Cultural Policy in South Korea

Making a New Patron State

Hye-Kyung Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317567523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Cultural Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1Introduction

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 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 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 ‘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 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; 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.

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 stat...