COVID-19 Exceptionalism: Explaining South Korean Responses
COVID-19 Exceptionalism: Explaining South Korean Responses
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DOI：
10.1080/18752160.2021.2004355
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发表时间：
2022-01-02
影响因子：
0.8
通讯作者：
Kim，Hyomin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Chekar，Choon Key;Kim，Hyomin
COVID-19给地球仪带来了挑战，并带来了许多共同的经验教训。然而，我们被淹没在将国家流行病应对措施描述为某些民族国家固有和独特的比较账户中，我们认为，这导致了COVID例外论。本文对韩国“成功”应对COVID-19危机的“文化”解释提出质疑。流行的说法是，韩国基于集群的缓解战略是通过严格的接触者追踪和大规模检测系统来维持的，这是由大流行准备的三个独特要素实现的：1）韩国的“文化”，即将面部覆盖规范化，2）韩国公民将公共卫生优先于隐私的共识，以及3）韩国的IT基础设施，使有效的数字接触者追踪成为可能。通过揭穿这三个神话，我们证明了为什么亚洲的“威权优势”理论和“亚洲文明”的反驳都没有充分抓住韩国对COVID大流行的反应的现实。在处理相对未知的病毒时，将风险概念化为可管理对象的方式产生了分配减轻风险责任的特定模式。COVID例外论不仅可能导致强化“（东亚）亚洲”/“西方”刻板印象的问题，还可能导致其他问题，例如含蓄地给予负责协调COVID-19应对措施的人政治上的豁免权。
COVID-19 has presented challenges across the globe that led to a number of shared lessons to be learnt. Yet, we are inundated with comparative accounts that characterize national pandemic responses as inherent and unique to certain nation states, which, we argue, led to COVID-exceptionalism. This article challenges “cultural” explanations of South Korea’s “successful” responses to COVID-19 crisis. The popular narrative has been that Korea’s cluster-based mitigation strategy was sustained by rigorous contact tracing and mass testing systems, and this was made possible by three distinctive elements of pandemic preparedness: 1) Korean “culture” of normalizing face-covering, 2) Korean citizens’ consensus of prioritizing public health to privacy, and 3) Korea’s IT infrastructure enabling efficient digital contact tracing. By debunking the three myths, we demonstrate why neither the Asian “authoritarian advantages” thesis nor the counter-argument of “Asian civility” adequately captures the reality of Korea’s reaction to the COVID pandemic. The ways in which risks are conceptualized as manageable objects produce particular modes of allocating responsibilities for risk mitigation, when dealing with a relatively unknown virus. COVID-exceptionalism may cause not only the issue of reinforcing “(East) Asian”/“Western” stereotypes, but also other problems such as implicitly granting political impunity to those responsible for coordinating COVID-19 responses.