This thesis aims to study the following two research subjects; first, the structures and strategies of the Lee Myung-bak government’s Korean Wave policies, which strongly supported the New Korean Wave as a new growth engine for the state, and second...
This thesis aims to study the following two research subjects; first, the structures and strategies of the Lee Myung-bak government’s Korean Wave policies, which strongly supported the New Korean Wave as a new growth engine for the state, and second, the aspects and the implications of the socio-cultural transformation in South Korea caused by these state-led cultural policies and the New Korean Wave.
Initially driven by the spread of Korean dramas televised across Asia in the late 1990s, the Korean Wave evolved from a regional development into a global phenomenon, the New Korean Wave, due to the proliferation of K-pop music videos on YouTube starting in the late 2000s. However, it is not just because of YouTube, but there are various factors influencing the Korean Wave, developing as the New Korean Wave, such as consistent state support and the rapid growth of the transnational cultural industry over the past 10 years. The growing acceptance of South Korean pop culture in many parts of the world has prompted the South Korean government to use the Korean Wave as a tool for soft power. In this process, state intervention to support the Korean Wave has been gradually deepened and widened. Finally, the Lee government designated it as ‘a new growth engine’ and intensively developed it.
Therefore, in order to organically understand the formation process, structures and socio-cultural effects of the New Korean Wave phenomenon, we should consider it as a ‘cultural formation’ which is strategically produced and reproduced by state policies, the cultural industry, the media, academic discourse and the public desire for developing it, rather than simply a popular ‘cultural trend’. In other words, it is necessary to consider the New Korean Wave from various angles and levels in economic relations and political power relations. Bob Jessop’s ‘strategic-relational approach’ could be a proper methodology for analyzing networked structures among state-society-market and their interactions. Like Poulantzas, Jessop characterises the capitalist state as the material condensation of the relation of social forces, or as a strategic field, and also as a process of intersecting power networks. His state theory could give us a point of view for examining organically the relation between global conditions and national factors in forming the New Korean Wave. Moreover, it could be useful to review the Lee government’s contradictory growth strategies, which are business-friendly and neo-liberal on the one hand and developmental and state-interventionist on the other hand.
The ultimate purpose of studying the process by which the New Korean Wave has been fostered as a growth engine is to understand the strategy and mechanism as well as the governance structure and power relations which make the New Korean Wave ‘a mythical phenomenon’. For this, I focus on analyzing both the power fractions within the power bloc in South Korea that actually planned and promoted the state’s Korean Wave policy, as well as the network structures between them and their strategies.
To sum up, it can be said that the characteristic of Lee government’s Korean Wave policy has been to promote ‘the marketization and commercialization of everything’ by marketing the New Korean Wave both inside and outside the country. It appears that there have been two types of strategies which the Lee government used during the process of developing the New Korean Wave as a national industry. They are ‘cultural political strategy’ and ‘cultural economic strategy’. The Lee government took advantage of the New Korean Wave to promote this administrative achievement and to gather together diverse power fractions having different interests in the hegemonic project which advocates increasing ‘national interest’ and promoting the ‘national brand’. Furthermore, the discourses on the New Korean Wave which are produced mainly by Korean media and academia in association with the state have had the collective voluntary agreements of the public and this helped the Lee government take over the hegemony in promoting the Korean Wave policy. We could call this the ‘cultural political strategy’ of the Korean Wave policy. Then, what is the ‘cultural economic strategy’ of the policy? Its purpose has been to make the developmental logic of the content industry rapidly spread to all the levels of Korean society by designating and supporting the New Korean Wave as a new growth engine. This seems to have accelerated the tendency of rearranging the cultural topography in South Korean society to that advantage of the commercial content industry.
As a result of these strategies by which the state develops the New Korean Wave as the dominant cultural formation having hegemonic influence on Korean society, mobilizing not only the national budget, administrative organs, laws and institutions but also various power fractions and public enthusiasm, major socio-cultural changes have occurred that should not be overlooked. For example, more and more researchers in the academic world have come to rely on the government’s contents promotion fund, and the media also have come to play a role as the ‘Government Information Agency’. Further, local governments have ended up competing for various state projects related to the New Korean Wave in order to get more financial support from the central government. In the case of large corporations, they have formed a strong network with the government and ranging from producing the Korean Wave policies to conducting related business together. Moreover, as many huge Korean Wave events have been held around the country and most media have promoted K-pop idols, the passion of young people who want to be K-pop idols themselves peaked. In this regard, it could be seen that the New Korean Wave fostered by the Lee government as the state’s core strategic industry has had a great influence on the structure, function and role of the Korean social formation, since it has been enthusiastically accepted in South Korea as well as abroad.
By organically analyzing the relations among state policies, cultural phenomena and the socio-cultural transformation of the Korean social formation, I try to show that a cultural phenomenon by itself is not a stationary object but a dynamic process. It is also the material basis which actually affects the lives of the general public and an ideological apparatus which is involved in the formation of the subject as well.
In conclusion, my main point is this: if various power fractions are strategically condensed into the state’s cultural policies while pursuing their own political and economic interests, and if the dominant cultural phenomenon and the state’s cultural policy have a significant influence on the cultural lives of the public, then they should be the field for hegemonic struggle where the cultural movement has to intervene for the formation of alternative cultural lives in the public and the new subject who is not submissively identified with the dominant ideology.