bulletin/2016/05/30/020000 0000AKR20160530151500033.HTML); Chosun Biz com (2 March 2016) Korea Export Bank, creating a 160 billion won fund for cultural content and health care industries … recruiting a fund management company by 16 March (http://biz.chosun. com/site/data/html_dir/2016/03/02/2016030201682.html); KBS News (28 January 2016) Culture-­ITC convergence fund to be launched (http://news.kbs.co.kr/news/ view.do?ncd=3223455); Chosun Biz com (27 May 2016) KOBACO and IBK Bank creating a fund of 40 billion won to foster promising audiovisual SMEs. http://biz. chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2016/05/27/2016052701297.html (all accessed on 25 August 2016). 19 www.yonhapnews.co.kr/bulletin/2017/10/18/0200000000AKR20171018135200005. HTML (accessed on 26 October 2017).

6 The Korean Wave inside out

The Korean Wave and cultural policy In the last two decades, Korea has undergone a remarkable image upgrade to a cool centre of global pop cultural production. This is a dramatic event given that the country’s culture was little known to outsiders until the 1990s. Cultural production and dissemination used to be a domestic affair although its forms and styles were under heavy Western influence, especially with European high arts predominating arts curricula in schools and US films and pop songs enjoying huge popularity. The fierce, and even violent, protests of Korean filmmakers against the direct distribution of Hollywood films by US studios in the 1980s plainly demonstrated the weak position of local cultural industries vis-­à-vis global market forces. International researchers and media seldom showed interest in Korean culture, implying that the country, as one of the East Asian tigers, might have become significant economically but not (yet) culturally. In this context, Samuel Kim, a seasoned scholar in East Asian international relations and Korea’s foreign relations, noted in his concluding chapter of the book Korea’s Globalization that ‘one would search in vain to find in Korea’s exports any made-­in-Korea cultural products, whether computer software, music, movies, TV program, or books’ (S. Kim 2000b: 257). Then, the impressive growth of Korean cultural industries and the surging overseas demand for their products suddenly put the country in the limelight. ‘Korean Wave’ or ‘Hallyu’, a term coined first by the Chinese-­speaking media, initially referred to the tidal and endemic popularity of Korean pop culture products in China and Asian societies.1 With the popularity spreading beyond Asia, this term established itself as a common descriptor of the global recognition and consumption of Korean contemporary culture. When it comes to the Korean Wave’s relationship with cultural policy, opinions are not unitary. On the one hand, there is a mainstream economic viewpoint that sees Korea as a beneficiary of globalisation and free capital flows and argues that deregulation, market competition and free trade were pre-­conditions for the innovation and success of the Korean cultural sector (J.-s. Kim 2007; Korea Times 2011). The market-­driven business strategies of the pop music industry might be a relevant example here but it should be noted that many other cultural

The Korean Wave inside out   119 industries such as film and animation have relied on state policies in mobilising financial and other types of resources. On the other hand, a number of researchers highlight the Korean government’s dedicated support for cultural businesses and their export efforts. They point to the crucial role a nation state can play to champion domestic cultural industries even in the age of market-­driven globalisation (J.-E. Chung 2012; Jin 2006, 2014, 2016; Kwon and Kim 2014). It is interesting to consider these different viewpoints against the backdrop of the existing debate where Korea’s economic performance – both economic success and failure – has been made sense of from the two opposing perspectives. For example, was the country’s spectacular economic development in the 1960s and 1970s a consequence of its adoption of a market economy, or the state-­controlled development of it? (Haggard and Moon 1993; Öniş 1991). Was the financial crisis that broke out in 1997 caused by the government-­led management of economy, or the country’s hasty embrace of the neoliberal style of economic governance in the 1990s? (Chang 1998; Lim 2009). Symbolising the nation’s economic success in the post-­crisis and post-­industrial era, the Korean Wave appears to be another point for debate, where the supposed roles of the market and the state in steering cultural industries are advocated and legitimised. Regardless of which viewpoint is taken, however, ‘industrial development’ and ‘export’ tend to set the discursive boundary so that policy makers, media and ordinary Koreans are left with limited room for contemplating non-­economic (aesthetic, social, political and civic) dimensions of popular cultural production and consumption. In the meanwhile, there are voices of discontent that suggest that the Korean Wave has been hijacked and instrumentalised by state cultural policy. For instance, Jungbong Choi (2015) discusses the crosscurrent in the Korean Wave: ‘hallyu’ (the Korean Wave) as a creative cultural phenomenon initiated by overseas fans of Korean pop culture vs. ‘hallyu-­hwa’ (Korean Wave-­isation) as a state-­run campaign driven by the government, media and other institutional stakeholders. While offering a persuasive critique of the institutionalisation of the Wave and its dubious effects, Choi finds that the state project gains popular currency as it strikes a chord with Korean people’s desire for external recognition as an important source of their national and cultural confidence. Similarly, it has been observed that the Korean Wave is used as a cool nation brand for almost anything Korean that is exportable, and Korean Wave-­themed projects are a popular post-­industrial option for both national and local economic strategy (H.-K. Lee 2013). Yet, the relationship between the Korean Wave and cultural policy is reciprocal and mutually influencing: the policy both instrumentalises and encourages the Wave; and the Wave reorients the policy towards transnational consumerism and ‘post-­cultural’ approach to cultural policy. This chapter intends to probe into the intersection and interactions between the Korean Wave and cultural policy. It will examine how the government and its agencies have ‘captured’ the Wave and absorbed it into the domain of statist cultural policy, and how the discourse of Korean Wave, in turn, has rearranged the policy’s boundaries, goals, modus operandi and participants. Importantly, the

120   The Korean Wave inside out exploration lies in the contemplation of cultural globalisation as a ‘national project’, meaning that the Korean government tries to actively manage cultural globalisation by purposefully turning it into a national development strategy. Korean Wave as an outbound globalisation strategy is centred on its contribution to nation branding, export and diplomatic endeavours. This strategy corresponds with overseas consumers’ multifaceted responses crisscrossing across entertainment, leisure, learning and other terrains of everyday life (J. Choi 2015): it ranges from enjoying K-­pop or drama, developing positive images of the country, trying Korean food, learning the Korean language and traditional culture, buying Korea-­branded products, visiting Korea, to yearning to experience everything Korean. With the fusion among diplomacy, entertainment media, export promotion, tourism and fandom, the conceptual and analytical distinction between the Korean Wave as a cultural phenomenon and Korean Wave as a state project becomes increasingly murky. At the same time, we should note that the Korean Wave works as an inbound national strategy as well, where Koreans are encouraged to live the positive nation brand ‘K’ and exposed to various public policy messages packaged with signifiers of the Korean Wave. Interestingly, the Wave has been incorporated into various policy campaigns including those intended to assist the ‘neoliberal socialisation’ (McGuigan 2015) of young-­generation Koreans, that is, their forming of a new ethic and subjectivity suitable for post-­industrial and neoliberal working and living conditions in contemporary Korea.

Korean Wave as a cultural phenomenon Industry professionals note in retrospect that the Korean Wave was a ‘cultural phenomenon’, which they never anticipated. In fact, both the Korean government and the public were amazed by the sudden popularity of Korean pop culture in some Asian countries in the second half of the 1990s, but regarded it as a one-­off oddity. Their assumption was wrong, however, and the fever went on to expand across the region and beyond. Clearly, the Korean Wave contests the view that equates globalisation with cultural imperialism, standardisation, homogenisation, or Americanisation. It is emblematic of cultural contra-­flows, or regional and global dissemination of culture and media coming from a periphery (Thussu 2007). It recentres the process of globalisation (Iwabuchi 2002) by challenging the unitary directions of mainstream flows originating in global cultural centres such as the United States (see also H.-J. Cho 2005). In the same way that Korea’s state-­led capitalistic economic development was a ‘national’ – rather than Westernising – project, its experience of globalisation is not simply subsumed to the theory that sees globalisation as Westernisation, or the global diffusion of Western modernity. Meanwhile, ‘cultural hybridisation’ has been a major theoretical framework for the existing analysis of the Korean Wave (Jin 2016). That is, globalisation does not necessarily mean the weakening of nation states or national culture as it can trigger and facilitate a reinforcement and reinvention of local culture

The Korean Wave inside out   121 (Pieterse 1994). At the junction between transnational and national forces, hybridity emerges through new practices of cultural expression, such as local cultural producers inventing new forms, styles and contents of culture by creatively adapting and articulating global cultural forces with their own local traditions, tastes, styles and social norms. Instead of passively receiving popular foreign culture, the domestic audience may actively appreciate music, film and TV programmes from abroad and inscribe their own interpretations and meanings to these cultural products (Ryoo 2009; Shim 2006). In this sense, cultural globalisation as hybridisation is believed to engender ‘the third space’, where new kinds of connections and dialogues with other cultures can take place. This understanding of cultural globalisation resonates with the view that the increased sharing of Asia-­originated popular culture, such as Korean pop culture, in the region opens up possibilities of transcultural dialogue, connection and understanding among Asian societies. Scholars also believe that Asian audiences’ consumption of Korean pop culture such as TV drama, film and music can be a reflexive practice where they can have a fresh look at their identity, life and the socio-­cultural conditions they are living under and imagine potential alternatives (Y. Cho 2011; Chua 2012; Iwabuchi 2013; Y. Kim 2013). Transnational cultural consumption of this kind is seen as widening the audiences’ horizons and pool of reference points, prompting their mundane reflexivity and motivating their everyday creativity. This is not exactly what Arjun Appadurai calls ‘globalisation from below’ (e.g. international civil society) but those who research the Korean Wave from cultural studies perspectives tend to be quite positive about the reflexive and empowering aspects of Asian audiences’ ‘imagination in social life’ (Appadurai 2005: 6–7) through the consumption of Korean pop culture. As for what actually triggered the Korean Wave, there are multiple explanations. The first is the socio-­cultural changes in the receiving societies. The second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s saw the growth of middle classes in Asia and their surging demand for popular cultural products (Fung 2013; Y. Kim 2013). Despite differences in terms of time and scope, many countries in the region went through economic development and became more exposed to foreign cultural imports. In particular, there was a rise of cultural consumers who pursued urban lifestyles and were equipped with a transnationalised cultural appetite and who had growing desires and tastes for quality cultural products regardless of the country of origin. The expansion of cultural markets and the increased consumer demand for pop culture products in the region was a happy coincidence for Korean cultural industries, which strengthened their production capacity during the 1990s when freedom of expression and cultural experiments were encouraged and socially appreciated, and cultural businesses began adopting more systematic management approaches (Shim 2006, 2008). As of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the industries could create a range of cultural products, from TV dramas to computer games, which had high production values and, thus, had the power to attract overseas consumers. The increasing demand for Korean pop culture was also situated within the shifting political economy of the region’s media industries, especially the trend

122   The Korean Wave inside out of deregulation and liberalisation. For example, the Taiwanese TV industry was deregulated in the early 1990s, opening the door to Japanese TV drama series and shows, and later Korean pop culture products that were cheaper in price (Huang 2011; Shim 2008). The gradual deregulation of Chinese cultural markets, especially TV, also meant a new opportunity for its domestic audience to be exposed to selected foreign products that satisfied government censorship. As a cultural hybrid, Korean pop culture has worked as a bridge or buffer between Asia and the West (Ryoo 2009: 145). Unlike US TV dramas that are embedded in individualism and sexual freedom, Korean productions skilfully mix Asia’s modern outlook and imageries (its affluent middle classes, urban landscape, modern lifestyle, trendy fashion and consumerism) with conservative and traditional values (the importance of family, respect for the elderly and the avoidance of explicit sexual expression). In short, Korea’s experience of cultural hybridisation and embedded modernisation makes its pop cultural expressions appealing and relevant to Asian audiences (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008). Researchers have highlighted the idea of ‘cultural proximity’ as a key determinant of the Asian region’s warm acceptance of Korean pop cultural products. This idea was first explored in regard to Latin Americans’ preference for national and regional media products (Straubhaar 1991) and was further articulated to explain pan-­Asian consumption of Japanese pop culture since the 1990s (Iwabuchi 2002). Then, the rise of the Korean Wave created a new momentum to enrich the discussion. Cultural proximity in Asia (mainly East Asia) in its simplest sense refers to the sharing of Confucian cultural heritage and the prevalence of traditional culture that defines social relations and gender roles in Asian societies. Yet, another layer of cultural proximity is generated by these societies’ engagement with similar patterns of economic catch-­up, shared experience of living in the contemporary world and a feeling of coevality. This apparently leads to the trend of isomorphism in cultural tastes and desires in the region, and its intensification by the region’s sharing of Korean pop culture. More recently, the Korean Wave has begun to be felt in societies in the Middle East, South America, North America and Europe, challenging the thesis of cultural proximity. Does this mean that the Wave is a distinct media phenomenon that can proliferate across culturally distant societies? Has the industrialised, increasingly affluent Asia been a testbed for Korea’s globally appealing cultural commodities? Can the notion of cultural proximity be stretched to explore general cultural traits and social experiences of contemporary media consumers in Asia and elsewhere? However, overstretching the notion might result in its loss of analytical capacity. What we are witnessing is the evolving dynamic of the Korean Wave, which is determined by the interplay between cultural consumers who have transnational cultural tastes, their media environments that are globally connected, and Korean cultural industries’ capacity to create distinct pop culture genres, styles and contents that have already become quite visible in global cultural flows. The small size of the domestic market, along with high competition, functions as another driving force behind Korean cultural businesses’ ambitious outbound strategies, which are compared with Japanese

The Korean Wave inside out   123 media companies’ inward-­looking approaches (Kawashima 2018). Korean cultural producers’ global dream has been happily supported by the timely popularisation of the Internet and the arrival of online social networks, which provide them with immediate and almost unlimited access to overseas audiences (Jin 2016; Y. Kim 2013). The phenomenal success of Psy’s Gangnam Style is only one of many such examples. Today, Korean cultural businesses take ‘the global’ as a key guiding principle. For them, calling for state protection of the nation’s popular culture against global market forces might be a forgotten memory. They are working hard to convert the Korean Wave to a business phenomenon, localising their products in the overseas markets, hiring overseas talent, pursuing international co-­ production, increasing a company’s asset value via proving their artists’ global popularity, acquiring foreign investments, and strategically collaborating with foreign media companies. Their global strategy also includes emulating mainstream cultural flows and becoming part of them. They collaborate with Hollywood studios and talent agencies in the United States to better perform in the global cultural market and to increase their visibility in the US market. In turn, the US cultural industries have tried to incorporate the Korean Wave to improve their global strategies as seen from Billboard’s recent introduction of ‘K-­pop’ as a new music genre and the creation of a dedicated K-­pop page on its website. Netflix’s investment in the production of Okja (2017), a Korean blockbuster film, and Love Alarm (2018, planned) an original Korean drama series based on a popular web-­toon in Korea, would be another example showing an encounter of different paths of cultural globalisation.

Cultural globalisation as national project Meanwhile, Korean Wave as ‘a policy phenomenon’ should be seen as part of the country’s attempt to ‘actively manage’ cultural globalisation by turning it into a national cultural project. To better understand the ‘Korean way of globalisation’ (G.-W. Shin 2006: 206), one needs to consider the trajectory of the globalisation discourse in public policy discussion in the country. The starting point is that globalisation is not a worldwide, unitary project and there is a variance in its translation, conceptualisation and understanding across different societies. Unlike its translations in China and Taiwan (‘全球化’, meaning whole-­earth-isation) and in Japan (‘國際化’, meaning internationalisation), its initial Korean translation was ‘世界化’ (‘segyehwa’, meaning ‘make [Korea] like the world’) (Lim 2009: 144). While the Chinese and Japanese translations highlight global connectivity and becoming a world society, their Korean equivalence implied Korea’s advancement and becoming like the rest of the world (p. 144). It is interesting to know that the discourse was born with the civilian Kim Young-­Sam government’s (1993–1998) ‘segyehwa’ drive. Resembling the modernisation project of the Park Chung-­Hee government, ‘segyehwa’ was ‘initiated by the government as a state enhancing, top-­down strategic plan’, which aimed to improve the nation’s competitiveness and create a ‘new Korea’ that would be an active member

124   The Korean Wave inside out of the global economic community (S. Kim 2000a: 3; 2000b: 242). Again, like the modernisation push, ‘segyehwa’ encompassed reform and rationalisation in a vast range of policy areas including diplomacy, security, economic governance, public administration, education, science and technology, information and culture, which were overseen by the presidential Segyehwa Promotion Committee.2 Korean policy makers saw globalisation as the nation’s transformation – its becoming connected to the rest of the world, adopting international standards and gaining international competitiveness. However, their hasty globalisation policy in economic management, which was centred on liberalisation and deregulation, led to a national crisis in the form of financial meltdown in 1997 (Chang 1998; Lim 2009), and consequently the concept of segyehwa fell out of fashion. When referring to globalisation, Koreans today use the terms ‘jeonjiguhwa’ (全地球化, or whole-­earth-isation) and ‘geullobeollaijeisyeon’ (Korean pronunciation of the English word ‘globalisation’) as well as ‘segyehwa’, the top-­down campaign elements of which have now been somewhat weakened. Even though Kim Young-­Sam’s globalisation project in the 1990s failed to bring about its promised outcomes, it was an exemplary case that demonstrates how Korea has localised Western discourses and paradigms so these can ultimately assist the nation’s economic development and work as a catalyst for its social transformation. Korean cultural policy in the 1990s was under the significant influence of Kim Young-­Sam’s globalisation drive. The focus was on improving the nation’s ‘cultural competitiveness’ by upgrading Koreans’ cultural life so it could be on a par with that of advanced nations and by ‘globalising quality of life’ (G.-M. Park 2010: 220). As such, globalisation in cultural policy discourse showed strong ‘internal’ orientation and was broadly interpreted as ‘becoming like the rest of the world’ or, in other words, catching up with the existing patron states in the West. It is within this context that Kim Young-­Sam’s cultural policy put forward not only ‘cultural industries’ as a new economic sector but also ‘cultural welfare’, especially the expansion of the nation’s cultural infrastructure and enhancement of public cultural enjoyment. Despite the government’s enthusiastic advocacy of globalisation as a new normal, the nationalist and protectionist view of culture prevailed under Kim Young-­Sam’s leadership. The most remarkable event was the demolition of the Jungangcheong building in 1995, which was built by the Japanese coloniser as government-­general hall and had thus far been used as Korea’s government hall. Its removal was the most de-­colonising moment in the country’s cultural history since 1945. When it came to cultural diplomatic efforts, the government’s main concern was the traditional type of international cultural exchange, such as Korean cultural organisations’ participation in international festivals and fairs and the country’s hosting of international cultural events. Without state support for cultural export, broadcasters and TV production companies had to find a way to enter overseas markets by themselves. The next president, Kim Dae-­Jung (1998–2003), did not inherit the ‘segyehwa’ discourse. He advocated a progressive vision of ‘universal globalisation’. This

The Korean Wave inside out   125 notion, which is similar to what Arjun Appadurai calls ‘globalisation from below’ (2005), referred to the globalisation of freedom, human rights, justice, peace and equity (Lim 2009: 146). At the same time, his government implemented neoliberal economic reform that resulted in the opening up of Korean markets to foreign firms and the integration of the Korean economy to the global financial market. The coexistence of ‘globalisation from above’ and ‘globalisation from below’ in President Kim Dae-­Jung’s understanding of Korea’s relation to the world appeared to be a manifestation of the inconsistency existing in his third-­way politics (J.-E. Chung 2012; Lim 2009), between a market economy and democracy, and between neoliberal economic policy and progressive social policy. Although the idea of ‘globalisation’ was not frequently mentioned by his government, it provided an important context for state policy regarding cultural industries and cultural export. If Kim Young-­Sam’s cultural globalisation policy was inward-­looking, Kim Dae-­Jung’s policy was notably outbound. The implicit message coded in his policy was that Korea should actively manage cultural globalisation and make best use of it for national economic development. The government’s ‘New cultural policy’ document (1998) offers ‘cultural solutions’ to Korea’s biggest challenge at that time, which was to rebuild the nation and upgrade its economy in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 1997. Cultural export was part of the proposed solution: the document set an ambitious target that the country would increase cultural exports by 6.5 times in five years (MCT 1998: 13). The government began supporting the overseas promotion of Korean audiovisual products by funding translation, dubbing and subtitling. However, the most crucial event was the creation of the Korea Culture and Content Agency (KOCCA) in 2001, which had a clear mandate to expand the country’s cultural exports. From its inception, this agency invested heavily in showcasing Korean popular cultural products abroad and facilitated cultural export by funding, providing market information and legal advice, and organising events where cultural companies could meet potential investors. Overseas cultural promotion and export support were established firmly as an essential component of the country’s cultural (content) industries policy and their weight has grown over time (also see Chapter 5).

Korean Wave as a policy phenomenon The rising Korean Wave, especially the phenomenal success of the TV drama series Winter Sonata in Japan in early 2000s, made policy makers more confidently envision cultural, economic and diplomatic benefits of the global reach of the country’s pop culture. Soon, the Korean Wave itself – as a solid proof of culture’s economic utility – was made a mainstream category of cultural policy, connecting commercial cultural business to diplomacy, nation branding, tourism, export, regional development and numerous areas of public policy. The country began to feel an emerging sense of ‘cultural confidence’, which most Koreans – policy makers, cultural producers, media professionals and members of the

126   The Korean Wave inside out public alike – had lacked in recent history, where a sense of cultural crisis prevailed and culture was seen as something to be preserved and safeguarded from colonial legacies, Western cultural hegemony and vulgar commercialism. Dramatically departing from protectionism, Korea’s cultural policy began to perceive cultural globalisation as a vital condition for the prosperity of local cultural businesses and talents and a potential source of positive spill-­over effects in other economic sectors. A good example demonstrating the decline of cultural protectionism is the liberal Roh Moo-­Hyun government’s (2003–2008) cultural policy. The first thing to note is its efforts to successfully negotiate with the United States towards a free trade agreement by willingly halving Korea’s screen quota from 40 per cent (of all screening days) to 20 per cent. Some commentators think that this was an odd decision because Roh’s liberal government was supposed to be ‘progressive’ and more culture-­friendly (e.g. Jin 2014). However, this would be better regarded as an indicator of the end of the old, protectionist rationale of cultural industries policy. In spite of its rhetoric of ‘cultural exception’ and ‘diversity’, the government persistently advocated the necessity for a screen quota cut for the sake of practical benefits such as diplomacy, a trade deal with United States and the nation’s economic growth (W.-J. Lee 2004: 227). Another aspect of his cultural policy is the consolidation of economism. In its early days, the government took a rather cautious approach to the Korean Wave, expecting it to serve as a potential catalyst for transnational cultural dialogue, the development of North East Asian culture and increased cultural collaboration within the Asian region (MCT 2003). A new agency called Korea Foundation for Asian Cultural Exchange (KOFACE)3 was set up in 2003 under the aegis of the cultural ministry to compensate for the economic orientation of KOCCA’s programmes and foster collaboration among Asian cultural industries. It was also meant to manage the ongoing and potential backlash towards the Korean Wave in some Asian countries; for example, the rise of cultural protectionism in China and Taiwan and the anti-­Korea sentiment in Japan. The Roh government’s repackaging of Korean traditional culture in its ‘Han (Korean) style’ brand project was another attempt to tone down the expansionist drive in the Korean Wave policy and, at the same time, incorporate traditional cultural elements into the policy (K. Hong 2014). This project, which encompassed Korean alphabet, food, architecture, music and traditional paper, failed to establish a strong ‘han-­’ brand but certainly broadened the scope of the policy beyond pop culture. However, the Roh government’s cautious approach to the Korean Wave was overruled by its global ambition (MCT 2004, 2005). Its proposal of three objectives of cultural policy – Korea’s becoming a world top five cultural powerhouse, a tourist hub in Northeast Asia and a world top ten leisure sports power – clearly indicated the Korean understanding of cultural globalisation as the country rapidly catching up with culturally advanced economies: Making Korea one of the world[’s] top five cultural powerhouses by 2010 by providing state-­level systematic and comprehensive support and thus

The Korean Wave inside out   127 securing advantages in competition with advanced economies […] Managing the discomfort against the Korean Wave in parts of Asia and spreading the Korean Wave globally by strengthening national brand power. (MCT 2005: 19, emphasis added) The policy’s economism was deepened by the conservative president Lee Myung-­Bak (2008–2013) who took the Korean Wave as an effective means of nation branding that was a presidential agenda. Within the government’s expansionist and evangelist perspective, the Korean Wave was firmly established as a global project, the mission of which was to spread Korean culture to every corner of the world. The government tried to unify the identity and cultural images of Korea under the cool brand ‘K’ and included almost all areas with which the cultural ministry is concerned, except religion (H.-K. Lee 2013). Believing that many areas of ‘K-­culture’, such as K-­fine art, K-­musical, K-­literature and K-­food, could join the Wave, the cultural ministry announced a comprehensive ‘Korean Wave Development Strategy’ under which a range of traditional and contemporary cultural sectors would benefit from financial, managerial and marketing support from the central government and its agencies. The strategy assumed that ‘developing both traditional and contemporary culture will lead to economic affluence; converging traditional culture and advanced technology will help Korea to attract the world’ (Lee Myung-­Bak cited in MCST 2012b). Traditional culture was imagined as a cultural resource that could be exploited for the creation of added values, tourism and nation branding. The instrumental usefulness of contemporary arts was also emphasised: by improving foreign audiences’ understanding of Korea’s contemporary arts, the backlashes to the commercially driven Korean Wave could be alleviated, ‘K-­content’ could be diversified and, therefore, the country could ‘avoid following the footstep of Hong Kong’s popular culture, which relied too much on film and lost its regional and global appeal soon after its heyday’ (MCST 2012b). ‘K-­culture’ is an ambivalent signifier, where the country’s cultural nationalism takes an outlook of globalism and the essentialist perspective of culture is fused with the logic of industrial production and export (KOCIS 2012; MCST 2013b). The industrial logic tends to reduce Korean society to ‘the country of origin’ of finished cultural products for export. Korea’s cultural connections to other societies and its active appreciation of various cultures from abroad are made sense of in this logic, leaving little scope for pondering and discoursing on the growing hybridisation and diversification of Korean culture itself (K. Lee 2008; Ryoo 2009; Shim 2006). Instead, Korean contemporary culture, regardless of its genealogy, is frequently understood from an essentialist perspective as reflecting the Korean nation’s deep-­rooted characteristics and spirit. In an age when the idea of ‘national culture’ no longer has significant efficacy, the Korean Wave provides policy makers with a framework, in which they can articulate the nation’s cultural confidence and their desire to ‘expand Korea’s cultural territory’ by supporting cultural exports and nation branding (MCST 2015b).

128   The Korean Wave inside out The government’s Korean Wave policy has grown very quickly, resulting in a comprehensive package of plans, funding, investment, events, training, market research and marketing, branding exercises, fandom research, consultation, showcasing, networking, and so on. Its outgrowth means that it now offers an overarching vision and goal for existing sub-­sections of cultural policy, such as content industries and creative economy policies, encouraging the country’s creative content makers, storytellers, cultural SMEs and one-­person creative businesses think big and target overseas markets (also see Chapter 5). In this sense, the Korean Wave is a powerful pedagogic discourse that instils in the country’s cultural producers’ global mind-­sets and ambitions and assists them in developing a new subjectivity as global cultural players. In doing so, the discourse of the Korean Wave works as an effective catalyst for Korea’s outbound cultural globalisation and post-­industrial social transformation.

‘Post-­cultural’ Korean Wave and policy convergence The boundaries of the Korean Wave policy have continually been broadened as policy makers believe that the Wave can generate multiple benefits across different sectors and industries. The mapping of the policy at the central government level is a good way to observe the convergence across cultural promotion, diplomacy, cultural and non-­cultural exports, tourism and other economic activities. The policy is populated by a number of ministries, all of which claim their share in the Korean Wave: cultural ministry (overseas promotion and export of K-­culture), foreign ministry (export support and cultural diplomacy utilising the Korean Wave), the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (culture-­ITC convergence, support for K-­pop hologram theatres and export support), trade ministry (nation branding, Korean Wave expo and export support) and agricultural ministry (K-­food) (KOFICE 2015). While duplicating policy actions, these ministries and their agencies are also collaborating, increasing the weight of the Korean Wave as a cross-­government policy agenda. One of the industries that has been hugely affected by the Korean Wave is the tourism industry. Seeing the Wave as a saviour of the inbound tourism industry, the government’s key strategies have targeted Asian countries, especially China, which is the biggest and fastest growing tourist market with nearly 6 million Chinese visitors (over 45 per cent of all visitors) in 2015.4 Observing that affluent major cities on the east coast of China are already familiar with Korean contemporary culture and, thus, are mature markets for Korean products, policy makers are hoping to bring the Korean Wave to the ‘Western Frontiers’ of China by implementing dedicated efforts in its western cities (KWPC 2015). For instance, the cultural ministry has decided that the focal point should be Chungching City where a K-­culture flagship store will be built soon and a series of promotional events will be organised. The national framework of tourism policy itself has been rebranded as part of the Korean Wave policy and the prefix ‘K-­’ permeates various schemes: ‘K-­smile campaign’, ‘K-­travel’ (transport between Seoul and regions), ‘K-­tour card’ (travel card targeted at Chinese

The Korean Wave inside out   129 visitors) and so on. Even visa rules have been loosened so Chinese tourists who visit for a reason related to the Korean Wave (e.g. K-­pop concert, fashion, beauty or cultural experience) can enter the country with less bureaucracy (MCST 2016d). More recently, the government has pushed the boundary of the Korean Wave to include shopping in its agenda. To boost the ‘Korea Grand Sale’ event targeted at shoppers from affluent Asian societies, the cultural ministry organises a K-­culture fair as part of its annual ‘cultural month’ (October), reorienting the cultural month that has thus far focused on non-­commercial arts and culture. The Korean Wave, tourism and shopping are further blended as some talent agencies managing Korean Wave stars have begun collaborating with big corporations to bid for licenced duty free shops at tourist hot spots. The Korean Wave, as a post-­industrial economic strategy, has also fed into regeneration projects at local levels. Unlike the Western experience of culture-­ led urban renaissance projects that rely on ‘arts’ events and facilities (e.g. European Capital of Culture programme), the relative lack of arts consumption in Korea (as of 2016, 12.8 per cent, 4.5 per cent and 73.3 per cent of the adult population went to art exhibitions, classical music concerts and cinemas respectively) means that local regeneration schemes are keener to capitalise on the country’s vibrant pop culture (MCST 2016e). This was first triggered by the sudden influx of Japanese fans of Winter Sonata, the popular TV drama series, to the shooting locations such as Chuncheon and Nami Island in the mid-­2000s. It was promptly followed by many attempts to revitalise local economies by building a Korean Wave hot spot regardless of prior connection to pop culture production or tourism. The frequently attempted formula is to construct tourist destinations, Korean Wave symbols, and shopping and residential facilities, but these do not necessarily reflect local cultural identities or traditions. Such a strategy can easily fail as it relies on a naïve assumption that the motif of the Korean Wave would successfully attract private investors and tourists; consequently, the reality is that several such plans have been cancelled or delayed due to funding and management issues (H.-K. Lee 2013). The most notorious case is Hallyu World (formerly Hallyuwood), an ambitious mega project that was initiated by Gyonggi Province in 2005. It originally proposed constructing a Korean Wave-­themed park, a K-­pop arena, a large-­scale aquarium, broadcasting facilities, entertainment venues, hotels, shopping malls and residential and commercial facilities in Goyang City, which previously had nothing to do with pop culture production. The project’s intention was to create a mecca for the Korean Wave, integrating cultural production, consumption, tourism, broadcasting, digital content and shopping. Its expected benefits (increased production worth 32.8 trillion won or USD 2.8 billion for 20 years; 420,000 jobs) were thought to easily exceed the required cost (6 trillion won or USD 5.12 billion) (Hankyoreh 2015). However, it was postponed for ten years because of the economic recession and financial problems. The project seemed to be alive again when the presidential Cultural Prosperity Committee announced its resurrection in 2015 by saying that it would be rebranded as ‘K-­Culture Valley’ and be proceeded by a consortium led by CJ Group, one of Korea’s

130   The Korean Wave inside out conglomerates (Kyungkyang Shinmum 2016). Yet its future is still uncertain as many policy decisions made by the Park Geun-­Hye government including the K-­Culture Valley project are under suspicion for their links to her abuse of power and are being investigated by prosecutors. Hallyu World is emblematic of the trend that the Korean Wave has become a popular post-­industrial strategy of local economic development, which is driven by (local) political, economic and financial motivations rather than cultural considerations. As the predicament of the Hallyu World project demonstrates, local tourism and regeneration projects themed with the Korean Wave appear quite risky ventures with questionable benefits for local residents because they involve speculative investments that are conscious of trends in the real estate market and deal with multiple commercial actors who have dissimilar vested interests. Still, the Korean Wave is an attractive motif that local governments are eager to exploit when an opportunity arises. For instance, the pan-­Asian popularity of The Descendants of the Sun (2016), a military romance drama for TV, motivated Taebaek City (Gangwon Province) to announce a plan to exploit its connection to the drama – some parts of which were shot in a set located in the city – to boost the local economy by attracting Chinese and Asian visitors (Yonhap News 2016). While Taebaek’s post-­industrial strategy tries to tap into its superficial connection to the K-­drama and fabricate the city’s cultural identity, what is forgotten and disregarded is its industrial heritage and socio-­cultural identity as a former mining town, which played a pivotal role during the nation’s economic catch-­up period. The economic implications of the Korean Wave are not limited to tourism and regional regeneration as it has become a universal nation brand and export strategy for all Korean manufacturers and service providers. Nation branding locates nation states in an international market environment, where states compete for symbolic capital such as positive recognition and brand identity, which can turn into economic competitiveness in the form of increased inward investment, growth of foreign tourist income and additional exports. Making ‘the nation matter in a world where borders and boundaries appear increasingly obsolete’ (Aronczyk 2013: 3), the Korean Wave policy seeks to actively take advantage of globalisation by extending the cool images of the nation’s pop culture to everything that the country can export. From this perspective, the cultural ministry argues that the pervasiveness of the ‘K’ brand signals the arrival of the post-­cultural ‘Korean Wave 3.0’ which differs from early versions that focused on TV dramas and K-­pop: K-­culture, a keyword for the era of the Korean Wave 3.0, encompasses all of traditional culture, the arts, and cultural contents. If the existing Korean Wave was oriented to cultural contents and part of the arts, K-­culture includes traditional culture and shows the organic interrelation among the above three components. Furthermore, K-­culture goes beyond the sphere of culture. It wishes to share with the world everything that signifies Korea, or ‘the Korean’ that is the base for traditional culture, the arts and cultural

The Korean Wave inside out   131 contents. […] the Korean Wave is a cultural phenomenon but, at the same time, it is post-­cultural. In terms of government’s division of labour, it is not only a remit of Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism but also a pan-­ government responsibility. (MCST 2013b: 22–23, emphasis added) ‘Korean Wave 3.0’ or ‘post-­cultural’ Korean Wave, in practice, focuses on lending a brand identity to SMEs and locally based companies to give them visibility in overseas markets. Witnessing the Korean Wave’s positive impacts on SMEs’ exports, the government urges them to take full advantage of the positive image of the ‘K’ brand. It is within this context that the cultural and industry ministries have co-­ organised the annual Korea Brand and Entertainment Expos abroad, which showcase Korea-­made commodities in tandem with the country’s pop culture. Recently, the government began calling for more strategic partnership between SMEs and cultural businesses by directly holding workshops to ‘teach’ how SMEs can develop export strategies capitalising on pop culture and popular idol stars. For instance, under the new slogan ‘Converged Korean Wave’, the cultural ministry in partnership with the Korea International Trade Association organised a tour of a ‘Korean Wave marketing’ event across regions to explore various marketing strategies, including product placement in export-­oriented audiovisual products and buying out broadcasting time on overseas channels to maximise the synergy with the Korean Wave (MCST 2016c). This line of policy grows even more ambitious to the extent that the government wants to create a ‘Korean Wave ecology’ by launching a centralised online platform for collaboration between SMEs and entertainment companies. Similarly, pop entertainment events such as K-­Convention, Mnet Asian Music Awards and the DMC festival have become fused with export promotion activities where Korean traditional cultural items, ITC products, SME products and cultural technologies are presented and attract potential overseas buyers. As the Korean Wave is believed to be a useful instrument to leverage the upgrading of Korea’s export capacity in all sectors, its post-­cultural appreciation will intensify, effortlessly exemplifying the Korean style of ‘productive’ cultural policy.

Government-­industry collaboration The corporatist collaboration between the government and businesses was a typical feature of the Korean developmental state, and there are still traces of this tradition in many sectors. However, the rapidly growing partnership between the government and commercial cultural companies today is a new phenomenon that has quickly become a norm. Frequently, neoliberal cultural policy has been discussed in terms of diffusion of power and function of the government and public organisations to private sector actors and, at a quick glance this is what seems to have happened in the Korean Wave policy. However, a closer look tells us a different story. Instead of decentralising cultural policy, the government’s

132   The Korean Wave inside out partnership with private sector actors has strengthened the former’s top-­down and centralised approaches to the Korean Wave while merging public and private sector agendas. Through the relationship, the government accesses useful resources for nation branding, cultural diplomacy and export business whilst cultural companies can gain material and immaterial support from public agencies and can more easily find opportunities for increasing their asset and brand values. The Korean Wave has opened an unprecedented avenue where the relationship between the government and cultural businesses develops. When the country’s cultural industries policy expanded in the late 1990s and the 2000s, cultural businesses were a policy object rather than policy partner. However, this relationship transformed with the rise of the Korean Wave and the government’s increasing recognition of the roles played by private sector actors in creating attractive pop culture content and their global dissemination. So, it was unsurprising to see the government start working with business conglomerates, broadcasters and entertainment companies in developing policies concerning the Korean Wave. For example, the representatives of big corporations in the export, broadcasting and hospitality businesses (e.g. Hyundai Car, SK, Lotte Hotel, Shinsegae Department Store, Korean Air, Seoul Broadcasting System, etc.) were invited to sit on the Visit Korea Year Committee and the presidential National Brand Committee (Y.-H. Choi 2013). Influential business associations, such as the Federation of Korean Industries, and commercial companies took part in the Korean Wave Support Committee that was set up to actively post-­culturalise the Wave for the benefit of business sectors. More recently, this committee was replaced by the Korean Wave Planning Committee, a larger-­scale committee that has more executive power, involving six different government ministries, KOCCA, three terrestrial broadcasters, the three largest talent agencies (SM, YG and JYP), CJ E&M (cultural conglomerate), AmorePacific (the country’s biggest cosmetic company), CJ Foodville, Korea Venture Investment Corp., Korea International Trade Association and so on. Corresponding to the cultural ministry’s aspiration to ‘expand cultural territory’ of Korea and leverage the country’s export economy (MCST 2015b), this planning committee pursues ‘converged Korean Wave’ strategies, accelerating the integration of the Korean Wave to exports, SME support, tourism, nation branding and diplomacy. A notable example of public-­private collaboration in Korean Wave promotion is ‘SM Town Live World Tour in Paris’ (2011), which was organised by SM, one of the three biggest talent agencies in Korea, and was sponsored by the Visit Korea Year Committee, the Korean Cultural Center Paris and the Paris branch of the Korea Tourism Organization. The success of the event was a historical moment in the Korean Wave policy as it convinced policy makers that the Wave could go beyond Asia to become a global phenomenon. Being analogised by the domestic media to Korea’s cultural invasion to Europe, the event in Paris triggered London-­based fans’ flash mob that demanded YG (another big talent agency) bring its pop idols to London. Yet the flash mob was revealed to have been coordinated by the Korean Cultural Centre in London (Ohmynews 2011).

The Korean Wave inside out   133 While policy makers were eager to support the Korean Wave, the talent agencies benefited from media coverage and public recognition, which turned into financial gains. SM’s share price was greatly boosted by the K-­pop sensation in Paris, increasing ten-­fold between 2008 and 2011 and YG successfully floated on the stock market after the London flash mob (D.-Y. Lee 2012). Those talent agencies also attracted capital investment via the Motae Fund’s cultural accounts and proved to be very lucrative.5 As the economic turn in cultural policy accelerated under Park Geun-­Hye’s leadership (2013–2017), the collaborative relationship strengthened accordingly. The most noticeable aspect is the exceptionally extensive co-­working between the government and CJ Group, one of the Korean chaebols (conglomerates), which used to be part of Samsung group until 1996 and has successfully developed its entertainment arm, CJ E&M, over the past decade into a powerful media company working across TV, music, film and other cultural businesses. The partnership has occurred in a surprisingly impressive range of policy areas as the following examples from the year 2015 show: the representatives of CJ E&M and CJ Foodville (one of the group’s food-­related companies) sat on the Korean Wave Planning Committee; the Planning Committee, KOCCA and CJ signed an agreement to cooperate in promoting Korean export items at CJ-­hosted KCON and Mnet Asian Music Awards; CJ Foodville managed the restaurant at the Korean Pavilion, the Expo Milano (2015) in tandem with the government agenda of the globalisation of ‘K-­food’ (the theme of the Korean Pavilion was ‘Hansik (Korean food), food for the future: you are what you eat’); the cultural ministry and public sector actors collaborated with CJ to launch a ‘Converged Content Fund’; the K-­travel card was introduced via cooperation between the government, CJ and T-­money; CJ and Seoul Metropolitan Government co-­ hosted Culture and Creation Innovation Centre; the president selected a CJ-­led consortium to build a K-­Culture Valley (previously Hallyu World) in Goyang City to revive the project out of a limbo state; and the cultural ministry opened the Culture and Creation Convergence Centre, one of the flagship facilities that was introduced as the core of the country’s creative economy policy, at the CJ E&M Centre building in Seoul.6 The CJ Group has a track record in producing and exporting Korean pop culture with abundant resources such as media content, platforms, skills and know-­how, which the government could access via the partnership. The internal dynamics of the partnership need unpicking but it can be seen as an extension of the government’s policy capacity as well as its absorption of private sector perspectives. The consequence is the centralisation rather than decentralisation of the Korean Wave policy while public and private sector agendas overlap. In this regard, an interesting example is the cultural ministry and KOCCA’s collaboration with CJ in organising the annual ‘Crazy Camp’, where participants developed creative and innovative ideas for new cultural productions and businesses under close mentorship and support from KOCCA and CJ. One of the benefits for the competition winners at the Camp 2014 was that they would be favoured when applying for a job at CJ. This was a small-­scale scheme but it

134   The Korean Wave inside out aptly exemplifies how the country’s cultural industries policy is assisted by skills and resources offered by big cultural businesses. CJ’s exceptional willingness to support state cultural policy was speculated to be related to its weak position vis-­à-vis the government as its head was serving a prison sentence and the conglomerate might have been motivated to signal its active support for the government, hoping for his early release. However, recent findings indicate more complicated political factors behind the conglomerate’s heavy involvement in the policy: President Park Guen-­Hye, who was unhappy about the so-­called ‘leftist’ films produced by CJ, heavily pressured it to the extent that it ‘voluntarily’ assisted government initiatives and produced ‘patriotic’ films (Hankyoreh 21 2017). As the prosecutors are investigating Park’s abuse of power at the time of writing, the exact nature of the above collaboration is yet to be disclosed. What is known at this moment is that the partnership was driven by complex political as well as economic motivations while the ‘culture war’ (see Chapter 4) was extended by Park Geun-­Hye’s conservatism to the Korean Wave (and content industries) policy that had thus far been insulated from party politics thanks to the depoliticising effect of Korean society’s economic consensus of culture (see Chapter 5). The increasing dominance of the Korean Wave in cultural policy means that the government has more need for borrowing capacities and resources of private sector actors in order to be engaged further with and mobilise the Wave. Through working with a small number of large-­scale and resourceful cultural corporations such as CJ, YG and Naver (the nation’s biggest online portal), policy makers can centrally manage the partnership and instantly increase their implementational capacity. This appears to be a Korean style of privatisation of statist cultural policy. Since the recent revelation of the ideological motivations behind the government-­CJ relationship, CJ has been depicted as a powerless victim by news reports whereas there is still an absence of inquiries into how the emerging alliance between the government and big media corporations, which are in a dominant position in their sector, influence and potentially reorient cultural policy.

Korean Wave policy and overseas fandom The Korean Wave has broadened the arena of cultural policy by motivating the government and public agencies to directly engage with not only cultural businesses but also overseas fans of Korean pop culture. Here, we should be reminded of the fact that the Korean Wave as a cultural phenomenon was created and has been driven by enthusiastic overseas consumers and fans of Korean pop music, TV drama, film and so on. Beyond being consumers, they are a valuable proof of the success of the Korean Wave as well as being Korea’s potential cultural ambassadors. This motivates policy makers to closely monitor fan activities and devise policy measures to involve fans in the promotion of the Korean Wave. This results in unprecedented and intriguing proximity between cultural policy and cultural fandom.

The Korean Wave inside out   135 It is interesting to observe that Korean policy makers’ perception of pop culture consumers has dramatically changed over time. Using Gabriel and Lang’s (2006) typology of manifold faces of consumers, we can say that they were first regarded as ‘potential victims’ who were in need of government guidance and teaching (until the 1980s) and then ‘choosers’ and ‘identity-­seekers’, who enjoyed the products of the booming cultural industries and developed articulated tastes for pop culture content (1990s). In recent years, cultural consumers began to be more positively perceived as empowered, participatory cultural agents who passionately consume cultural texts, produce their own meanings and recreate the given texts by applying their own creativity. The popular discourse of ‘active users’, ‘prosumers’ and ‘collective intellect’ has been fully embraced by Korean policy makers (KOCIS 2012): The development of advanced technologies and the decline of their cost have led to the birth of ‘collective intellect’. Collective intellect clearly differs from the existing knowledge classes in terms of their inclusion of a wide range of social strata. Collective intellect advances, monitoring and checking the powerful such as nation states, businesses and media. […] culture that does not communicate with collective intellect cannot help demising. (KOCIS 2012: 15) The endorsement of the cultural power of consumers can be viewed as a natural extension of the value-­neutral and postmodern perspective of content industries held by Korean cultural policy makers (see Chapter 5). As both policy makers and experts no longer determine the values and merits of individual cultural products, it is consumers who are the ultimate judges. With the transfer and diffusion of cultural authority, overseas popularity and fandom are treated as an important source of legitimacy of Korean pop culture and its aesthetics. Foreign fans are regarded as competent and knowledgeable cultural arbiters, and their easy and immediate access to the country’s cultural products is an important issue for both policy makers and cultural businesses. This is why the latter are carefully negotiating with – instead of taking immediate preventative action against – unauthorised file sharing and downloading by fans, which is one of the most popular and convenient routes by which global fans access Korean popular culture. As discussed elsewhere (H.-K. Lee 2013), what happened to Right Now, a song Psy released in 2010, is very telling. Seeing the global sensation of Gangnam Style in autumn 2012, some Korean online users anticipated that Right Now would be the next global hit as the number of views of its YouTube video was rising and overseas fans left positive comments. However, access to the video was limited as it was graded as ‘R19’ by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which had the authority to regulate cultural content that could harm young people, due to its strong language. Online users began severely criticising the ministry’s conservative standards and blamed it for overseas fans’ limited

136   The Korean Wave inside out access to the video (Chosun Ilbo 2012). The prevailing view was that ‘the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family [itself] was a hindrance to the Korean Wave’, with its policy hampering Psy’s songs from reaching foreign audiences and consequently damaging Psy’s career as a global pop singer. Under serious pressure from online users, the ministry quickly decided to lift the restriction from the song and other R-­graded songs. There had previously been criticism of the ministry’s conservative criteria but they did not attract public attention. Only with Psy’s success as a K-­pop star, did censorship became an issue of market access and global exposure of Korean talents, showing both Korean policy makers’ and online users’ embrace of transnational consumerism. This incident has affirmed the hegemony of the Korean Wave over ‘politics of society’, where the debate on the restricted access to certain songs potentially offers the public an opportunity to examine the issues of freedom of expression and child protection against the shifting cultural and social conditions of the country. With the ambitious, and even aggressive, expansion of the Korean Wave policy, the boundaries between policy, cultural business, diplomacy and fandom are becoming ever more fluid. Global fandom of Korean culture has already become a cross-­ministry agenda, leading to an abundance of government-­led monitoring and market research. The two key actors are the Korea Foundation and the Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE). KOFICE, which was set up by the cultural ministry to promote Asian and international cultural exchange, takes the Korean Wave as its core mission and plays a key role in intelligence gathering in this area, including the publication of the annual Korean Wave White Paper, biweekly Global Hallyu Issue and the quarterly Hallyu Now. The Korean Foundation under the foreign ministry, which previously concentrated on the international promotion of Korean studies, traditional culture and fine arts, extended its diplomatic remit to the Korean Wave and has annually published the Global Village Korean Wave Report since 2012. Take, for example, the ambitious Global Village report of 2015 with almost 1,000 pages, surveying 105 countries and providing the following overview of the global fandom of Korean pop culture: A survey of 105 countries has found that there are 1,493 Korean Wave fan communities in 86 countries. The fan communities have 35,590,000 members as of December 2015. […] In terms of region, there are 310 communities (approximately 26,200,000 members) in Asia and Oceania, 804 communities (approximately 7,580,000 members) in America, 306 communities (approximately 1,620,000 members) in Europe and 73 communities (approximately 170,000 members) in Africa. (Korea Foundation 2015: 6) The report finds that different forms and genres of Korean pop culture enjoy popularity in different countries, proposing more targeted approaches to cultural exports worldwide. Similarly, the KOFICE publications discuss ongoing trends in surveyed countries and local news coverage on Korean culture, such as the

The Korean Wave inside out   137 characteristics of the Korean Wave in different religious communities in Asia (Buddhist, Muslim and Catholic) and cultural tastes of different sections of the global cultural market. What is really striking is that cultural and media fandom is now fully incorporated into the Korean Wave policy, where government agencies systematically gather and publish their analysis of global fan communities on a regular basis. Similarly trivial showbiz information as well as financial data (e.g. the trend of share prices of entertainment companies) have become a legitimate part of the Korean Wave intelligence gathering, highlighting the unusual combination of the postmodern, consumerist attitude to culture and the modern, top-­down approach to cultural policy making. This exercise is motivated and justified by policy makers’ unitary understanding of the Korean Wave as the best instrument of the nation’s outward globalisation strategy. At the same time, the Korean Wave seems to bring excitement and a trendy look to the country’s efforts in diplomacy and international relations. Since 2012, Official Development Assistance (ODA) targeted at communities in Asia and Africa has incorporated elements of pop culture, and has become part of the Korean Wave policy. One recent example is an ODA in Indonesia (2016), which involved the talent agency YG and focused on dance and vocal training for disadvantaged youth. Another form of ODA is to provide local TV channels with Korean audiovisual programmes for free, cultivating future fans of K-­drama. The Korean Wave policy also includes funding collaborative activities among overseas fan groups, inviting active fans to Korea and supporting fans’ online broadcasting on Korean culture (KWPC 2015). These programmes along with cultural training programmes (e.g. ‘K-­pop Academy’ run by the Korea Cultural Centre, London) intend to transform enthusiastic fans to self-­nominated cultural ambassadors of Korea and pro-­Korean creative entrepreneurs. The increasing intersection between cultural policy, creative business and fan culture appears to pose challenging questions to the existing fandom research and its typical depiction of fandom as a subcultural field. The research tends to perceive fans as subcultural elites, textual poachers and co-­creators whose meaning-­making and re-­creation activities are increasingly conditioned by digital technologies and online communications on a global scale (Jenkins 2006). Its fundamental concern has been fandom’s unsettled relationship with cultural industries in the form of dialectics between its ontological reliance on commercial cultural production on the one hand and its non-­commercial – sometimes anti-­commercial – pursuits on the other (Hills 2002). Such dialectics is also at the heart of the contemporary debate on active online audiences who contribute creative and personal content to social media platforms: they work as empowered and skilful prosumers, add values to those platforms for free and, at the same time, become commodities for online advertisers. Yet, investigating Korean Wave policy adds another layer of complexity to our understanding of the dialectics of fandom by shedding light on state cultural policy’s explicit endeavour to mobilise fan activities and overseas fans’ willingness to assume the role of an agent of cultural diplomacy. These fans seemingly view policy elements as part of the attractive package of the Korean Wave. So far, there have

138   The Korean Wave inside out been no recognisable events where the cosy relationship between policy and fandom is tested and fans become conscious of inherent tensions between the two crosscurrents in the Korean Wave – cultural and governmental imperatives. This contests our common expectation that fan activities would be subcultural, alternative and potentially subversive and urges us to carefully explore the complex configuration of contemporary transnational cultural fandom, where ‘(trans)national’ becomes a key concern of state cultural policy.

Pervasiveness of the Korean Wave and everyday cultural life In this section, we turn our attention to the Korean government’s conscious uses of the Korean Wave as an ‘inward’ policy strategy. The Korean Wave (or ‘K-­’) is a powerful and popular nation brand, which speaks to domestic audiences, too. The first thing to notice is that this brand normalises an essentialist and unitary image of the nation, which is distanced from the convoluted reality where its culture and cultural identity are continually contested and reconstructed. A similar example is found in Japan. ‘Cool Japan’, the country’s nation branding and cultural diplomacy strategy, promotes its culture to overseas audiences and facilitates international cultural exchanges whilst disregarding cultural and ethnic diversity within Japanese society – for example the existence of minority communities including approximately 900,000 Japanese residents who are Korean descendants and the increasing number of migrants (MOFA 2013). In a way, such disconnection is inevitable as the singular nation brand has too little scope to express the rich and complex cultural formation of Japanese society. This is the case with the Korean Wave policy too. There has been a continuous influx of immigrants and migrants, primarily from less developed Asian societies, since the 1990s and, as of 2015, there are approximately 1.3 million foreigners over the age of fifteen (including marriage immigrants and migrant workers, but excluding foreign students) in Korea (Statistics Korea 2015). Yet, the Korean Wave policy never takes into account the diversified cultural profile within Korea and the roles the new members of society play in both complicating and enriching its contemporary culture. Overall, policy makers take a schizophrenic perspective towards foreigners/outsiders within Korea (H.-K. Lee 2018). On the one hand, it wholeheartedly welcomes affluent tourists and tech-­savvy global fans of Korean pop culture as empowered, sovereign consumers. On the other hand, those marriage immigrants and their family members tend to be seen as a subject for cultural inclusion and assimilation in the framework of family and population policies mainly administered by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Meanwhile, migrant workers are treated as temporary labour rather than members of society. Between transnational consumerism, integrationist population management and purely economy-­centric approaches to migration, multiculturalism hardly takes root in Korean cultural policy. After all, cultural diversity is a phenomenon too complicated to neatly fit with the unitary – and cool – nation brand of Korea. Although it is disconnected from society’s internal cultural conditions, Korean Wave has become a means of implicit cultural policy and public

The Korean Wave inside out   139 education that relies on and utilises the Korean public’s identification with and internalisation of the projected nation brand. The public are invited to live the nation brand ‘K’, ultimately contributing to its success. They eat ‘K-­food’ and drink ‘K-­water’ (the new name of Korea Water Resource Corporation, the country’s public water provider). They are encouraged to join the ‘K-­smile’ campaign led by the Visit Korea Committee and young jobseekers are recruited by the Korea Tourism Organization to be trained to become a ‘K-­culture’ travel guide. The K brand is further stretched to be associated even with Korean reunification, the nation’s most complicated political agenda, and provides it with an unexpectedly trendy – and depoliticising – look: e.g. ‘One K’ (meaning unified Korea) was the title of a concert co-­organised by the government, political parties and several pop stars in 2015 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of national independence. The savvy and cool brand of ‘K’ is co-­created, circulated, affirmed and reproduced by public sector actors, domestic and international media as well as overseas fans of Korean pop culture. Today the prefix ‘K’ is associated with almost everything in, from and about Korea, creating an environment where Koreans feel and live the brand in their everyday life. Despite the emerging discontent with its saturation and brand fatigue, the Korean Wave came to serve as an effective communication channel for a surprisingly vast range of public policy agendas, from health, mental health, law enforcement, entrepreneurship, start-­up businesses and financial reform. President Park Geun-­Hye’s comments on the internationally popular TV drama series The Descendants of the Sun (2016) are revealing. According to the KBS news (2016), she stressed that successful cultural content such as this drama not only generates economic and cultural values but it can also contribute to public policies. She continued to say that this drama could have featured ‘long-­distanced health services’ that the government was championing and ‘part-­time work’, which would alleviate the career interruption of female workers, so that those policy agenda could be effectively communicated to the public. She called for more public support for such useful cultural contents. In a similar vein, many public policy makers intend to maximise the impact of their policy messages by involving pop stars and idols associated with the Korean Wave; it has quickly become a norm that those stars and idols endorse and advocate nation branding and export-­related organisations/initiatives such as international sports events, Korea Brand and Entertainment Expos, Incheon International Airport (which currently is a public corporation), King Sejong Institutes and the Creative Korea campaign. Various government departments and their agencies, too, seek out Korean Wave effects by inviting pop stars as ambassadors for their activities, such as e-­government and government 3.0 (Ministry of the Interior), the provision of national statistics (Statistics Korea), law enforcement (Ministry of Law) and taxation (National Tax Service). Stars are involved in public policy campaigns from traffic safety, mental health, emergency medical treatment, youth support and stop-­smoking campaigns to Korean reunification and general elections. Sometimes a noticeable schism emerges between the projected image and the real life of the stars, invalidating the policy

140   The Korean Wave inside out messages. For example, a member of 2NE1, a globally popular female idol group who were invited to advocate ‘law and order’ by the Ministry of Law in 2010, was accused of drug smuggling and generated negative media coverage. Despite the backlash, public sector organisations continued to regard the Korean Wave and associated idols as an invaluable cultural resource they can easily tap into to generate public and media attention and disseminate their messages more persuasively. As inter-­textually appealing commodities, Korean pop stars and idols saturate the country’s audiovisual culture, including TV dramas, TV entertainment shows, music programmes on TV and radio, film, advertisements on various media outlets and, of course, social media. By collaborating with the government and public sector actors, they transgress the field of entertainment and enter that of politics and public policy to become a kind of public resource, diversifying their already multifaceted identity. The above campaigns rely on the feeling of intimacy, familiarity and excitement that the stars and idols convey to the public, especially young-­generation Koreans. In tandem with the government’s ambition to nurture a ‘creative economy’ fuelled by SMEs and start-­ups, public agencies dealing with self-­employment, entrepreneurship, business and finance are keen to capitalise on the positive, active and young images of K-­pop stars, who are highly praised by domestic and overseas fans as ‘hardworking’, ‘being thankful and focusing on positive things’, ‘never giving up their dreams’ and [demonstrating] ‘consistent hard work and dedication’, which are important constituents of an ideal self in contemporary Korea.7 Notably, web-­drama, which normally consists of a few short episodes of ten minutes or so, has quickly emerged as a genre preferred by policy makers due to its briefness, narrative-­centred format and easy accessibility for young Internet users. An interesting case is Choco Bank (2016), a web-­drama series commissioned by the Financial Services Commission, the financial regulator in Korea. The drama was produced to advocate the government’s ‘financial reform’, especially the introduction of new financial services and technologies, featuring a Korean Wave idol (Kai from the idol group EXO, which has a huge domestic and global fandom) and an experienced young actress. The Financial Services Commission states that the drama is an ‘info-­romance’ web-­drama that explains some of the core elements of the country’s financial reform: This drama offers both information and fun by using product placement to explain the financial reform FSC is currently putting forward, such as crowd funding, ISA, online insurance comparison, current account transfer and fin-­ tech [finance technology] simple payment. (FSC 2016) The six episodes focus on two characters: Choco, a cute woman who runs a chocolate shop and Bank, a young and handsome man who has struggled for five years to get a job in the commercial banking industry. Choco and Bank meet accidentally, and Bank starts working at the chocolate shop. Using his good

The Korean Wave inside out   141 knowledge of financial products, he provides free financial advice to the shop’s customers and becomes well known. Eventually, he finds a job in the banking industry and the two protagonists admit their love. While following the formula of a romantic comedy, the series offers the audience information on the new financial products mentioned above. Thanks to Kai’s popularity and the romantic storyline, it has attracted a lot of attention both domestically and internationally. A similar approach was adopted by the non-­profit National Credit Union Federation of Korea, which commissioned a web-­drama series Tomorrow Boy (2016) that has proven popular since it was released on an Internet portal. In this series, an idol plays the role of high-­school student who is the hardworking bread winner for his family and receives helpful financial advice from a manager of the federation. Certainly, Korean policy makers regard web-­drama as a brand-­ new tool for disseminating financial information and skills among young generations in their late teens, twenties and thirties. One of the popular themes that public sector organisations try to address by casting Korean Wave stars is self-­employment and start-­up businesses. Reflecting the harsh economic reality that young-­generation Koreans face, web-­dramas funded by these agencies often feature the unemployed, the self-­employed and those running a micro business. These young people are portrayed as pursuing their dream, hardworking, fighting the feelings of anxiety and insecurity, overcoming challenges, and trying to become resilient, self-­confident and hopeful. The protagonists gain advice and support from their mentors, friends, neighbours and, importantly, public sector agencies. By the end of the dramas, they have learned lessons on how to manage their life and survive the post-­industrial economy characterised by economic recession, unemployment and the lack of social welfare provision. For instance, the web-­drama series Dreaming CEO (2014) funded by the Small and Medium Business Administration under the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy features a young CEO of a small start-­up that created and manages an app: he pursues his dream despite financial and business challenges and finally seeks advice from the above public agency. It is clear that the agency’s intention is to promote entrepreneurship and raise the young generations’ attention to business opportunities, by casting members of pop idol groups. Its messages are witty and neatly packaged in the typical format of enjoyable romantic comedy. Interestingly, public policy messages for the young generations are complemented and reinforced by those from private sector actors who create glossy web-­drama series and so-­called ‘public interest campaigns’. Samsung’s endeavour in this area is notable. Since 2013, this chaebol has produced a series of popular and well-­made web-­dramas every year: Perpetual Motion Machine (Muhandongnyeok, 2013), The Future of the Best (Choegoui mirae, 2014), Fancying the Challenge (Dojeone banhada, 2015) and The Positive Personality (Geungjeongyi chejil, 2016). These series portray the tough realities of young jobseekers (for example, those who want to enter the financial sector, get a stable job, become an idol, start up a one-­person business or become a film director) and the hindrances young employees of Samsung should overcome in order to

142   The Korean Wave inside out pursue their passion. Over the course of the series, these young people who are played by K-­pop idols or K-­drama stars learn to negotiate with their challenges, identify sources of support and try their best to turn their dreams into reality. The above web-­dramas constitute an intriguing field of cultural production and consumption. They provide K-­pop idols with an opportunity to easily debut as actors and develop their acting career without taking a serious risk, and offer drama producers and writers a chance to accumulate skills and test market tastes. In addition, the dramas themselves have become a part of the Korean Wave, attracting overseas viewers. Mixing up public policy campaign, entertainment and organisational PR, they generate highly polysemic cultural texts. While there might be viewers who empathise with the characters in the dramas and learn moral lessons, other viewers might see them as pure entertainment, focusing on good-­looking stars and entertaining storylines. Nevertheless, the public policy messages in the dramas seem to feed into the grand narrative of ‘the youth’ in contemporary Korea that enduring hardship and distress is a conduit for young people’s personal growth and survival strategy. The messages coded for young-­ generation Koreans are likely to be lost in translation when they travel across national borders while stars and their entertaining values are ardently appreciated by global fans. For most overseas fans, these dramas might be an extension of Korea’s trendy TV drama or K-­pop music videos and an opportunity that opens up a new phase for their chosen star’s multifaceted career, which they happily support. Whereas we do not know how successful the above campaigns have been in encouraging Koreans to make themselves better prepared to survive and prosper in the neoliberal and post-­industrial economy, there are cases where young people develop an ideal self within the framework of globalising Korean culture. Here, the discourse of Korean Wave offers a space where young Koreans relate themselves – as self-­appointed cultural ambassadors of the nation – to the world and test their creativity and talents within international settings. Beyond the top-­down public or corporate campaigns, a newly emerging trend is that ambitious young people, mostly in their twenties, pursue personal development and self-­actualisation by self-­teaching organisational and problem-­solving skills and looking for business opportunities within the framework of the Korean Wave. For example, groups of young people self-­organise very extensive overseas tours where they cook and showcase Korean food such as Bibimbap and Kimchi for local people in order to ‘globalise hansik (Korean food)’.8 Similarly, there are groups of young volunteers who travel abroad to introduce Korean culture such as traditional music, dance and calligraphy to global audiences.9 Their activities are normally sponsored by commercial companies, public corporations and/or public agencies. But what distinguishes them from conventional types of nation branding, cultural diplomacy or public policy campaigns is the self-­motivation, passion and genuine excitement that those young people bring with them. Obviously, there are no traces of top-­down policy or overt logic of the market here. Those young volunteers happily and willingly provide free labour and creative input to the Korean Wave. In their own narratives and media coverage, the success of the

The Korean Wave inside out   143 Korean Wave is described in terms of their adventure, self-­realisation, learning new skills and exploring new opportunities. Yet, the narratives do not necessarily reflect on the evangelical and missionary zeal conveyed in their activities: why Korean food should be tasted and Korean traditional culture be globally recognised. Between the policy discourse of the Korean Wave and the personal story of having a global, life-­changing experience, there proliferates a ‘cool’ sense of nationalism, which is packaged with voluntarism, self-­organisation, risk-­taking, youth culture and globalism. Hence, it is not an irony that the more global and entrepreneurial those activities are, the more national their achievements are deemed.

Conclusion As Gi-­Wook Shin and Joon Nak Choi (2009: 252) claim, it appears that Koreans see no inherent contradiction between nationalism and globalisation. Although the politically loaded idea of ‘national culture’ has lost its currency in cultural policy discussion since the 1990s (see Chapter 4), Korean Wave as a policy phenomenon has been led by a clear national agenda. ‘Korean Wave’ is an attractive replacement for ‘national culture’ in the sense that it offers Koreans a new vocabulary to articulate ‘the national’ in the age of its demise and reimagine it in the context of global cultural business. Successfully converting cultural globalisation into a national project, Korea aspires to become a global cultural production centre that creates and exports transnationally and even ‘universally’ attractive pop culture commodities. The Korean Wave fuels such ambition and serves as a framework of thinking that helps Koreans to make sense of cultural globalisation, relate themselves to the world and positively envision the nation’s post-­industrial economic development strategy. As explicit and formal cultural policy, Korean Wave policy aims at enhancing Korea’s export and tourism capacities and stimulating local economies. Its further integration into the country’s economic strategy means that it becomes increasingly post-­cultural and moves beyond the terrain of cultural policy. As implicit, informal and inward-­looking cultural policy, its helps domestic audiences, especially young-­generation Koreans, to improve themselves to become an ideal post-­industrial workforce who wisely manage their work and life and survive the adverse economic conditions. The post-­industrial, neoliberal self that is cultivated within the framework of Korean Wave looks different from the ‘neoliberal self ’ in the context of Western liberal democracies (McGuigan 2015) while their socio-­economic and political functions might not be very different. The former evokes some of the old, industrial – ‘productive’ and ‘developmental’ – ethic such as ‘hardworking’ and ‘perseverance’ but it does not necessarily promote autonomy (either from the state and the market), bohemian posture and a sense of disaffection, which are main constituents of the latter. It is telling that the typical image of Korean Wave idols and stars is imbued with the virtues of industriousness, perseverance and a positive personality rather than hedonism and a flamboyant lifestyle.

144   The Korean Wave inside out Korea as a global cultural production centre, or global cultural factory, is extremely productive in the following two senses. First, its cultural production and business are increasingly integrated into the nation’s post-­industrial development strategy and thus eventually help the nation’s economic production. Second, it creates a rapidly growing body of pop culture repertory, domestic and overseas fandom, a surging number of policy initiatives and programmes, a huge amount of media reports, market information and fandom survey results, and public policy campaigns utilising pop idols and stars. The deepening convergence between public policy, entertainment, cultural fandom, export business and entrepreneurship signals that the Korean Wave as a policy phenomenon is an area where the state relies significantly on private sector actors’ resources and knowledge and tries to tap into self-­initiatives of members of the public and overseas consumers of Korean culture. The other side of the intensifying convergence is an absence of critical distance between different domains, activities and actors. Cultural policy makers’ understanding of the country’s popular culture and cultural industries does not go beyond the sweetened vision of a successful Korean Wave; media discussion of the Korean Wave pays little attention to the increasing cultural and ethnic diversity in Korean society itself, not to mention the virtue of ‘mutual’ cultural exchange with foreign societies; cultural companies and Korean Wave stars very seldom resist working with governmental organisations; and cultural consumers and fans seem to rarely reflect on the economic, diplomatic and public policy imperatives that inform and mobilise the Korean Wave.

Notes 1 It is interesting to find that the keywords ‘Hallyu’ and ‘Korean Wave’ have 6,340,000 hits and 1,890,000 hits on Google respectively as of 20 September 2016 while ‘韩流’ (‘Hallyu’ in Chinese) continues to lead with 30,300,000 hits, indicating the unceasing appeal of Korean pop culture to Chinese-­speaking communities. 2 See www.archives.go.kr/next/search/listSubjectDescription.do?id=000845&pageFlag for more details of the Segyehwa Promotion Committee and the Kim Young-­Sam government’s globalisation policy. 3 As the Korean Wave was spreading beyond Asia, the foundation was renamed the Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE). Although it funds and organises cultural exchange programmes, its activities today are clearly oriented towards supporting the Korean Wave. This shows that it is extremely difficult to separate international cultural exchange from the increasingly powerful, overarching framework of the Korean Wave. 4 The statistics were generated via Korea Culture & Tourism Institute’s Tourism Knowledge Information System. http://know.tour.go.kr/stat/tourStatSearchDis.do;jsessionid= 462A76015A8B2069C3BCF53B68F6AAB7 (accessed on 20 June 2017). 5 According to the cultural ministry, SM has received investments of more than 12 billion won (USD 11.4 million) and YG more than 7.4 billion won (USD 7 million) via the Motae Fund, and their return rates are 437.3 per cent and 823 per cent, respectively as of January 2013 (see H.-K. Lee 2013). 6 I have identified these examples of the ministry-­CJ collaboration by reading relevant news reports and the ministry’s publications.

The Korean Wave inside out   145 7 For example, see the article ‘8 things that we can learn from our K-­pop idols’, at www. hellokpop.com/list/8-things-­that-we-­can-learn-­from-our-­k-pop-­idols/ (accessed on 13 June 2017). The article also lists ‘respecting their seniors’, ‘being proud of their nationality’ and ‘practice, practice and practice’. 8 The most famous example is Bibimbap Backpackers, which is a group of young volunteers who have promoted Korean food abroad by touring many countries since 2011. For their activities, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssEZMHMLbvY (accessed on 1 April 2017). 9 Arirang Yurangdan, which is a private diplomacy organisation consisting of young volunteers, is such an example. This group has toured sixteen countries (thirty cities) to introduce Korean traditional music, calligraphy and dance for the purpose of cultural diplomacy and cultural education. https://ko-­kr.facebook.com/ArirangYurangdan/ (accessed on 1 April 2017).

7 Conclusion Past, present and future of the new patron state

Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State, as the first English­language book on Korean cultural policy, has investigated the historical development of Korean cultural policy and analysed its transformation in the recent decades from the perspective of how the centrality of the state in the policy has dynamically negotiated with the forces of democratisation, neoliberalisation and globalisation. The (geo)political, economic and social embeddedness of the policy means that its evolution has been conditioned by the continuity as well as discontinuity of past legacies. The ‘modern’ cultural policy was introduced by the Japanese coloniser for the purposes of governance and mobilisation of the Korean populace. Some of the key practices and techniques of the colonial management of culture were ‘politically inherited’ by Park Chung-­Hee’s authoritarian military government, which institutionalised and expanded the nation’s cultural policy. Within the framework of national ‘modernisation’ focusing on controlled democracy and speedy economic catch-­up, culture (national culture) served as an agent facilitating ideological consensus and nurturing a productive workforce needed for the nation’s industrialisation. The emergence of the new patron state reflects the complicated and contentious transformation of Korean society itself from the late 1980s. The transformation was driven by democracy and the market economy, which became the core of Kim Dae-­Jung’s third way politics and were regarded as ‘two sides of a coin and two wheels of a cart’ pulling the country out of the economic crisis (S. Kim 2000b: 246). It was democracy that vigorously contested the authoritarian cultural policy and disempowered the politically charged official discourse of national culture. Yet, it was the market economy that ultimately determined Korean society’s new understanding of culture as mostly a money-­earning and export-­inducing sector, which quickly became a consensus. There was inherent tension between democracy and the market economy combined with globalisation, yet this did not agonise policy makers who opted for keeping them as separate agendas instead of seeking a holistic and unitary logic of the nation’s cultural policy. This book argues that Korea’s new patron state has been characterised by the centrality of the state in all three senses, that is, the nation state, an organiser of governance and a coordinator of social actions. Culture became decoupled from

Past, present and future of the patron state   147 statist ideological propaganda; however, it has still been taken as a determining factor and strategy for the survival, prosperity and success of the nation state. In this sense, culture is uninterruptedly perceived as ‘intrinsically instrumental’. The hands-­on cultural governance was replaced by a liberalised approach of governing at distance; yet, the actual distance between the state and the populace is not very far. In Korea, ‘neoliberal socialisation’ (McGuigan 2015: 25) or forming of a new ideal self has been under the influence of implicit cultural policy that intends to instil in Koreans a new ethic so that they can better manage the tough socio-­economic reality. The country’s experience highlights the very irony of neoliberal and global shifts of society: the consequences of these shifts escalate the need for stronger actions by the nation state in the form of cultural policy, both explicit and implicit. Cultural policy is not a static object that is under pressure of political and socio-­economic changes, but a dynamic agent that corresponds to, mediates and facilitates them. In spite of democratisation, neoliberalisation and globalisation, the statist and hierarchical mode of coordination of actions prevails in contemporary cultural policy in Korea. It also provides an overarching setting, in which the coordination modes of market and self-­organisation are encouraged in varying sections of cultural ecology. The strong discursive, administrative and financial capacity of the government is still a hallmark of Korean cultural policy; and this might hint at the relative lack of capacity on the side of the cultural sector. Although the co-­option between the government and the sector in its crude form disappeared, its legacy has affected their relationship. The new patron state in Korea has been impressively successful in accommodating democratic agendas, increasing public cultural funding, playing entrepreneurial roles in developing systematic support for cultural industries and cultural export, making cultural policy ‘actually happen’, and advocating the importance of culture for national prosperity. The policy’s intricate combination of the forces of democracy, the market economy and globalisation within the consistent statist framework challenges the binary viewpoint that posits culture, state and the market as fundamentally separate realms. The close interactions between these three realms constitutes a key criterion with which contemporary Korea, as a new patron state, can be distinguished from both the existing patron states, and those in newly industrialised or democratised countries. For example, actively turning neoliberal and global agendas into state-­mediated national projects would be hardly imaginable in the United Kingdom or the United States, the two centres of neoliberal public policy. Similarly, the simultaneous pursuit of democratic, economic and globalist goals would not be easily embraced by cultural policies in continental European societies such as Germany and France. Meanwhile, democratic agendas and cultural freedom promoted by Korea’s new patron state are not something that is always found in newly industrialised or democratised societies. In these aspects, Korean cultural policy occupies quite a unique position in the international map of cultural policies and can serve as a key reference point. However, the centrality of the state in Korean cultural policy has not continued without problems. This book finds that the development of state-­driven

148   Past, present and future of the patron state cultural policy in contemporary Korea has been deficient in societal discussion of culture. Between the imposition of national cultural consensus in the 1960s and 1970s and the celebration of economic efficacy of culture since the 1990s, Korean society has not had or created opportunities to engage itself in discussing the meanings and values of culture and to freshly imagine culture from the perspective of creative freedom (as positive freedom), cultural identity, citizenship, equality and cultural right. The progressive arts movement and cultural activism in the late 1980s and 1990s made efforts on this front but failed to facilitate a common understanding and shared language of culture whilst being squeezed between the rising consumerism and the expansionist cultural policy. In general, the society’s understanding of culture has been heavily shaped by the official discourse of culture – as an object of public’s enjoyment and economic value generation – that is consistently advocated by its top-­down plans, programmes and state-­sponsored research activities. The underdevelopment of social consensus on culture has a significant effect on the relationship between the cultural sector and the government. Although cultural policy has actively addressed democratic agendas, the foundation for autonomy of the cultural sector is persistently weak and the hierarchical mode of coordination prevails. It is under such conditions that the biggest debate on culture in Korean in recent years was about the ‘culture war’. The culture war since the 2000s has been a complicated ‘post-­democratisation’ phenomenon that reflects the rearrangement of the overall ideological landscape of Korean society itself: from the contest between democratic vs. authoritarian forces to the competition between so-­called leftist (liberal) and rightist (conservative) political forces, both of which show an emerging tendency of populism. While the overarching, parallel orientations of Korean cultural policy – democratising the arts and growing cultural industries – are mostly intact, discernible political splits and lack of trust between the liberal and conservative camps have been witnessed. Within this context, the crisis of cultural policy under Park Guen-­Hye (2013–2017) should be considered as a ‘post-­democratisation’ symptom of divisive politics and consequent politicisation of cultural policy in one way or another. Will the new liberal government (2017–2022), whose prime agenda is ‘cleaning off accumulated vices (built up by the previous two conservative governments)’, be capable and willing to demonstrate the reflexive capacity to go beyond party political considerations, reinforce the institutional autonomy of culture and, furthermore, endeavour to create opportunities to societalise – rather than keep statising – cultural policy discussion? Or, will its ‘new’ cultural policy amplify the culture war by triggering a repetition of the 2000s debate on power and resource distribution in the cultural funding system? The cultural industries and cultural export (Korean Wave) branch of Korean cultural policy has also shown complicated and contentious dynamics that are seldom noticed by the existing writings on neoliberal cultural policy or creative industries policy. Situated in the country’s embedded neoliberal reform, cultural industries and export policy has seen economism and statism closely working together. Whilst being part of the convoluted process of the ‘actually-­happening’

Past, present and future of the patron state   149 neoliberalisation and globalisation of Korean society, what occurs in the cultural sector is an emergence of an entrepreneurial state where the government is obligated to promote cultural industries by mobilising resources, inventing new methods of cultural financing, providing infrastructure and investing in relevant technologies and skills. The firm status of cultural industries as the nation’s new flagship economic sector means that promoting these industries is an important national project that can be hardly contested. However, the endeavour to develop an increasingly export-­oriented market economy of culture necessitated the state-­driven commodification of culture. Being turned into a fictitious commodity, the idea of culture is deprived of its diverse understandings, interpretations and nuances. Likewise, the non-­economic potentials of culture are unencouraged and ignored. In this sense, we can conclude that the concept of culture in Korea’s cultural industries policy is not fully operative and Korean society’s cultural imagination is markedly limited. Making a new patron state has been an exceptionally ambitious project, where the state leads and fuels the transformation and expansion of the nation’s cultural policy while energetically responding to forces of democratisation, neoliberalisation and globalisation, and their socio-­economic consequences. While still relying on the structure, organisation and modus operandi of cultural policy moulded within the nation’s historical trajectory, the new patron state strives to envision Korea as a democratic, post-­industrial and creativity-­driven cultural nation. It has attempted to compensate for the absence of social consensus of culture and the cultural sector’s lack of resources with its leadership and abundant policy capacity. However, this does not necessarily involve careful reflection on the meaning of culture, the very object of its cultural policy. Can the new patron state diversify and enrich its perception of culture, beyond something given for the public’s enjoyment and the nation’s economic growth? Will it be able to a create policy environment where discussion of culture becomes the politics of society? Will it be willing to ‘fine-­tune’ its discursive and administrative capacity while restoring and improving reflexive capacity? Can it work out a ‘collibration’ strategy where coordination modes of state, market and self-­organisation can strike a new – and better – balance (Jessop 2016: 172)? The future of Korea’s new patron state will depend on how it responds to and acts on these questions. Further research on Korean cultural policy might benefit from being situated in the international context of political, economic, technological and social changes, or being part of ‘the politics of (global) society’. Indeed, Korea’s democratic transformation of cultural policy can be compared with experiences of newly industrialised societies such as those in East and Southeast Asia. Its post-­ democratisation politics and the culture war can be further explored in line with the bigger, global context of divisive and popular politics especially in the existing patron states (McGuigan 2017). Similarly, the embedded neoliberalisation of culture in Korea encourages cultural policy researchers to look beyond the usual critique of neoliberal culture policy to develop more nuanced perspectives to capture diverse and inconsistent responses of the nation state to the contemporary economic and social changes.

150   Past, present and future of the patron state At the same time, Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State advocates the virtue in historical and contextual approaches to the study of Korean cultural policy. It is because the policy configured and has dynamically reconfigured in close relation to the historical trajectory that Korean society has gone on. ‘Looking back’ at and ‘looking around’ the (geo)political, economic and social conditions that have shaped and have been affected by the policy will be one of the most effective ways to identify new perspectives and insights, which can also work as a catalyst for better understanding of cultural policies beyond Korea.

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Index

anti-communism 27, 32, 44, 53, 56 arm’s length principle 61, 65, 79 arts council 47, 65, 75–78 Arts Council Korea 76–83 arts funding 47, 73, 75–77, 80 associations (of cultural sector or industry) 25–26, 48, 56–58, 60, 66, 76, 78, 80 autonomy (of the cultural sector) 5, 10, 15, 17, 57, 65–66, 68–69, 75–76, 78–79, 83, 143, 148; institutional autonomy 65, 75, 78, 82, 83–85 censorship 10, 25, 28, 39, 53–54, 56, 69, 70–72, 82–83, 112, 136 centrality of the state 3, 5, 14, 146 citizen drama 26 Cold War 21, 26–28, 34, 73, 81; cultural Cold War 21, 27–28, 59 colonisation of consciousness 21 consumer society 64, 70–71, 74 consumerism 68, 71, 84, 122, 148; transnational consumerism 136, 138 content industries 87, 98, 100–101, 102–104, 109, 115, 135 co-option (between government and the cultural sector) 11, 15–16, 20, 25, 34, 48, 56–57, 59–60, 83, 147 coordinator of social actions 6, 11–14, 146 corporatism 57, 75 creative economy 9, 14–15, 17, 89, 109–115, 128, 133, 140 creative industries 87, 97, 110, 113, 148 cultural activism (cultural activists) 17, 61, 64–72, 74–75, 77, 84, 148 cultural architype 17, 100, 102–103 cultural budget 105–107 cultural enjoyment 72–73, 84–85, 124 cultural export 9, 124–125, 127–128, 136, 147–148

cultural hybridisation 120, 122 cultural industries 102, 9, 12, 14–15, 17, 64, 70, 87–96, 98–100, 105–110, 115, 118–119, 121–122, 124–126, 132, 147–148 Cultural Industries Fund 98–99, 105, 108–109 Cultural Protection Act (1952) 33 cultural renaissance 46–47, 49 cultural rule 22–23 culture war 32, 33, 65, 75, 78, 81–82, 134, 148–149 Culture and Arts Promotion Act (1972) 47, 78 decolonisation 21, 26, 31–32, 35 democracy 63; cultural democracy 31, 63–64, 70, 115; democratisation of culture 31, 63–64; Koreanised, localised or controlled 39–40, 49, 50 democratic movement 3, 17, 64, 66, 69, 71–74 de-nationalisation of culture 66 depoliticisation of arts policy 65, 73 de-statisation 5, 72, 80 developmental ethic 44 developmental psychology 42 developmental state (developmentalism) 4, 18, 42, 90 diplomacy 120, 124–126, 128, 132, 136–138, 142 discursive capacity 14–15, 38, 45, 61, 104, 111 economic development 42–52, 89, 98, 101, 111–112, 119–120, 124–125, 130, 148 entrepreneurial state 15, 88–89, 92, 99, 107, 110, 115, 149 explicit policy 27, 29

168   Index fandom 71, 120, 128, 143–148, 144 fictitious commodity 89, 100, 103, 105, 149 Film Promotion Corporation 56 financial crisis (1997) 7, 15, 18, 90, 119, 125 Five-Year Plan for the Renaissance of Culture and Arts 47, 51–52 freedom of culture 2–4, 11, 68–69, 71–73, 84, 147 globalisation 1, 4–6, 8–9, 87, 90, 93, 120–121, 123–128 governance through culture 9–11, 20, 61 Government-General Museum 23–24, 27 government-industry collaboration 131–134 heritage 23–24, 27, 29, 49–52, 61, 97, 102; patriotic heritage 50 hierarchy 12–13, 75–76, 147 historical embeddedness 20 implementational capacity 15, 62, 74, 89, 104, 105, 134 implicit policy 27–29 industrialisation 42, 49, 61 instrumental 9, 20, 34, 53, 127, 147 intrinsic 9, 20 intrinsically instrumental 9, 147 inward policy 138 jeongsin munhwa 40, 49, 53, 61, 83 Joseon Art Exhibition 24, 48 Joseon Motion Picture Decree (1940) 25, 28 Kim Dae-Jung 74–75, 90–91, 93, 95–96, 124–125, 146 Kim Young-Sam 17, 72, 90, 92, 96, 98, 123–125 knowledge economy 93, 100, 102, 111 Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) 96, 98, 105, 125–125, 132–133 Korea Federation of Cultural and Arts Organisations see Yechong Korean Culture and Arts Promotion Foundation 45, 47–48, 51, 60, 74, 76 Korean Film Council 82, 99 Korean Wave 1, 18, 109–110, 114–115, 118–120 local cultural centres 32, 48 lottery money 80

market 12–13, 147 Minyechong 66–67, 74, 77, 80–81 modern cultural policy 20, 146 modernisation 37–38, 41–42, 52, 61, 101, 104, 123–124, 146 Motae Fund 99, 108–110, 133 Motion Picture Act (1962) 53–54, 69 Munchong 57–58 museum 23 nation branding 104, 120, 125, 127–128, 130, 132, 138–139, 142 nation building 27, 30, 35, 72 nation state 6–7 national culture 29–32, 35–36, 38, 41, 47, 49–50, 61, 64, 67–69, 120, 127, 143, 146 national festivals (competitions) 48–49 national genre 52 nationalisation of culture 49 neoliberalisation 1, 3–6, 12, 16–17, 87–91, 115–116, 146–147, 149; embedded neoliberalisation 90 neoliberal self 11, 143 neoliberal reform 15, 17, 88, 91–93, 113, 148 network 12–13, 66 new patron state 3–4, 14, 146 new village movement 45, 52, 56, 60 October Reform (Siworyusin) 39–40, 53, 56, 59 organiser of governance 6 Park Chung-Hee (president) 37, 39–40, 42, 58, 61, 94 Park Geun-Hye (president) 14, 65, 82, 89, 106, 109–113, 130, 133–134, 139 patron states 3, 12, 47, 63–64, 75, 124, 147, 149 peak organisation 56–59, 61, 74 politics of national survival 7 post-culturalisation (of cultural policy) 5, 15, 17, 89, 97, 108, 115 post-democratisation 65–66, 81, 85, 148–149 post-industrial (isation) 11, 73, 87, 92–94, 96, 100, 104, 113–115, 119, 128, 129 productive ethic 42, 48, 53, 61 progressive artists, progressive arts movement 17, 61, 69–71, 74, 148 Public Performance Act (1961) 53, 69 public-private investment funds 107–110, 114

Index   169 Recorded Music Act (1967) 53, 69 reflexive capacity 15, 74–75, 83–84, 148–149 regeneration 129–130 re-politicisation of arts policy 65 Roh Moo-Hyun (president) 74–75, 77, 95, 106, 126 Roh Tae-Woo (president) 72–74 Second Economy Movement 43–44 self-organisation 75, 147 screen quota 25, 55, 106, 126

state 6 state capacity 14–15, 19, 37, 64, 147 state leadership 14, 84 state-policy film 25, 56 statisation of culture 7 story 17, 103–105 story industry 103–105 US Army Military Occupation 26–29 Yechong 41, 43, 47, 56, 58–62, 69, 74, 76, 78, 80–81