Seoul, South Korea:
A factory turned battlefield, riot police armed with tasers and an activist who spent 100 days on top of a chimney: the unrest that inspired Netflix’s most successful series ever has all the hallmarks of a TV drama.
This month sees the release of the second season of ‘Squid Game,’ a dystopian vision of South Korea in which desperate people compete in deadly versions of traditional children’s games for a huge cash prize.
But while the show itself is a work of fiction, director and writer Hwang Dong-hyuk has said that the experiences of the main character Gi-hun, a laid-off worker, were inspired by the violent 2009 Ssangyong strikes.
“I wanted to show that any ordinary middle-class citizen in the world we live in today can fall to the bottom of the economic ladder overnight,” he has said.
In May 2009, Ssangyong, a struggling auto giant acquired by a consortium of banks and private investors, announced it would lay off more than 2,600 people, or nearly 40 percent of its workforce.
That marked the start of an occupation of the factory and a 77-day strike that ended in clashes between strikers armed with slingshots and steel pipes and riot police wielding rubber bullets and tasers.
Many union members were severely beaten and some were imprisoned.
‘Many lost their lives’
The conflict did not end there.
Five years later, union leader Lee Chang-kun staged a sit-in on one of the factory’s chimneys for 100 days to protest a verdict in favor of Ssangyong against the strikers.
He was fed food from a basket tied to a rope by supporters and suffered hallucinations of a tent rope that had turned into a writhing snake.
Some who experienced the unrest had difficulty discussing “Squid Game” because of the trauma they had suffered, Lee told AFP.
The fallout from the strike, compounded by protracted legal battles, caused significant financial and mental strain on workers and their families, resulting in about 30 deaths from suicide and stress-related problems, Lee said.
“Many have lost their lives. People have suffered for too long,” he said.
He vividly remembers the police helicopters circling overhead, creating an intense wind that ripped away the workers’ raincoats.
Lee said he felt like he couldn’t give up.
“We were seen as incompetent breadwinners and outdated labor activists gone mad,” he said.
“The police continued to beat us even after we fell unconscious. This happened at our workplace and it was broadcast to so many people.”
Lee said he was moved by scenes in the first season of “Squid Game” in which Gi-hun struggles not to betray his fellow competitors.
But he wished the show had brought about real change for workers in a country marked by economic inequality, tense labor relations and deeply polarized politics.
“While it has been widely discussed and consumed, it is disappointing that we have not turned these conversations into more favorable outcomes,” he said.
‘Shadow of state violence’
The success of “Squid Game” in 2021 left him feeling “empty and frustrated.”
“At the time, it felt like the story of the Ssangyong workers had been reduced to a commodity in the series,” Lee told AFP.
‘Squid Game,’ the most-watched series of all time on the streaming platform, is seen as the embodiment of the country’s rise to global cultural power, part of the ‘Korean wave’ alongside the Oscar-winning ‘Parasite’ and K-pop stars like as BTS.
But the second season comes as Asia’s democracy is embroiled in some of the worst political unrest in decades, sparked by conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed attempt to impose martial law this month.
Yoon has since been impeached and suspended pending a ruling by the Constitutional Court.
That declaration of martial law risked sending the Korean wave “into the abyss,” about 3,000 people in the film industry, including “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho, said in a letter after Yoon’s shocking decision.
Vladimir Tikhonov, a professor of Korean studies at the University of Oslo, told AFP that some of South Korea’s most successful cultural products emphasize state and capitalist violence.
“It’s a remarkable and interesting phenomenon: we still live in the shadow of state violence, and this state violence is a recurring theme in highly successful cultural products.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)