I thought this trip would be about my sister’s wedding. It was. But it was also about witnessing the anti-US beef protests. The size and scope were truly amazing. The anti-US beef protests, in brief, stem from the present government’s decision to open up the beef market to US beef as a part of the KorUS FTA. I don’t know that much about the details of how the state-of-affairs developed, but the government’s decision to open the beef market came by as a surprise to the populace at large. The president took the matter into his own hands without sufficiently paying attention to what the people wanted and went ahead and signed the deal. Lee’s concession has been taken as a sign of his “kowtowing” to the U.S. Right after the treaty was signed, a Korean TV program of the investigative journalism sort did a piece on how unsafe US beef is and how it possibly spreads mad cow disease. Condensed into one sentence, the main message of the program became ” if you eat US beef gleaned from cattle more than 30 yrs old, you’ll contract mad cow disease.” This, of course, generated huge fear among Koreans and added fuel to their mounting anger. They’ve been out on the streets since, and yesterday, the 21st anniversary of the 6.10 protest, marked the largest protest with 700,000 participants (this is not a conservative estimate) of the month.
The protests first started out as candlelight vigils, but then quickly developed into protests and became violent and illegal in part. Huge numbers of riot police were called out to contain the protests. In deterring the protesters from marching to the Blue House and in getting the protesters off the streets (occupying the streets, instead of the pedestrian walks, is illegal), the riot police exercised brutality here and there. As the cause of the protests changed drastically from opposing US beef to bringing down Lee from office, the level of confrontation between the police and the protesters mounted. And both sides saw a lot of injuries.
I spent hours and hours looking up related articles and editorials on the internet and was glued to the TV when the protests were broadcast. I still have a hard time understanding the protests. They’re taken as a righteous expression of disappointment and anger by the progressive organizations and people. Maybe it’s because I haven’t followed politics and social issues in Korea very closely, but I have a hard time taking up the same position. The other side, the politically conservative, is really not an option, since their view can more or less be summarized in 1) look at those Satan’s crowd trying to bring down the country and 2) stop the protests right now; KorUS FTA is the way to go! It feels like you have to endorse the protests if you’re politically progressive, but I find that hard to do because these protests are different from the ones I used to know. I mean, what’s so fascinating about these protests is that they brought together people from all ages and groups. You have elementary-school kids out with their mothers as well as middle-school and high-school kids marching with signs that say they’re too young to die.
American expatriates in Korea seem more or less alienated by the “unreasonable” character of the protests. Some of them think it’s ridiculous that the Korean protesters think that US beef will bring mad cow disease. Not just Americans but a lot of Koreans think the same. The media reportage of mad cow disease through US beef falls more in line with yellow journalism than responsible journalism. It’s easy to dismiss the outrage of the protesters as unreasonable and overly emotional. But what’s happening now is just too big and too forceful to be dismissed.
Personally, watching the protests has made me think long and hard about the nebulous concept of the people, the meaning of democracy, and neoliberalism. While marveling at the power of the people being demonstrated, I found it hard to simply agree with the cries for the right to be heard in democracy. The protesters identify as citizens in democracy. Didn’t the same citizens elect Lee as president, though? Aren’t there also responsibilities in democracy as well as freedom? (OMG, I fucking sound like Edmund Burke.) What puzzles me is that the same Koreans who view the beef agreement as “national humiliation” are those who send their kids abroad to be educated in English-speaking countries and those who want college classes to be in English. Or are they not the same Koreans? I’ve heard South Korea described as a country that aggressively embraces neoliberalism. Who’s the agent in this aggressive embrace? The government? The industries? The choe-bul? Or the people?
In refusing to renegotiate the beef trade with the U.S. (which is something the protesters are asking for), President Lee said that we need to think what would really help our national interest. He said that renegotiation will only negatively effect Korea’s terms of trade with the U.S. (which is true; the democratic party is more severe than the republican party on this and democratic nominee Obama has repeatedly said that he will renegotiate the KorUS FTA to protect the US automobile industry). He also added that Korea’s status in the world today is such that other countries will not sympathize with Korea’s attempt to renegotiate. While Lee is a neoliberal, what he said, I think, accurately reflects South Korea’s place in the world at the moment. Having been a corporate manager for a long time, Lee knows Korea’s economic status well. South Korea has made strides in economic development in the past decades (a large part of it due to the U.S.’s strategic cultivating of Korea into a US trading partner and market after WWII), and is an economic powerhouse in the Asia-Pacific now. It can even be viewed as a sub-imperial country in the Asia-Pacific. And yet, not many Koreans seem to think of “national interest” in relation to such geopolitical issues as the above. Frankly, that seems selfish.
People’s power can be revolutionary exactly because it is unbridled and comes from below. A lot of intellectuals of leftist inclination romanticize people’s power. But in orthodox Marxism revolutions are necessarily violent. The archetype of revolutions, the French Revolution, was bloody and chaotic. I think I witnessed a glimpse of both the force and the disorder of people’s power in the protests. As Nak-cheong Paik, one of my favorite Korean intellectuals, noted, the problem with the progressive camp in Korea is that it has no unifying agenda. Will the protests provide an opportunity for the progressives to come together? A last add on: the sycophantic politicians who came out to the rallies and protests when they realized that this is where the people are and loudly claimed to oppose the beef treaty made me sick at heart.
The NYTimes article that summarizes the anti-US beef protests.
