Won Joon Choe Responds

Dear Joshua,

I’d like to thank you for taking the time to write such a provocative response to my op-ed and also apologize for my own rather tardy response. While I had planned to respond earlier, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and they do so with ever greater frequency when you are taking care of a sick mother.

Be that as it may, as should be the case whenever thoughtful men engage in a dialogue, I hope our exchange will force both of us to re-examine and sharpen our own positions. In fact, this response itself is a product of such a meditation. In particular, I may have overstated the numerical strength of the conservative voting bloc in the South Korean electorate during the 2002 presidential election. The data show that, in sharp contrast to the 1997 presidential election and most of the other election years I have examined, the conservatives were in fact outnumbered by “liberals” during the 2002 election. Nonetheless, the data also shows that the main conservative opposition candidate Lee Hoi Chang would still have won the election but for the pro-American Hyundai mogul Chung Mon Jun’s alliance with Roh Moo Hyun, given that the two conservatives seem to have monopolized the moderate voting bloc between them.

Now to your objections, and I will try to respond to them sequentially. You begin by contesting two of the main premises of my op-ed. First, that there is no stable leftist, anti-American electoral majority in South Korea today; and second that the election of Roh was due to his rather politically shrewd but ideologically-discordant alliance with Chung Mong Jun, rather than the emergence of such a leftist electoral majority. Naturally, you urge me to “cite some objective factual support” to buttress these premises. In the same vein, you argue much later that there is a contradiction or “tension” between my assertion that co-opting Chung won Roh the election and my supposed later concession that (your words) “there was real sentiment behind Roh’s victory.

I am not as big a fan of polls as you seem to be a variety of reasons, but they do appear to indicate that my analysis of Roh’s victory is correct. The poll numbers throughout the 2002 election year demonstrates that Roh trailed Lee by huge margins before his pact with Chung, with the exception of a “convention bounce” that Roh received for a few months after the MDP convention in March (see Table 1 in http://www.asiasociety.org/publications/AU2003.pdf ).

Roh and Chung themselves even explained that they joined forces precisely because various polls showed that they had no chance of beating Lee singly. The formula worked like magic. Roh essentially absorbed Chung’s conservative/moderate base without losing his hardcore leftist base. In fact, this was an almost identical repetition of the deal that brought Kim Dae Jung and the ultraconservative Kim Jong Pil together earlier in the previous presidential election (though that was even a stranger marriage, given that Kim Jong Pil had pretty much created and ran Park Chung Hee’s dreaded KCIA that twice attempted to kill Kim Dae Jung, and the two men had harbored intense personal animosities toward one another). At any rate, Roh’s popularity skyrocketed immediately after the announcement of their alliance, leapfrogging that of Lee in the polls and never looking back. Of course, the problem is that the mainstream foreign press–which are largely liberal and anti-Bush–find it more convenient and probably sexier to explain the election result by inventing stories about some momentous “generational shift” or ideological realignment (that naturally disadvantages Bush), rather than through plain old backroom wheeling and dealing among politicians.

Before I am done with the Roh-Chung alliance, let me stress another important aspect about it that seems to have now become lost in the Western press. This alliance could have easily produced Chung as the presidential candidate, rather than Roh. Unlike the earlier coupling of Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Pil–where the former was clearly the dominant partner from the very beginning–Roh and Chung had actually agreed to decide on a presidential candidate among them purely on the basis of a series of polls to determine who would do better v. Lee in a two-man race. Roh won by a threadbare margin, and South Korea narrowly escaped having a presidential election between two ultra-establishment conservatives. Imagine how different the election debates, esp. in regard to South Korea’s posture toward Pyongyang and Washington, would have been if the latter scenario had actually materialized?

If Roh was not elected on the back of a new leftist electoral majority, he seems to be utterly incapable of creating and nurturing such a majority now. Many of his signature leftist domestic reforms–repealing the National Security Law, establishing a truth commission to punish colonialist era collaborators, moving the capital south to weaken Seoul-based elites, relaxing Seoul University’s stringent admissions standards–have created a major backlash in the electorate. The upshot of all this? Roh has been extremely unpopular throughout his presidency (see http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200506/kt2005063018520211990.htm ). In fact, I believe the approval rating of around 20 percent he registered earlier this year is a historic low for any South Korean president. Further, that seeming unpopularity has translated into his own Uri Party suffering a crushing defeat in the most recent by-election. Needless to say, these are hardly signs that the South Korean electorate has lurched left. If anything, the data may lead one to entertain hopes that the South Korean electorate has become chastened about the limits of South Korea’s leftist agenda.

Now you raised a very fair objection in pointing out that I may be contradicting myself by arguing that (in my own words) Roh “won the presidency by exploiting an ugly wave of anti-Americanism following the accidental death of two teenagers in a collision with a U.S. military vehicle” and at the same time maintaining that reports of anti-Americanism in South Korea is greatly exaggerated. To quote you again, I had “[conceded] that there was real sentiment behind Roh’s victory.

I plead “not guilty” to your charge of contradiction here, and perhaps my analysis of that particular episode of anti-American eruption is emblematic of how I understand anti-Americanism in South Korea. While the protests were nasty and widespread, they were still a manifestation of passing emotions rather than fundamental beliefs. Unlike, say, anti-American protests in the Middle East, they were not motivated by serious policy differences with Washington or an aversion toward American values, but caused by anger at the way the deaths of the two girls were perceived to have been mishandled–an impression that both then president Kim Dae Jung and the ruling party candidate Roh played critical roles in encouraging.

That these sentiments were passing and neither permanent nor deep-seated is demonstrated by looking at the comprehensive poll data that Rand put out in its wide-ranging 2004 study titled “Ambivalent Allies?” The authors of that study examined polls tracking South Korean attitudes toward the U.S. from 1988 to 2003. Throughout that time frame, South Korean views toward the U.S. were generally favorable, and there were only three recorded downturns. December 2002 was–voila!–one of the only three periods where the U.S. was viewed more unfavorably than favorably during those 15 years (chapter 3). The other two occasions? During June 1995 and during February 2002.

Further, that these sudden, transitory upswings in anti-Americanism are driven by emotionalism rather than serious policy or value differences with the U.S. is punctuated by a rather revealing poll taken during one of the three downturn periods, February 2002. When asked to cite the biggest reason for their diminishing regard for the U.S., a whopping 65 percent cited the Apollo Ohno incident! Now this is pretty trivial stuff, an incident where South Koreans believed that one of their speed skaters was wrongly disqualified in that year’s Salt Lake City Winter Olympics on behalf of the American Ohno, who was awarded the Gold Medal (p. 69). Far behind the Ohno incident in importance were President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech (18.8 percent) and the U.S. war against Afghanistan (8.1 percent). I would think that a genuine anti-Americanism would have emerged from sterner stuff.

Of course, chatter about culture or national character makes many enlightened Westerners squirm, but in the end I must turn to the cultural context to explain much of the above. The fact of the matter is that Koreans are an extremely emotional, volatile people; many have compared them to the Irish. Aidan Foster-Carter says South Koreans are primarily driven by the spleen; the political scientist Seung-Hwan Kim, in a revealing essay about anti-Americanism, points to the dominance of “ki-bun” (“a combitnation of mood, feelings, and emotions) as the motor of South Korean politics (see “Anti-Americanism in Korea, The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2002).

Certainly, no analysis of South Korean anti-Americanism is complete without incorporating this cultural context. The wild, (your term) “mercurial” gyrations you acknowledge in the South Korean public opinion is an outcome of the dominance of this ki-bun. So is the violent character of South Korean public life. In fact, to those who were born and raised in South Korea like myself, the incidences of random violence against American servicemen that you decry are not primarily “[expressions] of anti-Americanism. Rather, they are better interpreted simply as expressions of South Korea’s violent culture.

You also offer a lengthy summary of various polls that have persuaded you that “a clear majority [in South Korea] dislike “ËœAmerica.'” I will try to be quick here, but suffice to say I do not read those very data you cite the same way:

“¢ There is the matter of the reliability of these polls–which you too pronounce “dubious. Two polls you cite that took place in the same year and same month actually show different results. For instance, in the April 2005 Joongang Ilbo poll that asked to name the country that posed the greatest threat to South Korea, the U.S. is far behind both Japan and North Korea. But in the Frontier Times poll that took place at the same time, the U.S. leads all countries for that dubious distinction. It would be interesting to hear what could possibly cause such a discrepancy. For myself, I think your data tells me more about the inherent difficult of attempting to capture South Korea’s wildly volatile public opinion through static polls than anything else.

“¢ Second, I see no persuasive poll data that shows a “clear majority dislike “ËœAmerica.'” The only possible candidate here is the Pew Global Attitudes Project poll data that indicated that a minority of 46 percent held a “favorable” view of the U.S. But the question is how many held “unfavorable” view? Besides, the Rand study I cited earlier show that the “favorable” view rebounded to 50 percent by September 2003, four months after the Pew poll (p. 46). Again, the problem is that a historical context is lacking with these data, even if some of them do confirm your point.

“¢ Third, I see a lot of data you cited that really does not have much to do at all with anti-Americanism.

For example, again you make a great deal of June 2003 Pew poll data that purportedly show that–compared to other Asian nations surveyed–South Koreans put less emphasis on certain fundamental democratic or liberal values such as competitive elections, free press, fair judiciary, religious freedom, and free speech.

To begin with, if I were nitpicking, I could argue that the 48 percent South Koreans who thought free press was very important was a number higher than all other Asian countries surveyed except Bangladesh, not “among the lowest survey results in Asia” that you claim.

Next, in a more serious vein, I am not sure if the data says what you think it says on the surface. I assume you are trying to say that South Korea has a less democratic or liberal culture or institutions than other Asian countries surveyed. While I am a fan of cultural explanations and wholeheartedly agree that South Korean politics can be better understood through a Confucian or authoritarian lens (see an Asia Times essay I published last year titled “South Korea’s Retrograde Politics” http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/FI04Dg01.html ), it would take a lot more to persuade me that South Korea is less democratic or liberal than some of these Asian countries surveyed.

Consider, say, the question of religious freedom. Could it be that South Koreans deem it less important simply because religious conflict was one of the few conflicts that contemporary South Korea has been thankfully free of for most part? In contrast, in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan (which is for some reason considered part of the Middle East by the Pew Center)–all of which have been wracked by religious conflict in recent times–religious freedom is judged to be far more important. Another outlandish data, which to me clinches it (and you omit among the same group of questions about values), is the data that says South Koreans deem economic prosperity the least important among Asian nations surveyed! Pardon? Again, maybe the data simply shows South Koreans take prosperity for granted since that they are already prosperous?

Further, I don’t see how all this relates to anti-Americanism even if you are right that South Korea is less democratic or liberal than other peer Asian nations surveyed. I suppose a convergence of culture can help countries to grow closer together, but that is not always so. Although I don’t know if data are available, I suspect that the number of South Koreans who believed that the aforementioned list of democratic or liberal values were “very important” were lower than they were in December 2002 or May 2003 throughout those decades where South Koreans’ opinion of the U.S. were “favorable” for most part. Certainly, democratization in South Korea has been blamed for anti-Americanism in many quarters.

I have probably already written too much, so perhaps it’s time to wrap up. I obviously read the data that I have presented here and you have countered with differently than you do. I think they say that South Korean public generally has favorable views of the U.S., with a few highly publicized downturns owing to passing emotions that get out of hand for a time. The impression of widespread anti-Americanism is instead due to the fact that the Western media suddenly becomes transfixed by South Korea only during one of these downturns–or worse yet, when a particularly rambunctious minority does something outrageous that persuades the Western media that one of those downturns has arrived. And to the extent that anti-Americanism has in fact gained some “real” ground in recent years, it is due to a comprehensive propaganda effort of Roh’s leftist government–which can be countered by a new conservative government, which seems to be an increasingly greater likelihood in 2007 given Roh and his Uri Party’s immense unpopularity.

On the basis of all these factors, it seems to me rather myopic to give up on South Korea so soon.