Internet activism transforming street politics: South Korea’s 2008 ‘Mad Cow’ protests and new democratic sensibilities

Abstract

This article examines South Korea’s Internet-born ‘candlelight festivals’ of 2008, with a focus on online movement transforming protesters’ communicative patterns and sensibilities in the street. When the government resumed importation of US beef despite widespread concern about mad cow disease, Korea’s young Internet users criticized the government and mobilized for street protests. In the resulting protests, the festive crowd directly spoke back to authority with irreverent humor and carnivalesque defiance. This novel mode of political participation indicates new democratic sensibilities liberated from authoritarian preconceptions and limits that had dominated Korean politics. The transformation of protest modalities observed in Korea – a nation that has experienced the maturation of Internet activism – suggests that scholars should pay attention to how Internet users traverse online and offline spaces, and to how online politics reshapes local actors’ broader political experiences and expectations.

Keywords

activism candlelight protest Internet mad cow disease South Korea youth

In April 2008, 3 months after the inauguration of President Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013), the South Korean government began negotiating the resumption of beef importation as part of the free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States. American beef import had been halted 5 years earlier over rising concerns about bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as ‘mad cow disease’. The proposed importation stirred the country’s cyberspace over fear of the fatal disease, whose cause and means of transmission to humans as Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) were not fully known. The online space was soon inundated with disturbing stories and images of downed cattle, of vCJD patients’ sponge-like brains, and of the BSE epidemic in Britain between 1984 and 2009 – in which 180,000 cattle were infected, 4.4 million suspect cattle slaughtered, and 166 people killed by vCJD (Brown, 2008). An online petition began on Agora, an Internet bulletin board on the country’s largest online portal, Daum.net, demanding that the Korean National Assembly impeach Lee. The petition went viral, receiving 1.3 million signatures in 2 weeks.

When Lee signed the beef import agreement on April 18, Agora users immediately proposed a ‘candlelight festival’ (ch’ŏtpul munhwaje) in downtown Seoul, and Internet users took to the streets (Yoo, 2010). After the first gathering on May 2 drew 15,000 participants, the festivals – also called the ‘beef protest’ – spread, galvanizing young Koreans with carnivalesque slogans, music and dance performances. On May 13, when the National Assembly held a hearing on the US–Korea FTA, the festivals grew nightly, rebuking Lee’s policy proposals and demanding his impeachment.

In both online and street protests, teenagers under the voting age (of 19) emerged as the original critics of the president, well before oppositional parties or activists joined them. It appeared that youth activism, which declined after the country’s democratization in 1987, was reappearing after a long hiatus. During Japanese rule (1910–1945) and the subsequent authoritarian regimes (1948–1987), elite high-school and university students were foot soldiers in street protests, and university campuses were crucibles for alterative political visions. However, after democratization and the subsequent neoliberal economic restructuring in the 1990s, Korean youth was redefined primarily as consumers and a precarious labor force. Furthermore, in the competitive education market, Korean teenagers became infamous for having the longest study hours and highest private education expenditure in the world (The Chosun Ilbo, 2009).

Thus, when seemingly apolitical teenagers initiated an impeachment campaign and took to the streets in 2008, questions ensued. How did teenagers become the primary instigator of such intense opposition in 2008? And, what does this festive yet politically attuned youth activism mean in Korea’s social movement tradition?

I argue here that the teenagers brought out into the street the routinized online practices: they circulated messages and enacted performances that captivated them, built affective networks and temporary alliances surrounding these objects of captivation, and responded to authority with irreverent subversion. In the street, these practices established a distinct mode of political participation that moved beyond the demands of institutional democratization (the old democratic agenda), and outmaneuvered the Lee government’s attempt to justify beef importation and neoliberal reform as an inevitable global flow. In the Korean social movement tradition, the candlelight festivals offer a glimpse of new democratic sensibilities transcending the legacies of authoritarian era. These youth were able to participate in protests without any formal intention to undermine the government or consideration of the ideological ramifications of their actions. During the authoritarian era, casual participation in politics had been unimaginable – Koreans had no choice but to accord with the binary of pro- and anti-government activism, and taking the latter side often entailed physical and social sacrifice.

This broad shift in the modalities of political participation is indebted to both technological and contingent local experiences. Technologically, young Koreans built a collective on the Internet based on a shared yet underarticulated fear of contaminated beef and of Lee’s neoliberal policies and developed a potent critique of his larger neoliberal policies without adopting the language of institutional politics. Elsewhere, I theorized this as a politics of captivation (Kang, 2016). A user’s captivation with a message or image becomes the center of a new network whose circulation expands its reach to further audiences, and the number of linked connections makes a message more visible by placing it more prominently in search results. The captivation of users therefore circulates the message, determining its visibility for other viewers and inviting them to participate in the interpretive community around it. Furthermore, online captivation with an issue conveys nascent knowledge and judgment, but without conformance to existing political norms. For instance, the captivation with a conspiracy theory suggests that the public cares about an issue at hand but institutional politics has failed to offer a reasonable account for it.

Furthermore, these ‘online’ practices are no longer confined to a ‘cyberspace’ detached from reality, but constitute local actors’ political sensibilities. Philosopher Stephen Gaukroger (2012) notes that sensibilities make moral behavior a ‘nondeliberative aspect of one’s disposition’ (p. 390). The teenagers in 2008 had experienced the online space since their childhood. It was not ‘a placeless virtual domain divorced from actual physical places’ but part of organic experiences that weave online activities into other forms of private, interpersonal, and public activities (Postill, 2011: 21). The teenagers who developed their sensibilities online brought the modalities of online activism into the street.

In this article, I first discuss the political atmosphere leading to 2008, and then analyze the online discourses and street performances through postings on Agora and Candle Girls’ Korea, a Daum.net community in 2008. These platforms were not merely sources for online discourses; they offer a window to the candlelight festivals because slogans, parodies, and performances manifested both in the streets and in online communities. Although my focus here is on teenagers, the 2008 protests eventually became an assembly of heterogeneous groups. (For a study of the various groups and generations at the candlelight festivals, see Chŏn (2009), Kim (2010a), Kim (2010b), and Yi (2010).)

The teenagers of 2008: digital natives in a postauthoritarian and neoliberal era

The youth of 2008 were the first generation of Koreans raised after the authoritarian era, exempt from ideological contestation between authoritarianism and the democratization movement. Meanwhile, the neoliberal restructuring that began in their childhood in the late 1990s had made a lasting impact on their education, career, and political position. In 2008, this generation’s distinct experiences prepared teenagers to resist Lee Myung-bak’s neoliberal reforms while university students were withdrawing from activism.

The Korean millennials, born after the mid-1980s, were the local variant of ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001). Growing up in Korea’s early maturation of Internet culture in the 1990s, they were comfortable with getting news, expressing their thoughts, and finding like-minded people on social media. In the late 1990s, Korea established a robust online culture through aggressive government initiatives and homegrown content and communities. By 2002, 57.4% of all Koreans had a high-speed Internet connection, the highest in the world at the time (the rate was 97% in 2008) (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2013). The country’s two major portal services, Daum.net and Naver.com, launched in 1997 and 1999, respectively, offered free e-mail accounts and space for online communities several years before the introduction of MySpace or Facebook. In 2002, 90% of all Korean Internet users regularly logged onto Daum, making it one of the most visited Internet portals in the world (Kelly, 2003).

Furthermore, by 2008, Internet-born street rallies had already become a taken-for-granted response to controversy. In 2002, when candlelight vigils commemorated two 13-year-old girls killed in a roadside accident by a US military vehicle, youths joined together to commemorate their ‘sisters and friends’; in 2004, Koreans turned out to protest the conservative party’s impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun; in 2005, high-school students demonstrated against hairstyle regulation and educational reform.

Although it had been only 6 years since the initial Internet-born candlelight protests of 2002, for teenagers, the format became a natural response to perceived injustice. When the first candlelight protests appeared in 2002, participants and observers alike compared it to the anti-American activism of the 1980s, implicitly characterizing the then-new format of vigils as radical activism (Kang, 2009). In contrast, by 2008, candlelight protests had become a repertoire in their own right, and required no explanation. What Ru-mi, in junior high school at the time, told me in an interview in 2011 captured this change: ‘They might look radical to the older generation, but for us they are almost a natural response whenever we see something important on the news’.

Despite the more liberal political environment, the university students who in previous generations had led protests instead buckled down under the pressure resulting from recent neoliberal reforms. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the Korean Won devalued by 40%, raising production costs for some of Korea’s chief industries and led to bankruptcies. Even though Korea recovered from the financial crisis, youth unemployment remained more than twice the overall unemployment rate (9.3%, compared with overall unemployment of 3.3% as of 2008) (OECD, 2015). The opening of financial markets and influx of foreign corporations added a particular anxiety for college students and employees alike to equip themselves for global competitiveness – including acquiring English competency and a cosmopolitan sensibility, as well as honing their creativity (Abelmann, Park, & Kim, 2009). A college degree no longer guaranteed a secure job or middle-class status, and the ideology of competitive individualism became ‘common sense’ (Hall et al., 2013: 17). In the face of this heightened educational and professional competition, university students developed a conservative leaning.

Against this backdrop, conservative candidate Lee Myung-bak stormed to a landslide victory in the 2007 presidential election with his promises for economic recovery and prosperity. Lee was a self-made entrepreneur and instrumental figure in establishing Hyundai in Korea and beyond in the 1970s. He debuted on the national political scene as the mayor of Seoul (2002–2006), and his autocratic yet dramatic measures left visible marks in the city’s gentrification and mass transit system. Even before the presidential election, Lee had been considered a shoo-in with no viable competitor. In the December 2007 election, the historically low voter turnout of only 62.9% (compared with 70.8% in 2002, and later 75.8% in 2012) and extraordinarily large gap between Lee and liberal runner-up Chung Dong-young from the Democratic Party (46%–26%) illustrated the political atmosphere at the time (Kim, 2007).

During the electoral campaign, Lee’s unwavering lead gave rise to unique online enclaves centered on criticism of his prosperity rhetoric and bitterness toward the public that uncritically accepted it. With names like ‘Anti Lee Myung-bak’, these online communities drew citizens who denounced Lee’s policies – such as the pan-Korean Grand Canal, privatization of public corporations, and deregulation of medical insurance – for resorting to industrialization-era construction projects and a neoliberal outsourcing of public service (Yonhap News, 2010). In particular, Lee’s education policies, such as the deregulation of ‘special purpose’ high schools and liberalization of university admissions, drew teenagers to these online communities. Immediately after the election, these online communities turned into crucibles for mobilizing the 2008 protests (Yoo, 2010).

Under these circumstances, American beef importation eventually became the key issue highlighting the class-based nature of Lee’s neoliberal projects. For instance, the US–Korea FTA was expected to meaningfully hurt the typically small and independent Korean cattle farmers, with the primary beneficiaries being conglomerates that would gain preferential access to the American automobile and telecommunication markets. Furthermore, Korea’s upper class would still be able to afford ‘safe’ domestic beef, which was significantly more expensive than its imported counterpart; the choice for the lower classes would be considerably limited, while students, military service members, and the incarcerated would have no choice at all (No, 2009). Youth in 2008 shared underarticulated yet potent grievances toward Lee’s neoliberal proposal, and were prepared to voice their dissatisfaction.

‘You Eat the Mad Cow’: fear of mad cow disease and the critique of free choice

With concern rising about contaminated beef, Internet users soon made the mich’inso (mad cow) an icon for their protest – especially the image of a cow with a flower behind its ear, a visual pastiche of the popular comic character of a crazy girl who unashamedly displays erratic behavior (see Figure 1). Madness, as in ‘Mad Cow, Mad Education’, captured young people’s shared but underarticulated vulnerability to a fatal disease and to extreme educational competition, emerging as a central theme in young Internet users’ critique of Lee. The resulting street protests surrounding the slogan ‘You eat the mad cow’ highlighted Lee’s portrayal of health care, education, and survival in the global market as matters of personal choice, with little consideration for the unequal access to these resources.

Figure 1.

A visual parody of the US–Korean summit (public domain).

Figure 1 represents the kind of visual parodies that circulated after the US–Korea summit on 19 April 2008, depicting Lee as interested primarily in his debut on the international diplomatic stage rather than in the feelings of the Korean public. The text offers a satirical caption:

Myung-bak is happy now!

Accompanying and honoring the mad cow,

Thinking of proudly bringing it back to Korea,

He is happy!

The original photograph released from the summit conveyed the narrative that the American leader acknowledged Korea’s new president as an important partner, and that Lee had successfully employed his diplomatic skills. The visual parody, in contrast, offered the alternative narrative that Lee’s primary interest is to please Washington or to be recognized as a respectful partner, while turning a blind eye to public disapproval.

The mad cow icon particularly addressed the perceived inequity under Lee’s rhetoric of choice. Lee visited a beef farm on 26 April as a gesture of listening to cattle farmers’ concerns about inexpensive American beef; there, he responded that it was the farmers’ responsibility to produce quality beef to compete against the American product and to attract ‘the Korean consumers, who decide to choose American or Korean beef’ (Hankyoreh, 2008). For Internet users, this statement evidenced Lee’s disregard or small farmers whose livelihood was threatened or for the middle and lower classes whose food choices were significantly constrained by cost.

In this context, the title of the protest, ‘You Eat the Mad Cow’, is a direct refutation of Lee’s ‘free choice’ argument. The protests depicted the import policy as threatening the lives of Korean citizens and targeted Lee himself. Protesters held banners directly addressing Lee: ‘I am too young to die’, ‘President eats Korean beef, and we eat imported beef’. Protesters also wore cow outfits, and installed sculptures of Lee and the mad cow.

Popular slogans and chants during the festivals increasingly addressed Lee’s broader neoliberal policies. Education was the most prominent theme of the early protests; Protesters contended against Lee’s proposals to introduce additional competitive measures both among students and among schools – policies that led high schools to add another class period before the regular first class, dubbed ‘period 0’. Student protesters brought out banners that read ‘Our true movers are mad cow and mad education’, ‘If I died of mad cow disease and could not afford privatized health care, scatter my ashes in the Grand Canal!’, and ‘Period 0 to students, debt to patients, precarious work to workers, mad cow and GMO for our dinner’ (Ch’u, 2008; People’s Solidarity for Social Progress, 2008).

These parodies also addressed the privatization of the universal health care system, the increase of contract workers in lieu of employees with benefits, and the pursuit of the FTA. While Lee presented his policies as inevitable responses to an increasingly globalized and competitive economy, the parodies instead represented these measures as bringing unreasonable hardships to the average citizen. Such Internet-born parodies disrupted the government’s framing of competitiveness as a personal and national goal, and instead rearticulated beef import, privatization, and extreme academic competition as matters of collective concern.

This protest phenomenon suggests new possibilities for political participation through the Internet. The overlapping of ‘mad cow’ and ‘mad education’ draws our attention to the convergence of civic, private, and consumptive practices. It is difficult to ascribe to the teenagers at the protests any formal intention to critique broader neoliberal politics; instead, what rallied these young people was underarticulated, yet intense feelings of vulnerability to a fatal disease, anxiety toward increasing educational pressure, and the perception of government indifference to their safety.

This protest phenomenon does not allow for easy distinction between citizens and consumers. Participants complained that Lee’s rhetoric of ‘choice’ in privatization, deregulation, and free trade in fact failed to afford sufficient choice to consume safe products and quality public services ranging from beef to education to medical insurance. As Papacharissi (2013: 149) puts it, ‘The function of blogging is expressive first, and deliberative only by accident’ – the primary motivation of social media users is better characterized as that of a consumer than of a citizen. Accidental, however, does not mean unlikely or arbitrary. Issues that were deeply important and personally relevant to many Koreans formed a vernacular critique that unveiled the disregard for inequality underlying Lee’s rhetoric of competitiveness.

Evolving democratic sensibilities: the crowd and the carnivalesque

As the candlelight festivals drew more students and citizens, the government and conservative media described the public fear of BSE as an urban legend propagated by radicals (Kim, 2008). On 14 May, the government announced it would prosecute those who posted unsubstantiated information online along with initiators of candlelight protests. In their responses, the government and mainstream media alike drew on the interpretive lens of activist mobilization and conservative-progressive opposition. The protesters, however, did not respond with the same ideological language; instead, they increased their activities in scope and connectedness both online and in the streets, circumventing government authority with their presence, network, and sense of parody.

Conservative presses quickly attributed the protests to ‘leftists’, emphasizing the intentional intervention by radicals, while depicting the mass participation of youth as merely a pathological object. On 5 May, daily newspaper Dong-a Ilbo declared, ‘The leftists are gathering under the banner of “anti-U.S. beef” and “anti Lee Myung-bak” after failing in the presidential election and again in the general election’ (Dong-A Ilbo, 2008). Meanwhile, teenage participants were objects of ‘Internet brainwashing’. Leading conservative newspaper Chosun Ilbo invited a social pathologist, who went on to compare the candlelight festivals to a medieval ‘witch hunt’, in which teenagers were goaded by radicals into the irrational decision to stand up against the national interest (Kang, 2008). Unlike the conservative media, progressive publications such as Kyunghyang Sinmun and Hankyoreh presented teenagers as articulate critics of Lee’s ‘neoliberal policies’ (Ch’oe, 2008). In the reports, the students demonstrated a deliberate criticism of Lee’s education policy. Despite their opposing judgment, both the conservative and progressive presses attended to young participants’ political intentions and the consequent effects.

Contrary to the media coverage, the participants’ Internet and street protests show that they circumvented such debate and instead performed their political critique, blurring the boundaries between online and offline spaces. The day the government announced it would prosecute protest organizers, including Andante, Internet users brought the real-world format of mass protests online, posting en masse to the bulletin board of the National Police Agency: ‘I am Andante’, ‘Arrest me’ (Agora P’yeindŭl, 2008). Similar messages appeared on major portal sites, and within days, the trend had turned into the ‘Campaign for Ten Million Arrests’ with the goal of being detained in large numbers to outmaneuver the government’s efforts to subdue the protest (Agora P’yeindŭl, 2008).

Parody and subversion had been familiar practices online, appearing in response to controversial political and popular issues under the auspices of anonymity and rapid circulation. However, the candlelight festivals brought this carnivalesque subversion into the streets, directly speaking back to authority with irreverent humor. As candlelight festivals grew to draw tens of thousands of participants nightly, the Seoul police denied permits for protests in the name of public safety. Citing the illegality of the festivals, riot police shot water cannons to disperse the protesters and arrested them. In response to this police violence, protesters developed creative slogans and performances. For example, protesters chanted ‘Warm water!’ as they were shot by water cannons – a parodic diminishment of violence to simple discomfort from the cold water. Similarly, they rebuked the police for wasting water, chanting ‘Save water’, ‘Don’t waste taxes’, and ‘Send water to those in need’ (Naŭi Yuwolŭn, 2008).

The ‘hencoop tour’, a parody of mass arrests in late May of 2008, exemplifies the coordinated subversion between online and offline efforts. As the police began detaining protesters by the hundreds nightly, rumors spread online that the police would report the names of students to their schools, and to their parents’ employers. However, during the course of the nightly protests, these mass arrests soon became an ordinary experience. Protesters called it the ‘hencoop tour’ in reference to a riot-police bus, which was typically covered in metal lattice similar to a cage. Tongue-in-cheek ‘Free hencoop tour’ posters went viral. Figure 2 features a poster advertising a ‘Hencoop tour of Seoul with Podori’ in a bricolage of visual components, including a combat police bus against the backdrop of a candlelight festival, the mascot of the Seoul police (‘Podori’), and the ‘Hi Seoul’ logo of the annual tourist festival. The text in the lower left corner presents ‘tour’ information:

Period: Until the renegotiation of mad cow begins

Schedule: departing downtown Seoul at 2pm every day

Route: Various police stations in Seoul

Included: Room and breakfast

Host: Blue House [the presidential residence]

Sponsor: Seoul Police Bureau

Figure 2.

Online poster for the ‘hencoop tour’ (public domain).

The poster, as well as the experience of the actual hencoop tour, resignified arrest and detention into a free city ‘tour’. In the 1980s democratization movement, the ‘hencoop bus’ had been an object of fear, associated with the possibility of incarceration and torture. In 2008, in contrast, the hencoop tour presented arrest as a cultural experience. A 28 May newspaper described scenes from within the bus and police stations that would appear very eccentric to an older reader – teenagers unafraid of arrest, taking pictures in the bus as if on vacation, and behaving as though the police station were a tourist site (Yi, 2008).

However, the crowds did not principally intend to mock state authority or to organize themselves for the purpose of civil disobedience. Rather, they destabilized the work of the state with the scale and scope of their connectedness and communicative patterns. The festive and irreverent crowds in 2008 were not merely a product summoned by Internet communities but a new type of collective that opened a space for outmaneuvering the police with its scale, and that rendered state authority an object of satire. In examining the democratic uprising in the Philippines in 2001, Vicente Rafael (2003) reminds us that crowds in the street were a ‘kind of technology itself’ (p. 416). For him, the crowd itself made possible a different kind of experience of becoming one with strangers – envisioning the abolishment of social hierarchy and the overturning of authority. During the 2008 candlelight festivals, belonging to a collective and being connected to crowds nationwide enabled protesters to deploy their scale and network to outmaneuver the authorities.

This crowd in 2008 was neither a new generation of activists nor emotionally swayed masses mobilized by propaganda. Instead, as a collective, the crowd ‘demolishes fear before’ water cannons, combat police, and mass arrest, turning them into objects of laughter (Bakhtin, 1981: 23). The crowd reveals new dispositions to politics, thus new democratic sensibilities: the crowd’s behavior and expectations were unbound by institutional politics and instead drove intense feelings of belonging to a potent collective, of speaking back to authority without fear, and of irreverently subverting politically binding structures ranging from the police to the neoliberal policies.

Conclusion

The 2008 festivals brought the modalities of the Internet out into the streets. Such festivals might seem to youth participants to be natural extensions of familiar practices on the Internet; however, new technologies bring about significant social changes not so much because increasing numbers of social actors join a ‘network’ but because new ‘persons’ and ‘places’ are constantly emerging out of new modes of connectedness (Sheller, 2004: 50). In the broader scope of Korea’s social movement tradition, the carnivalesque protests and the young protesters’ comfort with them indicate the emergence of new democratic sensibilities. These sensibilities represent a significant departure from those of protesters of the previous generation, for whom political changes were associated with direct influence on institutional politics.

Beginning October 2016, South Koreans again poured into downtown Seoul with candles – along with smartphone screens lit in lieu of candles – this time demanding that President Park Geun-hye (2013–2017) step down. She was elected in 2012 largely on the older generation’s identification with her – the daughter of President Park Chung-hee (1961–1979), who is often credited with spearheading Korea’s dramatic industrialization until he was assassinated by his security chief. When a series of corruption scandals erupted, Koreans were shocked by the extent of corruption, abuse of power, and criminal activities by Park, her personal advisor, and aides. Mobilizing themselves on the Internet, about two million Koreans (2.5% of the entire population) took to the street with candles and dance and song performances (Park, 2016). The Internet-born protests eventually put sufficient pressure on the National Assembly to impeach Park and on the Constructional Court to uphold the impeachment in March 2017.

These recurring protests suggest a shift in attention from the Internet’s instrumental role to how its long-term use by local actors reshapes their political experiences and expectations. The 2008 candlelight festivals, and in particular their significant transformation from the solemn 2002 vigils, suggest that low-risk protest or feel-good activism (so-called ‘slacktivism’) is not an antithesis of meaningful protest. Rather, young users growing up familiar with the Internet – the circulation of captivating objects, the affective networks and temporary alliances surrounding those objects, and the irreverent subversion of authority without fear of persecution – have begun to embody these practices in the real world.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The analyses of the two examples presented in this article were originally published in Kang, J. (2016) Igniting the Internet: Youth and activism in postauthoritarian South Korea and included here with the permission of the University of Hawai’i Press.

Funding

A research grant funded by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Iowa supported this work. This work was also supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (Korean Studies Promotion Service (KSPS)) Grant funded by the Korean Government (Ministry of Education (MOE)) (AKS-2011-BAA-2102).

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