Korea's Protest Culture
by Michael Breen
Invest Korea Journal
Nov-Dec 2004Some years ago, a foreign correspondent based in Jerusalem, who I'd met in London, said to me, "Korea? Wow, you're in a war zone, man." Me? Someone from the Middle East is telling me I'm the one in the war zone? Yes, he insisted. He'd seen Korean student protests on TV.
The more I tried to play the protests down, the more I came across like some kind of blase war reporter-you know, emphasizing the month of boredom over the occasional ten seconds of sheer terror.
But, for those with ears to hear, I still insist, Korean protests ain't what they seem to be. They weren't in the 1980s and 1990s when protestors used to get tear-gassed, and they aren't today. They are not a symptom of deep, angry divisions, of instability and risk.
That's not to say that the protestors today do not have serious causes. They do. Sometimes the cause is political, sometimes it's labor-related, sometimes it's personal.
But what they all have in common is passion. This is a country of passion, exuberance and noise. It's a culture that understands emotion. To illustrate, if a drunk gets on a bus in Korea, instead of tut-tutting and remonstrating, people will stand up to give him (or her, I guess) a seat. Why? They know what it's like to blow off steam and do not feel threatened when someone else does it. And similarly, when someone in a headband yelling and screaming, the Korean instinct is not to condemn, but rather to think, "I guess he (or she, to be sure) is angry about something."
This has been a hard point to appreciate for me personally because protesting goes against my upbringing. When I see a demo, I have to confess, I feel the people are doing something wrong and my adrenalin starts. Protest is an act of political persuasion. It involves mobilizing the power available to you to weaken the other party and force it to do your bidding. It doesn't seem right. Nor, in a law-based environment, does it seem necessary. If the other party is truly in the wrong, why resort to a form of political action that has a semi-illegal feel to it? Why not, say, file suit?
This is because recourse to the law has not been historically popular with Koreans seeking redress. That takes some explaining. But first, let's get a better sense of what we're talking about.
A SEOUL DEMO GUIDE To get a feel for protest in Korea, I'd recommend a 1-kilometer stroll from Gyeongbok Palace to City Hall in Seoul's central business district. The first building on the right is the Central Government Building that houses various agencies. At morning rush hour, there is usually at least one person standing outside the gates with a placard detailing a complaint. The objective is to catch the attention of the relevant government officials as they drive to work. This protestor highlights the prime objective of most complaints, which is to shame, bully, pressure or otherwise get government to step in and take action.
Larger groups often congregate in the park next to the Sejong Cultural Center. Across the road on the left, next to the culture ministry, which is next to the American embassy, and set back slightly, is a small park. This is the site of regular events to protest American policies because it is the nearest and most convenient place for demonstrators to gather without violating a regulation outlawing protest within 100 meters of a foreign embassy. From time to time, protestors run mini exhibitions here, highlighting their causes. In the winter of 2002, after a U.S. court martial ruled that the road traffic deaths of two schoolgirls were accidental and acquitted two GIs on charges of culpable homicide, activists held displays linking this tragic event to other alleged crimes by American soldiers.
The riot police that ring the embassy itself serve as a permanent reminder of the protest culture in Korea. Political protest, of course, differs from labor and other types of protest. In Korea, the objectives of political protest are not always well articulated. Unlike in the United States, for example, where most social issues boil down to legal action-that is, all the arguing and demonstrating and column-writing that tends to stop once a law has been introduced or amended-in Korea, the objectives are less clear. What, for example, do anti-American protestors want? The common assumption is that protestors want the United States to withdraw its troops but two years ago, when American commentators started suggesting that the troops be withdrawn if they were not wanted, protestors took to the streets to complain that Americans did not understand Korean anti-Americanism.
"We don't want you to leave; rather, we want you to change your attitude," they said. This had not been clear before. And, frankly, it still isn't.
THE BLAME GAME While the objectives of political protest may not be clear, one feature is: blaming others rather than taking responsibility for problems one should rightly address oneself. Of course, you're not going to protest if you think that you are the cause of a problem. However, the relative ease with which others--be they the government or the conglomerates (chaebol)--are blamed is one explanation for the demonstration phenomenon.
But back to our trip. Further down, the telecom ministry sits in a good demo-free spot, squeezed between the U.S. embassy and the Kyobo Building, which houses the Finnish and Australian missions among others. No gatherings here, except of people waiting to catch buses.
Across the road, however, the Gwanghwamun intersection is a regular gathering spot for unionists. They are noted for their red headbands, brash-sounding songs, and yelling into loudspeakers. Their noisiness is turning downtown Seoul against organized labor. Their causes are quite easily defined because they're job-related. Wage negotiations may have broken down. Or, perhaps their company is about to be bought by another and they want to show that they can't be restructured out of their jobs.
Keep going on the right, across from the Korea Press Center, is the Seoul city council building where people upset by local government gather to punch the air. This rather institutional-looking building, incidentally, was the location of the first National Assembly. Last winter, foreign workers protested every morning on this corner.
Now, we reach City Hall and major headband territory. Action groups regularly protest in front of the steps. Their causes cover the spectrum, but a significant number are associated with city development projects. Local businesses fear loss of income during construction or as a result of construction and band together to make their case.
CONSCIENCE OF THE NATION The city plaza itself hosts larger and more political demonstrations. The most recent in October when tens of thousands protested against a government plan to abolish the National Security Law. While the government rightly notes that this law, which portrays North Korea as an enemy and forbids South Koreans from supporting or praising it, has been seriously abused in the past and used to incarcerate democratic dissidents, the plan to abolish it without any commensurate step by North Korea, fuels fears that Seoul's liberal government will be undermined by the North's communist regime. As with other large-scale political protests, various groups with different objectives jumped into the fray on this one-activists for human rights in North Korea, former South Korean spies agitating for due recognition and compensation by the government. This latter group threatened violence on the periphery of the protest when they started rocking police buses being used to prevent protestors from marching down the street. (Anticipating this one, police had double-parked the buses so they couldn't be pushed over). Police responded by hosing down the demonstrators with a water cannon.
"I know it's a naive question, but why do they fight?" asked a visiting British academic, who witnessed this scene. "They're undermining their own cause."
Thus framed, this is perhaps the main question from the foreign observer. Why do people in Korea seem to invest so much of their time and energy into demonstrating? Where does this culture of demonstration come from and why does it persist long after political dictatorship has gone?
Modern protest culture, you could argue, goes back a long way. There are historical roots in centuries past, when intellectuals were permitted to challenge decisions by the royal court. In modern Korea, when dictators ruled (until 1988), this role as a form of conscience of the nation fell upon students. Campus leaders arranged massive demonstrations, which served to remind rulers that they were unpopular. One important consequence of these protests-as with earlier campus movements from the 1940s onwards, was that they spawned future political leadership. Indeed, many a demo is actually the work of an ambitious young would-be politician or labor leader.
AVERSION TO LITIGATION With a few notable exceptions now sitting in the National Assembly, it tends to be forgotten that these young politicians, as protest leaders, contributed only indirectly or partially to the cause of democracy. Their protests were inarticulate, too violent, and while tolerated by the public, failed to garner widespread support. The memory of this failure is obscured by the events of June 1987 when a coalition of religious leaders called demonstrations to press for a democratic presidential election. Students naturally answered the call, but so did office workers, laborers and housewives. The massive nationwide protests that resulted led strongman Chun Doo-Hwan to allow a direct vote to choose his successor.
This victory showed the way for labor and every other group with a cause. Political protest was the way to go. The reason protests continue is that it still is. In the absence of more effective means, protest remains the most effective way to articulate your issue and get a hearing.
Two reasons, I would argue: first, since the emphasis within the educational system has been on the acquiring of knowledge to match and fuel Korea's breakneck pace of development rather than the exchange of ideas, there tends to be little debate as such. Secondly, the recourse to law is not a well-trodden path. Korean society is traditionally consensus based, with a marked preference to settle matters directly between the disputing parties.
So the next time you see red head-banded demonstrators waving banners or chanting with clenched fists, don't think that a revolution is imminent. Think more that you are a watching Koreans engaging in a time-honored practice designed to get their point across in the most dramatic way possible. And that they are doing in the same way that they do everything: with passion and fervor.