Anti-Korean sentiment and online affective community in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the rise of anti-Korean sentiment in contemporary Taiwan particularly at the turn of the 2010s. It moves beyond conceptualizing emotion as psychological status to conceive anti-Korean sentiment as a cultural text that debunks the complexity of emotion as an active agent of collective (un)consciousness. Specifically, the paper considers anti-Korean sentiment in Taiwan as an affective space where young Taiwanese demonstrate their active engagement in (re)locating Taiwan in the global imaginative map and their struggle for national identity in the midst of increasing geopolitical tensions in East Asia. Instead of seeing anti-Korean sentiment from an international relations perspective, this paper studies anti-Korean sentiment from a bottom-up perspective through in-depth interviews with young Taiwanese who are actively engaging with anti-Korean discussions and explore various ways that anti-Korean sentiment mediates and transforms imaginative relations between Taiwan and Korea and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Korea
• Taiwan
• affective community
• online culture
• geopolitics
• East Asia

Acknowledgement

The author thanks research assistants Chang Yung-Ying and Lee Yu-Chien for their excellent work and sincere assistant throughout her fieldwork research in Taipei. The author also appreciates the editor’s and two anonymous reviewers’ insightful comments and suggestions on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ji-Hyun Ahn is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is the author of Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Notes

1 It is beyond this paper’s scope to provide every single detail about the decision and controversy. For more details, however, refer to Shih (2010), an article featured in Taipei Times, and Ryall (2010), an article featured in The Telegraph.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a Royalty Research Fund from the University of Washington (2016–2017). Budget number: 65-2723.