South Korea has recently been experiencing an exceptionally high degree of what can alternately be described as political turmoil, domestic unrest, or citizen participation in the political process, depending on whom you ask. Demonstrators have taken to the streets in the greatest number in over two decades, since 1987, when a similar sort of collective action unseated a military dictatorship. Protesters are holding candlelight vigils, waving banners, and singing popular songs. Their presence has dominated many areas of Seoul, brought traffic to a standstill, triggered a power struggle in the South Korean government, and filled the front pages of national and even international headlines. And why have these citizens taken to the streets with such gusto, and in such quantity? According to most newspapers and indeed the protesters themselves, the impetus for their collective action is a hastily-negotiated free trade agreement over beef imported from the United States.

The sudden appearance of these protests in the generative news media– press releases– created the impression that their formation was also sudden and spontaneous, an impression which obscured the more important questions of why and how they were able to organize so dramatically and on such a large scale.

There is more here than first meets the eye. For news sources that only cover the surface level of events (e.g. the press releases that inform the commentary of most American journalists who write about international issues) the protests seem like a case of mass hysteria, engendered by irrational fears of mad cow disease. Many editorials in sources from the Wall Street Journal (“Testing President Lee” 6/10/08) to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (“South Korea: a beef with beef” 6/11/08) and the Detroit Free Press (“Web hysteria a danger to Korean deal” 6/15/08) take the view that ‘we eat American beef, why can’t the Koreans stop making a fuss and do the same’? The sudden appearance of these protests in the generative news media– press releases– created the impression that their formation was also sudden and spontaneous, an impression which obscured the more important questions of why and how they were able to organize so dramatically and on such a large scale. Sustained mass hysteria in such large numbers is a rare phenomenon, and in this case a poor journalistic excuse for a lack of information.

A protester speaks out at a South Korean anti-U.S. beef rally. Photo by Hojusaram. Some rights reserved.A quick examination of the timeline shows that it is not as irrational for South Koreans to protest this arrangement as it may initially seem. Around the same time that the South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak was negotiating this ill-fated beef import scheme, the Food and Drug Administration released new regulations prohibiting the use of high-risk cow components in animal feed, regulations which reinforced the 30 month-old distinction that is markedly absent from the U.S.-Korean April deal: “These high risk cattle materials are the brains and spinal cords from cattle 30 months of age and older. The entire carcass of cattle not inspected and passed for human consumption is also prohibited, unless the cattle are less than 30 months of age, or the brains and spinal cords have been removed.” (FDA Press Release “FDA Strengthens Safeguards for Consumers of Beef” April 23, 2008)

“Koreans eat more parts of the cow than what Americans do, and so we are worried that those parts especially will not be kept safe.”

According to Cheewoo Kim, who participated in the massive protests of June 10 where some reports put the numbers in the hundreds of thousands (“Protesters Want U.S. Beef Safety” Korea Times, 6/14/08), it is precisely this lack of parity in standards that has roused him and many of his friends to march in the streets. “It’s really outrageous. They don’t even need to inspect the beef after it’s imported. Koreans eat more parts of the cow than what Americans do, and so we are worried that those parts especially will not be kept safe.”

The real import of these protests, according to Kim, has been largely overlooked in the media coverage of the protests, and has more to do with the way that they formed rather than the substance of the protest itself. He readily admits that even to some Koreans, the beef issue seems like a somewhat arbitrary focal point for such a quantity of public outpouring, but it is the demonstrations themselves which are viewed as positive. “You have to look at how these protests began,” observes Kim. “At the end of April it was just young kids protesting, organized online, worried about bad American beef getting into their school lunches. It gave the government a headache because there was no way to stop them, so they tried to get control through the schools, through the teachers, by punishing kids. Then college kids got involved and then it started getting much bigger.”

As I walk with Kim down a narrow street in the district surrounding Hongik University in Seoul we spot a recently-taped poster advertising a “Stop the Mad Cow XXX” party at The Velvet Banana nightclub, featuring a silhouette of a cow filled in with the American flag and a octagonal stop sign sitting between its ears. In a way, this pop-art rendering is a better expression of the Korean frustration than many of the slogans carried by protesters. As Kim explained to me, many of the protesters are upset because they see the beef issue as yet another time the U.S. has tried to take advantage of South Korea. This frustration goes hand in hand with strong reservations about the presidential abilities of the pro-American Lee Myung-Bak to lead a South Korea independent of American interests, both economic (opening Korea’s markets to U.S. imports) and diplomatic (hostility towards North Korea, which many South Koreans hope to one day reunite with through economic cooperation).

The nation has the highest broadband penetration among its populace of any in the world, with over 70% of Koreans over the age of six online, and over 87.7% of all users using the high-speed xDSL connection type…

These frustrations, however, are politically irrelevant by themselves without some mechanism to coalesce. South Korean society uniquely provides that mechanism in the formula of mass mobile communication. The nation has the highest broadband penetration among its populace of any in the world, with over 70% of Koreans over the age of six online, and over 87.7% of all users using the high-speed xDSL connection type, according to a recent report by the National Internet Development Agency. This last statistic is significant because it means that as opposed to mere textual communication, most Koreans have the ability to quickly send large files like video or music to their groups of friends. However, it is the text that continues to dominate. Earlier on the metro from Insadong to Hongik, Kim had pointed out a ‘thumb person’: a boy of maybe twelve or thirteen, eyes glazed in lax concentration over a mobile phone, fingers moving literally faster than my eyes could follow over the keypad. We both marveled.