The New Policy, published by the MCT in October 1998, had four grand ‘objectives’.
These were the realization of the ‘Second National Building’ through the power of culture; the pursuance of the ‘knowledge and information society’ in which the cultural sector was to play a central role; the formulation of a ‘productive and civic cultural society’ (within South Korea) and the establishment of a ‘mature national community’
(including North Korea); and, finally, the embodiment of ‘open culture’ through the harmonization of the Korean cultural identity with universal globalism. With the exception of the forthone, these objectives are not directly related to culture in the traditional sense, and this reveals that the original intention of the DJ government’s cultural policy was to engage much wider sectors of society.
The MCT introduced three strategies to expand the coverage of cultural policy and thus achieve these objectives (MCT, 1998: 8-10). Firstly, in order to produce a new kind of vision fit for the ‘cultural century’, the New Policy called for the establishment of macro-policy directions rather than micro-policy activities. It also called for the aggressive mobilization of the symbolic power of the coming new millennium. To change the status of culture into a key driver of national development, the plan attacked the
‘old’ view that culture was something limited to the ‘value of purpose and abstractness’.
Instead, the New Policy argued that culture was ‘directly and actively related to other social sectors’ and thus had also ‘pragmatic and strategic value’ for high-value-added creation, social inclusion and Korean reunification, and so forth. Finally, the authors of
140 New Policy realized that a number of changes were urgently required if Korea was to move away from the methods of cultural administration that had previously prevailed.
The first mission was to shift away from a ‘department store-like policy’, which simply managed various cultural sectors separately, towards a select-and-focus policy which would ‘nurture key sectors’, such as CI, in order to enhance the efficiency of the policy.
The second mission was to replace the ‘provider-centred regulation policy’ under which the government had unilaterally led changes of policy object, and replace it with a
‘consumer-centred participation policy’ which would enable the government and the people to work together to make changes autonomously. The final mission was to pay attention to not only ‘the changes of the policy object’, but also to changes in the
‘policy subject’. So these strategies encompassed establishing a new policy vision, a new status for culture, and new styles of cultural administration.
In order to embody these core strategies, ten smaller objectives were introduced in various areas of Korean cultural policy. For the purpose of this research project, I need to shed light on the seventh of these objectives, which concerns CI policy. The New Policy identified the nine most important tasks that were necessary for ‘establishing a system for the radical development of CI’ as follows:
(a) Preparing the institutional base for CI development;
(b) Establishing CI infrastructure as quickly as possible;
(c) Selecting strategic genres (i.e. film, animation, broadcasting, music and games) and preparing support systems for them;
(d) Enhancing synergistic effects between CI genres (e.g. establishing the system for sharing CI-related information);
(e) Promoting the inception and production of CI and developing a modernized distribution structures for CI;
(f) Establishing a system for nurturing skilled talent;
(g) Supporting strategic export products and their entry into overseas markets;
(h) Promoting fashion design products;
(i) Preparing responses for the planned opening of the market to Japanese popular culture.
During the later development of Korean CI policy, the last two of the nine tasks disappeared. However, the others have remained firmly entrenched as key objectives in each and every long-term policy plan.37
37 The tasks can be categorized as either ‘establishing comprehensive infrastructures’ (a, b, f) or ‘symbolic intervention into the CI value chain (c, d, e, g), although this policy framework was not yet introduced at the early stage.
141 6.1.2 The Unfolding: Three ‘Visions’ of CI (February 2000 – December 2003)
The Five-Year Plan for CI Development was monumental in that it was the first government plan solely dedicated to CI promotion (cf. 5.2.4). According to the plan (MCT, 1999a), Korean CI policy had to focus on ‘establishing the base’ for CI development by aligning institutions, ensuring financial resources, nurturing skilled talent, and so forth for the first stage (1999). It was then to focus on ‘strengthening international competitiveness’ by developing strategic products for export and pioneering overseas markets for the second stage (2000-01). Finally, it was to attend to the ‘actualization’ of the vision of ‘CI as a national basic industry’ through the establishment of a symbolic CI complex and the consolidation of international competitiveness for the final stage of the plan (2002). The stress on export expansion is fairly conspicuous.
About a year later, the plan was upgraded in CI Vision 21: The Five-Year Plan for CI Promotion (MCT, 2000b), which retained the same basic structure as the previous plan.
Therefore, it is better to deal with the latter plan in greater detail to comprehend how the policy framework set out in the New Policy unfolded. The MCT also published similar long-term plans for CI promotion over the next few years: Contents Korea Vision 21 (MCT, 2001b) and The Participatory Government’s CI Policy Vision (MCT, 2003b). These three plans, which contain ‘vision’ in their titles, are very similar in both form and content.
For example, each plan suggested almost the same rationales for supporting CI, although the terms were slightly changed each time. To be concise, the plans conceived the rationale for promoting CI in connection with four different kinds of impact: Direct Cultural Impact (promoting cultural democracy, enhancing the creativity of the people, raising the diversity of cultural contents); Indirect Cultural Impact (strengthening the fine/basic arts sector, protecting cultural identity, improving the national brand);
Direct economic impact (creating jobs and high added value in the CI sector, expanding exports of cultural contents, activating local creative economy); and Indirect Economic Impact (activating related industries, promoting exportation of other industries, improving local conditions) (see also MCT, 2000a: 22; 2003a: 4). Within this consensus, the later plans were produced to revise and complement the vision, strategy and action
142 plans suggested in the earlier plans. Therefore, an examination of each plan is required, along with a comparison between them.
Table 6.2 Comparing the Three ‘Vision’ Plans for CI
As seen in the table above, the policy plans can be compared to each other in relation to at least three aspects; vision, strategy, and action plans. The broadest aspect for comparison is vision. The policymakers had quite ambitious objectives concerning the promotion of CI as ‘environment-friendly’ (smokeless) and ‘knowledge-intensive’
(weightless) industries. It is notable that the Korean CI policy vision became gradually more concrete with each new policy document, although each plan expressed its vision in the same tone, heavily stressing the importance of economic value. The first vision was very abstract and directly borrowed DJ’s phrase ‘make CI into a national basic industry of the 21st century and into a leading industry of the knowledge-based economy’. The vision became more concrete in the second; ‘preparing the base for becoming a key producer of cultural contents by 2003’. The final plan declared a very
143 specific vision; ‘making Korea the fifth strongest producer of CI in the world’ by 2008.
Here, the ‘fifth strongest’ measures strength in terms of the domestic market size.
According to the plan (MCT, 2003b: 5), the Korean CI market accounted for 1.5% of the world market in 2003, which was about the tenth in the ranking. It then set an ambitious goal of climbing up the rankings to fifth place after ‘America (40%), Japan (10%), Germany (5.5%) and Britain (4.4%)’ by 2008. The economic logic became increasingly clear as the policy vision evolved to stipulate very specific figures.
In terms of strategy, the second aspect of comparison, the first two plans seem to have been well summarized in the last plan. The strategies for the promotion of Korean CI in The Participatory Government’s CI Policy Vision (MCT, 2003b) can be divided into two categories. They either seek to establish cooperation ‘between the central and municipal governments, private companies and related universities’ or to strengthen the growth base in terms of ‘talent, infrastructure, investment and R&D, and overseas expansion’. In the first two plans the establishment of a cooperative system for CI had been presented as simply an action plan for building an information-sharing network.
However, it was elevated in the third plan to become one of the two overarching strategies of Korean CI policy. The second strategy of ‘strengthening the growth base’ in fact covers two related, but distinctive strategies suggested by former plans. The first is the nurture of various types of ‘infrastructure’ to enhance the basic competitiveness of CI, while the second concerns the promotion of strategic ‘genres’ and ‘products’ to achieve rapid growth in both domestic audience share and export scale.
The final aspect of comparison between the plans is the action plans they put forward.
As shown very well in the bottom row of Table 6.2, after the introduction of nine action plans for CI promotion in the New Policy, no significant changes were made throughout the evolution of the three long-term plans. Aligning laws and institutions, developing infrastructure and technology, promoting production, distribution and consumption, nurturing talent, expanding exportation, and promoting local CI are the main repertoires. At the same time, however, comparing each plan reveals that the policymakers who authored each plan did not employ the same theoretical framework for the action plans of CI promotion. For example, the concept of ‘infrastructure’ is very obscure. In some cases it refers to the facilities such as the CI complex or quango buildings, but in others it includes very broadly information networks or education systems. Additionally, each new plan made quite a few trivial changes. For instance, ‘technology development’ was suggested together with
‘promoting inception/production’ in CI Vision 21, but was aligned with ‘fostering skilled talent’ in The Participatory government’s CI Policy Vision. Similarly, ‘aligning laws and
144 institutions’ was given the highest priority in Contents Korea vision 21, but was given the lowest in the next plan. No reasons were given for these changes. In line with the definition and scope of CI prescribed by the Framework Act on the Promotion of CI (cf. 5.2.3), these numerous and surplus changes in the key policy plans can be taken as evidence of a lack of consistent theoretical perspectives. However, this is not to say that there was no underlying policy direction for CI promotion or that the policy framework for CI changed very often. In spite of various insignificant changes at the action plan level, the core logic and main direction of CI promotion were inherited and refined in each successive plan.