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(Beck and Grande 2007).

      In recent decades, particularly after the global dissolution of the Cold War, Asia is following suit under the comprehensive socioeconomic integration among Asian nations, peoples, and enterprises in autonomous and pragmatic terms (Chang, K. 2014). Apparently, Asia has been evolving into a transnationally organized industrial capitalism in tandem with its formation into a grand transnational labor market, a regionalized popular cultural zone, and so forth. These dramatic and fundamental changes seem to endow Asia with a historically unprecedented materiality, which allows for its recognition as a new regional unit of (compressed) modernity.

      Modernitization inherently involves compressed modernity. Above all, knowing, or being forced to know, modernity – as opposed to unconsciously growing into it – is an epistemological quantum leap. But the knowing process often involves unprecedented sufferings and sacrifices imposed by the initial modernizers on the rest of the world, often through invasion, colonization, or exploitation. Thus, achieving modernity as rapidly as possible and as greatly as possible became a historical exigency in order to minimize or remove such externally originated sufferings and sacrifices in the coming years. However, once political sovereignties and/or socioeconomic autonomies were lost under colonialism, the concerned nations often lost their status as a unit of modernity and, instead, incurred instantaneous incorporation into the transnationally reorganized modernity of invader nations. In all these simple occasions of modernitization, whether self-promoted or involuntarily coerced, modernity has been reasoned, pursued, or imposed in compressed manners. More complicated occasions of modernitization do not differ, as shown in the subsequent chapters in Part II of this book as to South Korean experiences.

      1 1. In this regard, David Harvey’s (1980) observation on the (global) time–space compression under the accumulation crisis of late modern capitalism should be differentiated from the national, regional, organizational, familial, and personal condensation of time and space under postcolonial compressed modernity.

      2 2. See Ernst Bloch ([1935]1991), Heritage of Our Times. As Germany was behind England and France in industrialization, and in modernization in general, Bloch perceived the German social situation as wedged between backward culture and modern industrialism.

      3 3. See Kim, J. (2019) for a lucid account of Korean traditional medicine’s arduous struggle in the contemporary health sector under the hegemonic dominance of Western medicine.

      4 4. “Too dynamic” once became a thematic phrase for South Korea among many foreign media correspondents in

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