Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (19 page)

Nonetheless, this new generation distinguishes itself from the hardworking model students of an earlier generation who were driven by familial pressures to achieve in the highly regimented discipline of formal schooling through the well-recognized education management of their families (especially
their mothers). Today’s successful student must necessarily be more than simply a hard-working social conformist: He or she must be a self-starter. The new generation also sees itself as different from student movement activists who, although not model students, conformed to another sort of collectivistic pressure. Both of these earlier groups, then, are imagined as collectivist subjects driven by the external demands of families or their cohort group. In differentiating themselves from the past, contemporary students articulate a discourse of individuality, style, and self-fashioning. Additionally, the scope of this new persona extends beyond South Korea in an age of radical liberalization and the globalization of all forms of capital. Competition does not end at the boundaries of the state. Thus, the present college generation is deeply committed to a cosmopolitan ideal in which people are able to circulate in a wider and increasingly global arena. At the heart of this personal development project is English mastery, and many students described English as a necessary base (
beisŭ
) (Park and Abelmann 2004; see also Crystal 2003).

In some senses, the lives of the students today are not so radically different from student cohorts in the past. Personal development of the educated in South Korea has long demanded considerable individual energy and vitality. Family and other collectivities continue to assert considerable pressure on students; indeed, it can be argued that neoliberalization in South Korea—particularly in the form of the repeal of employee benefits and state social support—has even led to new formations of familism, namely the ideology of family as the locus of support and social welfare. However, people narrate and take responsibility for their circumstances and predicaments in ways that are quite new. Thus this generation’s self-understanding and modes of narration must be situated at the juncture of neoliberal social, economic, and educational reforms in South Korea today.

Although we cannot claim that the four students we discuss in the following pages perfectly represent a generation at large, we were struck by the consistency of their narratives about self-development.
5
We do not argue that college rank, class, and gender would articulate with the new forms of subjectivity in the same manner for every young person; however, we do think that they articulate in ways that are revealing. It is in this spirit that we linger on these four narratives to examine the variable modes of articulation in more detail and to preserve the dialogic quality of their expression.

The
IMF Crisis and South Korea’s Neoliberal Turn

This generation of students spent their childhood in an increasingly prosperous and democratic South Korea. In their early or late adolescence, however, they experienced the IMF crisis (1997 through 2001). This crisis marked a period of economic uncertainty leading to a broad array of social and policy reforms that were neoliberal in character. South Korea’s neoliberal turn involved a critique of crony capitalism and led to the call for venture capitalism in a deregulated market. Creative, global, high-tech youth were critical to this reform project (Song 2003).

Intensified privatization, individuation, and globalization are the large context for the transformations of subjectivity we write of here.
6
Increasingly, neoliberal subjecthood demands that individuals become self-managers who “produce [themselves] as having the skills and qualities necessary to succeed” (Walkerdine 2003: 240). Yan Hairong (2003) coins the term
neohumanism
to describe, after Marx, how human exchange value in China today has extended to subjectivity. Specifically, she analyses the Chinese construct of
suzhi
(quality) as follows: “
Suzhi
is the concept of human capital given a neoliberal spin to exceed its original meaning of stored value of education and education-based qualifications to mean the capitalization of subjectivity itself” (2003: 511).
7
Of course, post-IMF South Korea and market-reform-era China represent entirely distinct historical configurations, but the neoliberal spin Yan describes is one that perhaps unites youth worldwide (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 307).

Similar to other structural transformations imposed by external governing bodies, the IMF crisis forced the South Korean state and the corporate sector to become leaner and meaner. Unemployment skyrocketed in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. With radical corporate and banking restructuring as well as escalating transnational investment in the South Korean corporate sector, labor had to become increasingly flexible (Shin 2000). Today’s youth face a transformed South Korean economy in which full-time, secure employment is harder to procure, state and local protections and services are curtailed, the reproduction of the middle class is fraught with uncertainty, and the vagaries of transnational capital figure profoundly. These students face a reality that is ever more vulnerable and precarious, just as new models of personhood proclaim personal responsibility and authorship
for
one’s economic and general wellbeing. Ironically, however, their deep-seated embrace of these new narratives of personhood appear blind to the structural transformations that have fashioned these new subjectivities.

Furthermore, in a South Korea that is becoming increasingly class stratified or, as many have argued, polarized, we are particularly interested in how students do or do not take stock of their structural positions, which are registered here through college ranking.
8
For South Korea and other recently democratized states, the trappings of neoliberal personhood are particularly appealing because they stand for liberal democratic reform in which people can enjoy self-authorship, personal freedom, and self-styled consumption (see Song 2003; 2006). Thus the ironic meeting of neoliberal and postauthoritarian/collective liberal “individuals” is such that young South Koreans can unabashedly celebrate what might otherwise appear to be so nakedly pernicious (Song 2003 and
Chapter Ten
in this volume). As neoliberal transformations are easily celebrated in the name of liberal values, so too are particular features of the authoritarian developmentalist education system, especially its egalitarian ideology and standardization, which are now dismissed as backward historical burdens (Park 2006).
9

South Korean higher education, along with South Korean mainstream K–12 education, has long been driven by social demand. In earlier decades, this was for equal access, and more recently, for neoliberal reforms, namely deregulation, privatization, diversification, and globalization. Although some charge that the state continues to lag behind consumer demand (
Hankook Ilbo
2004; D. Lee 2004), South Korea today offers a case of state-managed deregulation of higher education in accordance with neoliberal values of efficient self-management, productivity and excellence, diversification, and global competition (Mok and Welch 2003; Mok, Yoon, and Welch 2003; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2000).
10
In other words, although neoliberal reforms have been accelerated by social demand and global pressures in the aftermath of the IMF Crisis, as Mok and his coauthors (2003) argue, they have also been highly orchestrated by the South Korean state.

The new model student is an autonomous student-consumer who is responsible for managing his or her own lifelong creative capital development.
11
South Korea’s elite university students have benefited most from the government distribution of national resources through the selective state support of higher education. Their coeducational campuses most deeply enact the
new
global human capital development that these students are well able to articulate.

This is the historical context in which contemporary college students are able to narrate their human capital development while obscuring the structural workings of college rank and family capital. The self-focused narration of this new generation works against a more broadly social imagination because it celebrates individuals who do not conform to collectivist demands. We are intrigued to find young champions of flexibility when it is flexible labor structures that jeopardize the secure futures of young people and, in particular, young women. This meeting of liberal and neoliberal values—precisely to the extent that flexible labor appears to speak to personal freedom—thus champions endless reinvention and frequent career changes. Indeed, a number of students we interviewed, particularly women, looked forward to flexible work lives in which they will be able to exercise their creativity, grow, and accrue experience. We were struck by the absence of talk about the gendered constraints in this new labor market and the burden flexibility imposes on women.

This “more radically individuated sense of personhood” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 305) thus obscures class and other structural differences. In the words of our interlocutors, the “machinelike” (
kigye kat’ŭn
) students—the previous generation of model students who lived “as they were directed to live” (
sik’inŭn taero
)—were, ironically, better poised to recognize the structures that constrained their futures. The burden today of “living as one wants” (
hago sip’ŭn taero
) renders invisible the forces that impinge on one’s choices in life.

We now introduce four students in greater detail: Heejin from Koryŏ University, a top-tier private school, and the others from lower-tier schools: one from Myŏngji University in Seoul and two from Inch’ŏn City University outside of Seoul. The designation of university level is complicated. For example, it is hard to put any university in Seoul on a par with those outside of the city and even more so with those in the provinces (
chibang
). Inch’ŏn City University, which is located in a city not far from Seoul, is somewhat betwixt and between because it is neither a Seoul school nor a provincial one. Although Heejin busily distinguishes herself even from her own top-tier university peers, she is nonetheless deeply invested in her university’s reputation for vitality and excellence and the status it confers on her—her campus capital. The students from Myŏngji and Inch’ŏn on the other hand, articulate their projects of self-development against the grain of their campuses.
Precisely because their campuses are not easily identified with these neoliberal modes of being, they understand that they must shoulder the burden of their own human development. They thus articulate a vision of how to make the most of their college studies.

An Elite College Student

It is the feeling of
energy
, the motivation to continuously do something.

We return to the Koryŏ University student with whom we opened this chapter and her thoughts on “self-management.” Heejin dwelled on self-management as a way of distinguishing herself from her close associates during her
chaesu
year, the year after high school when some students study to retake the college entrance exams to ensure college admission or upgrade their eligibility for more elite schools:

I probably shouldn’t say this, but those of us here are at this level [and she motioned as if to include the campus around us]. Our society is led by people at this higher level. . . . Frankly speaking, among my friends from my
chaesu
year [that is, those who attended the same college preparation institute], I am the only one who got in here. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying they are bad. They all go to provincial colleges or . . . We all used to hang out together, but when we parted at 1 a.m. I would go home and study until 3 a.m. before I went to bed. They just went to bed because they were tired.
So it was all about self-management
. . . . It isn’t that I look down on them. If I were to talk to them like this, they would think I was a different person. But I talk to them only about fun stuff. . . . I have friends whom I hang out with, friends I study with, and friends I consult with about the future. [emphasis added]

When we met Heejin a year later in her sophomore year, her position on self-management had hardened. Koryŏ University, she said unabashedly, was an elite school that should stand, metonymically, for students like herself: self-managers invested in the kinds of new human development sketched in the preceding pages.

She described a university that was a far cry from the one that her high school teachers had described: “Hang in there, hang in there, once you get to college you can do whatever you want.” Instead, to her delight, Heejin found
people
who studied really hard. She told us that she had been “moved” by the long line of students waiting to enter the library at 5 a.m. For Heejin, competing, self-managing, and working hard made her feel alive and vital. She described the energy that comes from activity and achievement:

[If you have to study in college] you can feel that you have
achieved
something. . . . When I was selected to be an exchange student [she hadn’t gone yet], the feeling was amazing—the sense of
accomplishment
. When I got into college, into the department I wanted, and . . . It is the feeling of
energy
, the motivation continuously to be doing something. [emphasis added]

Heejin was unfazed by the thought that this intensity of effort should be unending and that the point was not to arrive at one place or another. On hearing Heejin’s litany of activities and credentials, her friend asked, “But does this leave
you
any room for
self
-development?” Heejin’s retort was quick and easy: “But this is a part of self-development, too.” We understand her retort as refusing to make a distinction between a private or personal self and a market-oriented or instrumental one. Minutes later, the friend pushed her again, “You enjoy competition so that you can realize your dreams, right? It isn’t that you want to compete forever, right? Do you want to agonize yourself with endless competition?” While Heejin’s friend was keenly aware of the external pressures that demand neoliberal selfhood, for Heejin this self-hood resonates with her sense of her own essence, a selfhood well suited to the demands of the day and therefore deserving of reward.