The new patron state in South Korea: cultural policy, democracy and the market economy

ABSTRACT

This article explores conceptual frameworks for understanding Korea’s contemporary cultural policy by looking into the historical transformation of the culture-state-market relations in the country. It argues that Korea has become ‘a new kind of patron state’, which emulates the existing patron states in the West firmly within the statist framework and ambitiously renders government-led growth of cultural industries (and the Korean Wave) as a new responsibility of the state. The formation of Korea’s new patron state has been driven by a ‘parallel movement’ consisting of democracy and the market economy, which has defined the political and socio-economic trajectory of Korean society itself since the 1990s. Democracy has been articulated in cultural policy as cultural freedom, cultural enjoyment and the arm’s length principle; meanwhile, the market economy of culture has been facilitated by a ‘dynamic push’ of the state. After discussing the parallel movement, the article points out the tension, ambiguity and contradiction entailed in cultural policy of the new patron state.

KEYWORDS:

• South Korea
• cultural policy
• new patron state
• cultural industries
• Korean wave

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The ministry’s 2015 Cultural Policy White Book (p. 48) notes that the newly born ‘cultural ministry’ had a total of 316 staff members. Its ‘Munhwacheyukgwangwangbu jeongwonhyeonhwang (The current number of staff)’ shows a total of 646 people are employed by the ministry as of September 2016. In addition, the document indicates that 2,094 people are employed by organisations affiliated with the ministry, such as the National Museum of Korea and the National Gugak Centre.

2. In terms of cultural spending (spending on arts and culture; excluding tourism and sports), local authorities spent more (3,272.8 billion won) than the central government did (1,986.8 billion won) as of 2015 (data generated at KOSIS website).

3. The cultural ministry and Korea Culture and Tourism Institute began regularly conducting surveys on Korean’s cultural enjoyment to understand the cultural life of Koreans (every 3 years since 1988 and every 2 years since 2006).

4. Yet, its actual policy focuses on the creation of stories for film and drama, in the form of original prose, 10% of which is dedicated to dialogues that express and highlight main characters.

Additional information

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Hye-Kyung Lee

Hye-Kyung Lee is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London. She has written on cultural policy and industries, cultural marketing and transnational fan culture. She co-edited Cultural Policies in East Asia (2014 Palgrave Macmillan) and co-wrote a commissioned paper ‘The challenges and opportunities for the diversity of cultural expressions in the digital era in East Asia’ (2015, UNESCO Bangkok Office). Her monograph Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State was published in 2018. She is co-editing the Routledge Handbook of the Cultural and Creative Industries in Asia (2018) and Asian Cultural Flows: Cultural Policies, Creative Industries, and Media Consumers (2018).