Performing Community: A Comparison of Korean-Language Newspapers in Beijing and Sydney

More than six million Koreans now live outside Korea, in 173 countries, according to data released in 2003 by the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Jungang Ilbo 7 Feb. 2004). This number represents 13% of all Korean people and hence constitutes a diaspora of highly significant proportions. As migration from Korea continues, and the number of generations born outside Korea increases, identifiably "Korean" identities both proliferate and diversify. As Stuart Hall argues, identities undergo constant transformations and are "increasingly fragmented," "fractured," and "multiply constructed across different, often antagonistic, discourses, practices, and positions" ("Introduction" 4).

As people with a common ancestry and a shared history follow diverse itineraries of migration, the diasporic identities that emerge are necessarily heterogeneous. Identities are constituted and reconstituted within differing host cultures and are variously marked by a desire to recuperate what has been "lost." My focus in this essay is on the quite different identities developed by Koreans in Beijing and Koreans in Sydney as a result of the very different social formations, ideologies, and political agendas of each host country; in particular, I will be concerned with the role played by Korean-language community newspapers in this process. Here, I consider issues of the Beijing Journal (henceforth BJ) and the Sydney Korean Herald (henceforth SKH). Allan Bell has argued that

The stories people tell are a core part of their social identity, and the construction of a life story is crucial to our self-identity. The idea of the story is also central to news media. Journalists do not write articles, they write stories—with structure, order, viewpoint and values. So the daily happenings of our societies are expressed in the stories we are told in the media.

In addition, the media are important social institutions. They are crucial presenters of culture, politics and social life, shaping as well as reflecting how these are formed and expressed. Media "discourse" is important both for what it reveals about a society and because it also contributes to the character of a society.

(64–5)

Bell's triad of "culture, politics and social life" is formulated a little differently by Norman Fairclough when he proposes that the discourse of newspapers constitutes social identities, social relations, and systems of knowledge and belief (55). An examination of how community-language news media reflect and shape systems of knowledge and belief pertaining to the culture, politics, and social life of diasporic communities, linking individual and group identity to social identity, offers considerable insight into the relationships between host and diasporic cultures.

There are substantial Korean communities, of comparable size, in Beijing and Sydney: 55,000 Koreans in Beijing (BJ 28 Jan.–3 Feb. 2005, 9) and 46,000 in Sydney.² Their size enables a useful comparison between them: they are relatively small diasporic communities in comparison with the large communities in the United States, for example, and they do not (yet) have support networks comparable to those of the United States. Their relationship to the host country is also strongly shaped by the strongly contrasting political systems of China and Australia. Common traditions and cultural practices deriving from the home (originary) country are performed within each host country, but negotiations with the sociocultural circumstances of the host country may modify or reinterpret ideas of Koreanness. Like many other diasporic communities, diasporic Koreans are constantly negotiating the implication that they are culturally "inauthentic" or culturally fractured in comparison with Koreans living in Korea, and this issue of status affects cultural negotiation with both home and host societies. What constitutes the essence of being Korean is a challenging question in a globalized world, where many people migrate, travel, exchange ideas and goods, and negotiate identity in an expanded intersubjective field. In addition, diasporic conceptions of home culture are at perpetual risk of becoming anachronistic, as Koreans in Korea themselves change under the influence of globalization. Significant changes emerge from, for example, the aspirations of students returning home after studying abroad and of returning migrants; cultural exchange through multimedia and Internet use; and the pressure on cultural representation stemming from...