https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7200-7883
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ABSTRACT
This article presents Jeju Island, the largest island in the Korean Peninsula, as a spatial ensemble newly constructed by various geopolitical and geoeconomic forces in East Asia. A new urban model called the Jeju Free International City has integrated China’s growing presence as a geoeconomic opportunity for local economic development. Yet, the subsequent establishment of Jeju Naval Base is premised on the vision of China as a new geopolitical threat that should be addressed. This incoherence results from the problematic articulation between the geopolitical–economic imaginations of the central government and economic development imperatives of the local growth coalition. This paper draws upon recent discussions of geopolitical economy and calls for provincializing geopolitical–economic analysis. The operation of zoning technologies in Jeju Island has been closely associated with the promotion of the contradictory visions of China’s rise, and as a result fails to reconcile geoeconomic and geopolitical discourses, practices and desires.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 There are several media narratives with a strong geoeconomic tone. For instance, one column from The Washington Post describes the United States’ ban on Huawei as follows:
The Huawei assault may be the Trump administration’s most important long-term strategic decision, because it confronts China’s technological challenge to the United States head-on. The goal is to prevent Huawei from dominating 5G wireless communications, the next phase of the digital revolution, by blocking use of its technology by the United States and its partners. (Ignatius, Citation2019)
2 However, as Roy (Citation2017) stresses, to provincialize should not be reduced to ‘geographic inversion … to [simply] locate research in the cities of the global South or in the non-West’ (p. 35).
3 This section is a revised, updated version of Lee et al. (Citation2017).
4 The author conducted interviews with local civic group members in January 2016.
5 Yet, this vision has operated with anticipation of nationwide neoliberalization in that it always entailed the view of Jeju as a pilot project site for new policies and institutions, such as the privatization of public education and health services (Republic of Korea Navy, Citation2002, p. 3).
6 Later, when the conflict around the naval base escalated, the conservative Lee Myung-bak government began to mobilize the typical narrative that the base would serve to protect from attacks of North Korea (Ahn, Citation2011).
7 To alleviate the negative public perception of a military base, the idea of a civilian–military complex port was discussed at the private meeting between the central government, Jeju government and the navy in December 2007, and the government officially confirmed the construction of a civilian–military complex port where 150,000-ton cruise vessels would be docked in September 2008 (Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, Citation2019, pp. 163–164).
8 When the author visited the site of the construction-cum-protest in 2016, several foreign activists were witnessed in the protest camp near the construction site, which was very unusual for protest scenes in Korea.
9 In early September 2012 when the conflict around the base construction reached its peak, the World Conservation Congress, known as ‘Nature’s Olympics’, was held at the Jeju Convention Center, about 7 km from Gangjeong Village, which Paik and Mander (Citation2012) called ‘greenwashing the navy base’.
10 Father Moon Jung-hyun, a prominent figure of South Korea’s democracy and peace movement, asserted: ‘I am Gureombi Rock. You are Gureombi Rock. If I allow the navy to kill Gureombi Rock, it also kills me. It also kills you’ (Cloughley, Citation2014).
11 Taking the first summit meeting between Korean President Roh Tae-woo and President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev in Jeju in April 1991 as momentum, intellectuals in- and outside Jeju actively supported the vision of Jeju as ‘a buffer zone of East Asian disputes and as a base for international cooperation’ and demanded the designation of Jeju as an island of peace (Jeong, Citation2016). But after President Roh’s official designation, this vision was employed to promote tourism and receive development projects from the central government (Jeong, Citation2014, pp. 37–38).
12 Unlike this work that focuses on geopolitical–economic contradictions at the local scale, most existing studies approach them from the national scale (Kim, Citation2016a, Citation2016b; Sohn, Citation2019). While they tend to offer some suggestions to resolve this dilemma, the present paper pays more attention to their repercussions for local everyday life.
13 Drafting this plan included the Samsung Economic Research Institute, a key private think tank that circulates and strengthens neoliberalism as the dominant discourse on economic development in South Korea (Kim, Citation2009). This may be closely related to the general orientation of the 2nd Plan, which emphasizes further openness in both physical and institutional terms. In addition, the 2nd Plan adds free movement of ‘knowledge’ along with people, commodities and capital as its development model.
14 Along with China, those who support the base also highlight the threat from North Korea, a banal subject in South Korean politics (Lee et al., Citation2014).
15 Moon Jung-in (2011), who has served as an adviser to both former President Roh Moo-hyun and current President Moon Jae-in, rejected the claim that the Jeju Naval Base would serve to check China in cooperation with the United States and argued that it was a preventive measure for self-defence to protect maritime sovereignty and national interest. Another editorial from Dong-A Ilbo (Citation2012) blamed protesters for ‘eventually helping China and North Korea … [and] giving up national security and interest’.
16 Christine Ahn, founder of Women Cross DMZ, shared a story about calling the Korean embassy in the United States. Against her questioning of the Jeju base, the reply from one embassy is striking: ‘Don’t call us; call the U.S. State or Defense Departments; they are the ones who are pressuring us to build this base’ (Ahn, Citation2011).
17 Interview with Young-Chul Hong, a leading figure in Jeju’s civil society, 12 January 2016.
18 In this respect, Jeju’s GPE differs from that of Pyeongtaek, where Camp Humphreys, the largest overseas US base in the world, was just established and ‘the militarism-as-development propaganda campaign of 2004–06 served its double purpose of disabling anti-base protests in the broader Pyeongtaek area and allowing local pro-development forces to institute major building projects’ (Martin, Citation2018, p. 983).