Sino-NK Tue, 01 Sep 2015 14:11:56 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Taiwan’s Collective Memory of Japan: Around the Horn Mon, 31 Aug 2015 09:00:02 +0000

Office of the governor-general of Taiwan, in Taipei (1937). | Image: Wikimedia Commons

Abe Shinzo’s August 14 statement brings a few things to mind. First, it reminds us of a thing that Niall Ferguson once described as post-colonial “self flagellation” in the British context. Abe’s intriguing assertion that remorse cannot really last forever on the part of Tokyo and one day the page would and should be turned is not, however, a sense that seems to be shared by other countries in East Asia, where Japan’s colonial adventure tends to be regarded as a monolith and megalith of misfortune. While the Koreas, China, and others may ascribe to anti-Japanese paradigms, emphasizing savagery and exploitation of the period, Japanese occupation is not remembered in these pained and angry tones everywhere in Tokyo’s former zone of sovereignty and control.

As recent extraordinary research on the Jianan Dashu irrigation system in northern Taiwan has shown, other polities are capable of memorializing Japanese imperialism in positive and even fond ways. Hatta Yoichi, engineer, planner and constructor of the Wushantou Reservoir within the irrigation system, has statues built to his memory and May 8th is celebrated with happy connections between past colonial master and servant. How is this possible in the aftermath of what to many in East Asia was one of the darkest moments of its recent historical memory?

While we cannot hope to give a comprehensive answer, here in the first of a new series of loose and informal but considered and knowledgeable scholarly interactions and engagements, “Around the Horn,” Steven Denney, Sino-NK’s managing editor, explores Taiwan’s current cultural memory of those times under Tokyo’s yoke. — Robert Winstanley-Chesters, Director of Research

Taiwan’s Collective Memory of Japan: Around the Horn1)A variation of the Introduction appears in the September 2015 edition of The Diplomat Magazine. See: Steven Denney, “A Tale of Two Histories: Japan, Taiwan and Korea,” The Diplomat Magazine Vol. 10, August 31, 2015.

by Steven Denney

Commemorating the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender, Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe delivered an official cabinet speech in which he expressed remorse for Japan’s past deeds and the sufferings endured by many during the long and brutal Pacific conflict. He did not, as some had hoped, renew any apologies made by previous leaders, nor did he make any new ones.

Abe’s carefully celebrated speech precipitated a barrage of criticism from South Korea and China, both countries that bore the yoke of imperial expansion. Between 1910 and 1945 Korea was a colony of Japan, and between 1937 and 1945 China bore the brunt of Japan’s military advances into East Asia. As I show in my August 15 article, “Twitter Says: South Koreans Not Satisfied with Abe’s Speech,” South Korea’s media fired a united volley across the mediasphere: Abe did not go far enough in his non-apology (they wanted him to re-new the apologies and make new ones), nor were his words sincere. Chinese media was equally was equally unimpressed.

The response is rather unsurprising given the negative perception of Japan among South Koreans and Chinese. Anti-Japanese sentiment and colonial/imperial experiences are integral and deliberately-cultivated aspects of Korean and Chinese national identities. Such as it is, Scott Snyder, director of the U.S.-Korean policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, was quoted in an August 12 Wall Street Journal article (“South Korean Struggles With Legacy of Japanese Colonization”) asking, as a sort of surrogate inculcator for Japan itself, a question on the minds of many:

While the question was asked regarding South Korean attitudes toward Japan, the same question could be asked of China, or North Korea for that matter. But is it the same for all countries that suffered the brunt of Japanese imperial expansion? Nick Kapur, a historian of modern Japan at Rutgers University, thinks not. Kapur Tweeted on August 14, in response to a query by economist Noah Smith as to whether “studying history can sometimes do more harm than good,” the following:

To probe this puzzle a little further, I reached out to my Taiwanese and/or Taiwanese studies colleagues, asking them the following questions: Do you agree that the Taiwanese do not hold as deep a grudge against Japan as do Koreans and (mainland) Chinese? If so, what explains the lack of animosity? If you disagree, why? Is there a similar, or near similar, level of historically driven bitterness, or is it something much less, simmering below the measurable surface?

Below are responses from four people: Chieh-Ting Yeh, Harvard Law School graduate and co-founder, co-host and editor-in-chief of Ketagalan Media, a news and commentary platform “that informs, inspires, and facilitates the movement of ideas and trends between Taiwan, Asia and the rest of the world;” Ching-Fang Hsu, a PhD student in political science at the University of Toronto and current president of North American Taiwan Studies Association (2015-2016); Derek Sheridan, a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology at Brown University and former program director of the North American Taiwan Studies Association; and Scott Simon, research chair in Taiwan studies at the University of Ottawa, school of sociological and anthropological studies, and author of numerous publications on Taiwan, including Tanners of Taiwan and “Formosa’s First Nations and the Japanese: from colonial rule to postcolonial resistance.”

Chieh-Ting Yeh | I think the question you are asking is very interesting, and one that has baffled everyone outside of Taiwan. My short answer is: After the Japanese colonization was over, Taiwan (the people and land that the Japanese surrendered) was colonized by the Chinese Nationalist government. The people who have lived through both have a rosier memory of the past colonizer compared to the current colonizer, while people nowadays would rather not associate themselves with the current colonizer’s own anti-Japanese sentiments.

An interesting hypothetical to ask would be, if Taiwan had become a self-ruling nation-state on par with Korea and China, would the Taiwanese state and people be just as critical of Japan’s wartime actions? I believe so, given Taiwanese activists fighting for self-government or outright independence during the 30s and 40s.


“Formosa [from the Italian, Ilha Formosa] from the latest Japanese government surveys” (1901). The red line indicates the extent of Japanese control over the island. | Image: Wikimedia Commons

Ching-Fang Hsu | To comment on the quote [from Nick Kapur], I wouldn’t go as far as saying “nobody in Taiwan hates Japan – literally nobody – when they did just as bad stuff there.” Rather, I’d say people are aware of the nature of colonization and have painful memories of Japanese oppression–e.g., police brutality, severe social control, discrimination, war, food shortages, war drafts, etc.

Yet, why do westerners have the impression that Taiwan doesn’t hate Japan? And why do we see this friendly connection between the two societies at present? Arguably, it is due to the comparison made to the Kuomintang. Compared to the Japanese colonial rule by law and order, the KMT colonial style and authoritarian rule seemed even worse and unacceptable. When Taiwan was “returned” to the Allies, and China took over Taiwan as a representative of the the Allies (that is, Taiwan was not returned to China directly), Taiwan was in a pretty good shape in terms of infrastructure and the economy: most of the population was literate (i.e., could read and write in Japanese) and an active intellectual network was present (doctors, lawyers, teachers, and even left wing groups).

By contrast, China was in pretty bad shape, and the bureaucracy was not well disciplined. Corruption was a very serious problem in the late 40s when the KMT was processing take-over, along with other social problems. So in the collective memory of Taiwanese society, it was a less “developed” KMT that came to rule (and rule badly), with unacceptable suppression (see, for example, the “228 Massacre”). Although it is meaningless to consider “which colonizer was worse,” it is because of the linear development in the Taiwanese history that leads to the lack of, or less, animosity towards Japan.

Another important note is also briefly mentioned by Chieh-ting. [Chieh-ting and Ching-fang were part of the same email thread. – Editor] Taiwanese people have been trying hard, since democratization, to learn the national history disguised and even misplaced by the KMT. For a long period of time, the KMT imposed a Chinese identity and ideology upon the Taiwanese population through education and all kinds of informal, cultural channels. A crucial part of this Chinese identity is the construction of history and worldview, and of course, labeling Japan as the “evil side” in WW2 is a key component. Many people, educated before the 90s, did not even realize that their grandparents’ generation was in fact on that evil side half a century ago. This disconnection between generations and intentionally misleading education was common prior to democratization.

For the reasons articulated above, this is perhaps why Taiwan does not join the crowd and “go after Japan.” This is because, to put in in comparison to China, our history is different from (and more complex than) the Chinese point of view. Such difference is crucial, but could be easily misinterpreted and even ignored by the forceful voice of the Chinese. This is perhaps why we see this distance between Taiwan and China (and possibly Korea) on this issue.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower waves to a Taiwanese crowd during his visit to Taipei in June 1960. | Image: Wikimedia Commons

Derek Sheridan | I think it is generally true that anti-Japanese sentiments connected to the experience of Japanese colonialism are much less present in Taiwan than in other places. However, it is important to unpack what we mean by “Taiwanese.” Those who came from (mainland) China in 1949 brought with them the experience of the war, and that legacy continues to inform attitudes among waishengren [外省人; people who moved to Taiwan from mainland China between 1945 and the early 1950s]. The benshengren (本省人), Taiwanese who lived on the island prior to the beginning of KMT rule, generally have a more favorable view of Japan, associating it with colonial modernization.

Exceptions and contradictions can be found everywhere, however. Not all benshengren can be assumed to share such attitudes, and it is important to remember that in the aftermath of the KMT’s retreat to Taiwan, Chiang Kai-Shek, who once attended Japanese military school, even invited Japanese military advisers to the island to help him plan for a never-realized military re-conquest of China. In other words, contemporary historical attitudes must be understood as retrospective.

Benshengren attitudes towards the Japanese must be contextualized in terms of the arrival of KMT rule. Unlike Korea, which had more of the outlines of a national identity (a kingship and its own writing system) when it was colonized by Japan, Taiwan’s emergence as a distinct entity is closely linked to Japanese colonialism, which effectively unified the island in terms of both infrastructure, but also in the creation of a colonial elite. Prior to 1945, Taiwanese movements for autonomy and/or independence within/from the Japanese empire did so often within the assumption of being part of a Chinese cultural sphere. The transfer from Japanese to Chinese Nationalist rule in 1945 was presumptive decolonization, but due to the manner in which the Nationalists took control of the island, imposed Mandarin, took over Japanese industries and property, and effectively eliminated the local elite during the 228 Incident, “decolonization” was experienced as “recolonization.”

In addition to memories of political oppression, it is also important to remember that average living standards did not return to the pre-war colonial level until 1960. Positive views towards the Japanese period may say more about Taiwanese views of the KMT than it does views of the Japanese per se. Furthermore, debates about Japanese imperialism in Taiwan are less debates about Japan than debates about national identity in Taiwan. There is, in fact, a history of anti-Japanese movements in Taiwan before 1945, but these narratives were marginalized under KMT rule as footnotes in a greater Chinese anti-Japanese narrative. The result is that even today, studies have shown that many students think it was the Japanese who bombed Taipei in 1945, rather than the Americans.

The rewriting of Taiwanese historical narratives under democratization entailed centering Japan as part of that story. It is perhaps because Taiwan’s shifting status has often been at the mercy of imperialism and great power politics that memories of colonialism and empire are reworked in the service of establishing local identities. The fact Taiwan is awkwardly positioned between the PRC and Japan on such issues therefore makes debates about Japan’s colonial history directly linked to the question as to whether Taiwan should be aligned with the PRC against Japan or with Japan against the PRC. Criticism of Japan is muted for some because it is associated with Chinese nationalism and the project of Chinese unification. Even films in Taiwan which depict the Japanese colonial period seem to go out of their way to humanize the Japanese characters, even while not shying away from depictions of violence or oppression. As much as we may strive for nuance in our views of history, binary logics are compelling in the field of political struggle where history is so much at stake.


The celebration of Taiwan’s retrocession at Taipei City Hall (1945). | Image: Wikimedia Commons

Scott Simon | I agree that sentiments of grudge are not as widely spread in the population in Taiwan as in Korea or in the PRC.

First of all, the Taiwanese population has diverse histories vis-à-vis Japan. The Mainlanders, who came to Taiwan with the ROC beginning in 1945, had just come from fighting a war against Japan. They quite understandably held a deep hatred of Japan. They were approximately one-seventh of Taiwan’s population by 1949. They had a difficult time adjusting to the “Native Taiwanese” who had lived through 50 years of Japanese administration, wore Japanese clothing, lived in Japanese-style homes, and spoke Japanese but rarely Mandarin. So, there is less of a feeling of grudge in Taiwan–because there are different ethnic groups in Taiwan with different historical experiences with Japan.

Second, unlike Korea and China, there was no protracted warfare in the territory when Japan took it. The Chinese on Taiwan surely felt betrayed when the Qing gave their island to Japan in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki; and then ignored their pleas when Taiwanese leaders asked for recognition as the Republic of Taiwan shortly thereafter. The Qing and Japan had agreed that Taiwan would be Japanese “in perpetuity.” The majority of Taiwanese came to accept that, becoming less Chinese, yet not quite Japanese, with the passage of time. By the 1930s, the goal was to assimilate the population to Japan and, soon after, the Taiwanese joined the war effort on Japan’s side without much reluctance.  In fact, in some aboriginal villages, the Japanese had to use a lottery system to select recruits, because so many young men were eager to go to war. So, there was a stronger positive identification with Japan.

Thirdly, this was surely reinforced by a positive experience with colonial rule. The Taiwanese came to enjoy improvements in public health (entire elimination of rabies and a host of tropical diseases), drinking water in Taipei, roads, railways, ports, the most modern irrigation system in Asia, agricultural improvements, industrialization, public schools and universities, etc. In short, the Taiwanese became modern during the Japanese period; and an entire generation of elites were trained under Japanese mentorship. When the Mainlanders arrived in 1945, they perceived a gap in the “cultural level” between China and Taiwan. They credited Japan for improving their lives. This sentiment is very widespread in Taiwan, even among the youth, who say they learned this from their parents and grandparents.

Fourthly, and this is almost systematically ignored, the Taiwanese endured Allied bombings during the War. They thus had personal experience of war with the Japanese rather than against the Japanese.  This profound emotional experience made the Taiwanese very different from the Chinese (some of whom had suffered the Nanking Massacre; and others also had very negative experiences of Japanese violence).

Fifthly, Korea and China became independent after the war. From a Taiwanese perspective, they were not even consulted to see if they wished independence or to stay within Japan or be incorporated into the Republic of China. Instead, outsiders determined that they were to be annexed by the Republic of China (we cannot accurately say “returned” because it was not the ROC that negotiated the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895).  Their experience with the ROC quickly turned from enthusiasm to tragedy after the violence of the 2.28 Incident in 1947. So, Korea and China experienced the departure of the Japanese as liberation. The Taiwanese saw it as the imposition of a second colonial power–and some of them use exactly those words to describe the situation.

Sixthly, whereas in Korea and China, politicians have successfully kept negative memories of Japan alive as part of their own nationalist agendas; Taiwan has competing nationalist agendas. On the one hand, the KMT (historically dominated by Mainlanders) has kept anti-Japanese sentiments alive–and they have spread throughout the population due to the success of their education system since 1945. On the other hand, opposition parties have nourished the idea that the KMT was worse than the Japanese; and has even cultivated a certain nostalgia for Japan. So, there is a diversity of sentiments toward Japan that probably correlates at least somewhat with political preferences and nationalist yearnings (ROC vs. Taiwan).

In conclusion, due to these historical and sociological factors, the difference between Taiwan and China or Korea is not merely the depth of any grudge against Japan. Looking at it in three dimensions, there is also the extent of grudge against Japan. Some people have no grudge at all, but rather a sentiment of gratitude and respect for the Japanese.

Just a few months ago, an elderly Amis man told me that he was jealous of his brother, who got to fight for the Japanese, whereas he was too young to join the military. He said, “We are not the ones who surrendered. It was the Japanese emperor who forced us to surrender. We would have fought to the end.”

I don’t quite know what to do with such politically incorrect enunciations, but I hear them very frequently in Taiwan.

Correction notice: The article originally stated Eisenhower visited Taipei in 1961; he visited in 1960.

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Unpacking Beijing’s “Sinocentric Narcissism” during the Loudspeaker Crisis Tue, 25 Aug 2015 19:34:16 +0000















But these are minor details; on to the complaints:






























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Charismatic Politics: Kim Jong-suk’s Supporting Cast of Female Fighters Tue, 25 Aug 2015 08:06:52 +0000
Kim Jong-suk and the azaleas


In the midst of a recent “state of semi-war” in North Korea, the country’s domestic media featured multiple portrayals of patriotic women steeling themselves ideologically for a showdown with external enemies of the revolution. For many women in North Korea, this process has been mixed with an intensified state focus on history. Old artifacts of Kimist loyalty such as “slogan trees” are re-emphasized through new songs and new music videos featuring the female voices of the new Changbong Band. On August 22, North Korean television showed one group of women marching up to Musan, a mining city along the Chinese frontier, and depicted their contemplation of monumental art depicting the young Kim Jong-suk engaging in acts of anti-colonial resistance. 

But for women simultaneously targeted by state messages about growing prosperity in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-suk’s journeying and struggles against the forces of Imperial Japan are marked by both an intense precarity and an extraordinary level of violence in their moments of altercation. Robert Winstanley-Chesters’ “…and did these feet in ancient times…” series published earlier this year will have acquainted readers with several permutations of the mythical woman of Baekdu. Amid the ongoing commemoration of North Korea’s revolutionary history, Winstanley-Chesters here urges us to consider evolutions in her narrative and the state’s paring-away of women whose exposure to imperial violence was intense. — Adam Cathcart, Editor-in-Chief

Charismatic Politics: Kim Jong-suk’s Supporting Cast of Female Fighters

by Robert Winstanley-Chesters



Pyongyang’s institutions urge North Korean citizens to re-temporalize and re-territorialize events from the period in contemporary time. This is done for the purposes of ideological reiteration or the transmission of political charisma — as we saw last year with the march of the school children and recently in the Red Flag Relay. 2)Red Flag Relay Groups of Service Personnel Arrive in Panmunjon,” Rodong Sinmun, August, 17, 2015. At the center of such drives are the experiences and encounters of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-suk and Kim Jong-il — but rarely are any other revolutionary Koreans singled out as exemplary.






There is extensive focus, for example, on the similar backgrounds these women shared with Kim Jong-suk, whose childhood as an impoverished share cropper harassed by landlords and Japanese colonialists at the margins of Korean and diaspora life and the impact this had on her rapidly developing sense of nationalism is intricately detailed as a vector of her transformation in her many biographies. Choe Hui-suk, for instance, is described as having been “bereaved of her mother at the age of three. She and her father, a farmhand, barely got along under all kinds of exploitation, contempt and poverty.”5) Daughter of Korea,” Women of Korea 4 (1986): 25. Pak Rok-gum was born into a ‘poor peasant family in Kyongsong County, North Hamgyong Province,6)“Woman Revolutionary Fighter Pak Rok Gum,” Women of Korea 1 (1987): 26. similar to Li Gye-sun.7)“The Brilliant Last: Anti-Japanese Revolutionary Fighter Li Gye Sun, Women of Korea 1 (1987): 27. Pak Su-hwan was even born in the same county, Hoeryong as Kim Jong-suk and grew up “undergoing all sufferings and sadness of a ruined nation.”8)“Pak Su Hwan: Woman Anti-Japanese Revolutionary Fighter,” Women of Korea 4 (1987): 30.

Pak Rok-gum


These women, similar to Kim Jong-suk utilize education as a transformational vector in their transformation from obscurity in the mass of Korean peasantry into politically inspired, committed revolutionaries. Choe Hui-suk, for example, “trained herself to be a woman revolutionary under the guidance of the great leader,”9)“Daughter of Korea,” Women of Korea 4 (1986): 25. and Li Sun-hui was one of a “large number of women who were educated in the revolutionary idea” 10)“Liberty, then Life Counts,” Women of Korea, 3, 1991, 29.. Similar to Kim Jong-suk’s own experience, these women, having been bestowed with and transfigured by charismatic revolutionary consciousness, project this charisma through educative and agitative activities. Pak Rok-gun for instance apparently “concentrated her strength on bringing many women to class awakening and rallying them around the revolutionary organizations,”11)“Woman Revolutionary Fighter Pak Rok Gum,” Women of Korea 1 (1987): 26. and Chon Hui is recounted as “having exerted herself to train the children to become fighters possessed of iron will, perseverance, courage and boldness.”12)“Chon Hui, Anti-Japanese Revolutionary Martyr,” Women of Korea 4 (1988): 20.

Crackshots and Angry Tigresses | Perhaps unsurprisingly this group of attendant female guerrilla fighters beyond their perhaps more positive educational contributions are equally adept at acts of combat and violence. Kim Hwak-sil, apparently called “woman commander” by her colleagues and comrades was a “crackshot” who “could hold a rifle by the barrel in each hand and lift them overhead.”13)“A Guerrilla Amazon: on Kim Hwak Sil, An Anti-Japanese Revolutionary Fighter,” Women of Korea 1 (1990): 25. Kim Il-sung himself presented her with a golden ring for “mowing down the enemy with a sharp-edged bayonet like an angry tigress, shouting out ‘Enemies, Come on! I’m avenging my comrades with this bayonet.’”14)“A Guerrilla Amazon,” 25. Pak Rok-gun was “as brave as a lion in battles…. She walked more than 15km a day with a machine gun on her shoulders,”15)“Eternity,” Women of Korea 2 (1990): 25. and Pak Su-hwan “fought bravely in many battles including those at Chechangzi and Naitoushan.”16)“Pak Su Hwan: Woman Anti-Japanese Revolutionary Fighter,” Women of Korea 4 (1987): 30.





Choe Hui-suk




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1. Wreaths Laid before Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetary on Mt Taesong,” Rodong Sinmun, August 17, 2015
3. Biography of Kim Jong-suk (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 2002), 132.
4. Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful (New York City, NY, Random House), 1970
5. Daughter of Korea,” Women of Korea 4 (1986): 25.
6. “Woman Revolutionary Fighter Pak Rok Gum,” Women of Korea 1 (1987): 26.
9. “Daughter of Korea,” Women of Korea 4 (1986): 25.
10. “Liberty, then Life Counts,” Women of Korea, 3, 1991, 29.
14. “A Guerrilla Amazon,” 25.
15. “Eternity,” Women of Korea 2 (1990): 25.
19. Ibid., 25.
20. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 26.
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Yongusil 73: Complex Networks, the State, and Civil Society in South Korea Mon, 24 Aug 2015 22:15:36 +0000

Until recently, national and transnational issues in South Korea were predominantly addressed through state-centric network strategies. Despite the continuing power and influence of state governments, a power that shows few signs of waning, state-centric networked strategies are becoming increasingly dependent upon civil-society and non-government driven network strategies to succeed. Such is the primary claim of “The Implications of Civic Diplomacy for ROK Foreign Policy,” a chapter contribution to Complexity, Security and Civil Society in East Asia: Foreign Policies and the Korean Peninsula (Nautilus of America Inc., 2015), a recently published volume edited by Peter Hayes  and Kiho Yi (both of the Nautilus Institute).

Drawing upon the latest in IR network theory–specifically the notions of “structural holes” and “weak links”1)Structural holes are, in short, opportunities to connect people; the ability to access a structural hole represents networking capacity (brining together disconnected parties). As bridges between groups or networks, weak ties are essential links for the flow of information from group to another through “nodes” (a person, institution, or even a state) and connect otherwise disconnected groups into a broader community. See: Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360-1380; and Ronald S. Burt, Structural Holes: the Social Structure of Competition (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1995).–the chapter on civic diplomacy in South Korea explores the idea that the South Korean state has taken on the role of a mediating broker, what is described in the chapter as a “civic state – that is, a state that aims to provide expertise, remove obstacles, and act as an arbiter, regulator, and orchestrator while enabling civil society, regulating the market, and nesting in rather than dominating networked autonomous communities.” Importantly, such a state “might find civil society and local governments to be more effective in addressing pressing problems of foreign policy than the relatively blunt, brittle, and distant tools of traditional diplomacy – military power – and the efficient but often amoral instrument of market power.” (p. 320)

Sino-NK managing editor, Steven Denney, and co-editor, Christopher Green, participated in the research and writing of the chapter, conducting fieldwork in Seoul over the course of the summer, 2013. Contributing three of the six case studies, Denney and Green examine the expansive role of South Korea civil society, looking at how non-governmental organizations and other institutions are both working through and actively creating transnational networks for the purpose of solving global problems under new civic diplomatic conditions. The first case study assesses how South Korean NGOs are working to address the issues of deforestation and food scarcity in Northeast Asia (Green’s interview with Park DongKyun explores recent efforts by South Korean civil society organizations to confront the problem of deforestation in Northeast Asia). The second case study examines the critical role played by the “Refugee Aid Network” in the passing of South Korea’s Refugee Act, the first independent refugee law passed at the national level in Asia. The third case study explores efforts by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies to build transnational networks and the implications such efforts have for global community building and cosmopolitanism. The other three case studies focused on: historical memory and jointly written (Japan-China-South Korea) history textbooks;2)See: Japanese-Chinese-Korean Committee for Common History Teaching Materials of the Three Countries, History to Open the Future, published in Korean (한중일 3국공동역사편찬위원회), Chinese (东亚三国的近现代史(修订版), and Japanese (東アジア3国の近現代史). the Jeju Peace Forum; and the East Asia Institute.

State-oriented complex networked governance has proven to be an insufficient condition to effect regional and global problem solving. The three case studies written by Green and Denney show that neither ecological devastation nor refugees respect Westphalian sovereignty, and nation-states tend to act when they feel they must, or thanks to the fortuitous presence of a driven individual. It is rarely done out of altruism or a compulsion to proactivity.

South Korean civil society operates within this nation-state based world order. As such, domestic networks come into being more readily than their transnational equivalent. Yet South Korean-led transnational networks also exist, and some have been uncommonly successful. Many of these networks are multi-sectoral, including state and market entities; others are constituted only of civil society organizations. All are a major source of new social capacity to respond to common problems and implement shared solutions in Asia.3)The definition of civil society is worth revisiting. According to the World Bank: “the term civil society to refer to the wide array of non-governmental and not-for-profit organizations that have a presence in public life, expressing the interests and values of their members or others, based on ethical, cultural, political, scientific, religious or philanthropic considerations. Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) therefore refer to a wide of array of organizations: community groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), labor unions, indigenous groups, charitable organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, and foundations.” The leaders and actors in these South Korea-based networks are playing the vital role of weak ties so crucial to overcoming structural holes between mainly unconnected networks. It is clear that South Korean civil society organizations are regional leaders in instigating transnational networks. This is a role borne of South Korea’s structural location and, of course, a supportive diplomatic and economic ecosystem that calls for an outward focus.

However, there are still limitations to development. In particular, the requirement for a financial visionary to nourish the growth of networks has lost none of its importance since South Korean civil society began to look out across the sea in the 1990s. In particular, without access to reliable sources of funding, transnational networks may form but are extremely difficult to sustain. What is shown above all else is that the development of transnational networks in Asia today is still governed by the “lone wolfery” of individual visionaries, rather than a systematic ecosystem of transnational network creation, funding, and growth. Transiting to a model that can survive the loss of these lone wolves is a critical challenge for the future.

Conversely, governments and cities that wish to create their own “trans-governmental” networks across borders lack the ideational and visionary content that lone wolf-led civil society can offer–while having accountability that the lone wolf cannot supply. Perhaps the two will eventually be able to weave together complex networks of civil society and local government-city organizations, thus creating new capacities to solve transnational problems. However, that is still some way off, even with the manifest advantages that obtain in South Korea.

“The Implications of Civic Diplomacy for ROK Foreign Policy,” and the case studies explored therein, shows what has thus far been accomplished and the promise that lies ahead. Achieving middle power status is not just about acquiring greater military reach and economic might; it is about connecting otherwise desperate networks and enabling entrepreneurial problem solvers in a complex environment. South Korea’s middle power position puts limits on what it and its networks can do, but it also opens up unique opportunities. Progress made to date shows the potential of civil society organizations, working through or with the state, to resolve local, regional, and even global problems. A South Korea state committed (even if only nominally) to solving global problems, coupled with pressure from below, has created new networks, opportunities, and problem-solving efforts.

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Yongusil 72: The End of Ethnic Nationalism? A Review Mon, 10 Aug 2015 15:58:51 +0000

For some people, nationalism is a dirty word. “A reactionary philosophy masquerading as progressive,” writes Tony Blair dismissively. However, in scholarly terms nationalism actually describes the cohesive glue of all the national societies that populate the globe in today’s era of nations and nationalism (including the British union, which counts Blair as a supportive member). “A political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent,” is how Ernest Gellner defined it many years ago. For better or worse, this is still the way of the world. A violation of Gellner’s principle may arouse anger or profound loss, whereas its fulfillment can lead to feelings of completeness, spurring the writings of national anthems and national histories that reify and reinforce the nation.

But not all nationalisms are the same. There are two predominant types: ethnic and civic, which stake out differing approaches to the question of who is or can be part of the national unit.1)David Brown, in Contemporary Nationalism: Civic, Ethnocultural & Multicultural Politics, offers a concise but sufficient explanation of the origins of both types of nationalism. See, esp., chapters three and four. Ethnic nationalism defines the national community on ethnic lines, emphasizing common lineage, language, religion, and physical appearance. One is born a member, not made. On the other hand, civic nationalism defines the nation by, via David Brown, “the belief that residence in a common territorial homeland, and commitment to its state and civil society institutions, generate a distinctive national character and civic culture, such that all citizens, irrespective of the diverse ancestry, comprise a community in progress with a common destiny.” One can be made a member, and is not necessarily born as one. The two types are not mutually exclusive, and although civic is generally inclusive and ethnic tends toward exclusivity, both types portend to transcend class and gender (whether they actually do this is another matter).

South Korea is a nation defined by ethnicity—the minjok. Henry Em’s “’Minjok’ as a Modern and Democratic Construct: Sin Ch’aeho’s Historiography” and Andre Schmid’s Korea Between Empires are two works, among several, that pinpoint and contextualize the origins of the concept and thus of Korea’s modern, nationalist origin.2)The Wiki “Korean nationalist historiography,” which includes the work of Schmid and Em, is surprisingly good and an excellent bibliographic source. A (modern) nation borne of Japanese imperialism, the notion of a common ancestry uniting the people over time proved quite useful for generating a sense of “Koreaness,” theretofore not a thing. (Were there any “Koreans” in the sense we understand it today in pre-modern Korea?) A concept of common ethnicity helps people unite against non-ethnic “others,” specifically colonial oppressors or neo-colonial occupiers. Indeed, the notion that all Koreans are part of an ancient race, that is, an ancient nation, is the bedrock upon which (re)unification discourse has long been built.3)Shin Gi-wook discusses the relationship between ethnic nationalism and unification in Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy, Ch. 10, “Ethnic Identity and National Unification.” Accordingly, the Korean nation was divided against its will; this is a grave violation of the nationalist principle of congruence and one that must and will be corrected.

No longer, it seems.

In the latest paper to be published on the matter, Emma Campbell argues in Nations and Nationalism (June 2015 edition) that ethnicity no long carries much weight with young Korean adults in determining what it means to be Korean and who can be a part of the national fabric. In “The end of ethnic nationalism? Changing conceptions of national identity and belonging among young South Koreans,” she contends that a new South Korean national identity has emerged. She claims that, as reflected in the attitudes of her subjects (interviews with 150 university students, some in Korean and others in English), young South Koreans feel little to no sense of (national) community with other ethnic Koreans because of a shared ethnicity. Unification no longer enjoys the support it once did among South Korean youth and no longer is the national community restricted to people of Korean ethnic decent; times have changed and South Korean nationalism has evolved. One might immediately think that this represents a shift from ethnic nationalism to a more civic variant. Campbell thinks not; for her, it is neither.

South Korea’s Evolving Nationalism: Towards a New Type? | The answer Campbell offers is a new “type” nationalism. Though a complex and inherently non-homogenous thing, “one current characteristic of [South Korea’s] evolving nationalism is a globalised cultural element that reflects shared cultural values including modernity, cosmopolitanism and status among the young.” This means taking pride in South Korea’s economic achievements (modernity); placing a premium on sophistication, education, international experience, and the like (cosmopolitanism); and being mindful and respectful of the importance of national standing “as well as [Koreans’] individual and family economic and social status” (status). What this means, more generally, Campbell explains:

The characteristics of South Korean globalised cultural nationalism… reflect the opportunities provided by relatively wealthy and developed nations. Those opportunities include access to education, travel and technology, those same advantages readily available to young people who have grown up in contemporary South Korea.

The consequence of a globalised cultural nationalism de-linked from ethnicity is, for Campbell, quite clear:

Thus, immigrants from countries of comparable economic status to Korea have the potential to be welcomed into such a nation. For other arrivals to South Korea who have not lived in the same sort of enabling environment – especially those ethnic and non-ethnic Koreans arriving from the North, China or other developing nations – it will be much harder to acquire and demonstrate the manifestations of this emerging South Korean nationalism.

Campbell presents a snippet of her findings based on the 150 interviews she conducted from her fieldwork in South Korea between the years of 2009 and 2014, choosing what she sees as representing the attitudes of her interviewees and, by extension, Korean youth writ large.4) More information on her interviews, including the interview questionnaire and demographic information on some interviewees, can be found in her 2011 PhD thesis, “Uri nara, our nation: Unification, identity and the emergence of a new nationalism amongst South Korean young people.” The article reviewed here is derived from the thesis, written at the Australian National University. This is a problematic assumption (addressed in detail below), but Campbell’s interview findings are nevertheless not to be taken lightly. Change is indeed afoot. Consider the following quotes from the paper:

They can completely become Korean. I live in the countryside where there are many people married to women from the Philippines, Vietnam. (Interview in Korean, Gyeongnam National University, 31 May 2010).


[Joseonjok] are a bit similar to North Koreans. We have the same ancestors but I don’t feel that they are my people. (Interview in Korean, Sookmyung Women’s University, 21 April 2010).


Yes I think that Gyopo [Korean-Americans], Southeast Asians, [and] Westerners can become South Korean if they want to. Except Joseonjok. In my opinion I don’t like the Joseonjok. They have some social problems. Except the Joseonjok, any kind of people who want to be Korean are okay. (Interview in English, Dongguk University, 23 April 2011).

These quotes seem to suggest that, at least for young South Koreans, race is not nearly as important as other characteristics that define national community membership. For Campbell, the hierarchy revealed is one that approximates “hierarchical nationhood” (a concept coined by Seol and Skretny in a 2009 Ethnicities article to explain the racial hierarchy in South Korea) but without the racial associations.5)Seol and Skretny show how, socially and legally, a certain racial hierarchy is maintained, with Korean-Americans at the top and recent ethnic migrants, like North Korean defectors, at the bottom.

For Campbell, this “could just as easily represent the new globalized cultural nationalism. When seen as a league table for acceptance, it correlates strongly with the perceptions of young people about particular ethnic Korean groupings and their similarity to the globalized cultural norms of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and status.” It is a compelling argument and explains why Korean-Americans (who are relatively wealthy, often at least bi-lingual, and from a developed country) might find it easier to be accepted into society over, say, North Korean defectors (who are relatively poor(er), speak Korean with a northern Korea accent, and are from an underdeveloped country).

That ethnicity has been de-linked from national identity is simple enough to uncover, and has been done so by a handful of others already, but explaining how, exactly, globalization has changed the idea of what it means to be “Korean” is a whole other thing. Campbell specifies that she is deliberately avoiding an explanation of “how” for reasons of space. We might expect this task to be taken up in her forthcoming book, South Korea’s New Nationalism: The End of “One Korea”?, where she presumably explores her thesis in greater detail, including a deep dive into the causal mechanism of change: globalization.

Methodology Matters | Overall, Campbell presents a challenging thesis worthy of consideration. There are some eye-catching quotes (such as those above) and an interesting consideration of how globalization can affect nations and nationalism(s). There are, however, a few seemingly rather important methodological concerns and one conceptual thorn in the side left unaddressed.

The first methodological concern relates to representativeness. Campbell claims that because 78 percent of young people in South Korea go to university, interviewing university students represents the median view of 20-something-year-olds. This is problematic for the simple reason that there are a great many young people going to university in South Korea who probably should not be–this is the nature of South Korean higher education, as it is American and British. The variation between universities of various standards (within and without Seoul, “national” universities and private variants, etc.) is so large in some cases as to question the logic of her assumption–which assumes a homogeneity that clearly does not exist–in its entirety. It does not help that the editors of Nations and Nationalism did not oblige Campbell to include an interview table with a breakdown of all her interviewees by school/region, age, etc. We are told that “this paper relies primarily on interviews with 150 students recorded between 2009 and 2014,” but are left entirely in the dark after that (beyond that which we are able to glean from quotes in the main text).

One might be willing to forgive this omission if Campbell was a little more forthright with the limitations of her research design. 150 students is not a small amount, but she passes the findings off as representative of South Korean youth writ large. There are, of course, all sorts of limitations to conducting fieldwork: time, energy, finances, etc. Making compromises is simply part of the game. One might only wish that Campbell had addressed this particular concern head on.

The second methodological discomfort stems from the relatively uncritical treatment she gives her interview findings. There is practically no consideration of the impact that Campbell–a white female Australian university scholar (ergo axiomatically cosmopolitan)–has upon her interviewees. There is an inherent power dynamic involved in any interaction, not least when such interactions are between a white foreigner and a status-conscious Korean. This is an uncomfortable fact for many, but one that must at least be acknowledged.

Further, little consideration is given to the structural positions of the young interviewees within South Korean society and how that might be affecting the answers. Consider this quote:

I was amazed when I talk to elementary students today, it doesn’t matter what [the non-Korean national] look[s] like, black or white, if they can communicate with them they see them as a fellow citizen. It doesn’t matter who the person’s mother is. It just matters that it’s the person’s friend. They are more open. So you see some older generations wondering why someone is dating someone who is foreign but that idea is fading away and maturing as the younger generation grows and they will have kids. And by the time teenagers become [adults] . . . the idea of ‘foreigner’ will dissipate a lot more. (Interview in English, Yonsei University, 29 April 2010).

The interviewee’s prognostication about the future of South Korean attitudes towards “foreigners” may very well be true, but the fact that the answer was given in English by a Yonsei University student says as much about the “globalised cultural” attitude of those attending one of the most elite and self-consciously cosmopolitan of all South Korean universities. Indeed, it does not surprise us (accumulatively, the authors have spent well over a decade living, working, and studying in the country, primarily in Seoul) to hear the answer. Not because such an attitude is prevalent among all young adults across the country–quite the opposite–but because it is prevalent at Yonsei University, and among South Korea’s political and economic elite. More honest qualification of the data accrued would have left less space for accusations of overreach.

Lastly, a conceptual quibble. Campbell’s claim is that she has located a new “type” of nationalism. There are a lot of interesting things about this argument. Her culling of the “hierarchical nation” based on ethnicity in favor of a form of globalised nationalism is engaging. However, one might not be ready to accept that “globalised cultural nationalism” is a category in its own right. Is not what Campbell describing simply an exclusive kind of civic nationalism?

Remember, a national community defined by civic nationalism holds “the belief that residence in a common territorial homeland, and commitment to its state and civil society institutions, generate a distinctive national character and civic culture, such that all citizens, irrespective of the diverse ancestry, comprise a community in progress with a common destiny.” This is an ideal, of course, but as a definition it seems to capture the elements of Campbell’s “new” nationalism rather well. Would it not have been better for her to have simply rolled her stipulated values into the developed concept of civic nationalism and then work from there? If it truly is a new type of nationalism that we are seeing develop in South Korea, as Campbell maintains, then there will need to be a much more precise and in-depth discussion of what this means.

Herein there lies an unexplored critique of civic nationalism as being inclusive and relatively open (i.e., it often is not anything of the sort). Perhaps Campbell is right that a new type has emerged. This is possible, but she (or someone else) will have to make that case more forcibly than in this article. Moreover, some may find Campbell’s treatment of shared cultural values (modernity, cosmopolitanism, and status) too abstract or ill defined for comfort. Space may have been a constraint on what Campbell could or could not expound upon, so that much should be taken into consideration. However, the thrust of this article takes us to yet fertile ground, leaving one to wonder whether we should even be there in the first place.

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Yongusil 71: Tiempo Devorado addresses Corea del Norte in “Invisible Transitions” Thu, 30 Jul 2015 15:38:22 +0000

Popular mythologies have it that North Korea is a nation lost in time, floating in temporal limbo, a dinosaur of ideology and governance. Hopefully readers of Sino-NK and the Yongusil will follow our often plaintive assertions that this is of course entirely not so. While Pyongyang’s commitment to acute nationalism, vigorous uncompromising expressions of autarky, and a tendency to the ahistorical or histrionic are certainly undimmed in our contemporary era, times in North Korea are certainly a-changing. But perhaps times are changing because they always have been. While Pyongyang’s focus on the charisma of the Kim family (its own overwhelming legacies and futures manifested and projected as dramatically as ever), Sino-NK has analyzed the advent of economic systems and practices which ultimately are entirely disconnected from that charisma. Private citizens are forced to rely on their own initiative, rather than the benevolent fatherly love of a Leader, be he called “Great Leader,” “Dear Leader,” or “Respected Comrade.” We have also traced the minutiae of its diplomatic exchanges with the wider world, as the sands of geo-politics have shifted and displaced a North Korea rooted in unstable ground. We have also examined developmental policies as they have ebbed and flowed, and music and cultural praxis as its subjects and styles have transformed from the martial to the mini-skirted. North Korea, like any nation, is a space and place of permanent transition.

How fitting, then, that the Catalan journal, Tiempo Devorado, published by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, should seek to address issues north of the 38th from a similar perspective. In an extraordinary volume, born of interactions at 2014’s 1st World Conference of North Korean Studies in Seoul, Jelena Prokopljevic, Barcelona-based Serbian architect and researcher focused on architectures of socialism and post-socialism, has collected a number of intriguing and deeply scholarly interventions and considerations of North Korea’s “invisible transition.” Prokopljevic herself and Charles Armstrong of Columbia University offer what surely will become a landmark piece of analysis on the urban structures and constructions of North Korea. “Socialist Postmodernism: Conceptual and Comparitive Analysis of Recent Representative Architecture in Pyongyang, Astana and Ashgabat, 1989-2014” firstly periodizes Pyongyang’s architectural production in a way we have not seen before, exploding the myth of North Korea’s coherent adherence to the architectural practices of socialist modernity before, secondly, reframing the contemporary built environment within the connected urban landscapes of contemporary post-socialist Central Asia. Considering Pyongyang’s recent architectural styles alongside those of Astana and Ashgabat allows for a different future view of North Korean construction, one which builds the future within a melange of styles and influences from internationalist, nationalist and post-nationalist futurity.

Prokopljevic and Armstrong’s fine words are not alone, but joined by a considered piece of analysis from Balazs Szalontai of Kookmin University, “If the Neighbourhood Catches Fire, One Will Also Come to Grief: Chinese Attitudes towards North Korea’s Confrontational Acts, 2009-2014.” Szalontai, in an extraordinarily close reading of a huge collection of Chinese, Russian, Hungarian, and North Korean texts, weaves an intricate narrative of both Beijing and Pyongyang’s diplomatic exchanges and difficulties during a time of nuclear endeavor on the part of North Korea and rapid geo-political escalation when it comes to China’s importance. Arriving in 2014 with newly emboldened Russian Federation paying serious if playful geo-politics with its railways and transport infrastructure, Szalontai demolishes the notion that North Korea or China never engage in transitions in diplomatic or relation terms, presenting a fascinating tapestry of interaction and reaction.

Eric Ballbach of the Freie Universtät Berlin moves the volume’s analysis intriguingly from the external to the internal, presenting in “Constructions of Identity and Threat in North Korea’s Diplomatic War Discourse,” a rarely considered mirror to the extensive analysis and modeling of other nations’ conception of North Korea as threat or risk. Ballbach, making extensive use of North Korean theoretical and media texts, examines using a methodological framework of poststructural discourse, the United States as North Korea’s eternal other against which a revolutionary bastion must be built and maintained and through which both geo-political transformation and expensive and diplomatically destructive nuclear necessity can be both undertaken and born.

The volume also includes a brilliant piece of scholarship from Sino-NK contributor Tatiana Gabroussenko of Korea University, which feels like a next step following her fine monograph “Soldiers on the Cultural Front.” “Well Nourished Beauty: Culinary Symbolism in the Mass Culture of North Korea, 1960-2014” outlines the place of food and the space and place of its consumption within the cultural narratives of North Korea in a way which we cannot remember having read before. Again using some fascinating North Korean texts, Gabroussenko unveils a presentational world in which food is to be displayed and present, yet not eaten, where hunger in the face of absence is reified in extraordinary poetry (“Today the dead heroes of Paektu Mountain/See us smiling and dancing in the snowflakes,/With only fresh snowflakes in our bellies…” — Hang Cheong-gyu, quoted by Gabroussenko, p. 8), and the most basic of goods are glorified far beyond their humble origins as potato extracts.

Finally, aside from the contribution of Sino-NK’s Director of Research, a short form version of which has already appeared at Sino-NK, Avram Agov recounts the reality of encountering and treating a tuberculosis outbreak in North Korea. Benjamin Young, in a most insightful review, explodes some lop-sided mythologies about heritage management and its analytic potential, and Roger Mateos Miret and Jelena Prokopljevic in a helpful interview with Dr. Jongchul Park, President of the Republic of Korea’s “Korean Association of North Korean Studies,” consider the nature, notions, and practices of North Korean studies south of the DMZ, especially in light of the foundation of the globally minded and aspirational World Conference of North Korean Studies. The Yongusil here invites the reader to allow some of their own time to be consumed by this satisfying and potentially landmark volume.

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Yongusil 70: Korean Studies, the Copenhagen Interpretation and BAKS Papers 16 Thu, 30 Jul 2015 14:09:24 +0000






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Returning to the Courtyard: Rescaling Charismatic Landscapes in North Korea Mon, 27 Jul 2015 09:30:35 +0000


North Korean politics seems to lead to peculiar physical manifestations of ideology, national commemoration, and futurist desires. This can be seen in areas ranging from the construction and morphing of monuments, to the the radical re-stylings of young Kim Jong-un as the reincarnation of his grandfather, and into the embedding of military hardware into Pyongyang’s cultural productions. 

To the external viewer of North Korean matters, these manifestations can seem entirely absurd. (After all, would a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in the US have surgery in order to resemble Ronald Reagan, or surround himself compulsively with iconography of Dwight D. Eisenhower or the Dulles brothers in order to connote strength and legitimacy?) In Pyongyang, however, the city’s population has become accustomed to an intense level of propaganda; lives are lived within a legal, security, and cultural framework which is almost overwhelming in scale–or so we imagine.

Perhaps the state’s omnipresence may now simply be a matter of aspiration rather than lived reality. Political scientists like Thomas Callaghy have conceived of the function and utility of “domain consensus” as a way of understanding the legitimative connection that any totalitarian state and its institutions might broker with its population. However, for Sino-NK’s Director of Research Robert Winstanley-Chesters, there is another vector entirely through which these processes might be better understood: Through Cartography and Geography. — Adam Cathcart, Editor-in-Chief

Returning to the Courtyard: Rescaling Charismatic Landscapes in North Korea

by Robert Winstanley-Chesters




Kim Jong-un and Sinchon3









Ri Kyong Sim

Ri Kyong-sim: Rescaling personified. | Image: KCTV




Charisma in the Biotechnology Branch Laboratory: Image KCNA

Charisma in the Biotechnology Branch Laboratory | Image: KCNA






























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A Roundtable Review of Shine Choi’s Re-Imagining North Korea in International Politics Wed, 22 Jul 2015 13:30:30 +0000
Korean War Armistice signing: US General Harrison, left table, and North Korean General Nam II, right table, sign documents, July 1953. One party at the table has undoubtedly held more discursive influence on how the "other" is perceived. | Image: USFK

Korean War Armistice signing: US General Harrison, left table, and North Korean General Nam II, right table, sign documents, July 1953. One party at the table has undoubtedly held more discursive influence on how the “other” is perceived. | Image: USFK

Much contemporary analysis of North Korea revolves around the desire to achieve justice for persons subjected to horrors unseen, invisible, or unspeakable. The stories told in memoirs, from television studios, and in proceedings held by the UN and the United States Congress provide mental pictures of a people facing down depravation and a predatory, totalizing state against which the rest of the world ought logically to recoil. But in this process of narrative shaping, the privilege and position of the critical “see-er,” the public interpreter, or even the casual voyeur is rarely considered. North Korea exists in many forms of reality, but the way we see it is also constructed, often arbitrarily so. Even defectors are limited by the prisms into which their stories are filed away.

Shine Choi arrives at the knotted task of North Korea scholarship, seeking to encourage us down paths that question our visions, our impressions, and how we convey knowledge about the DPRK. By turns profound and disturbing, Choi’s latest work, Re-imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and Alternatives, raises questions seldom seen in the study of North Korea. This challenging and considered piece of scholarship has pricked our consciences and consciousness at Sino-NK and rattled our analytic frameworks; on occasion we were forced to head for the library just to make head or tail of any of it. But most importantly, we were engaged in no uncertain terms by this extraordinary book. — Adam Cathcart, Editor-in-Chief

Choi, Shine. Re-imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and Alternatives. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015. 224 pp. ISBN: 9781138791688.

by Sino-NK

Ruminations on the Epistemology of North Korea Studies: Thinking with Shine Choi

by Koen De Ceuster (Leiden University)

Don’t we all have our little rituals when it comes to handling new books? Some decorum in front of the result of years of intellectual labour just seems appropriate. Unwrapping a new book, there is always a thrill of anticipation, the expectation of being intellectually stimulated. I am old school, I like the sensuality of a printed book, the way it sits in my hand, the feel of the paper, the sight of the letter type and the page layout, the smell of the book. And then there is the routine of taking in the cover, flipping over the book and reading the back text, going through the table of contents, scanning the bibliography and the index. Only then, if time allows, will I sit back and start reading.

This turn to affect describes another form of experiential knowledge that adds to and cradles the habitual highbrow pretence of rational detachment that pervades the scholarly profession. Such an opening paragraph feels to me like an appropriate opener to this review of Shine Choi’s Re-imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and Alternatives. With its efficient, masculine rationality, this title is strangely unbecoming for an audacious and sensitive book that, more than anything else, questions how we as a scholarly community engage North Korea as an object of research. Shine Choi raises some very fundamental epistemological questions that reverberate in how North Korea is set up in international politics, but in fact digs far deeper into how we come to know what we think we know about North Korea, without ever really returning to the international politics mentioned in the title, let alone coming up with any workable answers. But maybe the title is a ploy to lure those who look for quick answers into the intellectual quicksand of self-reflection, because, let’s face it, is our real problem not that we expect any book with North Korea in the title to inevitably come up with roadmap for solving the “North Korea problem?”

I do not usually fetishize opening sentences; I rather have a thing with titles. However, in this case, the opening line of Shine Choi’s book put a smile on my face. “The international problem of North Korea is that North Korea is a work of fiction.” Direct and bold, it leaves little room for ambiguity. While the timid-natured might have felt the need to argue this statement, not so Shine Choi. Her message is clear, you are either with me or against me on this one. What follows is a bold and brave intellectual exercise that fundamentally questions the modes of knowledge production on North Korea. The critique on how North Korea is framed in international politics is not new as such–there is a growing body of research that has sought to break down the prevalent securitization narrative–but the effort at problematizing the question of how we come know what we think we know about North Korea and why this matters is unrivaled in its depth and scope. The book talks about the ‘North Korea problem’ in a relational way and does this by situating international politics within a larger (fictional) body of knowledge production and cultural differentiation. In doing so, it questions the monopoly of rational knowledge production as biased and power-centered. Deeply influenced by the work of Trinh Minh-ha, Shine Choi tries to think other modes of knowledge beyond academically sanctioned methods of research and their ingrained power imbalance.

Shine Choi is an iconoclastic scholar who strains at the leash of accepted modes of knowledge production on North Korea, unwilling to accept the conditions within which authoritative knowledge is produced. What she questions is a tradition of masculine knowledge production which sets the researcher up in a position of unaffected authority from which to speak objectively about a muted, powerless North Korean object that is not allowed to speak back. She challenges this fiction of rationality that is so typical of knowledge production on North Korea. Instead, she ponders alternative ways of knowledge production that not only return agency and voice to North Korea(ns), but also reframes the observing subject as physically and emotionally implicated. In doing so, this epistemological exercise also touches upon the ethics of doing research not just in relation to North Korea as research object, but also more in general by returning the gaze to the researcher and how (s)he is implicated and present in the research process as a person (i.e., politically, emotionally, bodily).

Far from easy, far from conclusive, this book provides good food for thought. It rattles at the cage of power induced rational knowledge production on North Korea, by now the last remaining frontier of old school Orientalism. With Gayatri Spivak, Shine Choi hovers between scholarship and activism, frustrated by the abyss that looms in scholarly writing between the instrumentalized research object and the writing subject. With Trinh Minh-ha she looks for a third, in-between space, where she seeks to overcome the ingrained subject-object dichotomy through an activist stance, no longer speaking about, but speaking with, respectful of the subjecthood and attentive to the voice of the other. In thinking this through, Shine Choi makes a very powerful and convincing statement for critical feminist international relations. As a critical exercise, this book is refreshingly honest, though simultaneously fundamentally disquieting as the in-between space of “speaking with” raises the spectre of the muted scholar, unable to speak (back). Does it all have to end in the abdication of the critical scholar? Can there be said no more?

Establishment DPRK figure Hwang Jang-yop (second left) with Kim Il-sung and a visiting delegation in Pyongyang, 1980. Seventeen years later, Hwang would depart North Korea for a different life in Seoul. | Image: KCNA

Establishment DPRK figure Hwang Jang-yop (second left) with Kim Il-sung and a visiting delegation in Pyongyang, 1980. Seventeen years later, Hwang would leave North Korea for a different life in Seoul. | Image: KCNA

Without Us, There is No Them? Shine Choi on Defector Literature

by Christopher Green

“Authenticity” is touted as a vital element of contemporaneous writings about North Korea, but it is one that Shine Choi problematizes in her chapter on the output of three prominent individuals who (physically) departed their homeland for South Korea in the early days of mass migration. In “Be(com)ing North Koreans in an affective world,” Choi exposes the way “authenticity” and its counterpart, “the real,” are conceptualized and refracted through the lens of these literary productions. For her, authenticity on these terms is a tool for disciplining how North Korean agency is possible: a way “of allowing ‘North Korea’ to exist in this world on ‘our’ terms.”

“Efforts to distinguish the authentic ‘real’ from the manipulated/ing North Korea(ns) often effectively constrains how North Koreans speak, act and become political subjects,” she declares.

The works of what Choi calls “survivor-witnesses” are “necessarily acts of translation which (re)create… stories of hardship to make demands on publics and publicity on behalf of those who suffered and continue to suffer.” The texts produced by, or in the name of, said individuals lead toward a shared path to a normative middle ground through which the translation of experiences of social harm can be transformed into “collective injustices that… assert the public-ness of [the authors’] lives as a matter of collective redress rather than just a private problem or a product of individual circumstances.” Literature as activism.

As such, Kang Cheol-hwan’s book The Aquariums of Pyongyang urges the international public to compel the South Korean citizenry to shake off its collective apathy toward North Korean human rights abuses. Meanwhile, Hwang Jang-yop’s I have seen the truth of history [나는 역사의 진실을 보았다] asserts the unavoidability and appropriateness of his departure, in order that at least one person could be outside North Korea to speak for the voiceless ordinary people.

The result is this: While Kang and Hwang began their respective journeys from very different points, one a prison camp survivor and the other an elite official, they both end up constrained (perhaps willingly, perhaps not) by the necessity of being a certain kind of North Korean. For them, this “being” opens the way to the presumptive destination; the intersection of redemption, recovery, salvation and rescue. These are the concepts that testimony mobilizes and are, inter alia, presumed to be the purpose of the exercise. Choi states compellingly that “a purer collective, one which excludes perpetrators and evil” can be and is established by this mode of storytelling. It is not made explicit, but one assumes that she thinks this would not be the case if the narratives in question were somehow unconstrained. She may be right.

The stories carry within them the idea that hope, agency, and change come from beyond North Korea’s borders (or rather, that there is only space for their formation on the outside); that the aforementioned salvation, rescue, recovery and redemption are possible only when individuals align with the “right” side. The third of the survivor-witness writings that Choi addresses, that of Choi Zini, disrupts this conceptualization through the declaration that anyone who has left should simply stay gone, but in the end even she does not hold this most difficult of lines. Rather, through the publication Rimjingang, she joins Kang and Hwang alike in the “privileged position of a now outside, free individual who has traveled that road from subservience to defiance and has reached enlightenment.”

I imagine that Choi laments the situation that she describes, though she acknowledges (rightly) that all three authors are perfectly within their right to pursue their work in this way. She also recoils from putting much flesh on the bones of an alternative formulation; as such, the book is theoretically robust, but it sheds little light. Perhaps this is because Choi is cognizant of the fact that what she critiques compellingly is also arguably reasonable, and quite possibly inevitable. There is no way to square that circle.

Her closing declaration would certainly seem to suggest this: “Rather than offer a critical reading of these activities,” she states with reference to Rimjingang and Kang’s prominent NGO vehicle, the North Korea Strategy Center, “I instead believe that this new site of intercultural encounter… is an exciting area of further research and reflection on what third scenarios demand of academic engagements.” It is a reversal: a moment of denial and avoidance.

Kim Jong Il and his shadow in 1971, while directing musical accompaniment for the opera Sea of Blood

Kim Jong Il plots out harmonies for an operatic spectacle in 1971. | Image: Chosun Central TV

Reading Shine Choi through Guy Debord’s ‘”Society of the Spectacle”

by Robert Winstanley-Chesters

“Separation is the Alpha and the Omega of the Spectacle” (Guy Debord)

“The International problem of North Korea is that North Korea is a work of fiction” (Shine Choi)

Having attended many a conference session subtitled, “How do you solve a problem like North Korea,” this author has encountered many a time that very fiction with which Shine Choi so provocatively begins “Re-imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and Alternatives.” This author has also walked within that fiction, talked to people from that fiction, even approached that fiction from the other side; the side in which the fiction crystallizes and manifests itself into a most concrete, physical and distinct terrain. Choi here has written a dense, neutron star of a book. Little conventional light can escape its 224 pages, her argument pulsing vigorously and metronomic against the dull edifice of North Korea studies. Perhaps it would be most productive, then, to read Choi through the lens of a similarly atomic philosophic burst, Guy Debord’s 1967 landmark of Situationism, “The Society of the Spectacle” (“La Societé du Spectacle” in its original French).

Every reader of Sino-NK and other academic fora with a North Korea focus will know the dead hand of the securitization agenda, the infantile “comedy-fication” of Pyongyang, the siren call of human rights universalism, even the labyrinthine, rabbit-hole myopia of division system theory. None of these ultimately does justice to the study of North Korea, to North Koreans or even to North Korea itself. Choi essentially calls out the entire edifice of academic and intellectual procrastination, demanding an “interruption” to the entire enterprise, or, if not a clattering down of the house of cards, then at least a brief hiatus in its chitter and chatter. Choi asserts that perhaps rather than politics and security, it should be a real product of Debord’s “spectacle” that we might see, hear and think North Korea as a culturally produced space.

Choi fascinatingly alights on the necessity of seeing and encountering North Korea differently through the moment of this interruption, using the work of Trinh Minh-ha, James Church, and Guy Delisle as exemplary eyes through which alternatives to imagining North Korea might be achieved. In particular, there is a focus on acts of conventional displacement (or digression) on the part of Trinh and detection (or uncovering as opposed to “encountering”) on the part of Church.

This would all sound rather diffuse and potentially artistic were it not for Choi’s demand that, rather than engaging and encountering this new un-securitized spectacle as an element of entertainment praxis, as viewers or ‘see-ers’ we not be released from the demands of morality or conscience, but instead fall head long into them. Similar to Sandra Fahy’s magnificent co-option of the field of emotion as a tool for empirical analysis, Choi reframes our viewing and seeing as an encounter with pure, unadulterated suffering. This is a torment which demands of us, claws at us, wretches in front of us, demanding an answer… which of course certainly cannot be a continuation of separated present.

Intriguingly, Choi’s suggestion is to remove the field of play and experience entirely from “tempo-reality” and to delve into the realm of the spectacle and of cultural production in order to relocate an empathetic reality; empathy being a lifeboat of real experience upon to which we can grab in these ephemeral waters.

Utilizing a very careful and considered set of literary and filmic readings, Choi encounters new possibilities for empathic, real, undivided love for North Korea. This love will ultimately break and fracture division as seen in filmic disruption present in productions such as “Over the Border,” “Typhoon,” and “Our Homeland.” This is the radical love of Sonia Ryang’s conception, with conceptual and emotional space for the viewer and participant to love North Korea now that he or she has been embraced, changed, and re-defined by new subjectivities. As Choi puts it when referring to Yang in on “Our Homeland:” “This intimate relationship with her subject gains articulation in all her productions, which crucially mediates how North Korea as an object of love is encountered and imagined.” (p. 160)

Finally, in this “love-space” of empathic “spectacular” production, Choi engages Spivak’s conceptions of re-centered, de-centered selves, understanding them to open up “the possibility for exploring a greater diversity of in-between spaces and translative transactions” (p. 219). We arrive with Choi at this space of acute hyphenation, barriers broken, defences down, at the Omega of the Spectacle. In Spivak’s “simultaenity” a world with “both ends,” subordination and disruption, it is as if our heterogeneous production and encounter themselves become pure mobilization as much as they become actualization. In this spectacular re-production, the division of North and South Korea is remobilized by its reproduction into and beyond spectacle, a critical, vital act of detournément.

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A Roundtable Review of Suk-young Kim’s DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border Mon, 20 Jul 2015 17:26:48 +0000
Background image is a 1969 map of the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ). | Image: CIA


The amount of critical and emotional energy expended outside of North Korea on the media event known as “Women Crossing DMZ 2015” should indicate that the barrier between the two Koreas remains as controversial and galvanizing as ever. In approaching the boundary with a scholarly eye, Suk-Young Kim, an associate professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, provides much food for thought. Responses from three scholars follow. — Adam Cathcart, Editor-in-Chief.

A Roundtable Review of Dr. Suk-young Kim’s DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border

Kim, Suk-young. DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 224 pp. ISBN: 9780231164825.

by Sino-NK

Thus Flows the Han

by Robert Winstanley-Chesters

Crossing the absurd infrastructural behemoth and dividing line between the two Koreas is as problematic and difficult as ever, and currently virtually impossible for natives of the Korean peninsula. One emotion that citizens, institutions and political cultures of both nations do share surrounding their separation, is intense sorrow, no matter how triumphant the representation of the conflict which created it might be. Division is in many ways acutely painful, felt as such, manifested in commemorative architectures and monumentality as such and held in both private and public memories as such. Yet extraordinarily most research and academic writing on this unfortunate stasis focuses primarily on both the military and ideological conflagrations which resulted in it, and the political and bureaucratic relationality which essentially still sustains and propagates it and which prevents any real movement towards its resolution.

Suk-young Kim’s “DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship on a Divided Peninsula” serves as a frankly quite brave, personal and heartfelt riposte to much of that writing which is generally as sterile and abstract as the environment of the plane in which I write this review. While underlining the ludicrousness and injustice of the division and separation and its crystallization on the 38th parallel, Kim is primarily focused on the real encounter of the division through both attempted, undertaken and longed for crossings of the division, both in conceptual or internalised forms and in its practical, infrastructural physical form. On the 65th anniversary of the war, and nearly the 70th anniversary of the Liberation of the Korean Peninsula, which brought with it the extraordinarily bitter pill of division, the separation and separateness of the Korean Peninsula now has a long history to itself and it is intriguing that before delving into the realm of current personal performance and encounter with the division, Kim moves backwards to explore the cultural representations of its earlier years. Investigating early theatric representations of division in Yu Chi-jin’s 1958 play Thus Flows the Han River and Sin Go-song’s Ten Years from the same year but from north of the dividing line, she encounters social productions which are still in the process of learning to live with separation, concerned with its geographies and in Ten Years with familial impact of attempting to cross the newly re-bordered terrain. Later from the filmic output of the peninsula from the 1960s and 1970s in South Korea’s The DMZ and North Korea’s The Fates of Geumhui and Eunhui, Kim suggests a peninsula exploring notions of citizenship, belonging and nationality in the face of continuing, fearful, anxious division.

It seemingly would not be until matters connected to Lim Su-kyung’s fateful and famous attempt at a personal unification on the cusp of the collapse of transnational communism on August 15th, 1989 that journeying across the DMZ is presented by Kim in an example of personal embodiment. Lim’s journey and her optimism it seems was utilised by North Korean narratives as a fracture in South Korea’s “division system.” Lim’s eagerness though seemingly reflecting the deep personal longing for connection across the space of the 38th parallel more generally, still extant some 44 years after the initial political moment of separation. This, for the reviewer opened really the most exciting element of the book, and one which is grounded in personal experience from Kim.

Lim Su-kyung’s journey was between two spaces locked, it seemed, in something of a cultural stasis, not dramatically changed in cultural or psychic ways (other than the impact of the separation), since 1945. In contrast, in the near present when Kim goes searching for a route of connection across the ossified terrain between the two Korea’s, she is doing so as a citizen of country which has undergone radical socio-political changes and structural adjustment during the 1990s and 2000s. Kim encounters border spaces concocted around the dividing line which, while ultimately offering no real passage across the division, are presented as a confusing melange of pained commemoration and consumption focused touristic experience. Spaces like Imjingak Peace Park which while seeking and manifesting an interest in objects which channel the raw authenticity of war time border are equally happy to adopt the role and style of a theme park. Or the briefly opened Geumgang mountain crossing, which in homage to its corporate benefactor appears to have focused on encountering the North Korean other through processes of consumption.

Ultimately of course, despite her previous fascinating exploration of the nature of citizenship on a divided peninsula, Kim, like any South Korean, is not allowed to cross the real border, to break the bounds of the division. While she points out that non-Korean foreigners are allowed to do so on occasion and may visit and encounter North Korea itself, they never really existentially experience the division as an impact on their bodily subjective, as North Korea in reality is as foreign and bordered as South Korea. Kim can it seems not cross as a Korean, in the unified sense, but instead must carry the structures and processes of her South Korean citizenship either as she approaches or crosses the demarcation line. Therefore in this frequently intense book, crushingly the only emotional citizenship she and any contemporary South Korean is allowed to perform is one of silent, pliant consumption. Real border crossing, of the kind her mother so poignantly wishes to perform for the memory of her uncle, will have to wait.

A detained North Korean sailor walks over the DMZ at Panmunjom, July 2015. Image via StimmeKoreas.

A detained North Korean sailor walks over the DMZ at Panmunjom, July 2015. |Image: StimmeKoreas

Border Crossing as a Method

by Shine Choi

Border crossing is a method of making and unmaking the political. Or this is what I as a student of politics took away from reading Suk-young Kim’s DMZ Crossing. Two competing sovereigns have long used the DMZ border, and the sense of separation that it affects, for the top-down purposes of state building and body politics. The author reminds us early in the book that citizenship in both South and North Korea places emphasis on citizens’ duties to the state rather than their rights as citizens. (p. 9) She argues that while Korean cultural productions are not simply mouthpieces for anti-communist or communist state propagandas, Korean citizenships, in North and South, are intimately entangled with state building founded on two diametrically opposed claims to sovereignty that rely on separate Koreas.

The broader insight of the book is that there have always been border crossings as gestures to alternatives, i.e. as a method for reimagining what is possible and the terms of body politics. Here, border crossing is a way of negotiating with one’s immediate surrounding and present–or as the author put it, the terms of one’s citizenship – by crossing over, by moving over and back, by insisting borders are there to be crossed. It is a way of creating alternative terms of longing, belonging, surviving and being in the world by escaping, however momentarily, the hold that both sovereign powers seek to exercise in the language of citizenship. I hope I am not misappropriating the author’s argument when I say the book presents a strong sense that stopping acts of border crossing is unjust: it is a major exercise of (state) power that is wrong not only on humanitarian grounds but also because it impedes alternative realities for the future of the Korean peninsula to emerge. It is holding full realization of citizenship, or what I would call the political, hostage.

What DMZ Crossing illustrates well is the pluralistic nature of border crossing as a method of (un)making the political in cultural practices across time (begins with immediate years following the Korean War and ends in 2000s) and across cultural genres (theatre, film, documentary, war museums, tourism). We get a dense account of how diverse border crossings have been aligned by and disrupted the preferred statist meanings of the paradoxical space that is the DMZ. It also shows that a border like the DMZ, once put in place, becomes a site of emotional, political and cultural investment whose workings are hard to undo. The DMZ has developed a life of its own, and to be more precise, the reality is not a simple case of the state (that imposes) versus the ordinary people (that suffer the imposition). The DMZ has become a site of paradoxical longing, reliving trauma and remembering by citizens and statecrafts sometimes in synchrony, sometimes in discord.

For me DMZ Crossing most powerfully serves as a particularly poignant and painful document of how scholarship on DMZ and North Korea is crucially shaped by borders and unequal freedom to cross them. The author’s border crossing in(to) the Korean peninsula is halted, repeatedly diverted and constrained because she is a South Korean citizen unaffiliated with the state. The author cannot access Panmunjeom, Pyongyang and other cultural spaces in the Northern side that she identifies as important for her study. In Chapter 4 “Borders on Display: Museum Exhibitions” where she faces the no trespassing sign to the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in the North, the author asks,

What would it feel like to sit on the revolving stage and be mesmerized by the spectacular visions of victory while an eternally shining red star sees it all from the empyrean? Would I feel embraced by the eternal presence of the Great Leader, or would the critical distance between what I feel and what I am supposed to feel alert me to resist the manipulative indoctrination by the state? (p. 136)

These are curious questions especially since they appear at the end of the chapter after the author presents a seamless recreation of the experience of being over there through secondary sources and experiences. For me, these questions point to the heart of the matter of the book–the pain of being contained and kept out by virtue of one’s stakes in crossing borders. I then read the final chapter, “Nation and Nature Beyond the Borderland” as a release, an alternate routing for deploying border crossing as a method in borderspaces that are open to her as a Korean citizen. The personal turn at the end of the book that recounts a family story brings us back to this pain more intimately.

Thus, I would like to add this book to a growing archive of expressions of indignation by Korean citizens especially in the global climate where mobility is power. To reappropriate the author’s description of DMZ tourism, the book “is about celebrating mobility as much as mourning immobility… is an ambivalent emotional experience predicated on the hopeful “vicarious crossing” and the frustrating impossibility of actual crossing” (p. 148). As an academic document of pain and indignation of being bounded by borders, this book points to the honest and difficult discussions that need to take place, especially between Korean citizen scholars and international scholars, about concrete strategies for more imaginative, prolific, multi-variant border crossings that the sphere of academic research can and must open up.

According to Lankov, a unified Korea with Seoul as the capital is likely to be accepted by China | Photo Courtesy of Korea Report

Seoul’s institutional channel for DMZ crossing. | Image: Korea Report

Vicarious Crossings

Reviewed by Valérie Gelézeau (Associate professor at EHESS, IIAS Leiden fellow)

In DMZ Crossing, Kim Suk-young considers the Korean border as the stage on which the lasting drama of the division is performed. To achieve this, she examines various types of border-crossers, avoiding to oppose in a binary way border control expressing the State authority and legitimacy on one hand, and, on the other hand, acts of crossing affirming resistance of individuals or groups to that authority. Instead Kim argues that crossers can act as agents of the State, discusses how their emotions are manipulated, and analyzes how “border crossers use their physical bodies and emotions as optimal frontiers to resist the state’s conventional right to define citizenship.” (p. 4)

This program makes the book a welcome addition to the already vast Korean Studies’ scholarship devoted to the border, the division, and its separated families in various other disciplines (mainly anthropology and history), simply because it offers the fresh approach of performance studies. In fact, the book is particularly interesting for being representative of an “emotional turn” in social sciences, which puts affect and emotion (and the body as the primary signifier of those human emotions) at the centre of the perspective.

The five chapters of the book are logically set, each addressing a certain type of border-crossers, with one example from the North, and one from the South. Each chapter introduces a specific medium of capturing border crossing (from theater plays in chapter one to DMZ places of memory in chapter five), laid in chronological order, from the late 1950s to the present.

The first two chapters encounter border crossers in stage plays (Chapter 1: 1958 Ten Years published in Pyongyang and Thus flows the Han River published the same year in Seoul) and movies (1965 South Korean movie The DMZ, and 1975 well-known North Korean movie The fates of Kŭmhui and Ŭnhui). While Kim Suk-young shows that border crossers can also be dramatized as dangerous infiltrators (chapter 1) and not only victims of the partition, she retraces particularly well the making of the separated family paradigm in visual fictions. Drawing on the work of political scientist George Marcus (Sentimental citizen 2005), she argues that (Korean) citizenship appears defined by “intuitive bonding between lost family members–an interesting way to challenge other notions of citizenship relying on political or ethnic criteria.

I particularly liked chapter 3, the beautifully titled “Twice crossing and the price of emotional citizenship,” which focuses on specific types of political border crossers who cross not just once but twice. While the 2003 South Korean documentary Repatriation was not new to me, having it confronted with the 1989 North Korean documentary on Lim Su Kyung The Flower of Unification (a South Korean college student who visited North Korea in 1989) was particularly enlightening, as it allows the reader to measure the distance between emotional display of border crossing by North and South media.

This rigorous construction challenges a secondary structure in two parts, the first one being based on materials that are familiar to a scholar in performance studies (theater plays, films and documentaries), while the second part embarks the reader into the self-staging of the author’s border crossing (“vicarious” at times), and an emotional (auto-)imagination of the border.

In that second part (chapters 4 and 5), the author recounts her own experience of museums and places of memory and how they might be used as similar materials for analyzing the border on stage. I somewhat regretted that these chapters were not situated in the backdrop of existing scholarship on museums, border crossing studies, or tourism in other disciplines.

Chapter 4 in particular will be a bit hard to use, because the author uses obsolete states of the Pyongyang War Museum (조국해방전쟁승리기념관), in reference to disparate sources (a 1973 tourist guide edited in Pyongyang, “several accounts” (p. 133) not more precisely cited, some pictures from tourists found online, etc.). In fact, the museum was entirely renovated in 2013 and reopened precisely on July 23, 2013 as a commemorative gesture to the end of the war. Now, what the visitors face entering the museum is a giant statue of Kim Il Sung obviously created to enhance the resemblance to the new leader Kim Jong Un. And, while museographic techniques show the knowledge of international museums, the border is indeed featured in this new version of the museum (from didactic videos to installations).

Inspite of this issue, in chapter 5, although Kim Suk-young justifies the use of auto-ethnography as a method, the account might have been much more significant if that experience were articulated in regard to other works having elaborated on similar topics (e.g. Christian Park’s anthropological critique of the Kŭmgangsan tour). Moreover, since space is not only a stage of performance, but a much broader social construct, it seems hard to interpret what planners had in mind on the bases of a single journey (the June 25, 2009 trip to Imjingak, a “solemn experience”) and without having considered their voices.

In the end however, it is in this second part where the book, extremely well-written, full of creative power and–indeed!–affect, poses real questions. But not about the Korean border. This book is about other types of border in writing, such as borders between social sciences and literature, or ethnography and (auto)-biography, or academic paper versus fiction or epistolary writing. While a considerable amount of research was devoted in Western academia to a critical approach of ethnographic methodology, current research emerges regarding those new issues (Ivan Jablonka affirming that history is literature (2014), Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan on how to deal with the blurred limits between ethnography and self-staging). Although Kim Suk-young does not explicitly mention this body of research in her book, she clearly argues for other ways to approach scholarly writing.

By offering this skillfully written emotional journey into the division, she indeed manages to advocate for de-bordering academic literature, which is probably why we really all would want to read this book.

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