A danger to avoid or nothing to worry about? China and the protests in Korea during 2016–2017
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20578911221112462 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | East Asia |
A danger to avoid or nothing
to worry about? China and
the protests in Korea during
2016–2017
Sunghee Cho
Miyazaki International College, Japan
Abstract
“Diffusion-proofing”literature discusses the measures taken by authoritarian regimes to prevent
the diffusion of protests from other authoritarian states. What about protests in a neighboring
democracy? Do they also fear diffusion due to the proximity, or are they not concerned because
of the difference in regime type? This study analyzes Chinese state-run news outlets’portrayals of
Korean protests calling for the president’s impeachment from October 2016 to March 2017,
based on the frequency and the focus of the reports as well as the descriptions of protests/pro-
testers and the Korean government. The findings indicate that China did not fear the diffusion
effect, as shown in their positive descriptions of the protests and protesters in frequent and
detailed reports, although they adopted a cautious approach, with reports focusing more on
the government side and emphasizing the public’s frustration, low government support, and the
president’s wrongdoing. Overall, China appeared to be less concerned about the diffusi on effect
due to the regimes’dissimilarity.
Keywords
China, democracy protests, diffusion, diffusion-proofing, Korea
Introduction
On October 4, 2017, the China Digital Times reported on leaked censorship instructions for a
Korean movie, A Taxi Driver, which read as follows: “From the Beijing Cyberspace
Administration Oversight Center: Find and delete all introductions, online encyclopedia entries,
Corresponding author:
Sunghee Cho, Miyazaki International College, Miyazaki, Japan.
Email: sunghee.cho@tuj.temple.edu
East Asia
Asian Journal of Comparative Politics
2023, Vol. 8(1) 291–306
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/20578911221112462
journals.sagepub.com/home/acp
film reviews, recommendations, and other articles related to the August 2017 South Korean film ‘A
Taxi Driver’” (Rudolph, 2017). What was wrong with this movie, especially a month after its
release in China? To both the Chinese public and Chinese authorities, it bore too much resem-
blance to China’s experience in Tiananmen Square in 1989. A Taxi Driver, watched by over
12 million Korean people and ranked as the 15th most-watched movie of all time as of May
2022 (KOFIC, 2022), is about a taxi driver in Seoul taking a German journalist who wants to
cover the Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1980 to Gwangju, where they are caught in
the middle of a military crackdown. While it was hailed as a riveting historical movie in
Korea, the Chinese audience’s responses worried the authorities. On Chinese social media,
Douban and Weibo, people discussed that it reminded them of the Tiananmen Square protests
and crackdown (Hong, 2017); thus, Chinese authorities banned the movie and deleted any
mentionofitonsocialmedia.
If Chinese authorities reacted like this to a cultural product—though based on a true story—then
how would China react to actual protests against the government happening in its neighboring
country? In 2016, in response to the president’s widespread political scandals, Koreans held
weekly protests calling for her impeachment from October 29 to December 9, when the impeach-
ment bill was passed in the National Assembly, and past March 10, 2017, when the Constitutional
Court gave a final verdict upholding the impeachment. The rally organizers estimated that from
October 29, 2016 to April 29, 2017, a little fewer than 17 million Koreans participated in about
23 protests (Lim, 2017).
What can we expect as China’s response to such government-challenging protests in its neigh-
boring democracy? Due to the dearth of literature on authoritarian regimes’reactions to protests in
neighboring democracies, it is difficult to directly apply theories to infer China’s behavior.
However, we can try to base our inference on the literature discussing the diffusion of democratiza-
tion/democracy protests and diffusion-proofing efforts by authoritarian regimes regarding protests
in other authoritarian states. According to the literature, due to Korea’s geographical proximity and
its social connections with China, these protests had the potential to make the Chinese government
worry about diffusion. On the other hand, the regimes’dissimilarity (as an extreme case of differ-
ence beyond merely variants of authoritarian regime types) could have made the Chinese govern-
ment worry less about the effect. So what happened? This study attempts to determine which
argument better represents China’s reactions to the protests in its neighboring democracy by exam-
ining Chinese state-run media’s portrayals of the protests in Korea from October 29, 2016 to March
10, 2017.
This study shows that unlike the descriptions of protests in authoritarian regimes, Chinese media
frequently covered these protests with detailed information such as about their scale and the pro-
testers’demands, and did not frame the protests and protesters in negative ways. This shows that
generally, China did not strongly fear diffusion from the protests in Korea, which gives more
support for the importance of regime types in assessing threat levels. Conversely, the media
focused more on the government side and repeatedly reported on the public’s frustration toward
the government, President Park’s low approval ratings, and her wrongdoing. However, with the
absence of the negative framing of the protests and protesters, these can be understood as rather
a cautious approach than outright fear-driven reactions, and some of their comments can be under-
stood in the context of China’s discontent with the Korean government about its decision to deploy
the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in Korea. Beijing strongly condemned the
decision, and it was sometimes mentioned directly when the media discussed criticisms of the
Korean government.
292 Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 8(1)
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