Hallyu and Crisis

In episode five ("A Fair World") of Netflix Korea's international hit series, Squid Game (Ojingŏ Keim, 2021 - ), we learn the origin of Gi-hun's (Lee Jung-jae) misery. Keeping night watch in the player dormitory to protect his alliance group from attack, Gi-hun (a.k.a. player 456) remembers the violent labor strike that he participated in at his former employer's factory, an automobile manufacturer where he had worked for over a decade. Specifically, Gi-hun remembers a co-worker being beaten to death. His partner for the night watch, the elderly Il-nam (O Yeong-su) recalls his own memory of the well-publicized incident and remarks, "someone died there, right?" The reference is to the 2009 SsangYong Motors strike when 976 workers seized the company's plant in Pyeongtaek and held it from May 22 to August 5, 2009. The management's reaction was severe and eventually violent. After shutting off power and water and denying medical care, riot police were eventually called in to end the standoff. Twenty-six workers died in the wake of the strike from suicide or disease after being terminated from their jobs.1 To add insult to injury, the Korean Supreme Court overturned a lower court's decision to affirm the legitimacy of the layoffs that precipitated the strike.2

In episode five, roughly the midpoint of the first season, the strike is represented, counterfactually and crucially, as if it were happening in the player dormitory. We see Gi-hun looking at the floor of the large room where the contestants sleep. We see canisters of tear gas skittering across the floor, releasing their toxins. The formerly diegetic site here pivots into one of extradiegetic memory. With the cloud of tear gas now occluding the bunk beds, we return to the trauma of 2009. We see riot police beating a helpless striker who turns toward the camera and Gi-hun's perspective before the striker is bashed in the head by a club. It is not until Il-nam interrupts Gi-hun's memory that we return to the dormitory. Their subsequent conversation explains what had caused the flashback. Like that evening in the dormitory, Gi-hun had stayed awake at night to keep watch, fearful of the riot police who might barge in at an unexpected moment. He and his fellow strikers had also built a barricade, like the one his allied fellow players had constructed to protect them from the stronger group on the other side of the room. The scene's clever editing, which renders the dormitory analogous to the occupied SsangYong factory, pointedly imagines the strike as an extension of the brutal game depicted in the show. Hence, game space (as it tends to do) becomes a heuristic for thinking about broader forms of competition. Indeed, this is a fundamental premise of Squid Game. Beginning with the conclusion of the tug-of-war game at the start of the episode, a game in which the contestants must work together to defeat another team, the episode is concerned with makeshift alliances of various sorts, from the player's various alliances with strangers to whom they must entrust their lives to the hasty alliance the doctor in the group of players makes with some of the game handlers who surreptitiously scheme to sell the organs of dead contestants for profit. This thematization of provisional solidarity sets up the gut-wrenching marble game of episode six, when the fiction of alliance is exploded when the players pair off with favored partners only to learn that just one of each duo will make it out alive.

Relatedly, the larger function of episode five is to situate the bizarre game that these players have willingly committed to participating in within a larger historical frame of South Korean global modernity. To this end, the episode also delivers that vastly underrated thriller trope of a detective going to a library or archive for the purpose of understanding the otherwise strange circumstances in which the detective has become embroiled. Hence, attached to the front man's quarters is a storage room containing files about the history of the game, including detailed profiles of each player over the course of many years. The dates here are important. We see that the game began in 1988, that watershed year in South Korean history marked by the end of the dictatorship and the first democratic elections. This was also the year of the Seoul Olympics, which is frequently heralded as the point of Korea's emergence onto the global stage. The first files that are illuminated by the detective Jun-ho's (Wi Ha-joon) flashlight are those from the 1998 edition of the game. This is the year that the Asian Financial Crisis, begun at the end of the previous year, fully manifests in South Korea. Here, the crisis was more commonly referred to as the IMF Crisis, after the International Monetary Fund, which imposed harsh conditions on the bailout package it offered to the Korean government, thus fundamentally restructuring the Korean economy and making it far more open to western capital. It is now commonly believed that the terms of the bailout package were worse than the original crisis itself. One of the key elements of the terms was a radical change in labor policy, encouraging much more flexible employment practices for Korean firms, which had historically provided workers with far more stable (often lifetime) employment. After pausing on the 1999 volume of player profiles, Jun-ho scans the shelves and we see the passing of the years as marked by thick archival volumes, each year encompassing boxes of files, until he arrives at the 2020 game files, the year before the current game, where he finds his own brother's profile.

Gi-hun's flashback from 2021 to 2009 adds texture to the detective's quick historical overview by providing a case study of a life determined by a series of cascading crises. If the present is best epitomized by a zero-sum game in which only 1 of 456 contestants survives to win the cash prize, then Gi-hun's memory links that cultural diagnosis to a signal event that epitomizes the broader transition the Korean economy has undergone over the past few decades. For most workers (notably, the field of players in the game come from all walks of life) once thriving in a booming manufacturing economy, the successive crises since 1998 have dramatically eroded quality of life, and produced conditions in which they had to improvise, either through highly competitive commercial ventures (opening restaurants that chased the latest fad, like fried chicken or Taiwanese cakes) or increasingly insecure forms of employment. At the same time, high interest informal lending (legal and not) skyrocketed in the country, putting additional pressure on ordinary people (including many of the contestants depicted in the show) trying to keep their heads above water. The South Korean economy moved from high growth rates during its developmental phase to stagnation while social inequality quickly increased, even as the children of wealthy families were frequently fetishized as the heroes of television dramas. Indeed, most of the contestants in the show's game experienced the harms of this transitional historical period as it produced the difficult conditions that led them to opt into the game's high stakes competition. The game space of Squid Game is thus not a fantastic respite from a brutal Korean economy but rather a stylized expression of it, recoding distinct historical moments of crisis as children's games, from the brutalities of war in Red Light/Green Light (episode one) to the frustrations of organized labor in the Tug of War (episode four/five) to the vertiginous blind entrepreneurialism implied in the glass panel bridge (episode seven).

And just as Squid Game can be understood as an expression of the cascading series of crises stemming from the IMF Crisis in South Korea, we can also see the show more specifically as commentary on the place of South Korean culture industries under the rubric of Hallyu (or literally Korean Wave) within the larger historical trajectory from which it derives. To this end, we must see Hallyu not just as a massive explosion of creativity in South Korean popular culture in music, television, and film that harmonized the efforts of artists and businesses but also as a highly-funded, state-coordinated strategy that  reproduced and transposed the logics of industrial developmentalism of the earlier postwar years, during which South Korea rapidly grew from one of the poorest economies in the world to one of the richest. The decision in 1994 by President Kim Young Sam to emphasize the culture industries is often cited as a key origin point of Hallyu. As the story goes, President Kim reacted to a report that global box office receipts for the Steven Spielberg hit, Jurassic Park (1993) had surpassed the export sales figures for Hyundai automobiles. Hoping to capitalize on such opportunities, President Kim's administration passed aggressive legislation that would help stimulate South Korean cultural production just as his predecessors had done for the other industries that previously drove the nation's economic growth. The story is often overstated. But though it tends to downplay the role of the creativity, ingenuity, and sheer determination that characterizes much of South Korean popular culture in the past three decades since the pivot, it does also remind us that the pivot toward culture that culminated in Academy Awards and internationally acclaimed Netflix hits was neither autogenous nor accidental.

Often forgotten from the Hyundai/Jurassic Park story is the economic context in which the president's decision was made. At the time of the decision in 1994, the South Korean economy had registered two successive years of low GDP growth. While the actual numbers (6.2% and 6.88%) would be wonderful news in 2022, they were not only disappointing after a three-decade long period of double-digit economic growth. but more importantly suggested that the rapid developmental period that South Korea had relished since the 1960s was coming to an end. Indeed, Kim Young Sam's presidency would end with the IMF crisis in 1997-1998, which ushered in a period leading directly to the more stagnant conditions characterizing the contemporary economic moment captured in Squid Game.

The other important context for the state investment in cultural production was the global success of Japanese popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s, which offered benchmarks, models, and cautionary tales for Korean forays into the sector. In his landmark study of Japanese media globalization of the period, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (2002), Koichi Iwabuchi argued that this cultural production at once negotiated western media influence while rearticulating its historically vexed relationship with Japan's neighbors in Asia. But coming at the end of this period of globally popular media, when the downturn of the Japanese economy had come to seem permanent, the so-called "lost decade," Iwabuchi's study was also something of a swan song that marked the end of this "unexpected" moment of mass cultural exporting. And significantly, the book's final paragraphs describe the rise of Korean popular culture flowering at the time of writing. The pairing is illustrative for our context here as well. Just as Japanese popular culture reaches its apex after the dramatic collapse of its asset price bubble in 1991, Hallyu emerges most forcefully after South Korea's IMF Crisis in 1997-1998. In both cases cultural production became increasingly important to the national economic outlook as more traditional sectors failed. There are of course important differences. K-pop music, for example, has emerged at the same time as the expansion of new media modes of music distribution, while J-pop's apex required it to rely on a model that depended more directly on record sales. In addition, South Korea has a much smaller domestic market than Japan's, making the export imperative even stronger. But in both cases, the compensatory promise of the cultural export business becomes more pressing in the shadows of seeming endless economic stagnation and recession. As Iwabuchi writes, "In this gloomy situation, connecting to outer worlds, particularly to 'Asia,' comes to have a renewed significance for Japan to find its way out of the current wretched condition."3 Notice here that trade becomes subsumed within an abstraction ("connecting to outer worlds") that ceases to distinguish between acts of communication and exchange, thus occluding the distinction between friendship and commerce.

As in the case of contemporary social media companies that are also fond of this term, connection here is a thinly veiled euphemism for revenue seeking. In the case of Japan in the 1980s and South Korea a decade later, the imperative toward replacing industrial outputs as both economies began to deindustrialize heightened as the task turned toward replacing revenue generated in each nation's postwar developmental phase. In her book, Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema (2016), Youngmin Choe suggests that the category of Hallyu has become vague, becoming "so broad that it now seems to signify any Korean cultural export," even those that fall outside of the historical period the term was originally designed to designate. Thus, here we must insist on returning this capacious group of cultural exports to the historical framework in which they became so necessary. This recontextualization is not just necessary because Hallyu cultural products, particularly in film and television, have so frequently depicted the effects of economic crisis in Korean social life but more important because the phenomenon is more materially connected to the crisis it so often depicts.The point of all this is to say that Hallyu in many respects does not just depict economic crisis, as might initially seem to be the case for Squid Game, but is itself a direct expression of the economic crisis it often depicts. This is not to say that every Black Pink or BTS song should be read as allegory for the political economy that looms behind it, though this is certainly a fun exercise and there has indeed been some interesting research recently about the connection of sugary pop songs and economic downturns.4 Rather, it is to say that the emergence of culture industry frameworks in places like South Korea and the business practices that made them highly competitive in the global marketplace were driven by crisis conditions. Semi-peripheral economies, like South Korea's, are not buttressed by large domestic markets (as in the case of the U.S.) and are thus forced to react to shifting global priorities. So though Hollywood may remain the aspirational horizon (as evidenced by the Jurassic Park ideal), semi-peripheral culture industries are ultimately more materially constrained.

Consumer taste for popular culture is fickle, and even more so when that consumer public is addressed in global terms. Particularly on an international scale, success today does not ensure success tomorrow. Indeed, too much success today nearly ensures its subsequent waning as boredom sets in and attention turns toward the next big thing. The curse of the surprise megahit is that the fact of its unlikely success makes the feat more difficult to reproduce. We will soon see how the second season of Squid Game performs. Certainly, Netflix's robust Korea operations have struggled to repeat the kind of success season one enjoyed in its other productions, though there have certainly been some more modest successes. In closing, it is worth reflecting on the physics of the metaphor implied in Hallyu, that of the wave. Although the wave in popular culture, Korean or otherwise, is frequently cited as a figure of emergence (i.e. the coming of a new wave), we must be reminded that waves by their very nature also recede. In fact, the stronger the force with which they crash on the shore, the stronger the force with which they pull back into the sea. Indeed, not only should we anticipate Hallyu's eventual receding as capricious global appetites shift, we should also note that its emergence was itself indexed to an emergent recession that it initially resists with great bravado but eventually joins.

---

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon (@JosephJJeon) is Director of the Center for Critical Korean Studies and Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Vicious Circuits: Korea's IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century (Stanford University Press, 2019) and Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2012).  

---

References