Soo Yeon Kim | Trading State, Network Periphery: Korea in Asia’s Evolving Geoeconomic Order

SBS Seminar

Soo Yeon Kim
Associate Professor and Korea Foundation Chair; Editor, Pacific Affairs, School of Public Policy and
Global Affairs, University of British Columbia

Soo Yeon Kim is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, where she holds the Korea Foundation Chair and serves as Editor of Pacific Affairs. Her research is in international political economy, with a focus on the politics of trade, regional integration in Asia, and global economic governance. She is the author of Markets, States, and Community: Regional Economic Integration in ASEAN (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia) and Power and the Governance of Global Trade: From the GATT to the WTO (Cornell University Press, 2010), and the editor of BRICS and the Global Economy (World Scientific, 2020). Her work has appeared in International Organization, World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Affairs, and the Review of International Organizations, among others. Before joining UBC, she was Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore, and she has held fellowships at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, Princeton University; the Transatlantic Academy, German Marshall Fund of the United States; and the East-West Center. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and a B.A. from Yonsei University.

Chaired by Hojung Joo, Assistant Professor in the Department of Government, Harvard University

Abstract:
South Korea presents a puzzle for our understanding of Asia’s geoeconomic order, the arrangement of power that runs through the region’s economic networks and infrastructures. In regional production networks, Korea is the trading state par excellence, a country that built its position through commerce. It sits at the center of “Factory Asia” in key sectors, supplying the semiconductors, batteries, and components on which regional manufacturing depends. Yet in the physical infrastructure of the region’s digital economy, the undersea fiber-optic cables that carry almost all international data, Korea sits at the edge. An original dataset of nearly 700 submarine cable systems worldwide shows that Korea hosts fewer international cables than Taiwan or the Philippines, ranks far below Japan and Singapore as a crossroads for the region’s data flows, and was largely passed over in the 2010s, when Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon rebuilt the Pacific’s cable map around its neighbors. Korea is well connected, but nothing flows through it. It is an endpoint, but not a central node.

How did a country so central to Asia’s flows of goods remain marginal to the region’s flows of data? A related puzzle sharpens the question. Korea has built one of the world’s most advanced domestic digital infrastructures, from universal broadband to one of the world’s first nationwide 5G networks, yet this strength stops at the border. Process-tracing analysis indicates that these facts are connected. The institutions that wired Korea so thoroughly at home, an industrial policy aimed at exports and national buildout, a telecommunications market dominated by the former state monopoly KT, and regulations that discouraged the foreign investment that made hubs of Korea’s neighbors, help explain why the trading state’s centrality stopped at the water’s edge. In the current political moment, as security concerns push Asia’s digital infrastructure away from contested chokepoints, new cable projects are drawing Korea back toward the center of the network, though as a beneficiary of others’ security calculations rather than its own design. What this reveals about Korea’s position and power in Asia’s evolving geoeconomic order is the larger question of the book project from which the talk is drawn.

Generously supported by the SBS Foundation Research Fund at the Korea Institute, Harvard University