Mess with one SEAbling, and you mess with us all

 The social media war with the 'Knetz' led South East Asians to make the point that South Korea's soft power rose on the wholehearted support of the region's young.

You may have heard that Malaysians were at “war” recently on social media. But it was not the usual battles with Indonesians accusing us of stealing their cuisines or Singaporeans accusing us of being corrupt or Filipinos accusing us of being bad at karaoke.

No, we South-East Asians now have a common adversary: South Koreans.

It started in late January when a South Korean influencer was caught using professional equipment to video a performance by a South Korean K-pop band in Malaysia, which was apparently against the venue’s rules.

That started a social media war between some nuts in the two countries which turned into a regional battle with South East Asian “SEAblings” against Knetz (short for Korean netizens).

The Knetz tried to get fellow North East Asian neighbours (NEAblings?) on their side but failed. Instead, the SEAblings got a lot of regional and even global support, including some from Poland on account of how similar their flag is to Indonesia’s.

Here’s the cute part – apparently the SEAblings take their regional kinship very seriously, and for the moment are happy to put aside their long history of bullying, cyber or otherwise, against each other.

This is like the famous Middle Eastern saying, “Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my cousin. Me and my cousin against a stranger”.

Suddenly, SEAblings are taking on “strangers” from South Korea.

Many posted saying it’s OK for us South-East Asians to dump on each other, but outsiders better not get in the way, because we’ll put aside our beef and focus our bile on them instead.

All this could very well have been the plot of a movie made by Asean’s headquarters.

SEAblings are being so lovey dovey and kumbaya with each other right now, conveniently forgetting our previous fights and too busy to think about our future ones.

Racial dogfight

Things got racial, as things on social media tend to get. The racial dogfight became quite vicious such that adults in some room somewhere, likely in Seoul, ought to be concerned with.

At stake, and I don’t say this lightly, is the South Korean brand itself, built over the last few decades through soft power (K-pop, television, movies etc) on a foundation of its economic and technology hard power.

It wasn’t always about South Korea in our neck of the SEAbling wood though.

Years ago, my two youngest children were enthralled with everything Japanese and ended up in Japan for six years doing their university degree and becoming fluent Japanese speakers.

They’ve moved on since, but Japan remains close to their heart. Such love and fascination can last a lifetime and have a great impact on how we see other nations.

Being from the generation that grew up in the 1950s and 60s, anything Japanese was considered cheap enough and good enough for those of us who couldn’t afford the “white men” stuff.

Things have changed a lot since then. For certain things (cameras, cars, watches) Japan will always be my automatic first choice, and there has to be really good reasons for me to do otherwise.

The generation before me lived under the often-cruel Japanese Occupation during WW2. But much has been forgiven since then, including by my parents who lost their first-born twin sons to disease and other war calamities.

But in today’s social media age respect, affection, brand and reputation, perhaps even forgiveness, don’t last very long.

K-pop’s conquests

The SEAblings have been at pains to make the point that Korea’s soft power was built on wholehearted support from South East Asia’s younger generations.

That’s certainly true. South Koreans don’t get as much attention from Japan and China, their two closest and oversized neighbours, who are busy building, nurturing, preserving and perhaps even destroying their own brand.

South Korea certainly can’t expect much from their own siblings in North Korea, who are busy trying to survive in their own self-imposed socialist nirvana.

All this is happening at a very crucial time when the SEAblings in various measures are finding their own feet and building their own confidence after decades of being in the backwater.

We’re no longer just here to make up the numbers. There are about 600 million of us who are now more alike than different, more related than we care to admit, and more optimistic about our future than most others in the world.

South Korea certainly has earned its prosperity and cachet as an Asian power. But it’s also caught between a rock and a hard place, smack between nations who aren’t its historical friends, including its own sundered relatives up north.

Tied to the US

The country has been accused of seeing itself more as a western nation than Asian, and not just because of its newfound prosperity – after all nobody ever accused the Japanese of that, and none will ever accuse China of it either.

Perhaps a few historical and demographic factors may explain this. The US went to war to protect South Korea from an invasion by China-aided North Korea in the Korean War in the 1950s.

Its miraculous rise from the ashes of this nasty civil war mirrors the rise of the US too. South Korea is also the only Asian country where Protestantism is the single largest religious group, surrounded by either Buddhist or nominally atheistic communist nations.

That could be yet another tie that binds South Koreans to the US.

Its easy to understand how they often struggle with the question of how Asian they are. While they are geographically in Asia, do they feel they belong here? Does this explain their reputation for being rather haughty with their brown fellow Asians?

I see this as a problem with Singapore too, which has worked hard and truly earned the title of a developed nation and is also stuck among hundreds of millions of people with whom it has less and less in common except for geography and perhaps DNA.

Are they Asians?

And there’s Australia as well, a European culture stuck in close proximity to, but unlike, Asians who aren’t sure who they want to be associated with.

But to be fair, increased Asian immigration, higher Asian prosperity, growing Asian economic ties and weakening ties to Europe, has led to Australians having debates, quite vociferous at times, as to where they should be leaning, and I think the answer is increasingly Asia.

Perhaps this explains why the social media war blew up. Its happening between a group of overachievers locked amid a bunch of previously underachieving, but increasingly developing and intensely proud people, albeit still carrying a tinge of poor self-image.

We’ll leave the South Koreans to figure out their own answer to this.

But as one of the 600 million SEAblings who feel increasingly proud and confident of ourselves as time passes, I’d say this to one and all: touch one of us, and you touch all of us! And “all of us” even includes Singapore! - FMT

 The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.