David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.
Only beautiful, please: Korea’s new battle with bad press
Courtesy of Thomas Evans
By David A. Tizzard
There is something deliciously ironic in the sight of a government — let’s say, the government of the Republic of Korea — that once invited the world in for the selfie by the Han River, now issuing warnings about what voices may or may not be heard in its territory. More precisely, it was said by a member of the government this week that foreign content creators who post “derogatory commentary” about Korea may face entry bans. The country’s dignity is now apparently as fragile as a YouTube algorithm.
Yes, it is understandable that Korea wants to clamp down on hate speech. The president also said that racially targeted, nationality-based denigration can no longer be tolerated when pointing towards the increased anti-Chinese sentiment the country is sadly witnessing. Thankfully, unlike his democratic party predecessor who used anti-Japanese sentiment to boost his own ratings, President Lee Jae Myung is playing a very straight bat in terms of international relations by trying to be friends with everyone. Giving U.S. President Donald Trump a gold crown, saying nice things about Chinese leader Xi Jinping and making continued overtures to Pyongyang. Lee has come a long way since his time as governor of Gyeonggi Province, when he ordered mandatory COVID-19 testing for all foreign nationals working in the province. That policy was very controversial and drew criticism for being discriminatory. Thankfully for him, his army of reporters seems to have forgotten about it. Four years is a long time ago, after all!
But there is a difference between guarding national dignity and signaling to the outside world that criticism may cost visas. Let me say it plainly: This is not simply “protecting national image.” It is the transformation of the liberal ideal of free expression into a regulatory instrument. And once you limit the enemies of democracy, you rarely stop at them. Suddenly, every traveler with a camera is a journalist. Suddenly, critique is contraband. Suddenly, we are all meant to curate our impressions of the country the way one curates an Instagram feed.
And here, because history loves a callback, we find ourselves drifting back to John Everard’s book, “Only Beautiful, Please.” Everard, a British ambassador wandering through Pyongyang, tried to take a few unflattering photos of daily life. Nothing scandalous, of course. Just images of a country being a country. A North Korean official, unable to help himself, leaned over and whispered the line that became the book’s title: “Only beautiful, please. Photo only beautiful.” It was part command, part plea, the distilled essence of a nation that feels both proud and ashamed of itself at the same time. This was a psychological two-step that Everard saw repeated everywhere during his two and a half years in Pyongyang.
The tragicomic thing — the thing that should make all liberal democrats shift uncomfortably in their seats — is that this refrain now faintly echoes in Seoul. Not shouted, not mandated, not accompanied by a minder in a drab olive coat. But whispered just enough to make the air feel different. Just enough to make creators wonder if they’re supposed to shoot reality as it is, or as it ought to be according to the Ministry of National Feelings.
“Only beautiful, please” used to be a North Korean request. It should never become a South Korean policy.
But here is the other irony, the one that keeps elbowing me in the ribs every time I sit down at my computer: I understand exactly why people make the content they do about Korea. Not because they hate the place. Not even because they’re trying to save it. But because the algorithm, the invisible deity to whom we’ve all apparently agreed to give our attention, rewards a particular genre of emotional pornography. I know this because I’ve uploaded 117 episodes of my podcast, and every single time I’m confronted with that blank title box, I feel the machine’s breath on the back of my neck. I know what it wants. It wants blood. It wants grief. It wants the spectacle of a society in psychic freefall.
And all I have to do is type the words: “The Most Depressed Country in the World,” “Why Korea Is Racist,” “Korean Gender Wars,” “Korea Is Dying,” “Why Korea Sucks.”
I never do. Partly because I don’t see the country that way, but also because content creation is not my full-time job. I’m not financially tethered to virality. I don’t have to monetize every feeling I have about the place I live. But not everyone has that luxury. For many, the choice is existential.
So while the government frets about “negative portrayals” of Korea, what it fails to understand is that the very platforms it courts actively incentivize the darkest, most distorted versions of this country.
We live in an ecosystem where social media can, in theory, illuminate the parts of the world that would otherwise stay hidden. But, more often than not, it distorts them into hyperreal caricatures: glossy utopias or trauma-porn dystopias. And Korea lands dead center in the crosshairs of this system.
The country is popular. People want to know about it. People want to talk about it. But most crucially, people want to consume it. And so the takes that rise to the top are not the nuanced ones. Not the ones that remember that the country went from colonization to civil war to dictatorship to democracy in less than a single human lifetime. Instead, they are the dystopian technoscape views where everyone is sad, overworked, lonely and secretly plotting their escape to some imagined West where problems apparently dissolve in the presence of croissants.
Perhaps even worse, social media creates a new priesthood of online cynics who claim they’re bravely revealing hidden truths about Korea. Their self-image resembles the right-wing grifter who insists he is being silenced and canceled while touring the nation and releasing bestselling books.
There is profit in pessimism. There is data in despair. You can practically see the dollar signs in the eyes of the tech giants every time a video titled “Why Korea Is Killing Me” hits the recommended feed. Now insert into this environment the South Korean government’s latest suggestion that foreigners who say mean things might face visa consequences.
When a democratic society accidentally echoes even a whisper of the logic used by authoritarian ones, when “Only beautiful, please” becomes not just a North Korean command but a South Korean expectation, you don’t protect national dignity. You fracture it.