Pandemic Nationalism in South Korea
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Pandemic Nationalism in South Korea Joseph Yi 1 & Wondong Lee 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract As in much of the world, the Coronovirus pandemic has dominated South Korean politics in 2020. Compared to other countries, Seoul’s approach has been highly nationalist and politicized, as the ruling party lauded its pandemic response as the global standard and linked it to a larger, leftist-nationalist agenda. This “pandemic-leftist” discourse peaked around the April 15 midterm elections, but subsided the following month, as domestic and foreign setbacks arose. To explain, firstly, a competitive-nationalist race to flatten the infection curve encouraged the government to infringe on the civil liberties of infected patients, and society to stigmatize them. Other countries contained Covid-19 without such rights violations and stigma. Secondly, critics distinguished between the government’s relative success in pandemic response and its general failures in economic and foreign policies. Instead of asking other countries to learn from one’s country, each country would do well to learn from the experiences of others and to continually improve its own policies. Keywords Korea . Japan . Covid-19 . Pandemic . Nationalism . Media . Politics
Pandemic Politics and “South Korean Model” Moon Jae-in was elected as South Korea’s President on 10 May 2017, after the year-long scandal and impeachment of former, conservative (rightist) party President Park Geun-hye. Representing the politically leftist-nationalist, Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), Moon started with astronomical public approval ratings (around 84%),1 as he promised to dramatically improve the people’s livelihoods and relations with North Korea. The Moon Administration raised the minimum wage by 16.4% in 2018, the largest increase in nearly two decades, and by 10.9% in 2019,2 and limited businesses to a 52-h work 1
Katharina Buchholz, “President Moon’s Approval Rating Is in Free Fall,” Statista (29 May 2019), https://www.statista.com/chart/18207/presidentmoon-jae-in-approval-rating-south-korea
2
Lee Ho-jeong, “2020’s minimum wage to rise 2.9% to 8590 won,” Korea JoongAng Daily (12 July 2019), https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/ article/article.aspx?aid=3065452
* Wondong Lee [email protected] Joseph Yi [email protected] 1
Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea
2
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
week. In 2018, Moon became the first sitting president to meet with a North Korean leader (Kim Jong-un) three times. However, by 2019, Moon’s approval rating dropped by more than half to low 40s and even 30s, because of economic slowdown, lack of progress on North Korea talks, and political scandals (Yonhap News, 18 Oct. 2019). Pundits expected Moon’s ruling DPK party to lose seats in the midterm (15 April 2020) legislative elections. However, the spread of the Coronovirus to South Korea, with the first reported case on 20 January 2020, upended such expectations. Initially, the Moon Administrati
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