Eastern surveillance, Western malaise, and South Korea’s COVID-19 response: oligarchic power in Hell Joseon

With COVID-19, powerful political and economic forces have magnified their power and expanded inequality. Many critical scholars have celebrated how South Korean authorities have contained the virus in ways that ignore power relations. The government coordinated its pandemic response by expanding its formidable surveillance technologies for tracing, tracking, and mining every activity of ordinary citizens. State managers produced powerful images of the government, in Confucian fashion, protecting the public from a dangerous threat. I will connect these performances of power with an examination of how authorities harnessed its pandemic response to private capital. South Korea’s reaction to COVID-19 does represent a positive alternative to the dominant form of oligarchic rule that prevails in Euro-American societies. The governing elite deployed state power in ways that used this conjuncture to continue previous patterns of domination that have continuously expanded surveillance, extending techniques for the extraction of vital data for commercial and political purposes. Rather than celebrate the South Korean authorities, we should analyze how COVID-19 response has deepened South Korean society's social contradictions.