South Korea in Transition

South Korea in Transition Politics and Culture of Citizenship

Edited by

Chang Kyung-Sup

I~ ~?io~;~;n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK

South Korea's condensed transition in citizenship politics: an analytic introduction Chang Kyung-Sup Department of Sociology, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

From class politics to citizenship politics In late May 2011, South Korean university students began to stage daily mass protests for 'half-priced tuitions'. South Korean universities and independent colleges - most of them being private ones - have allegedly charged 'the world's second most expensive tuitions' in a society where the world's highest proportion of high school graduates (i.e., about 90%) proceed to college education. 1 The halving of university tuitions was a key election pledge of the country's current president Lee Myung-Bak, but he exhausted national budgets in highly controversial infrastructure construction projects and thus decided to balk on the tuition commitment. The halving of tuitions would be possible only in terms of heavy governmental subsidies to universities or students because most universities are desperate about their own survival under the rapid decrease of collegeage population. Amid the plummeting popularity of Lee, his political party (the Hannara Party) announced to pursue the halving of tuitions, however, only to Lee's embarrassment and objection. University students immediately took to the streets, staging mass 'candlelight' rallies every night. Opposition politicians began to visit protesting students, but they were not greeted warmly but criticized for their alleged political opportunism. Students were not looking for institutional political allies or new broad-based political fronts. It was a very specifically focused 'politics of tuition' premised upon a sort of citizenship right to affordable university education - namely, educational consumer citizenship. Having failed to systematically reframe their political ideologies and policy doctrines in the twenty-first century environment, even relatively progressive political parties and politicians had no clue for politically allying with these angry educational consumers. The ruling government reacted rather cautiously lest these angry educational consumers should turn into political rebels against state power for broad societal concerns. 2 This political situation was very much reminiscent of the anti-American beef candlelight protests three years ago. In its impulsive pursuit of becoming a 'hub nation of international trade', the freshly installed Lee Myung-Bak administration approached the USA in early 2008 for immediate ratification of the South Korea-US Free Trade

SOUTH KOREA IN TRANSITION

Agreement (FTA), offering to almost unconditionally open up the South Korean market to American beef which was then suspected of serious risk of the mad cow disease (Chang 2013). A rather puzzling political development ensued - that is, scattered protests of mothers and their student children concerning food safety ended up igniting nationwide rallies against the government's decision to import American beef including parts avoided by other countries for potential infection risk. The government's harsh reaction (in terms of police crackdowns) only helped to amplify the public anger against the 'uncommunicative' state leadership concerning the basic conditions of people's daily life. 3 From late spring to early summer, a variety of life world citizens gathered in hundreds of thousands to protest against the Lee government. In the citizens' lengthy battle, opposition political parties and politicians were no welcome guests. Nor were class-based organizations and groups, such as labor unions and peasant organizations, particularly active in leading the popular protests. The political inefficacy of peasant organizations was striking because the South Korean FTA with the USA was destined to fatally destroy the economic basis of farm families. Instead, a new line of political consciousness was evolving amid this unprecedented form of citizenship struggle, although it unfortunately failed to develop into systematic political ideologies or into sustained civil action programs. The above instances vividly illustrate that the sociopolitical landscape of South Korea, like many other aspects of its compressed modernity (Chang 1999, 2010), has been changing quite dramatically. It was not long ago that South Korea's belligerent and effective class-based struggles against the authoritarian developmentalist state and its business allies kept impressing and inspiring exploited social groups across the world. In the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, industrial workers' organized protests against the military political regimes served as a crucial basis for the country's arduous transition to democracy. Heavily exploited yet militantly resistant proletariat took the place of the country's state-dependent bourgeoisie, chaebol, as a main class basis of liberal democratization, whereas university students and progressive intellectuals promoted it as a historical project of political modernity. In its authoritarian mercantilist rule, the so-called 'developmental state' used to assume an entrepreneurial or statecapitalist position toward the working class so that even workers' economic struggle against private industrialists was directly suppressed by the government acting as a sort of industrial police. 4 In proportion to its political contribution to democratization, South Korean proletariat came to enjoy rapid improvement in income and other working conditions in the immediate post-democratization decade (between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s). In the mid-1990s, the government's attempt to enact laws for promoting labor market flexibility was put under a societal resistance led by labor unions, even jeopardizing the political sustainability of the incumbent state leadership of Kim Young-Sam. The peasant class was not alienated, either. This was evident when South Korea's decision to join the Uruguay Round ignited peasants' collective anger and the nation-wide popular political support for them. 5 An unprecedented amount of budgetary support for farming and village life, in tens of billions of dollars over several years, had to be offered in compensation for the sacrifice to be made by agrarian population. The main capitalist class, chaebol, felt seriously threatened by these social and political developments. In a sense, sudden democratization turned their dependence on the developmental state into a political jeopardy. This was because they had remained seriously underprepared in terms of independent class instruments for labor control

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and political environmental management. It was fortunate to chaebol that there were other powerful classes that felt seriously alienated and threatened under the country's democratic political, social, and economic transformation (Chang 2012b). They included developmental bureaucracy, judiciary organs of the state, voted-out conservative politicians, and ultraconservative media. Their collaboration for the military's developmental dictatorship, in effect, had made them para-bourgeois classes or institutions because chaebol had been considered the core developmental arm of the state. With the military dictators dethroned, chaebol and political and social accessories of developmental authoritarianism felt 'homophily' with each other (cf. McPherson et al. 2001) as commonly vulnerable elites. They soon formed a new line of developmental coalition pivoting around chaebol's economic interest coated with neoliberal ideologies. They would effectively co-opt the administrations led by the so-called democracy fighters in terms of regressively developmental policies (in construction), developmentally rephrased neoliberal policies (in particular, flexible labor market), and neoliberal globalization policies (financial liberalization, FTAs, production transnationalization, etc.). 6 These policies, as implemented so hastily, were not necessarily beneficial to chaebol, as evidenced by the national financial meltdown in late 1997. Ironically, the IMFrepresented global finance forced the South Korean government to intensify most of these policies while allowing its role in corporate rescuing and industrial restructuring predicated upon the South Korean public's phenomenal amount of financial sacrifice. The two administrations led by the supposedly progressive presidents, Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Moo-Hyun, followed such de facto orders from global neoliberal capitalism so earnestly that they ended up being repeatedly praised as Washington's model students. Their neoliberal policies and chaebol's resiliently corresponding performances soon induced the South Korean economy to resume its usual growth dynamic, however, with a consequence of becoming capitalism without or beyond national capitalist social relations. First, major South Korean firms survived the financial deadlock of 1997-1998 mainly on the basis of massive lay-offs and, despite their immediate recovery, have refused to reinstate regular employment to anywhere near the pre-crisis level. Most of their new employees have had to accept various types of non-regular employment, under which stable class-based bargaining power is unattainable and entitlement to social security benefits is seriously limited (Chang 2007). Second, a majority of industrial exporters have speedily transnationalized their production basis, massively relocating industrial and managerial jobs to countries with cheaper labor and/or big markets. Third, numerous small-and medium-sized industrial firms have tried to complement their weak competitiveness and financial vulnerability in the chaebo/-dominated economy by relying on foreign migrant workers' cheap labor. 7 Besides, various service businesses (e.g., restaurants, dispatched care-giving, etc.) have heavily relied on the relatively cheap labor supply by ethnic Koreans from China. 8 Fourth, the radically swift capital account liberalization allowed global finance to instantly take over major portions of stock ownership of South Korea's most profitable industrial exporters, utility firms, banks, etc., and thereby induced a global reconfiguration of South Korean capitalism. Fifth, the aggressive trade liberalization in terms of multilateral and bilateral FTAs has particularly devastated agriculture, which is land-scarce South Korea's most vulnerable sector, accelerating exodus of rural youth. In both agricultural

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production and familial reproduction, South Korean villagers now have to heavily rely on human inputs from poorer Asian societies, including ethnic Koreans from China. These neoliberal and/or global tendencies are not unique to South Korea. But their velocity and intensity are so extreme that the country appears as if it had been reborn overnight, shedding all the well-known characteristics as a society of clear class divisions and confrontations. Of course, the class conflicts that South Korean capital engage in have not disappeared but spread to other societies such as China, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, and even North Korea, whereas migrant workers from much poorer Asian countries constitute a new group of proletariat that are subjected to South Korea's timeworn sweatshop industrial regime. Also, foreign brides in rural families seem to constitute a sort of semi-proletariat in that most of them, much like their mothers-in-law in bygone years, undertake both productive and reproductive labor for their new family members. 9 However, these class relations are not governed by private material interests alone, but more crucially are predicated upon politically arranged conditions of economic, social, and other rights that are broadly interpretable as forms of citizenship (see Seol's chapter in this book). Among South Korean nationals within South Korea, the social and political primacy of direct capitalist class relations is rapidly attenuating as they are placed in various heterodoxical conditions of work and life- namely, transitory, partial and/or multiple employment, multiple and/or indirect structure of labor exploitation (such as dispatching), self-exploitative freelancing and small business, financial or and real estate speculation as a widespread form of income generation, consumer credit-based (vis-a-vis market or social wage-based) livelihood, extended educational competition (or educational credential inflation), prolonged material dependence (of young and not-so-young adults) on parents, minimalistic consumer life of poverty-stricken elders, and so on. Both in productive and reproductive activities, more and more South Koreans find that their material interests are, on the one hand, only vaguely identifiable in terms of class relations and, on the other hand, increasingly interpretable as hitherto neglected citizenship rights. While shop-floor class struggles are still materially crucial for various types of organized workers, it is the citizen consciousness of diverse types of exploited, alienated, and deceived social groups, including both Koreans and migrants, that provides the core ethical and social impetus for civil challenges to the state and its neoliberal policies and allies. University students asking for cheaper education and young mothers resisting risky trade of beef are modest but crucial manifestations of such new citizenship politics.

In perspective In theoretically elucidating South Korea's abrupt transition in citizenship politics, we can draw useful insights from the observations on late modem or late capitalist social situations offered by Ulrich Beck (Beck and Grande 2010) and Alaine Touraine ([1998] 2001). Their interpretations of neoliberal and/or global capitalism differ mutually, but can serve complementarily in explaining the drastic sociopolitical transitions in recent South Korea and elsewhere. Let us briefly examine each of their arguments. Beck (Beck and Grande 2010) proposes the concept of 'second modernity' to depict a civilizational condition that various (mostly negative) 'side-effects' of modernity add up to a qualitatively different situation in which the fundamental values of modernity are still respected, but have to be pursued with radically different social means and institutions under a 'cosmopolitan paradigm'. Such a new stage of human civilization

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is characterized by global free trade and financialization, deindustrialization and corporate deterritorialization, informatization and cyberspace, bioscientific manipulation of life forms, borderless ecological and epidemiological hazards, transnational demographic flows, and even globally financed and managed regional wars. In my view, to the extent that second modernity is an outcome of intensification of first modernity which, in tum, has pivoted around liberal capitalism in an overwhelming majority of nations, neoliberalization may be considered a critical manifestation of second modernity. Under second modernity, Beck argues, many social institutions of early modernity -the state, political parties, class organizations (such as labor unions), market economy, welfare system, schools, industrial enterprises, and families - abruptly become ineffective or dysfunctional. 10 Since these institutions increasingly show seemingly irreversible weaknesses in delivering social functions and individual utilities that used to be taken for granted under early modernity, it becomes unavoidable for individuals to (re)design their biographies in terms of permanently individualized endeavors, pursuits, and existences. It is in this way that individualization has become an essence of social change under second modernity. In his Beyond Neoliberalism ([1998] 2001), Alaine Touraine-a globally renowned theorist and advocate of 'new social movements' - tried to critically and proactively analyze the French social situation as it was rapidly enveloped by global capitalism. 11 While '[t]he opening up of the economy to world markets and the defense of vested social interests ... both led to the marginalization and sometimes even the exclusion of less well protected categories', many of these seemingly ill-fated social groups fought back successfully, often under the support of sympathetic intellectuals and concerned citizens, and even helped reformulate social values and political principles in the whole of society ([1998] 2001, p. 17). Building upon these remarkable socio-political experiences, Touraine tried to convince French society as well as himself on a possibility of social movement-led national reconstruction. 12 He remained fully hopeful when explaining in detail the mishaps and struggles of 'beurs affected by xenophobia, people with AIDS who had been victimized by a deplorable administrative management system, immigrants with no papers who had been trapped into an impossible situation by absurd laws or brutally sent back to their own countries, homeless families, and the unemployed' ([1998] 2001, p. 113). In a highly ambitious vision, he apparently suggested anew 'mode of modernization' ([1998] 2001, p. 9) based upon a partnership among underprivileged social groups, constructively critical intellectuals, and responsive state apparatuses. Apparently, South Korea seems to have entered Beck's second modern stage as rapidly increasing numbers of South Koreans express severe frustration with the government, political parties, labor unions, dominant industries, welfare programs, educational institutions, and even own families. Such widespread frustration may have begun with the unprecedented national financial crisis in the late 1990s, but the impressively immediate economic recovery has not alleviated but rather intensified most South Koreans' material and psychological discomfort. The post-crisis political economy in the country has been restructured in such a way that most social and political institutions have either become ineffective in protecting and improving most people's livelihood or turned dysfunctional in terms of aggravating the destitution, inequality, and alienation of grassroots people. In particular, the national framework of capitalism has been constantly losing not only its economic functions (e.g., labor supply, production basis, product demand, etc.), but also its social and political utilities (e.g., inter-class

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struggle and conciliation, class-based political competition, nationalized provision of education, care, and basic utilities, etc.). Concurrently, global supplies of portfolio capital, unskilled labor, and even brides have massively poured in so that the economic and social configurations of the country have been abruptly globalized (or, in Beck's wording, cosmopolitized). Besides, diverse groups of overseas Koreans (including North Korean refugees) have been accommodated as a sort of circumstantial citizens whose supposedly special status, in fact, closely reflects the economic interests and political needs of domestic elite and grassroots. 13 Once accepted, however, those unskilled foreign workers (concentrated in sweatshop factories), foreign brides (married, above all, to poor peasants), and overseas Koreans (permanently or temporarily residing in South Korea) have to endure the endemically tyrannical conditions of work and living that have inflicted and/or have been avoided by their local Korean counterparts. Under these conditions, nevertheless, South Koreans and their foreign mates in work and family have not necessarily been atomized (as would be predicted by Ulrich Beck). Their reactions and the social and intellectual environments surrounding them are somewhat reminiscent of the French situation analyzed by Alaine Touraine. When candlelight holders, online protesters, sit-in demonstrators, advocacy volunteers, and specialized activists address such diverse social concerns as food safety, affordable education, ecological protection, multiculturalism, protection of sexual, religious and other minorities, the rights of women, youth, tenants, foreign workers, etc., South Korea's sociopolitical landscape does not appear much different from that of Touraine's France. However, South Koreans have been engaged in much more steeply uphill battles because of the institutionally and ideologically infantile nature of their democracy and the pervasive legacy of the lengthy state authoritarianism. In this regard, South Korean intellectuals and activists have called for 'deepening of democracy' or 'second democratization'. 14 In a highly interesting or even intriguing aspect, the above-listed social protests, movements, and advocacies have not only been adversely suppressed by, but also helped to rectify the still substantially authoritarian political culture and governance. In the latter aspect, democracy has been evidently substantiated in terms of the specific citizenship rights of each political subject, be it in social, economic, cultural, ecological, and/or legal domain. For instance, the candle-light protesters have always been holding their candles toward the Blue House (i.e., the presidential complex), contending explicitly or implicitly that their causes constitute the sacrosanct basis of statecitizen relationship and that their solidarity can override any forms of top-down political ordinances and relations. Such sociopolitical development does not warrant that South Koreans can achieve stable justice even without class struggles, but it is certain to help complement the seriously curtailed class politics in bolstering the country's still fledgling democracy.

Structures and transformations of South Korean citizenship Various substances of the contributed articles in this volume have already been introduced above in elucidating South Korea's transition from class politics to citizenship politics. Broadly speaking, the authors of the individual chapters seem to concur on my characterization of the country's recent sociopolitical transition. Nonetheless, the theoretical and historico-social significance of each chapter's subject matter is not reducible

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to this grand theme alone. Roughly speaking, the contributions can be grouped into four broad themes: transformative state-society relationship and citizenship politics (Michael Seth; Chang Kyung-Sup); reshaping civil society and democratic citizenship (Seungsook Moon; Kong Suk-Ki); reconfigured nationhood and national citizenship (Chulwoo Lee; Minkyu Sung); neoliberal or cosmopolitan enlargement of Korean citizenship (Seol Dong-Hoon; Kim Hyun Mee). Michael Seth offers a historically nuanced citizenship perspective on one of the most distinctive characteristics of South Korean modernity, namely South Koreans' unequaled 'education zeal'. While education has been an essential tool for realizing the 'advantages of late development' in the modern era, its significance has been particularly conspicuous among East Asian societies. Japan's quick conversion into a powerful capitalist industrial system was critically facilitated by its successful promotion of public and high education. Such strategic utility of education was kept on Japan's mind when it implemented a colonial education policy in Korea by which most Koreans, as one type of Japan's undercitizens, were systematically kept alienated from high education. 15 On liberation, Koreans' educational frustration during the Japanese colonial period immediately turned into a national aspiration for education. With substantial American support and guidance before and after the Independence, the new state managed to establish and gradually strengthen a national public education system as a core basis for citizenship building. While the essential role of education for social and economic modernization was commonly acknowledged by both state elite and ordinary people, the state also tried to see public education from apolitical viewpoint. In a sense, the education zeal shared by virtually all Koreans was cunningly abused by the controversially installed rightwing regime under Rhee Syng-Man and, later on, by the military regimes under Park Chung Hee, etc., as a convenient condition for imposing political indoctrination and quasi-military regimentation through schooling. Such uncanny purpose ultimately backfired as university students and their intellectual professors began to launch forcefully organized protests for democratization. Campus life itself became part of the civil curricular for citizenship education. On the other hand, fierce educational competition has doubly disequalized society due to the extremely high cost of schooling and private tutoring and the endemic socioeconomic inequalities resulting from educational credential differences. Chang Kyung-Sup's chapter analyzes the complex and dynamic relationship between political economy and citizenship politics in the context of rapid capitalist development and neoliberal restructuring. It offers the concept of developmental citizenship to describe the basic nature of state-citizen interactions under the country's developmentalist political rule. While the developmental state once successfully mobilized and rewarded its citizenry in the state-organized programs of industrialization and economic growth, its reluctance to arrange adequate social security (or acknowledge its duty of protecting social citizenship) would result in mass devastation at times of economic depression. When the 1997 national financial crisis and the radical neoliberal measures for crisis management made developmental citizenship fundamentally untenable amid the massive disenfranchisement of laboring population from the industrial economy, the gross lack of social protection measures instantly drove a striking proportion of South Koreans to severe poverty. Addicted to developmental propaganda and opportunism, most South Koreans reacted to this situation by calling for immediate developmental revitalization, instead of demanding a serious welfare state regime. Their national economy did get revitalized, however, only by aggravating their material

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mishaps through rampant unemployment and underemployment and economic monopolization. It was only in this baffling context that South Koreans began to stage citizenship struggles for various social rights. Seungsook Moon deals with women's 'lived experiences' of citizenship as a social status in the post-democratization era. By carefully analyzing citizenship narratives of participants in a major women's movement organization, she reveals that many South Korean women have struggled to establish a meaningful and constructive status as communally associated citizens. Such cognitive aspiration for citizenship is particularly strong among women with 'the combination of better access to economic and cultural resources and experience of upward mobility'. However, most women's understanding of the so-called women's issues intricately reflects the dominant logic of the patriarchal political economy by which unpaid or underpaid reproductive labor supposedly belongs to the private sphere. This epistemological or ideological dilemma is exacerbated by the uneasy relationship between women's movement groups and other NGOs and activist groups pursuing 'social movements'. While women's movement groups are often asked to collaborate for urgent political and social causes of broad significance, their own struggles for women's issues are rarely backed up by a broad coalitional support of civil society. In this context, the strengthening of women's movements will not only elevate women citizens' social and material status further, but also help rectify the patriarchal obstacles to broad-based citizenship struggles for social and economic rights. Kong Suk-Ki offers a systematic appraisal of the cosmopolitan status of South Korean civil society by analyzing the conditions, processes, and consequences of the engagement of South Korean NGOs, unions, and activists in the global justice movements such as the anti-globalization campaigns in Seattle, Cancun, Hong Kong, etc., the World Social Forums, and so on. The international reputation of South Korea's combative civil society was fully borne out by the headline-making radical acts of a few Korean participants during the anti-globalization protests. South Korean NGOs and activists were once eagerly expected to lead anti-globalization struggles transnationally. However, their physical and emotional intensity built up through decades of life-and-death struggle against chauvinistic developmental authoritarianism has served no substitute for the cosmopolitan outlook and network required for a global civil leadership. Besides, South Korea's abrupt and incomplete democratization has demanded them to keep concentrating their struggle on national issues. The degree of such introversion, however, differs significantly among different types of social movements. Not surprisingly, among the four types of social movements examined by Kong, environmental and human rights movements (belonging to the so-called 'new social movements') have faired much better than labor and agrarian movements (belonging to the 'old social movements') in terms of 'global framing' of agenda and struggle. These differences may be a natural outcome of the relatively cosmopolitan nature of environmental and human rights issues. But, in the current era of neoliberal globalization, even the labor and agrarian issues have been drastically globalized so that global framing is indispensable even for these supposedly old social movements. Chulwoo Lee scrutinizes the extremely complicated issue 'of identifying, and of determining the status of, ethnic Korean migrants who assert membership of the Korean national community'. The turbulent political and social experiences of the Korean nation in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries led to massive diasporas across Eurasia ~ in particular, large Korean communities in Manchuria

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(currently Northeast China), former Soviet Republics in Central Asia (mainly Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan),and Japan. After liberation, South Korea's political and economic dependence on the USA has been responsible for sustained streams of economic, social, and educational migrants to the USA. The dramatic internal transitions in Soviet Union and China and their diplomatic normalization with South Korea have been accompanied by the ardent desire of ethnic Koreans there to visit or immigrate to South Korea. The South Korean state, under a conscious position of identifying itself as the supposedly legitimate heir of the pre-colonial Korean nation-state, has accommodated these co-ethnic visitors and migrants under a complex set of political considerations (for instance, the diplomatic relationship with the states with which these overseas Koreans' citizenship rests) and administrative instruments (that is, identifying mechanisms for family line and ethnicity such as Japan's colonial family registries, socialist household registries of China and the Soviet Union, etc.). Eventually, what may be called 'ethnizenship' has evolved to cater to various social and economic interests of overseas Koreans. However, this quasi-citizenship regime has recently been complicated by the economic(and political) considerations in respect to more affluent groups of overseas Koreans in North America and Japan, whose superior occupational, educational, and/or financial conditions allow for statuses more closely approximating full citizenship. Minkyu Sung offers a commanding analysis of the political and psychiatric parameters for North Korean refugees' settlement and adaptation in South Korea. The post-liberation history of the inter-Korea relationship has been critically characterized by various streams of exile population between the two Korean states - in number, predominantly from North to South Korea. Most significant occasions of South-bound movement include: the fleeing of North Korean landlords and entrepreneurs amid the communist revolution in the late 1940s; the arrival of North Korean refugees during the Korean War; the mostly via-China exodus of North Korean population hit by economic crisis and/or natural disaster since the mid 1990s. While those few North Koreans who 'defected' to South Korea during the latter's military rule of the 1960s to early 1990s were generously greeted and strategically used for anti-North Korea propaganda politics, the massive arrival of North Korean 'refugees' in recent years has required the South Korean government and society to conjure up a social policy for helping to transform these supposedly harassed and impaired human subjects into viable citizens of liberal capitalism. Not only pedagogic guidance for facilitating North Koreans' adaptation to South Korean society but also psychiatric diagnosis and intervention for specifying and alleviating their presumed traumas and related psycho-cultural problems have been called in. The concerned psychiatric practice appears to have been structurally politicized as it takes for granted problematized North Korean political and social order (besides the traumas experienced during the defection process) as a root cause of North Koreans' supposed psychological problems and defects. In conservative understanding, they are seen as psychological victim of North Korea's 'human rights crisis'. This has led to a social situation that I suggest to term as sympathetic stigmatization - these compatriots from North Korea with politically caused unfortunate traumas and related psychological difficulties have to be sympathetically embraced by South Korean society but still need to strive for self-transformation into capable citizens of (neo )liberal capitalism, accepting inferior labor market status in the meantime. North Koreans in increasing numbers have found this situation flatly

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disgraceful and unacceptable, and thereby opted to migrate further to the United States, etc., or even return to North Korea. Seol Dong-Hoon provides a highly detailed account of the economic, social, and legal status of foreign workers in South Korea. The South Korean government confers different residential, occupational, and welfare rights to different types of foreign populations such as professional workers and investors, less skilled workers, less skilled ethnic Koreans from overseas, undocumented workers, and marriage-based immigrants and permanent residents. In the early years of labor import, unskilled workers from poorer Asian countries were not even formally recognized as regular wage laborers but conveniently called 'industrial trainees'. Under mounting ethical and political pressures as well as practical necessities, the work permit system was adopted in 2004 to legally acknowledge and regulate the laboring status of various types of foreign workers. While the South Korean policy is a manifestly neoliberal regime of transnational labor outsourcing, its legal and humanitarian evolution has been critically facilitated by human rights as a global citizenship regime and by bilateral international agreements for reciprocal protection of basic social rights. However, less skilled foreign workers' reproductive rights are still rigidly restricted, with their families barred from residing together. Also, undocumented workers, as illegal aliens, are denied most of the basic social protection measures (except industrial accident compensation) and thus have to carry on chronically risky work and living. Kim Hyun Mee provides a thorough critical account of the social and technocratic environments and the everyday familial situations of explosively increasing marriages between South Korean men (mainly in rural areas) and foreign women (mostly from poor Asian countries). The recent economic instability and bipolarization have made rapidly increasing numbers of South Korean men unattractive as South Korean women's marriage partners. This dilemma is particularly acute in rural areas, from which most young women have exited to evade deprived cultural environments and conservative familial norms, not to mention the gloomy material prospect for farming. From the early 1990s, underclass men in urban peripheries began to find Joseonjok (Korean Chinese) women as attractive alternative for their urgent marriage, and soon approached other Chinese (mostly Han Chinese) women similarly. From the mid 1990s, this social trend was proactively accelerated by rural communities and governments that were beset with involuntary bachelorhood of even many middle-aged peasants, shrinking fertility, and a threat of demographic meltdown of communities. Many localities even enacted rules and policies that formally purport to help rural bachelors find foreign brides through financial and administrative assistance. The communal and governmental intervention in rural marriage was facilitated by an instantaneous growth of the marriage brokerage business that broke path for a huge transnational marriage market for poor Asian women - in particular, Vietnamese women. Being the only cosmopolit(an)ized, if commercially, entity - vis-a-vis Korean villagers and their local governments and Asian brides, often, from villages themselves - the marriage brokerage firms have played a comprehensive set of functions, ranging from mail-order type matchmaking to post-marriage 'in-warranty' services (such as counseling by telephone or visit, running Korean language classes, and sometimes offering parent-like disciplinary measures on foreign brides). The sheer number of explosively increasing transnational marriages - about two hundred thousand marriages by the first decade of the new century - forced the South Korean (national) government to step in immediately with measures for facilitating foreign brides' adjustment and stabilizing their

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marriage relationship. The no-secret instrumentalist position of South Korean families and their local and national governments for stabilizing social reproduction (e.g., making bachelors 'full men', procreating children, providing domestic service and familial care for elderly, etc.) has been somewhat complemented by the cosmopolitan concerns and helps by impressively increasing numbers of civil activists and intellectuals, with one consequence being the official name of the concerned public policy, 'the multicultural family policy'. Such euphemistic term has nevertheless effected a constant moral pressure on the concerned administrative and professional bodies for strengthening the genuinely multicultural nature of their programs and activities, but this pressure does not seem to meaningfully penetrate the private domain of foreign brides' family life and relations with their largely conservative husbands and parents-in-law.

Whither South Korean citizenship? The new century's diverse sociopolitical developments, including the problems analyzed by the contributors to this book, converge on the growing significance of citizenship politics in South Korean society. Despite the variegated backgrounds, processes, and purposes of the involved movements and struggles in citizenship politics, there is a gradual merger of the underlying aspirations toward an inclusionary welfare state system by which social, economic, and cultural rights of various deprived and alienated social groups, including many circumstantial citizens from poorer countries (including North Korean refugees), can be protected sincerely and steadily. By early 2011, the welfare state has suddenly become a national aim involving both conservative and progressive factions in political and civil society, insinuating that the oncoming elections may be fought over serious welfare issues for the first time in the modern political history. 16 Comparatively speaking, this is an ironic development because the welfare state system has originated from the social democratic evolution of class politics, or as a historical outcome of state-mediated compromise between capital and labor, in the West European context. South Koreans are now seeking the welfare state system at a time when their class positions and relations have been abruptly destabilized and seriously obscured. Besides, the labor-representing political parties, whose West European counterparts have served as the engine of the welfare state, have remained extremely weak in their political footing and influence due to the particular historical and political reasons I explained elsewhere (Chang and Chang 2002). It is to be seen whether the country's respectably aggressive social movements and intellectual activism can effectively make up for such adverse social and political conditions in breaking a new political path for social democracy and establishing the welfare state system as an inclusionary citizenship regime.

Acknowledgements This introductory chapter has been prepared by revising and expanding the Introduction to the special issue of Citizenship Studies, Volume 16 Number I (2012). The publisher's permission is appreciated.

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Notes I. See Seth's chapter in this book issue on South Koreans' 'education zeal' from a citizenship perspective and my book, South Korea under Compressed Modernity: Familial Political Economy in Transition (2010, Chapter 3), on South Koreans' familial educational pursuits as a manifestation of compressed modernity. According to OECD data, the average annual tuition of South Korean students was US$8519 for private universities and colleges and US $4717 for public ones. Both were the world's second highest, behind the USA only ( Chosun Ilbo, http://www.chosun.com [Accessed 16 June 2011]). See Korea Higher Education Research Center (2011) for a thorough critical analysis of the social, political, and financial factors behind the tuition issues. 2. See Turner and Chang (2012) on the importance of consumer citizenship in the post-developmental context. 3. See Amnesty lnternational's (2008) report for a detailed account of the South Korean government's abusive practices in this regard. 4. See Chang (2012a, 2012b) on the nature of state-citizen/labor relationship under developmentalist governance. 5. The Anti-UR (Anti-Rice Import) Million People's Petition Movement was launched as the South Korean government was set to sign the UR agreement in 1993. The petition was actually signed by about 13 million people, making a Guinness world record. 6. Cho (2007) critically assessed this tendency as singaebaljuui (neo-developmentalism). 7. See Seol's chapter in this book on the economic, social, and cultural conditions of foreign migrant workers in South Korea. 8. See the chapters by Seo! and by Lee in this book on the legal and other status of ethnic Koreans who have recently arrived (back) in South Korea for various purposes. 9. See Chang (1995) on the semi-proletarian status of South Korean women during the early-to mid-industrialization period. 10. Relatedly, Crouch (2004) indicates that the 'post-democratic' tendencies in advanced industrial democracies have subordinated national social, and economic interests to the rapidly growing power and interests of the transnational or global bourgeois classes in financial, industrial, and even agricultural sectors. 11. See my review of this book in Contemporary Sociology (Chang 2003). 12. At the same time, Touraine voiced aloud critique of la pensee unique (meaning one-way thinking), which is 'roughly equivalent to the TINA ("There ls No Alternative") of the Thatcher years in Britain' ([1998] 2001, p. 118). He rebuked a sort of defeatist globalism as French tend to think, 'given that we live in a globalized society consisting of transformations and technologies, of new transnational units of production and financial networks, and given that new industrial countries where wages are often very low are entering it too, it is absurd to speak of political choice' ([1998] 2001, p. 12). To him, globalization -more precisely, global financial capitalism -is not an unprecedented form of capitalism, and thus its adverse consequences may well be overcome by the conscious and concerted efforts of national society and polity. 13. I suggested this concept to Yoon (2012) for his analysis of the fluctuating status of North Korean refugees in South Korea. 14. See Choi (2002) for a thorough and persuasive account of this situation. 15. I propose the concept of undercitizen to depict the stratified nature of colonials' citizenship. This concept may also be used in describing the status of various categories of migrant persons nowadays. 16. In an interesting development, Park Geun-Hye, a daughter of Park Chung-Hee and a most favored candidate for next national presidency, declared on 20 December 2010 that she would pursue a proactive, preventive, and sustained welfare state system with South Korean characteristics (Yonhapnews, http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr [Accessed 20 December 2010]). This triggered wide political and social repercussions, setting a serious stage for politics of the welfare state. Major opposition candidates for next presidency had to immediately follow the suit, and many media began to carry major special series on welfare issues. Park ended up getting elected into the nation's presidency in December 2012.

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References Amnesty International, 2008. Policing the candlelight protests in South Korea. London: Amnesty International. Beck, U. and Grande, E., 2010. Varieties of second modernity: extra-European and European experiences and perspectives. British journal of sociology, 61(3), 409-443. Chang, K.-S., 1995. Gender and abortive capitalist social transformation: semi-proletarianization of South Korean women. International journal of comparative sociology, 36(1-2), 61-81. Chang, K.-S., 1999. Compressed modernity and its discontent: South Korean society in transition. Economy and society, 28(1), 30-55. Chang, K.-S., 2003. Review of Alaine Touraine, Beyond Neoliberalism. Contemporary sociology, 32 (3), 361-363. Chang, K.-S., 2007. The end of developmental citizenship? Restructuring and social displacement in post-crisis South Korea. Economic and political weekly, 42(50), 67-72. Chang, K.-S., 2010. South Korea under compressed modernity: familial political economy in transition. London/New York: Routledge. Chang, K.-S., 2012a. Developmental citizenship in perspective: the South Korean case and beyond. In: Chang, K.-S. and B.S. Turner, eds. Contested citizenship in East Asia: developmental politics, national unity, and globalization. London/New York: Routledge, 182-202. Chang, K.-S., 2012b. Predicaments of neoliberalism in the post-developmental liberal context. In: Chang, K.-S., B. Fine and L. Weiss, eds. Developmental politics in transition: the neoliberal era and beyond. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 70-91. Chang, K.-S., 2013. Developmental politics in South Korea: from developmental liberalism to neoliberalism. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming). Chang, K.-S. and Chang, G.-Y., 2002. Cold war, compressed modernity, and labor politics: dislocated political society and democratic labor party in South Korea [in Korean]. Studies in international a.flairs, 24, 151-191. Cho, M.-R., 2007. Developmentalism and democracy [in Korean]. Bipyeong [Critique], 17 (winter), 131-152. Choi, J.-J., 2002. Democracy after democratization: crisis and conservative origin of Korea's democracy [in Korean]. Seoul: Humanitas. Crouch, C., 2004. Post-democracy. London: Polity Press. Korea Higher Education Research Center, 2011. A country of mad tuitions [in Korean]. Seoul: Gaemagowon. McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L. and Cook, J., 2001. Birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. Annual review of sociology, 27, 415-444. Touraine, A., [1998] 2001. Beyond neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Turner, B.S. and Chang, K.-S., 2012. Whither East Asian citizenship? In: Chang, K.-S. and B.S. Turner, eds. Contested citizenship in East Asia: developmental politics, national unity, and globalization. London/New York: Routledge, 243-255. Yoon, I.-J., 2012. Circumstantial citizens: North Korean 'migrants' in South Korea. In: Chang, K.-S. and B.S. Turner, eds. Contested citizenship in East Asia: developmental politics, national unity, and globalization. London/New York: Routledge, 218-239.

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