Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the conditions for creating a public space amid the globalization of the Northeast (East) Asian area, from an example of Qingdao, China.
The following points can be pointed out as features of the Northeast Asian area. (1) The dense motion of people and social networks exceeding the state is formed. (2) Centralized government from the Early Stage continued, and the Northeast Asian area has been composed as Dynasty-Relations among the states. (3) The strains created by the Cold War concentrated in this area after World War II, and the Korean Peninsula and China (the mainland and Taiwan) were forced to split. (4) In this area, nationalism, which can also be considered the “hypertrophy phenomenon of the self” resulting from high economic growth, is strong. These features have specified the imaginative faculty with which people understand each other.
In Northeast Asia, transnational movements have increased rapidly, and mixtures of cultures have occurred in everyday lives of people, such as media culture, movies, music, food, cosmetics, and fashion. It could be said that the mixture of various cultures is the product of an affluent society.
Industrialization has caused the “convergence of cultures, ” and global media has produced the “deodorization of culture, ” but different ethnic groups interact and live together. We may realize that neither convergence nor deodorization can be performed. Their lives are divided by a national wall, which stands between South Koreans and the Chinese. On an ethnic level, a wall, which obstructs communication between the Han race and ethnic Koreans and between South Koreans and the Chinese Koreans, also exists clearly. It is not so easy for them to get over the barriers that inhibit the sharing of a “public space” and “joint consciousness” and direct understanding of each other's experiences in the near future.
However, given today's reality in which we are already living as neighbors, and given the changing ethnic identities, we must determine the conditions for coexistence by transcending nationalism that is shut by “self-hypertrophy.”
