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Domestic Constraints of Sino-South Korean Environmental Cooperation: the Case of Trans boundary Air Pollution

  • Analyses & Alternatives
  • Abbr : A&A
  • 2022, 6(1), pp.163~194
  • DOI : 10.22931/aanda.2022.6.1.005
  • Publisher : Korea Consensus Institute
  • Research Area : Social Science > Social Science in general
  • Received : February 4, 2022
  • Accepted : March 6, 2022
  • Published : March 31, 2022

Sangbum Shin 1,  Soel-ah KIM 2,  Kang Myeong Ji 1

1연세대학교
2홍익대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

A transboundary environmental problem refers to an environmental problem that goes beyond a country’s territory and damages neighboring countries. It is a difficult problem because, basically, it is a natural, rather than intentional, effect, and it is extremely hard to make a scientific consensus on the cause-effect relations between upstream and downstream nations. Air pollution, especially PM 2.5 and PM 10, is one of the typical cases of transboundary environmental problems in the Northeast Asia. This paper analyzes the constraints of environmental cooperation between China and South Korea to address transboundary air pollution issue. It argues that lack of trust and ideological hostility, rather than, scientific uncertainty, is the biggest obstacle for effective cooperation, and these hostile discourses and ideas are mostly generated by media in the downstream nation, the South Korea. In order to identify how South Korean media frames this issue, this paper searched newspaper articles in the six representative South Korean newspapers during the period of 2014 and 2020, and analyzed about 2,000 articles selected. It finds that South Korean media has framed the transboundary air pollution as a China bashing and related domestic political cleavage issue, while it neglects to show the cooperation attempts that the two countries have made to date. Also, while the media focuses on China hate frame, it has never reported the Chinese government’s domestic policies to reduce air pollution and their results. Media’s overuse of hate and blame frames not only has disrupted trust building but also it will delay a possible turning point of environmental cooperation between the two countries in the future.

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