Decomposing the crude divorce rate in five countries: Singapore,Taiwan, South Korea,the UK,and Australia

Over the past few decades, the level of divorce, measured by the crude divorce rate (CDR), has increased dramatically in both the East and the West, but has recently appeared to fall or level off in some countries. To investigate whether the recent decline or stabilisation of the CDRs reflects the real trends in divorce risk, a decomposition analysis was conducted on the changes in the CDRs over the past 20 years on two western and three East Asian countries, namely, the UK, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore. The following is observed: the decline in the CDRs of the UK and Australia in the 1990s, and of Taiwan and Korea in the 2000s, was mainly due to shrinkage in the proportion of the married population rather than any reduction in divorce risk; only Australia experienced a genuine reduction in divorce risk between 2001 and 2011; and the continuous increase of Singapore’s divorce level between 1990 and 2010 may be is an unintentional effect of the government’s marriage promotion policies. The shift in the population age structure, and more importantly, the drastic decline in marriage, has seriously distorted the CDRs, making them unreliable indicators for monitoring divorce trends.     

Democratization and museum policy in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This article examines the two distinct historical policy paths taken by the South Korean government in the late twentieth century towards the democratization of museums. One was based on the creation of a museological public sphere as an extension of the political democratization movement of the 1980s. This demonstrated the potential to become a valuable component of the wider incipient national public sphere within which civic subjects could discuss their individual and collective historical memories. However, despite this potential, a museological public sphere failed to influence the general trajectory of national policy regarding the democratization of museums that had been in development since the early 1980s. This other policy path towards cultural democratization was triggered by the award of the Seoul Olympics in 1981. It was based on public participation and entitled the ‘cultural Olympics’. An important strategy of the cultural Olympics was the construction of a new institutional infrastructure to expand the public right to enjoy culture. This path facilitated an increasing entanglement with neoliberalism in 1990s. Finally, the 1997 IMF crisis furthered the association between a superficial idea of democratization through institutional expansion and the practices of neoliberalism, a trend which continues within South Korean museum policy today.     

Rethinking culture and development: the culture-led community development project in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This study examines the use of culture in South Korean community development by analyzing four cases of ‘Initiative for Creating Culture Communities in Everyday Life’ (ICCE) and their development discourses. Effectively mobilized by the state during the period of industrialization and modernization that began in the 1960s, culture has been utilized for social development by the South Korean government since the 2000s. The complex relationship between development and culture in terms of economic and social approaches is reflected in the development discourses of ICCE projects. Indeed, as an alternative to previous economic approaches, these projects show that the government still strongly intervenes in social development through symbolic power. To examine this process, we administered a semi-structured questionnaire and held in-depth interviews with eight members of the government-led ICCE project, including its practitioners, artists, and residents. This study finds that despite its efforts to decrease direct intervention in the development of these societies, government power is strongly exercised in symbolic form through discursive practices. We thus suggest that to prevent a specific participant from unilaterally possessing symbolic power in the development process, the government should create an environment in which various agents can participate in the development discourse.     

韩中建交后韩国华侨社会地位变化考察

采用定量分析的方法,对在韩华侨人数变化的趋势、有关在韩华侨研究的概况进行了分析;从政府对华侨的关注及政策的改进、韩中民间经济贸易关系加速、韩国华侨扩大对外交流的努力、华侨学校的再兴等方面阐述了韩中建交后韩国华侨社会的变化;并从政治、经济、社会、文化等层面对韩国华侨地位加以评估。结论是,由于韩国政府对外国人政策的变化,中国人在韩国的影响力日趋显著;受教育、人才等因素的影响,在韩华侨在韩国的地位并无明显改善;随着新华侨影响幅度的加强,在韩华侨社会有很大的发展前景;韩国政府对于外国人的政策已有相应程度的改善,包容多种文化的政治态度应予以肯定。     

Mad cow militancy: Neoliberal hegemony and social resistance in South Korea

Massive protests shook South Korea through the summer of 2008. This political eruption which exhibited many novel and unexpected elements cannot be explained by pointing to basic political conditions in South Korea (strong labor unions, democratization, and so forth). Neither does the putative reason for them – to protest the new President’s decision to reopen South Korea’s beef market to the U.S. – adequately explain the social dynamics at play. In this paper, we examine the political geography of the ‘candlelight protests’ (as they came to be known), focusing in particular on their novel aspects: the subjectivities of the protesters, fierce ideological struggles, and differentiated geography. We argue that the deepening of neoliberal restructuring by the new conservative regime formed the underlying causes of these intense conflicts. In other words, the new protests should be seen as a response to the reinforced contradictions engendered by neoliberalization and a new alignment of social groups against the prevailing hegemonic conditions in South Korea. In this view, the huge demonstrations revealed vulnerabilities in conservative hegemony but failed to produce a different hegemony. To advance these claims, we examine three aspects of the protests: first, the neoliberal policies of the new conservative regime; second, the intense ideological conflicts around the media; and finally, the spatial materialization of the protests.     

汉代以前山东与朝鲜半岛南部的交往

根据<史记>等文献记载,山东与朝鲜半岛南部的文化交往始于秦代.本文从考古实物出发,在韩国出土的考古实物中辨别出来自战国时期齐国的铜剑和铜鼎等遗物,从而以确凿的考古证据证明山东和朝鲜半岛南部的人员与文化交往至少在战国时期就已开始了.战国时期齐国亡民应是从山东半岛出发,经海路直接东渡到达朝鲜半岛南部的,这对于纠正学界认为这条航路开通于南朝刘宋时期的传统认识也有一定帮助.     

The dual Green Revolutions in South Korea: reforestation and agricultural revolution under the authoritarian regime

In South Korea, the Green Revolution has been commonly understood as the development and dissemination of new rice varieties ('Tongil' rice) and the rapid increase of rice yield in the 1970s. However, revolutionary success in agriculture was not the only green revolution South Korea experienced; another green revolution lay in the success of reforestation projects. In the 1970s, South Korea's forest greening was closely related to its agricultural revolution in several ways. Therefore, South Korea's Green Revolution was an intrinsically linked double feature of agriculture and forestry. This two-pronged revolution was initiated by scientific research - yet accomplished by the strong administrative mobilization of President Park Chung Hee's regime. The process of setting goals and meeting them through a military-like strategy in a short time was made possible under the authoritarian regime, known as 'Yushin', though the administration failed to fully acknowledge scientific expertise in the process of pushing to achieve goals.     

明万历援朝将士与韩国姓氏

万历年间 ,明廷援朝抗倭将士立下赫赫战功。战后许多将士落籍朝鲜 ,亦有许多将士的子孙东渡定居。明朝将士落籍及援朝将士子孙东渡使朝鲜的姓氏结构发生了变化 ,增加了韩国历史上从未有过的姓氏 4个 ,本贯 14个。这些华裔在朝鲜朝廷和地方都受到重用 ,在军事、经济、文化等各个领域都做出了贡献。     

Consistency or Change in Women's Politicization in South Korea

Using 1982 and 1990 survey data, this paper examines the extent to which the gender gap in politicization has persisted and/or changed in South Korea. The core emphasis of the paper is on whether economic development and generational turnover hove reduced gender inequality in some altitudes–psychological involvement, protest potential, system trust–that are important for political activity. The findings indicate that both economic development and generational shift have narrowed the gender gap in politicization over an eight-year period. It should be emphasized, however, that the socio-political structure has not caught up with Korean women's attitudinal changes, thus resulting in a phenomenon of "institutional lag."     

The good, the bad and the confusing: the political economy of social care expansion in South Korea

Recent social policy reforms in South Korea indicate a progressive shift by a conservative government to modify the familialistic male breadwinner model that informs its welfare regime. The Korean government has demonstrated support for women through an increase in the provision, regulation and coordination of childcare and workplace support programmes for working parents. At the same time, labour market reforms have also created more pressures on women to seek and maintain paid work outside the home. Conflicting social and economic policy objectives have resulted in a confusing mix of policies, advancing and impeding gender equality at the same time. This contribution examines the recent family–work reconciliation policy reforms in Korea and discusses why these reforms may be good politics but a bad deal for women.     

Outstanding issues in bilateral economic relations between Australia and South Korea

This article examines and analyses the main issues in the current bilateral economic relations between Australia and South Korea, particularly focusing on the Korean perspective. Above all, the trade imbalance continuously favouring Australia has been an issue of great concern on the part of South Korea. Australia and South Korea have shown disagreement over the lopsided trade issue, regarding attitude, approach and standpoint in addressing it. While the Korean side broadly converges on the view that the bilateral trade imbalance needs to be redressed, there are four differing viewpoints on explaining the lopsided bilateral trade: (i) the Korean government's view; (ii) the Korean business sector's view; (iii) the relevance of culture; (iv) Korea's favourable perception of Australia. This paper seeks to answer an important question in the context of the two nations' economic/trade relationship: why South Korea has ever engaged with Australia on good terms, albeit with disadvantageous trade relations. In this case, the nexus of economics and politico‐security is largely in action. That is, on one plane, South Korea is ranked as an important trading partner and a major export market of Australia. On another plane, South Korea politically needs strong allies like Australia which can give an unswerving support for it in both the regional and international arenas.     

The disciplinary politics of antagonistic nationalism in militarized South and North Korea

After the Korean War (1950–53), the two militarized Koreas governed each and every member of society in similar ways through their disciplinary politics of antagonistic nationalism. The existing studies of state formation in the two Koreas have neglected an aspect of state power that was neither necessarily top‐down nor violent from above but also reproduced from below. In both South and North Korea, especially from the 1960s to the 1970s, state power had internal dynamics that penetrated the day‐to‐day activities of most citizens and led them to actively accept and participate in nationalist rule. This article explores an understudied aspect of the two Koreas' state power that was disciplinarily diffused in people's everyday practices through reproduction of aggressive nationalism from below and the organic construction of the individual body and nation.