“We are in the midst of crisis”¹

In 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yul declared that South Korea is in a “demographic national emergency” due to its shrinking population. Drawing on the ancient example of Spartan population decline as a historical precedent for national collapse, he implied that South Korea might face the same consequence unless immediate and appropriate actions are taken. He also decided to advance pronatalist policies and to reorganize the ministerial structure, most notably by establishing a dedicated ministry of demographics (low birthrates, ageing population, and migration), whose minister would take on the role of Deputy Prime Minister in place of the Minister of Education.²

President Yoon was not the first and the only South Korean president who delivered the “crisis narratives”³ on national demographic issues. During the 1960s, the management of explosively rising birthrates became a paramount national imperative, deployed through widespread public campaigns, the implementations of biotechnologies (such as the introduction of contraceptive devices and unconsented sterilization) and the state-led promotion of the ideal nuclear family model – a legally married heterosexual couple with their two biological children. The total fertility rate had been on a steady decline, dropping below the replacement level in the early 1980s⁴. Confronted by this demographic shift, the South Korean government launched the “Basic Plan on Low Fertility and Aged Society” to mitigate the economic and social tensions and prepare for the upcoming futures entailing a rapidly shrinking and ageing population.

What is at stake? What went wrong? How should we fix it?

Crisis Narrative as a Critique of the present

The claim for “demographic national emergency” delivered by President Yoon instills an acute sense of urgency: it is an emergency! We should do something RIGHT NOW! This sense of urgency renders the population crisis as an immediate threat to national security and economic growth. This is how crisis narratives work as a critique of the present.

Crisis narrative is a concept suggested by an economic anthropologist Janet Roitman. Referring to a German historian Reinhart Koselleck, Roitman shows that the concept of crisis is bound to its cognate, critique, and by doing so, the concept indicates the peculiar idea that history and its philosophy could be separated from each other⁵. In other words, historical events and their representations could be alienated through the concept of crisis.

In this sense, claiming a crisis constitutes what she calls a “crisis narrative”. Crisis narratives are not neutrally elaborated stories; they produce a peculiar historical perception by demarcating the future and the past from the problematic present to apprehend what is going wrong right now. This perception entails a moral and political demand to recognize, address, manage, and overcome the present – the crisis. Crisis claims thus are not a mere recognition of the present; they are the critiques of the present, the act of generating knowledge about history while obscuring the very process of knowledge production. To put it differently, crisis narratives work as a blind spot for knowledge production⁶.

Two Folds of Crisis Narratives on Demographic Issues
Historical Inevitability?

Modernity is a controversial concept. When it comes to the South Korean contexts, its nuances become more complex because of the historical relationships that the society has made with the so-called Westernized ideas about modernity. Along with the colonial encounter with imperial Japan, modernization has been associated with ‘the civilized West’ as the historical stage on the blunt ideas around unilinear evolution of human societies in South Korea. West, under these ideas, is represented as both the present of the ‘Western’ civils and the future of non-Western peoples. Becoming modern has been equated with becoming the West.

The demographic crisis narrative in South Korea is intrinsically pertinent to this concept of modernity which has not merely been a distinctive historical phase but as a teleological project that the nation has aggressively striven to accomplish during the postcolonial era. Low fertility rates and ageing population serve as critical markers of this fraught modernization process. Within this discourse, the past is backwardly cast as ‘tradition,’ while the present is configured as a liminal, in-between status perpetually oriented toward a fully modernized future. This is how the ideas of “traditionalization of modernity”⁷ in Japanese society or the concept of “accidental pluralism”⁸ within the family ideologies of South Korea are suggested and constituted to understand the postcolonial project of modernization and contrasting manifestation between the past and the present (and the future) through the demographic markers such as low birthrates and ageing population.

Framed within this linear trajectory toward modernity, the demographic crisis operates as a paradoxical indicator: it signals that complete modernization has not yet been finalized, but remains imminent. Consequently, the crisis is rendered as a temporary and inevitable hurdle that must be properly managed for the nation to fulfill its rosy destiny – a fully modernized country. In this manner, the teleological promise of modernity structures the demographic crisis narratives, naturalizing the demographic markers of low fertility rates and aging population into the inevitable but conquerable historical destiny of modernization.

Urgent Chronicity, Chronic Urgency

Through successive Basic Plans, the South Korean government has signaled that the demographic crisis is a pressing emergency to be urgently quantified, managed, and ultimately resolved by the sovereign hands of the state. Yet, the proliferation of these policy measures over the span of two decades has done less to alleviate the issue than to construct a regime of permanent crisis, cementing its chronicity. Henrik Vigh demonstrates that crisis is “a constant prospect waiting for on the other side of horizon,”⁹ although it is being actualized and experienced through the narratives as well. The Basic Plans have included the practical policy measures to resolve the crisis while implying the future of so-called ‘population cliff’, reframing the present problems into the matters of possibilities.

Let me take a look at a few hypothetical ‘if’ scenarios:

If the nation fails to address the current crisis properly, it will face full-scale national extinction.

If we fail to act immediately, the state has to confront far more severe circumstances.

These scenarios illustrate how both urgency and chronicity permeate the demographic crisis narratives of South Korea. Through this rhetorical loop, the crisis narratives are made to feel both permanently ongoing and perpetually on the brink of disaster: we must do something right now, but it must be addressed and managed in appropriate manners. This simultaneity of urgency and chronicity constitutes the most distinctive and critical vector for understanding the South Korean context, and by extension, the broader East Asian experience. This narrative of crisis engenders “an oxymoronic permanence”¹⁰ wherein crisis is construed not as an object of scrutiny, but is normalized as the baseline context itself. Upon the context, a peculiar perception of history has been formulated: we are in the midst of modernization. By overcoming the backward past and current crises, we can move forward to a better future – a full modernity.

Yet, this is not the only story that we should deliberate on.

Beyond the Reproductive Futurism: Three Noncrisis Narratives

Crisis narratives generate moral judgment, post hoc denunciations, and critiques as immediate answers to the question of what went wrong. Who bears the blame for the crisis, and who must hold accountability? In searching for appropriate responses, society becomes consumed with accusing a specific culprit whether it be the individual, older generations, or a particular political regime. Regardless of who is eventually held accountable, this process fundamentally judges the past and the present, starkly partitioning them from a future conceived either as a flourishing era or as utter extinction. In so doing, a certain past, present, and future are foreclosed. “Can we narrate a future without crisis?¹¹ As Roitman asked, it is imperative to surface and give voice to the narratives that have been systematically marginalized and ostracized by the very framework of crisis – namely, noncrisis narratives.

Noncrisis narratives are neither positioned as anti-crisis stances, nor do they operate toward the resolution of the crisis itself. They do not mobilize post hoc denunciations or moral judgments such as human error or ethical failure. They rather attempt to project a future from different perspectives. Roitman suggests that noncrisis narratives allow us to imagine alternatives or other histories. Without relying on the concept of crisis, noncrisis narratives reconfigure our historical lens.

I propose three noncrisis narratives that deserve deeper scholarly analysis within the South Korean demographic contexts: singlehood, queer intimacies, and more-than-human relationships. Numerous studies including anthropology have already documented and analyzed these phenomena. Dominant demographic crisis narratives configure heteronormative biological reproduction under the sociopolitical paradigm of economic growth and developmentalism, both of which rely on a ceaseless supply of ‘healthy’ human labor produced and raised by the heterosexual couples as their fundamental prerequisite. Within the discourse of the “population cliff” – another crisis narrative, newly born and healthily raised in the ‘normal’ households are often regarded as the only future we can count on. To disrupt this reproductive futurism¹² embedded in the crisis narratives, I argue that we must reframe singlehood, queer and more-than-human intimacies as noncrisis narratives.

How do these noncrisis narratives expose the blind spot of the dominant crisis narratives, and what futures do they propose for us? I contend that it is inappropriate to illuminate these narratives either as a merely romanticized alternative or another indicator of alleged modernity. These stories must be deliberated as potent realities capable of imploding the dominant crisis narratives and radically shifting our epistemological structures of thinking about and feeling in this world.

*Acknowledgement

This essay is a revised and shortened version of the final term paper I wrote for the course ‘Crisis and Anti-Crisis’ at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2024. I am grateful to Professor Kath Weston and my coursemates for their fruitful discussions and thoughtful feedback on the essay.