Dr Se-Woong Koo was the keynote speaker at the ASAA’s 25th Biennial Conference held at Curtin University from 1 to 4 July 2024. This post is a shorter version of the keynote speech given at the conference.
On June 12, 2018, North Korea and the United States held their historic first-ever summit, bringing the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the then-US president Donald Trump together in Singapore. Concluding it was a press conference where Trump pledged to halt joint military exercises between the US and South Korea as a peaceful gesture toward Pyongyang.
Western media outlets were nearly unanimous in condemning the meeting, out of the rationale that it only legitimized North Korea on the international stage and undermined America’s national security and that of its allies, all on account of “surprise” allegedly felt in the region.
“Both the South Korean government and US forces in the region appear to have been taken by surprise,” declared the Guardian. “Pentagon and Seoul surprised by Trump pledge to halt military exercises,” heralded the New York Times. “Trump’s pledge to stop ‘provocative’ military exercises provokes alarm and confusion in Seoul,” quipped CNN. The American public radio broadcaster NPR added: “And the South Koreans said they’re still trying to figure out what it all means. So they clearly were surprised as well.”
Those in the know saw how facetious this media outcry was. What the office of the South Korean president actually said was that it needed to “find out the precise meaning or intentions” of Trump’s pledge, to go by usually more reliable and fact-driven reporting by the news wire agency Reuters. The South Korean government even added that they were willing to “explore various measures to help the talks move forward more smoothly.”
Indeed, real experts on inter-Korean politics would have known that the then-South Korean president Moon Jae-in, in power from 2017 to 2022, wouldn’t have been surprised or concerned, for he pursued a policy that went against the conventional hardline approach toward North Korea. Moon, a center-leftist, came to power promising to diffuse tension. He nudged Trump toward meeting with Kim. Moon’s own inter-Korean policy included pledges on “establishing peace on the Korean Peninsula” in conjunction with North Korea’s denuclearization as well as “preventing accidental confrontation” and “relaxing military tension”. In April 2018, two months before the US-North Korean summit in Singapore, Moon met separately with Kim and signed an agreement that included a clause on “ceasing various military exercises aimed at each other.”
That such facts were lost on many Western journalists speaks to how much North Korea reporting and by extension global news making is governed by biases and ignorance. Trump’s announcement of suspending military drills did not alarm Seoul; it only exposed Western media’s underlying assumptions about the world as they saw to be right.
The period we are living through is often called the “Asia Century”, and the rise of Asia in recent decades as a political, cultural and economic force to be reckoned with is undeniable; and yet, judging by Western news coverage of the region in recent years, much has yet to improve when it comes to how this region is represented to an international audience. Sadly, Asia remains profoundly distorted in the dominant Western imagination.
The caricatures of North Korea as propagated by Western media are all too well-known: embodied in the figure of Kim Jong-un’s wife (toting luxury handbags obtained despite international sanctions and thus signaling corruption of an authoritarian regime); as well as in the figure of Kim himself (and that of his late father, Kim Jong-il) as comic fodder sporting funny hair and a paunch, laughable even in his most despicable deed such as feeding his own uncle to ravenous dogs for disloyalty. Although that last story proved to be based on dubious sources, Western media nonetheless saw no quandary in printing, broadcasting and amplifying it before verifying it.
Even when Western journalists attempt serious reporting on North Korea, they sometimes tell outright lies. In November 2018 The New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning correspondent David E. Sanger broke a story to great fanfare that North Korea was hiding missile bases from the US. This was just six months after the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, and the Times’ clear intention was to discredit the attempt at rapprochement and Trump himself. Yet neither Sanger nor his editors at The Times seemed to have given much thought to the fact that the satellite photo it proudly featured on the front page of their website was dated to March 2018—three months before the Singapore summit. Adding salt to the wound, the South Korean government issued a statement that it had already known about these missile bases for two years.
Under much criticism and pressure, the Times tweeted that it still stood by the piece and did not retract it. But it offered no explanation as to how it met their standards.
Supposing North Korea is difficult to access and therefore hard to report on correctly, one must question why Western journalists are not better when the object of their investigation is South Korea, a country nowhere near as inaccessible as its northern neighbor. Apart from being obsessed with beauty, technology and cultural consumption that essentializes the country as bizarre and irrational in contrast to the putative West, the latter’s media cannot stop its reliance on Confucianism by way of ‘explaining’ how and why Koreans do the things that they do.
That was the case when an Asiana Airlines plane crash landed at San Francisco Airport in 2013, prompting observations that the culture of ‘Confucian’ hierarchy or “deference” was to blame. In April 2014 a ferry sank off the southwest coast, claiming the lives of more than two hundred people, many of them high school students. The fact that the crew instructed the passengers to stay put and that many of the latter listened was attributed by no small number of outlets, again, to a purportedly Confucian culture of obedience.
My current place of residence is Germany, which went through a series of lockdowns at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, the year that the virus forced many Western countries to shut down public life in order to curb the rising infection figures, German media allocated considerable resources to covering East Asia, not only as a place of the virus’s presumed origin, but also an example of how transmission of the virus could be contained while minimizing the impact on society. During this time I was asked by several German friends and acquaintances about a mysterious South Korean smartphone app that tracks everyone’s movement real-time for the government to see. I was in South Korea a few times during this time but never came across such an invention, but they insisted every South Korean had consented to real-time tracking around the clock, because how else could the country be so successful in dealing with the pandemic?
I pored over German-language news and realized where the misunderstanding came from: in South Korea, inbound travelers and those who were suspected of having contracted the virus had to go into a two-week home quarantine and download a live location tracking app to ensure compliance. In Germany, the government encouraged citizens to download an unrelated “Corona-Warn-App” that remained active on the phone at all times; it alerted the user about possible contact with an infected person, without betraying the user’s personal data to any authority.
In German media’s imagination of South Korea’s Covid policy, the South Korean app was seen as having the ever-present capacity of the German counterpart, but simultaneously exacting much greater violation of personal privacy under limitless state surveillance. Only that, coupled with the ostensibly obedient ‘Confucian’ nature of Asians before authority, could explain South Korea’s epidemiological successes.
Der Spiegel, the respected Germany weekly magazine, called South Korea a cautionary tale that “disregards protection of personal data”, falsely assuming that the ‘app’ be the all-seeing eye of the state. And the influential newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung equated South Korea to a “schöne, neue Welt” – after the German title of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World – and saw South Korea’s handling of the virus as an example of Asian countries that “want to know not only where a citizen’s smartphone is, but also what is saved on it.” And by those “some countries” German media were of course referring to China as the ultimate Asian nation for draconian social and political control, and South Korea being only a milder case.
So glaring was the bias of German media to downplay how Asia seemed to be better off than Europe in combating the Covid virus that the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s own Beijing correspondent Lea Deuber warned in a December 2020 essay titled “What we can learn from Asia” against seeing elements of Asia’s covid strategies, particularly the widespread use of masks, as a “Symbol asiatischer Gehorsamkeit” or “symbol of Asian submissiveness”. She identified “ignorance” and “racism” as underlying causes of Germany’s dismissive reporting on Covid in Asia, and accused Europeans of “looking at the Asian situation” with “knee-jerk arrogance”.
My work as a journalist in South Korea for five years prior to the pandemic brought me into contact with many Western reporters covering Asia. While I don’t agree with Deuber that racism was a factor behind all the patronizing coverage of South Korea’s handling of the pandemic, I cannot dismiss the ignorance and superiority complex she points to. So severe was the objection to lockdowns from certain circles within Germany that the successes of other nations without lockdowns had to be falsely portrayed and dismissed in order to justify to the public what the German government was doing. The sense of conviction within the German media establishment was palpable: how could Asians possibly do it better than we are, if there is not some hidden trade off in what they are doing?
It speaks to the heart of the current problem of how Asia is imagined by Western media, to the region’s detriment: many Western journalists, who seldom have the capacity to see the continent as it truly is, are hardly the objective instruments of factual reporting as they see themselves to be.
Describing the causes of the great 1943 Bengal famine under the British Raj, Janam Mukherjee, historian of modern Bengal, told the BBC, “Some MP who has no colonial experience, who has no linguistic capacities, who has not worked in a political system outside of Britain, can simply go and inhabit the governor’s house in Kolkata, and make decisions about an entire population of people that he knows nothing about.” And we have not moved far from that situation. Today Western journalists who have not had the experience living in a particular country, who never experienced its system, who have no linguistic capacities, can plant themselves in glass residential towers of major Asian cities, and shape the global conversation about entire populations of places that they know little about.
(Ironically, the BBC podcast series Three Million, which features the above quote from Janam Mukherjee, has been accused of appropriating and distorting the work of another famed historian, Madhusree Mukerjee, for its storytelling, again illustrating the dubious operation of contemporary Western media.)
I look to academics to correct this injustice. In this “Asia Century”, it is become all the more necessary to understand the region’s complexities, and Asian studies and its member scholars are more indispensable than ever before. The only way to shape reality is to shape its perception, and that power cannot be allowed to rest in the hands of the ignorant.
This research was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2022-OLU-2250005).
Image: Flickr
