ABSTRACT
In this chapter I anchor the politics of the rights of Korean Chinese in the process of South Korean democratization. The contestation of the rights of Korean Chinese extends to the question of democratic inclusion in South Korea. Two strands of thinking about democracy are presented in this chapter: one is the historical meaning of democracy in the post-colonial and post-Cold War context; and the other is the particular expression of the universal principle of equality and inclusion in the neoliberal capitalist context. While the two strands are interwoven, their analytic separation highlights the historical transformation of the idea of democracy in South Korea, reflecting its specific societal and global changes in the neoliberal capitalist era. Since democratization in 1987, the universal principle of equality and inclusion has constituted a new political culture in South Korea. As I explore in this chapter, this new political culture entails constitutionalism, cosmopolitanism, and a new state-centrism. I examine how the social movement for the rights of Korean Chinese simultaneously promotes and challenges this new political culture of neoliberal democracy in an attempt to reconcile the notion of universal human rights with constructing ethnic and national differences between the rights in South Korea of ethnic Korean and non-Korean migrant workers.
