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Gold-Collecting Campaign

The gold collection campaign was a voluntary sacrificial movement for the nation in 1997 to repay the debt of the Republic of Korea when the IMF asked for relief money. At that time, Korea had about $ 304 billion in foreign exchange debt. The campaign, involving about 35.1 million people nationwide, collected about 227 tons of gold. It was worth about $2.13 billion.^[2] It has become a representative example of the people's willingness to sacrifice their lives amid difficulties in the national economy.^[3]

The beginning of the gold collecting campaign

On July 2, 1997, Thailand changed its fixed exchange rate system, which has been maintained for the past 13 years. As the exchange rate system is shifted, the price of Thai baht in the foreign exchange market plunged This was a direct impetus for the East Asian financial crisis.^[4] Therefore, In an attempt to defend the country, On May 21, the IMF was asked to provide liquidity adjustment funds.^[4] At that time, There was a lot of controversy about what the real cause of the The direct cause was 'foreign exchange liquidity'.^[4] In other words, the domestic foreign exchange market lacks the dollar, the KRW(The monetary unit of Korea) exchange rate surges, and some financial institutions are faced with the inability to repay foreign debts.^[4] This is due to the fact that the foreign exchange crisis has been amplified, As a result, foreign borrowing by financial institutions was blocked, making it difficult to repay short - term external debt of $30 billion and long - term external debt of $45 billion.^[4] In the face of such a situation, "one dollar collecting campaign" was raised but it did not get much attention. Then, from January 6, 1998, the next year, KBS proposed a proposal to develop a 'gold gathering movement'.^[4] At the same time, this movement has received nationwide attention from the beginning of the campaign.^[4]

The development of a gold collecting campaign

The result of the gold collecting campaign

Criticism of the gold collecting campaign

When it started on January, 1998, the news articles repeatedly reported how people voluntarily participated, how much it could be helpful to overcome national crisis, and how shameful not participating with self-sacrifice behavior for country.^[5] Emphasizing the patriotism of the Korean people, it blurred the right reasons for economic crisis by emotional things. Instead, ideological effect such as ‘we can do it’ was succeeded.^[5] After the official close of the campaign, it was articulated other discourse by restructuring process.^[5] That is, the social memory of ‘gold collection campaign’ was reconstructed in combination with discourse of economic crisis, justification of Neoliberalism economic policies such as Pro-Chaebol, Capitalist-friendly policies, and labor flexibility, discourse of peoples’ over consumption, nostalgia for Park’s regime.^[5] Overall, it served only as a tool for constructing arbitrary discourses, and consequently critical reflection of historical event ws ignored.^[5]