The government considers that the serial policy of promotion of the cultural industries during the Kim Dae-jung regime may well have eliminated some of the prejudice against the commercial aspect of popular culture.82 In particular, it is highly probable that the lifting of the ban on Japanese popular culture created a favourable atmosphere for cultural exchange between the Korean and Japanese cultural industries, and that this vibrancy stimulated the export of Korean dramas to Japan.
Nevertheless, it is still unclear whether these policies of promotion and deregulation specifically increased drama exports. Even policy-makers have conflicting opinions about the influence of the government’s industry promotion and deregulation policies on drama exports. Kim Chul-min, the Director of MCT’s cultural industries policy division, argues that the serial promotion policies and subsequent building of a sound infrastructure for the creation of promising cultural industries may have had a favourable impact on drama exports. However, Koo Kyung-bon, President of the US office of KOCCA, claims that it is
82
Due to the influence of Confucianism, Korean society has preferred academic knowledge and so-called ‘high arts’ to commerce and technology. Before the 1990s, Korean people tended to deem popular culture inferior. The government’s assessment that serial promotion of the cultural industries has helped to remove this old-fashioned prejudice against popular culture seems quite plausible.
0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 70,000 80,000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Japan China Taiwan Hong Kong Others
still difficult to prove that this infrastructure subsequently paved the way for the outstanding achievements of certain cultural industries, such as drama exports.83
Indeed, it is highly questionable whether government support significantly stimulated early drama exports in the late 1990s. According to Park In-soo and Park Jae-bog, head of the programme export team of KBS Media and former General Manager of MBC Productions respectively, the initial television programme exports had already been launched by the programme trade divisions of each terrestrial station from the early 1990s, before the start of the Kim Dae-jung administration‘s cultural industries promotion policies.84 Goh Jeong- min, a media industry expert and head of Samsung Entertainment Group’s cable channel team in the mid 1990s, points out that the first export success of Korean dramas was deemed to be the broadcast of What is Love All About? (MBC, 1991-1992) on CCTV in 1997, which occurred prior to the establishment of the Kim Dae-jung administration in February 1998.85 That is to say, Korean broadcasting stations had already been exporting their programmes and achieving modest results from the mid 1990s onwards.86
A significant point is that government intervention in drama production, which had been common under previous military governments, began to diminish before the advent of the cultural industries promotion policies of the Kim Dae-jung regime. The Kim Young-sam administration (1993-1997), the first civilian government after the second military government (1981-1992), notably decreased intervention in drama themes and storylines, and government intervention seems to have almost entirely disappeared during the Kim Dae-jung regime. The broadcasting industry policies of the Kim Dae-jung administration seem mainly to have focused on the cable channel industry and independent programme productions, which were struggling to overcome the harsh effects of the so-called IMF crisis, rather than on terrestrial stations.87 Veteran drama producer Kim Seung-soo, who worked as a chief drama producer in MBC, notes that drama creators felt that some tacit censorship in drama production still remained in the Kim Young-sam regime, but that
83
Interview with Kim Chul-min, 14th July 2010, and with Koo Kyung-bon, 6th July 2010. Both interviews were carried out in Seoul, Korea.
84
Interview with Park In-soo, head of programme export team of KBS Media, 29th July 2010. Interview with Park Jae-bog, former General Manager of MBC Productions, 25th July, 2010. Both interviews were carried out in Seoul, Korea.
85
Interview with Goh Jeong-min, Professor of the Audiovisual Industry, Graduate School of Hong-ik University, 7th July 2010 in Seoul, Korea.
86
Interview with Park In-soo, head of programme export team of KBS Media, 29th July 2010 in Seoul, Korea. Hwang Seong-yun, a senior researcher at AGB Nielsen Media Research Korea, also agreed with Park’s argument in an interview on 23rd June 2011 in Seoul, Korea.
87
Interview with Yoon Jae-sik, senior researcher at KOCCA’s industrial policy team, 20th July 2010 in Seoul, Korea.
government censorship and intervention in drama production were virtually eliminated in the Kim Dae-jung regime.88
As mentioned in Chapter 3, the two military governments (1961-1979 and 1981-1992) strictly controlled all broadcasting content throughout their almost thirty years of rule. This content regulation included the restriction of drama broadcasts depicting communism, anti- government or democratisation movements, violence, social problems and what was termed ‘immorality’. All of these themes were defined as ‘unsound’ culture and deemed harmful to social unification by the autocratic Park Chung-hee regime, the first military government (1961-1979). In the 1970s, it was not uncommon for dramas which dealt even minimally with these themes to be taken off the air by the government.89
Due to this strict control, the diversity of drama themes was quite limited and drama producers could produce only a few genres, such as historical dramas, soap operas or melodramas, which were less likely to conflict with government regulations. In particular, drama producers tended to prefer historical dramas, because war scenes in historical dramas were exempted from the violence prohibition rule and, additionally, the government supported the production of historical epic dramas because they believed these dramas boosted audiences’ patriotism. This is the main reason why historical dramas have specifically flourished in the Korean drama industry.90 So, dramas were used by the military governments as a means of educating audiences, and diversity and freedom of expression were suppressed ostensibly to protect the public, but actually in order to prevent the public from awakening to the injustice of the authoritarian rule of the military governments.91 In this context, the military governments may well have recognised the importance of dramas as sociopolitical tools.
The first civilian government, the Kim Young-sam regime (1993-1997), which faced the new global trend of media marketisation in the early 1990s, gradually changed its broadcasting policy framework from one of regulation and control to one of industry promotion. Although the Kim Young-sam regime hoped to foster an atmosphere in which the broadcasting industry would become more commercially successful, as shown in Chapter 3, it is not likely that its members had definite ideas about how to promote the
88
Interview with Kim Seung-soo, 21st July 2010 in Seoul, Korea.
89
Interview with Joo Chang-yun, 6th July 2010 in Seoul, Korea. Joo is a professor in the Media Studies Department of Seoul Women’s University. He is also regarded as a leading media critic in Korea.
90
Interview with Cho Chung-hyun, Executive Managing Director of MBC, 29th July 2010 in Seoul, Korea.
91
broadcasting industry. So the Kim Young-sam administration took an ambivalent stance towards the broadcasting industry, neither intervening nor providing support.92
The Kim Young-sam regime’s pro-liberal stance toward the broadcasting industry was maintained by the Kim Dae-jung regime (1998-2002) which followed it, but, as discussed above, the support of the Kim Dae-jung regime mainly focused on cable channels and independent productions rather than on the terrestrial broadcasting stations. Yoon Ho-jin, head of KOCCA’s policy research team, pointed out that, whereas the previous military government had actively intervened in drama content in the interest of public education, neither of the two Kim administrations had been especially keen to intervene in or to promote the drama productions which the three terrestrial stations were predominantly involved in throughout the 1990s. Ironically, the government’s lack of interest in drama productions had had the effect of allowing drama producers autonomy:
In both Kim regimes, the government’s principal way of dealing with the terrestrial stations was to leave them to their own devices. Drama productions were included in this ‘live and let live’ principle because almost all dramas throughout the 1990s were produced by in-house productions. The abolition of external intervention seems to have led to the autonomy of drama creators. Most notably, KBS’s drama producers, who had passively accepted being directly controlled by the government for almost three decades, began to explore diverse themes, demonstrating a new-found creativity. Thus, the government’s indifference seems to have paradoxically resulted in the birth of creative ideas in the drama industry.93
Kim Young-hyun, the young female drama writer who wrote the famous Korean drama
Jewel in the Palace (MBC, 2003-2004), stated that she had not experienced any external
intervention in her work since she began to write drama scripts in 1997:
I think that almost all restrictions relating to drama themes disappeared during the Kim Dae-jung regime. Even communism is no longer the taboo subject it used to be, although drama creators still tend to avoid producing dramas with communist themes because ideological themes do not attract audience interest. Nowadays,
92
Interview with Lee Man-je, a senior researcher on the policy research team of KOCCA, 4th August 2010 in Seoul, Korea.
93
drama creators have to pay more attention to themes related to Korean conglomerates than to government restrictions, because a storyline with adverse to the conglomerates may lead to a decrease in advertising revenue. 94
Park Yang-woo, former Deputy Minister at MCT, admitted that throughout the 1990s the government was not especially interested in the commercial potential of dramas. At the same time, however, Park maintained that the government did contribute to some extent to the increase in drama exports by eliminating external intervention and allowing freedom of expression in drama production.95 The link between the elimination of government intervention and the success of drama exports may seem tenuous. However, as discussed in Chapter 2, it appears that the broadcasting industry has retained political weight in most Asian countries despite the strong media marketisation trend. In this context, the elimination of government intervention may be seen as a major contributing factor, however indirect, to the current prosperity of the drama industry and its consequent export success.
As well as freeing the industry from government control, the political and social democratisation achieved during the Kim Dae-jung regime seems to have played a role in the development of the drama industry. Shim Doo-bo argued that the optimistic atmosphere under a more democratic and tolerant government was more influential in encouraging the broadcasting industry to break into a broader market than individual promotion policies:
During the Kim Dae-jung administration, Korean culture was no longer subject to government intervention. This is significantly different from the cultural industries of neighbouring countries such as Taiwan or China, which are still under state control. The political and social democratisation achieved during the Kim Dae-jung regime brought down barriers all over society, which led to more frequent interactions and exchanges in different cultural fields. I think that both the abolition of state control and the increased interactions among artists were the main causes of the burst of creativity in the cultural industries in the early 2000s. In this respect, the cultural industries policies, and to an even greater extent the democratisation, of the Kim Dae-jung regime contributed to a more optimistic
94
Interview with Kim Youg-hyun, 15th July 2010 in Seoul, Korea.
95
atmosphere in export trials.96
With regard to these findings, the most important implication is that the development of drama creativity, which is one of the primary prerequisites for the production of high- quality content, seems not to have been closely connected to the Kim Dae-jung regime’s cultural industries promotion policies, contrary to the assumption of some researchers. Although the Kim Dae-jung regime’s cultural industries promotion policies had favourable results for cultural industries exports, whether these promotion policies specifically enhanced drama exports is far from conclusively shown. Indeed, it is the decrease in government intervention in drama productions combined with the liberalised and more democratic political and social atmosphere which began during the previous Kim young- sam regime and matured under the Kim Dae-jung regime, which is likely to have been more helpful in nurturing creativity and spurring drama writers and producers to explore and develop diverse themes and storylines.
In this respect, the government may have helped drama creators to produce content of sufficient quality to attract overseas viewers. However, it is open to dispute whether the abolition of government intervention can be regarded as a ‘considerable contribution’ to the creation of high-quality content and the consequent success of Korean dramas on the overseas market.
Another significant point related to the first is that the contribution to drama exports brought about by sociopolitical democratisation and the concomitant release from government intervention seems not to have been anticipated by the government. Although the government has been eager to foster the development of the cultural industries in order to enable them to compete on the international market, the true export potential of Korean dramas was initially recognised by only a few industry insiders, not by the government. Indeed, the government has acknowledged that the great success of the Korean Wave, which mainly centred on drama exports, was ‘a success without design’, which occurred without the government’s strategic support (MCT, 2003: 215). Accordingly, whether the government can play an appropriate role in supporting the commercial and private sectors in cultural industries such as television programme exports remains a question.
96
Interview with Shim Doo-bo, 20th June 2011 in Seoul, Korea. Shim, a professor of Media Studies at Sung- shin Womens University, is engaged in ongoing collaborative research on the Korean Wave with Southeast Asian researchers.