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| A worker wearing protective gear disinfects chairs as a precaution against the coronavirus at a subway station in Seoul, Friday, Feb. 21, 2020. AP |
By Emanuel Pastreich
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The passengers around me spent the flight taking about the coronavirus in Korea. We were given constant briefings about coronavirus when normally we would have heard about the plane's safety features.
When I arrived I was asked to fill out a complicated form as part of a screening for coronavirus at the airport. And that was just the beginning. The hotel was adorned with posters, all tables covered with printed material in English, Chinese and Korean on coronavirus, and disinfectant hand wash was placed in the lobby and in my room.
When I turned on the television, all I could see were back to back broadcasts by various government officials about the dangers of coronavirus. None of those broadcasts offered any scientific analysis of what the virus was and how exactly it was transmitted, or how it compared with other viruses and other health concerns.
The next morning, I visited a friend at a government office and again I had to fill out an elaborate form, and to have my temperature taken before I was admitted. I seriously doubt that if I had had the coronavirus (who knows, maybe I already have it) that it could have been detected by the process, which was more like a spectacle than a serious effort to address citizens' health concerns.
I was scheduled to give a public lecture about my new book in Korean and I had invited numerous people. The event was cancelled without warning ― and to this moment I have not been told exactly who made the decision, or why.
I felt a bit resentful of that sudden cancelation until I learned that many concerts, most lectures and most classes at universities had been delayed or cancelled as well. Weddings, vacations, even family gatherings had been put on hold in a growing mood of gloom and uncertainty.
In addition, 24/7 micro-reporting about the number of Koreans suffering from the coronavirus has created an effective blackout of all other information in Korea, domestic and international. As a result, it became difficult to assess just how much of a negative impact on the Korean economy has resulted from the radical decline in tourism, shopping, restaurant patronage and entertainment over the last few weeks.
Granted that manufacturing is increasingly dominated by large firms, we can be sure that the damage for ordinary Koreans will be severe, even if that suffering is not reflected in the stock market.
Massive delays in manufacturing have broken up the integrated supply chains focused on China, but spreading across the entire region, which support the Korean economy. Korea prided itself on its central position in a highly integrated East Asia, one reinforced by a series of trade agreements worked out over the last decade, along with investment commitments throughout the region.
But now the Korean dream of Seoul at the center in a prosperous future-oriented Asia has run into the wall of irrational and thoughtless policy decisions as a result of the coronavirus panic. A deep unease hovers over Seoul. The full consequences of this disruption are likely to manifest themselves in the months ahead, beyond the upcoming elections on April 15 in which no party seems able to address the economic collapse.
A stroll around Seoul revealed the economic devastation. Chinese tourism became a major source of revenue after the radical deindustrialization of the country over the last 20 years. Those who are not connected to well-financed corporations have few options other than to serve or cook at restaurants, to work at convenience stores or to drive taxis.
The most haunting part of my post-corona visit was a tour of Myung-dong, Seoul's tourist shopping district. Myung-dong was a bustling space to where young people flock in search of fashionable clothes, cosmetics, Korean Wave souvenirs and tasty snacks at the food stands open late into the night. Over the past decade, Myung-dong's economic engine was powered by a seemingly endless flow of Chinese tourists with money to burn.
But Myung-dong has become a virtual ghost town over the last month.
A few Japanese tourists wander here and there, but most of the stores are empty of customers. Moreover, stores that would normally sell skin lotions and tropical soaps now have their well-scrubbed young employees out the front waving to passersby to stop and buy high-quality protection masks. The fact that protection from coronavirus has become the primary source of income for many in a tourist center is a catastrophe.
The end of tourism is not limited to the blighted Myung-dong. Chinese tourism has dried up in Southeast Asia, and throughout the entire region, as a result of the response to the coronavirus. As Koreans are heavily invested in the development of Southeast Asia as well, the impact for them of this drama will grow exponentially, perhaps bringing on a radical contraction of the economy not unlike what happened to North Korea in the 1990s.
The Diamond Princess cruise ship that was placed under quarantine in Yokohama harbor, Japan, became a powerful symbol of the coronavirus epidemic. The decision of the Japanese authorities to keep all the passengers and crew on the ship had the unfortunate effect of increasing the number of people infected. The process became a source of any number of complex resentments against Japan without any logical debate on what past policy has been, or what future policy should be. Thus, what should have been a minor debate about how to treat a serious, but not extreme, contagion became a source of tremendous international tension.
The Korean government ended up taking the unusual step of banning all non-Koreans who had been on the Diamond Princess from entering South Korea. The seven South Koreans who had been on the ship were flown by a special charter to a temporary facility set up at Incheon International Airport where they must wait for 14 days.
The response in Korea also included an overnight questioning of ties to China. It was suddenly a big question whether the number of Chinese tourists visiting South Korea, Chinese students studying at Korean universities and the laxity of Korean health policy had created a "perfect storm" as Oh Young-jin of The Korea Times put it. Certainly many hotels will go out of business and many regional universities will go bankrupt if this trend continues.
The underlying assumption articulated in the media was that Korea should shut down its open borders. That is to say that South Korea should become something like the hermit kingdom Korea was before the 20th century. Or maybe the assumption is that Korea must adopt its own version of Trump's "America first" policies and start rounding up illegal immigrants while promoting through the media a blind resentment of anything foreign.
All these rash words in Seoul match up perfectly with the strategy of the Trump administration to take down China a few notches in the massive trade war, by racist assumptions and distortion of fact.
The United States has witnessed a disgusting series of articles that try to link the coronavirus to Chinese ethnicity, forming a disturbing parallel with the promotion of "yellow peril" fantasies in the late 19th century as part of an effort to demonize Chinese, and by extension, all Asians.
This media campaign reached a new low on February 3 in the Wall Street Journal article "China is the Real Sick Man of Asia" by Walter Russell Mead. Mead slammed China for supposedly covering up the real scale of the outbreak (a claim for which there is no evidence) and he tried to tie, by vague association, this disease that causes suffering for ordinary citizens around the world to the economic influence of China. The term "sick man of Asia" is precisely the term used in the racist efforts to portray the Chinese people as a "yellow plague" that would bring sickness, decadence and destruction to the "pure" West.
Such propaganda was used to push for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which blocked Chinese immigration (and later all Asian immigration) to the U.S. for 60 years. There is little doubt that racist policy makers like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are pushing for exactly such a response to this virus in the policy debate behind the scenes.
One can also catch a whiff of Peter Navarro's (Donald Trump's right-hand-man and Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy) Yellow Peril redox in the irrational effort to brand the virus as "Chinese." Let us not forget that it was Navarro who wrote the sacred text for China haters "Death by China," a chop suey version of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" that attributes all the contradictions of modern economics to a deep evil in the Chinese race.
What is most shocking is how naive Koreans are about this political game. They are willing to believe that this blatant attempt to associate the Chinese with disease and decay will have no impact on Korea. It is guaranteed, however, that the racist anti-Asian narratives being shaped by the "make America great again" team will include Korea no matter how many F35s it may buy. President Donald Trump's comments about the Korean film "Parasite" have already revealed this hidden agenda to scale back relations with Korea, as well as with China.
Korea's soft underbelly
The fact that coronavirus has been whipped up into a 9/11 crisis by the Western corporate media, despite the relatively small scale of risk, does not mean that Seoul is not at risk from contagious diseases. The truth is that a major outbreak of some sort in the future is a virtual certainty, and the risk is much increased by climate change.
Sadly the major issues of preparation related to policy for the response to epidemics in general are not discussed at all in the sensationalist news swirling around Seoul.
South Korea is woefully unprepared for a major outbreak of a contagious disease at every level. I took a family member to the emergency room at a major hospital last year and I was shocked to see how understaffed and inefficient the hospital system has become. Money has been poured into shiny buildings, high tech displays and fancy coffee shops, but there were few nurses, and even fewer doctors, to respond to the real needs of the patients. If Seoul were to suffer a major catastrophe, hospitals would be overwhelmed quickly.
The major culprit behind this state of affairs is not China. It is the drive to privatize medicine and to transform the profession of doctor into a source of profit, rather than an ethical calling. Hospitals increasingly make decisions based on the profitability of services, not citizens' needs. The Korean government has heaped oil on the fire by promoting medical tourism and other initiatives that encourage the assumption that the point of medicine is to make money by offering products to consumers.
Korea has witnessed a generation in which the best and the brightest in medicine have become experts in profitable fields like plastic surgery and forgotten what the Hippocratic Oath means. Medicine needs to be about healing; profit concerns need to be excised from policy decisions that skew medical treatment. This misuse of medicine, combined with the deeply anti-intellectual nature of journalism, has undermined the response to the coronavirus at every level.
Koreans have been taught by the media, and by the government, that the greater the flow of people between countries, the better. Globalization, in the form of limitless transfer of capital, of manufactured goods and of tourists, has been lauded as the only way to a brighter future. There was plenty of evidence that what Korea really needed was cooperation between people, rather than a flow of tourists and businessmen who have little meaningful contact with each other. Sadly, globalization has only made international relations colder, more mercenary and more transactional.
The possibility that the spread of viruses might be increased by internationalization is raising important questions for Seoul. There is good reason to rethink the promotion of an economy in which ordinary citizens are so dependent on tourism. We need to consider the importance of agriculture and local manufacturing. In other words, Korea needs to return to the traditional sustainable economy that was sacrificed on the altar of modernization after 1960.
Equally important is the process of governance and transparent decision-making. We are witnessing a classic case of what the author Naomi Klein has described as the "shock doctrine:" the strategy of whipping up a crisis as a means of pushing through laws, and changes in policy without any oversight or public debate. The media mania over coronavirus meant that dramatic immediate actions (without any voting by citizens, or input from real experts, let alone reference to best practices or appeal to the scientific method) are demanded by politicians and media figures who know absolutely nothing about epidemiology.
For example, the spread of coronavirus in Daegu has filled newspapers without any rational discussion of its true significance. Voices demand swift efforts to quarantine, immediately. But no consideration has been given to whether balance, and careful debate, might be more important than a rush to some sort of high-profile action.
That argument for radical action in Daegu is rendered suspicious by the media's focus on a religious "sect" called Sinbcheonji Church. This group has been scapegoated without any scientific evidence as the cause of the minor outbreak. In other words, the irrational scapegoating used in the U.S. to target Chinese has emerged in Daegu in a mutated form. Innuendo, and implied asso-ciation with a nefarious organization, is all that is required to get citizens to go along with authoritarian policies.
Suddenly it seems that the government is empowered to quarantine people for a disease that is serious, but not more serious than swine flu that swept through the U.S. without any of these drastic measures.
Even more worrisome is the readiness with which citizens go along with the decision to shut down all public events, lectures, concerts and other open discussions. In effect, civil society, and the right to gather and discuss among citizens, has been brought to a stop. It is possible that a serious outbreak might require quarantine, but in fact media hype is detrimental to such an effort. If anything, the political transformation of Korea by this crisis resembles the imposition of martial law more than a rational medical response.
Many Koreans have stopped using public transport because of the fears of contamination whipped up in the media. This trend not only creates tremendous traffic jams, in which citizens waste countless hours in cars away from family and friends, it also increases car emissions, damages air quality and hastens the catastrophic climate change that was already underway. The flight to private transport also means that the shared space critical to civil society has been taken away without scientific justification, or due process.
We also have to consider the question of priorities. Coronavirus has killed very few people outside of Wuhan, China. Sure, we should be concerned about coronoavirus, but is it the major threat for Korea, Northeast Asia or the world?
No, it is not.
Terrible plagues are killing Koreans right and left, but those plagues are taboo, and now, with all the metastasis of corona mania, those plagues are not even a topic for discussion among friends.
Koreans face a bleak economy, dominated by a handful of corporations with access to unlimited finance. This crippled economy has led to despair among citizens, especially youth, and engendered a tragically high suicide rate. So also, many have given up on marriage and family, leading to a rapidly aging society and palpable angst. That trend, combined with the cruel economic ideology of unlimited competition, as well as the promotion of the cult of the self, guarantees misery for millions. But this social crisis is ignored in the media and not addressed by government campaigns.
These threats, which have left tens of thousands dead, do not exist in current discourse.
The greatest threats today to Korea are nuclear war and climate change, not coronavirus, or even pandemics in general.
The military buildup in Northeast Asia, combined with the U.S. decision to walk away from arms control agreements, and from all international treaties, has vastly increased to threat of world war. The promotion of "usable" nuclear weapons has increased the risk even further. I have not seen any coverage in the media, even in the progressive media, of this grave threat to all Koreans.
Climate change will require a massive investment and reorientation of the economy to respond to rising oceans, the rapid decline in agricultural production and the rise in food costs that will result. Even those who are vaguely aware of climate change do not understand the dramatic impact of the collapse of biodiversity and the rapidly spreading deserts in Northeast Asia.
Korea has failed miserably to implement any meaningful policy for reducing its reliance on these dangerous sources of energy. As a result, air quality continues to worsen, leading to tens of thousands, or more, people suffering from terrible lung diseases, and other illnesses. At the very moment, because the media is wallowing in coronavirus reports, the air quality has reached an all-time nadir without any analysis of the causes. No policies to shut down coal plants, implement massive shifts to renewables, or end the import of petroleum are even being debated.
The culture of consumption and growth must be replaced with a drive to reach zero fossil fuels in as short a time as possible. That process will result in clean air and clean water, thereby reducing the terrible misery of the moment.
These crises mentioned above cannot be properly addressed because the extreme concentration of wealth in Korea, and around the world, makes policy decisions that go against short-term profit impossible. This trend is only getting worse and it is linked to the promotion by corporations of an anti-intellectual culture that makes it impossible for citizens to have serious discussions.
The consumption-driven, growth-oriented, dream for South Korea that has dominated every aspect of the society for the last 50 years is coming apart at the seams. The coronavirus is a real health concern that should be discussed seriously. But it has been used instead as a means to shut down journalism and cripple civil society. Rather than Koreans coming together to engage in a rational debate on the important topic of public health, they are left alone and isolated.
