North Korean Posters as a Mean of Propaganda

Propaganda is an attempt to spread social and political values to influence peoples thinking, as well as to control and shape their behavior. It is an inseparable tool of the North Korean state. In a totalitarian state where digital information is restricted, the standards of living are low, and access to education is limited, propaganda is a part of almost all everyday routines. Its key function is to support the existing regime and teach citizens to obey it. Drawing on semiotic methodologies, this article examines North Korean propaganda through the prism of visual art and identifies distinctive features of posters as one of the major elements of the complex system of North Korean propaganda. The relevance of this work lies in the permanent interest in the phenomenon of North Korean propaganda in the international arena. The purpose of this work is to study the distinctive features and characteristics of propaganda posters as an integral part of North Korean propaganda. The objectives of this work are a detailed consideration of the propaganda system, its distinctive features, structuring of campaign posters, slogans, and messages with their accompanying translation, embedded within this type of propaganda.

Nationalism

South Korea’s nationalism and political history have been shaping each other since the late nineteenth century. While anti-colonial nationalism has been the most important element of contemporary South Korean political identity, the South Korean state has also utilized and altered the forms and contents of South Korean nationalism. Key events in South Korean political history such as colonial experiences, national division, the Korean War, authoritarian rule, democratization, and globalization have been interacting with evolving discourses of nationalism in South Korean society. This chapter reviews the historical development of Korean nationalism, while emphasizing the interactions between nationalism and political history. It also suggests that Korean nationalism is at a crossroads amid democratic consolidation and globalization.

Challenging the “Hierarchy of Nationhood”: Diasporic Entitlement and the Case of Korean Chinese (Chosŏnjok) in South Korea

With about 7.5 million people, the Korean diaspora is concentrated in China, Japan, North America, and the former Soviet Union. Since the 1990s, many ethnic Koreans have been “returning” to South Korea, their putative ethnic homeland. Significantly, their treatment by the state has been unequal: On issues of residency and employment rights, ethnic Koreans from China (Chosŏnjok) and the former Soviet Union were relegated to second-class status compared to those from North America. This inequality is encapsulated in the phrase, used by a number of scholars, the “hierarchy of nationhood.” Surprisingly, perhaps, the Chosŏnjok community challenged this unequal treatment by asserting rights based on colonial victimhood, ethnic sameness, and cultural authenticity. While such expressions of entitlement are not unusual among marginalized diasporic groups, the Chosŏnjok achieved something remarkable, namely, they succeeded in gaining political and economic rights initially denied by the Korean state. Simply put, they successfully challenged the hierarchy of nationhood. Using a discursive institutional framework, we endeavor to explain how and why entitlement claims by the Chosŏnjok were effective. More specifically, we argue that the struggle by Chosŏnjok to overturn the hierarchy of nationhood had little to nothing to do with a coercive, dyadic power struggle against the Korean state, but was instead a fundamentally discursive struggle, which itself is a product or reflection of discursive agency, both on the part of Chosŏnjok but also, crucially, on the part of their key allies—religious leaders and civic organizations—in South Korea.

An Old Right in New Bottles: State without Nation in South Korean New Right Historiography

The New Right movement that arose in the early 2000s in South Korea was a response to a change in ownership of Korean nationalist discourse during the preceding decades. Although nationalism was the preserve of the South Korean right wing from the trusteeship crisis in 1945 through the end of the Park Chung Hee regime, a historiographical revolt in the 1980s that emphasized the historical illegitimacy of the South Korean state allowed the Left to appropriate nationalism. With the loss of nationalism from its arsenal, the Right turned to postnationalist neoliberal discourse to blunt the effectiveness of leftist nationalist rhetoric. An examination of New Right historiography on the colonial and postliberation periods, however, shows that despite the recent change in conservatives’ stance on nationalism, a preoccupation with the legitimacy of the South Korean state remains at the center of right-wing historical narratives. The New Right represents old wine in new bottles.

CHINA’S SHIFTING BEHAVIOUR TOWARDS SOUTH KOREA IN THAAD CRISIS RESOLUTION IN KOREAN PENINSULA

ABSTRACTThe THAAD crisis between South Korea and China occurred due to the installation of the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system by South Korea with the help of the United States which was considered as a threat to China's national security. China strongly opposed the installation of the defense system and imposed unofficial sanctions in a form of a boycott in the field of South Korean tourism, products, and pop culture, which provided significant losses due to China's retaliation. After the South Korean state visit to China which was held in Beijing, China’s boycott was later lifted, but the THAAD installed in South Korea remain stayed and deployed. Thus the question arises about why China chose to soften and not force the South Koreans to withdraw THAAD. This article uses the qualitative research method of literature studies and uses variables of foreign policy theory by Yuen Foon Khong as the theoretical framework in this paper. Therefore, it can be seen that China's softening of the THAAD issue is caused by the influence of China’s "peripheral diplomacy" foreign policy and the shifting of Chinese behavior so that China does not impose its will on the South Korean THAAD system to maintain good relations with South Korea as a peripheral country. Keywords: China, China’s Behavior, Foreign Policy, South Korea, THAAD

Ideas, Discourse, and the Microfoundations of South Korea’s Diasporic Engagement: Explaining the Institutional Embrace of Ethnic Koreans Since the 1990s

This article endeavors to explain South Korea’s institutional turn to “diaspora engagement,” which began in earnest in the late 1990s. This shift can easily be attributed to instrumentalist calculations on the part of the South Korean state, i.e., as an effort to “tap into” or exploit the human and capital resources of ethnic Koreans living outside of the country. But instrumental calculations and interests, while significant and clearly proximate, were not the only nor necessarily the most important (causal) factors at play. Using a discursive institutional and microfoundational approach, we argue that underlying the institutional shift to diaspora engagement, was both an intentional and unintentional reframing of the Korean diaspora as “brethren” and “national assets,” a powerful discursive combination. This reframing did not come about automatically but was instead pushed forward by sentient or discursive agents, including Chŏng Chu-yŏng (the founder of Hyundai) and Yi Kwang-gyu, who was a Seoul National University professor and later the third president of the Overseas Koreans Foundation. Journalists, religious leaders and other activists within South Korea’s NGO community, as well as ethnic Koreans themselves, also played key roles as discursive agents in this reframing process. Central to our discursive institutional and microfoundational approach is the assertion that ideas and discourse were key causal factors in the institutional shift to South Korea’s engagement with the Korean diaspora.

The New Right and the 1948 Foundation View: A Failed Revision of South Korean Cultural Memory

The emergence of the South Korean New Right movement in the mid-2000s led to the questions of how to commemorate and evaluate the ROK state establishment in 1948, and when to precisely trace such a “foundation” (1919 or 1948?) to be vividly discussed in South Korean society. Was 1948 primarily a political division? Or was it a “foundation for success”? Following the 2008 Foundation Day Dispute, a significant number of scholarly works on the subject has been produced. This article analyses the conservative side of this discourse, approaching the foundation dispute as a conservative attempt to regain hegemony over South Korean Cultural memory in post-democratisation South Korea. Analysing New Right-authored historiography on the subject of “foundation,” the present study discloses how conservatives narrated the formative years of the South Korean state, arguing that merely dismissing the New Right as historical revisionists is too simple a conclusion. Rather, this article argues that struggles over Cultural memory are rooted in the ideological and institutional polarisation of South Korean intellectuals in contemporary South Korea. Furthermore, by contextualising the Foundation View against progressive historiography within South Korea as well as Cold War history in a global context, this study answers why the Foundation View ultimately failed to gain acceptance.