South Korea’s Strategic Culture and China’s National AI STRATEGY: A Neoclassical Realist View

Abstract

Purpose: South Korea s foreign policy executives need to make security policy choices about China s AI as a security threat with normative nature. The purpose of this article is to identify the ideas of the South Korean security policy executives and to analyze the role of the policy elites’ perception in foreign policymaking about China s artificial intelligence as a newly emerging security challenge. Together with this, it is approached to evaluate the strategic perception of Moon Jae-in s foreign policy executive in connection with China’s artificial intelligence. Method: The article examines the document and speech of the foreign policymakers of Korea and China as well as the media coverage of the two countries by utilizing Kitchen’s neoclassical realism with a focus on the elites’ perception as an intervening variable, international systemic pressure as an independent variable, and foreign policy outcome as a dependent variable. Chapter 2 reviews the strategic culture of a middle power. Chapter 3 finds China’s AI strategy as a systemic threat. Chapter 4 explores the former Korean governments’ strategic ideas for China. Chapter 5 finds Moon Jae-in government’s idea of the China AI strategy. Results: The article reveals the nature of China’s AI, the role of Korea’s strategic culture, and the capacity of policy elites to emerging security. First, China s AI has the nature of systemic pressure. Sec-ond, the foreign policy executives of Korea differently respond to China’s systemic pressure. Third, the Moon Jae-in government’s policy elites have autonomous power against the international systemic pressure and consider the economic interest as important. Conclusion: This article concluded that the foreign policy elites’ perception intervenes between the international systemic pressure and state foreign policy-making. The elites induce the discussion of AI from the view of middle power multilateralism rather than that of AI from the view of ethical and geopolitical context. The article also says that Korea s foreign policy elites can operationalize the ideas in considering the balance of interest with China.