More than three decades after South Korea’s democratic transition, we thought we had consolidated our democratic progress. We imagined that our democracy was strong and would grow stronger.

We are learning we were wrong.

We are learning that our achievements in institutionalizing democracy are weak because they were achieved in a top-down way, enacted by a president or other politicians. Our everyday, ordinary cultural behavior is not supportive of democracy. Nepotistic practices and arbitrary decision-making persist in our society.

As we approach the April 10 congressional elections here, Korea is seeing huge backlashes against our democratization.

Our democracy is looking fragile.

Our leaders still have significant power—too much power—that can be misused very easily.

We see this in a wave of investigations and prosecutions of the political opponents of those in power.

The administration of incumbent president President Yoon Suk Yeol has been investigating, and seeking to prosecute, his opponent in the last election, Lee Jae-myung, who calls the government a “dictatorship of prosecutors.”

There have been repeated raids of media outlets that are critical of Yoon, himself a former prosecutor. He has filed criminal complaints and defamation claims against critics. His administration also handled the indictment and firing of a broadcaster it didn’t like.

Activists have also been targeted. Recently, there were raids at multiple progressive labor unions and the homes of their officials.

The administration has been putting political pressure on the judicial branch, which is supposed to be independent.

Protections for women have been eroded, in the workplace and in society alike. The president rolled back a rule that 30% of the president’s cabinet be women, and leaders routinely scapegoat feminism for economic problems, like the high price of housing and stagnant incomes.

Our democratically elected government is starting to remind us of the way our country’s 20th-century military rulers once attacked critics.

This is a time when democratic institutions should rally to protect democratic gains. The problem is that the most important democratic institutions, our political parties, are weak and divided. The president has feuded repeatedly with the head of his own party, often over scandals and controversies involving the first lady (the gift of a Dior handbag is at the heart of the story). As a result, the party is in turmoil. There have been multiple leadership changes, and it also lost an election last fall in Seoul.

But the opposition is also divided over scandals and competing factions—one associated with the former president and the other with the presidential candidate that president Yoon is now prosecuting. Former members of both the ruling and the opposition party have formed a new party, the New Reform Party, but it lacks power.

The lesson from Korea is that establishing democratic structures and institutions is not enough to have real democracy. Real democracy requires deep participation from across society.

In addressing our lack of cultural democracy, Korea has to overcome the challenge of our history. In the previous century, Koreans emphasized economic growth above all other priorities. The military used economic growth as a way to justify itself.

That economic focus has persisted into the democratic era. In our lives, economics has overwhelmed all other priorities. I’m a professor, and I’ve been frustrated to see the academic field become more professionalized and insular, and less involved in civic duty. We have become very good at calculating the costs and benefits of every decision.

Our pragmatism and focus on economy have seriously affected interpersonal relationships, and demoted the value of love and marriage. Korea has some of the world’s lowest birth rates, and more than 30% of households just have one person.

Life, and democracy, can’t be built by such strict calculation. Our economic culture has isolated us from each other at the same time as it has polarized politics.

While serving as Korea’s cabinet minister for gender equality and family during the previous presidency, I cultivated a very different approach, one that was community-based and personal. We probed individual cases of family issues in depth, and then, based on those cases, developed new methods of care—childcare, care for one-parent families, and support for multicultural families, migrant families, and marriage itself.

We called this initiative the common community care system. Parents would care for each other’s children and build networks. Neighbors would care for neighbors, and get to know each other better. The people themselves would decide how to organize care.

We were trying to change our patriarchal culture. If people cared more for each other, they would think more broadly, and more on the social level—and not strictly economically—when they made decisions.

We made some progress before I left the ministry. But since then, there has been backlash and backsliding.  Now the government is trying to eliminate my old ministry entirely.

The post This Korean Election Shows How Fragile Our Democracy Is appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My family lived in a modest, if not crammed, apartment unit tucked away in a far corner of the neighborhood. We moved there in 1987—the same year South Korea had its first democratic elections—and just in time to catch the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul on television in our new living room.

By 1996, Gangnam had already become known as the home base of the nouveau riche. Although I went to middle school with the kids who were among the first in the entire country to adapt the latest fashion trends otherwise only seen on TV, my life then was fairly ordinary.
Middle schools across South Korea still had gender-divided classrooms, and ours had just changed its school uniform policy to let girls wear pants instead of skirts. Still, we weren’t allowed to perm or dye our hair, or even let it grow longer than 3 centimeters below our ears. When school ended at 3 p.m., my friend and I headed to a nearby tteokbokki, “hot and spicy rice cake,” truck for the two-dollar snack.

My cooler classmates, on the other hand, headed to the school back lot to smoke cigarettes and practice dancing to the hottest new songs by the Seo Taiji and Boys, Deux, and Roo’ra—three of the first generation of South Korea dance music groups known for their intricate moves and catchy, hip-hop beats.

I was not one of these cool kids. I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair so that my bangs would rebelliously cover my eyes. My weekly allowance was just 6,000 won ($5), and I couldn’t afford to buy the most popular brands of clothing like Stüssy, Fila, or United Colors of Benetton.
What I did share with the cool kids was a longing to escape from our rectangular classroom in our rectangular school. There we were fed too much math, biology, grammar, and other things that prepared us for future national college entrance exams, and received too little of the most important information, like how to love ourselves or how sex works. Every day followed the same formula; I went to school, then to hagwon, or “cram school,” to prepare for those exams, did homework, and went to sleep, on repeat.

Cover art for SechsKies’ first album, which was released in 1997. Courtesy of So-Rim Lee.

My classmates’ daily back lot dance practices were fueled by a pent-up anger at having to conform to this educational system that did not allow us to speak until we “made it” to college–when we’d finally become adults and mattered to the world.

At 14, I wasn’t dancing or speaking, but dance music groups—not yet K-pop but dance gayo (dance-based popular music)—spoke to me. The young dancer-singers wore the kind of things that I wasn’t allowed to wear, which thus signified liberation—baggy pants that dragged to the floor, dreadlocks, large hoop earrings, and long gold chains around their necks. They seemed to inhabit a different world from everyone I knew—an imaginary world of gangsters, hip-hop, palm trees, and Los Angeles.

They were a screen dream, to which television offered the sole portal that enabled my imagination, since my only electronic gadget at that time was a small device that connected to a blinking, blue-toned Bulletin Board Service, or BBS, with a loud screech of its modem.

1997 brought with it the monumental International Monetary Fund crisis, or Asian financial crisis. Overnight, South Korea became immersed in a maelstrom of bankruptcies, unemployment, divorces, and suicides. The IMF offered the country a bailout. More than half of all of the powerful chaebol conglomerates shut down. Some young parents left their newborn babies at orphanages. A national gold drive took place to repay the loans from the IMF; 3.5 million people nationwide collected a cumulative 226 tons of gold, according to Forbes. People donated wedding rings, trophies, and even gold tooth fillings.

As South Korea reeled from the economic crisis, another monumental event took place: the debut of SechsKies (or in short, “Jekki”), the first-generation K-pop idol group. Their spiky moussed hair, youthful faces, slender physiques, and entertaining personas made them instant heartthrobs for us ’90s pubescents. My teenage self was swept up in their popularity. At the time, I had developed a secret crush on one of the girls in school, and was troubled about my burgeoning sexuality. When my crush fell for one of the boys in SechsKies, I followed suit—not only because I wanted to stay close to her, but also because SechsKies was the hipster currency of the entire school. You had to know all about these “idols” if you wanted to join conversations, belong to friend groups, or just be relevant in teenage life, even as the whole country seemed on verge of crisis.

As a nerd, I paid the idols respect the best way I knew how: I became a fan fiction writer. I wrote all day, every day—secretly scribbling away in my notebooks during classes, and typing them up in my little dial-up BBS machine at night. (I had to muffle the modem noise lest I woke my parents). I wrote out imaginary romantic scenarios between the SechsKies members Jae-jin and Ji-yong, which soon became a complicated love triangle as Ji-yong and Ji-won realized their feelings for each other. To pay homage to my fellow SechsKies fans, I cast members of the rival dance-idol group H.O.T. as antagonist thugs.

My unexpected 15 minutes of fame arrived in 1998—the same year that President Kim Dae-jung’s administration started investing in creative industries through the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism—when the SechsKies fan club on the Chollian BBS network began to read my ninth-grade erotica of K-pop idols making out with each other.

Since my name was not on the stories, I was not exposed as their author, but in school I became a minor celebrity. During the day, I would circulate my handwritten work throughout classes, so that my readers from the eight different homerooms in our class—including my crush herself—could request particular romantic scenarios in the next episode. In the privacy of my little room at night, I typed up the fan fiction magnum opus I had scribbled in my notebook throughout the day, and distributed it online. I returned to the real world only to flip over my SechsKies cassette tapes (all four albums) from side A to side B, then from side B to side A.

My parents, who were part of the so-called 386 generation (named after the newest PC in the 1980s, when they came of age) did not understand my interest in the SechsKies. My father was born two months after the end of the Korean War. His parents’ generation experienced postwar poverty and division, and had sacrificed democracy for economic development. By the 1970s, my mother was among the student demonstrators to protest Park Chung-hee’s military regime.

But neither of my parents could understand my rebellion against the educational system. Nor did they appreciate why I was glued to the TV to watch SechsKies perform live during weekend prime time TV, via the big three music shows aired on public TV channels KBS Music Bank, SBS Inkigayo, and MBC Music Camp. They dismissed my pubescent frustrations as symptomatic of the new brat culture.

K-pop quickly became a marker in adult minds that the entitled Generation X kids like myself could care less about democracy and nationalism.

While endless nights of fan fiction sustained me through middle school, South Korea went through the IMF-mandated socioeconomic restructuring, and paid back its $58 billion debt nearly three years ahead of schedule, in August 2001. The next year, South Korea successfully co-hosted the World Cup with Japan. Through this recovery, the costs of living soared in Gangnam, and my family moved out of my childhood home in 2004.

Walking down the familiar road towards school one last time, I remember noticing a flock of what seemed like mummies in broad daylight, with their faces bundled up in compression bandages, bold, black marks circling around their eyes like a kid’s imitation of a panda bear, and traces of pain behind their eyes. Armed with shopping bags, these apparent mummies crowded the doorways to every store, and even lined up at my favorite after-school tteokbokki truck.

Later on, I learned that I had encountered Gangnam’s transformation into a mecca of medical tourism. Alluring images of K-pop idols and before and after plastic surgery ads soon flooded the streets. This was no coincidence: There was a calculated effort by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to turn both K-pop and cosmetic surgery into export-oriented industries in the new millennium. Everything seemed so fast and glitzy in the streets of Gangnam, as if the IMF crisis had never happened.

As the scholar Marcus Tan has argued, Psy’s global megahit “Gangnam Style” embodies the merger of local, global, spatial, and temporal dimensions through the speed of sound and the internet. Tan also alleged that the song represents the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio’s concept of the dromosphere, or “a world asphyxiated by speed and arrested by a dictatorship of movement.” This is a pretty apt description of Korea’s transition from the end of the 1990s to the 2000s.

K-pop still moves at this speed. Countless girl and boy groups debut every year, and most of them fail to survive the industry that feeds on the speed of sound, youth, and newness. My 14-year-old self listened to Seo Taiji and Boys, Deux, or Roo’ra on my Aiwa cassette player, but today you can hear any K-pop song on almost any medium, anywhere in the world. Fan fictions, too, now have globalized platforms like Wattpad, which is simply incomparable to its BBS precursor in scope and size.

A couple of weeks ago, a student in my K-pop seminar at Columbia University told me that she’s been losing sleep reading BTS fan fiction throughout the night. “It’s a rabbit hole,” she said with glee and grimace. “Sometimes the internet K-pop fan community seems like an ideal alternate universe I’d rather live in, but sometimes it feels like a pointless, psychedelic escape that doesn’t solve any of my real problems.”

I smiled, nodded, and agreed.

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Can Californians learn to be as cool as Koreans in the face of nuclear annihilation?

Visiting Seoul last week, I asked people how they stay sane while living within range of North Korea’s weapons. After all, Kim Jong Un’s capital, Pyongyang, is just 120 miles from Seoul—the same meager distance protecting San Diego from Los Angeles.

Seoul’s regional population is now 25 million, about half of the country’s total population, and so South Koreans have been living productively under North Korea’s threats for more than six decades. But for Californians, being North Korean targets is disorientingly new—because of the regime’s recent advances in developing both nuclear warheads and intercontinental missiles that might be able to reach Disneyland. North Korean propaganda has sown fears with specific threats against California and even animations of nuking San Francisco.

These threats have been amplified by President Trump’s thoughtless provocations of the North—his pledge of “fire and fury like the world has never seen” seemed to welcome nuclear war—and by more official warnings in California. The L.A.-area Joint Regional Intelligence Center issued a bulletin last summer urging state and local officials in California to update nuclear attack response plans. The bulletin also included scary details, including how, post-mushroom cloud, your pets might carry enough radioactive contamination to kill you.

Arriving in Seoul a little jittery (my mother asked me if I really had to go), I found people in Seoul to be profoundly reassuring, especially considering that North Korea has its ground forces and thousands of pieces of artillery positioned near the border, just 35 miles to the north.

“Keep calm,” I was advised over again, with some citing the World War II-era British advice to “Keep calm and carry on.” In bars, patrons swapped out “and carry on” for “and drink beer”—a popular meme that nods to the Korean passion for spirits.

It’s also hard-won wisdom that Californians should adopt: To avoid war with a volatile neighbor for 60 years, you can’t lose your temper or your head. Indeed, the deepest worries I heard from South Koreans involved the reliability of President Trump, and whether he was truly committed to honoring the longstanding ironclad American commitment to protect South Korea even if it means risking an attack on the U.S. mainland. The North Korean strategy of escalation—through nuclear bomb and missile tests—is often seen as posing a question to the United States: “Are you willing to trade Los Angeles for Seoul?”

But that question, while linking the fates of California and Korea in a frightening manner, is seen as mostly rhetorical in Seoul, a city so economically and culturally vital that its destruction is almost unthinkable.

Instead, South Koreans see the current conflict cynically—as a contest between a dictator, Kim Jong Un, and a reality TV-authoritarian, President Trump, who both use threats to rile people up in service of keeping power, so they can enhance their personal wealth. So why play into their hands? One Korean scholar, boasting that his country had impeached its own corrupt and crazy president, Park Geun-hye, back in March, asked me if the United States might follow Korea’s lead and do the same.

Rather than give in to authoritarian madness, locals say it’s better to behave nonchalantly. That’s why South Korea’s new president Moon Jae-In went on vacation after the North launched an intercontinental ballistic missile this summer. The news media reinforces such sanguinity; last week, stories about shake-ups in Korea’s business world, rising Seoul housing prices, the upcoming Winter Olympic Games here in February, and efforts to tackle the social problems of suicide and “spy-camera pornography” got more notice than the possibility of a nuclear exchange.

During a daylong conference I attended on the future of Korean democracy, North Korea got mentioned exactly once. When I asked Monk Ji-Sun—the president of Korea Democracy Foundation, which protects the history of Korea’s democratization and promotes a more democratic future—about the situation, he argued that the best strategy is to ignore the threats and machinations of other powers and focus on developing the country’s own institutions instead.

To be sure, South Koreans are making some defensive preparations, and even discussing the possibility of nuclear weapons. In August, the government conducted a large-scale civil defense drill, though it wasn’t taken particularly seriously. And I met a few Koreans who admitted to having packed bags at home just in case of attack, with many of the items—cash, identification, water, food, first-aid supplies—that Californians assemble in their own earthquake kits.

One afternoon, I had coffee with Leif-Eric Easley, who grew up in Long Beach and now lives with his wife and two children in Seoul, where he is a professor at Ewha University. An expert on international relations and Northeast Asia, Easley argues that North Korea’s provocations are meant to divide its neighbors, so not rising to the bait is a good strategic response.

Easley says that Koreans stay cool in the face of threats because they understand the situation well, and knowledge reduces fear. But the risk of war is not zero, and he sees a certain desensitization to the war threat. After North Korea’s sixth nuclear test in September, the parks were so full of Koreans enjoying good weather and beer that his family found it hard to find a place to picnic. Part of this lack of fear is generational—the Koreans who remember the horrors of war are dying, he noted.

After our conversation, I walked by the U.S. Embassy, where I encountered competing protests—one a “No Trump Zone” that called for the pursuit of peace with the North, and the removal from South Korea of an American missile defense system known as THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). The smaller counter-protest urged a pre-emptive American strike on the North: “You Bomb North Korea. We Support You.”

Both protests were tiny compared to two nearby events. Several hundred Koreans, mostly in their twenties, were attending a job fair, a familiar scene in a wealthy country struggling with high youth unemployment. And a short walk away, in Gwanghwamun Plaza, thousands of young people gathered to watch a rehearsal for an upcoming Olympic-themed concert by the K-pop group Twice.

The nine young women in the group were singing their huge hit, “Cheer Up.” It’s about dealing with an anxious boyfriend who keeps texting his love, escalating in desperation to something that might sound threatening.

But the chorus offers some good advice, to girlfriends and Californians alike: Stay cool and de-escalate the confrontation. “I’ll act calm,” Twice sings, “as if it’s nothing.”

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