‘Netizens’ Crusade Buoys New South Korean Leader

The earnest young man in tortoiseshell glasses spends up to 18 hours a day peering at a computer screen. Despite his unassuming appearance, Hwang Myong Pil’s online moniker is “Nuclear Bomb,” and he is one of the secret weapons of South Korea’s president-elect, Roh Moo Hyun.

Hwang, 29, is a volunteer for an online fan club that is an increasingly important player in South Korean politics. The fan club, popularly known by a Korean acronym for “People who Love Roh,” boasts 80,000 members -- most of them in their 20s or early 30s with little previous taste for electoral politics. They are widely credited with playing a major part in Roh’s upset victory Dec. 19, and they are taking an unusual role in the transition to his Feb. 25 inauguration.

For years, futurists have been predicting that the Internet would displace television as the primary medium of political campaigns. The moment has come in South Korea, where about 70% of households are connected to the Internet.

The club says it has no formal affiliation with the president-elect, or with his official Web site. But from behind their terminals, volunteers take polls of fellow “Netizens,” a popular term in South Korea for Internet political activists.

They solicit suggestions for appointees to Cabinet positions and engage in debates over topics ranging from North Korea’s nuclear program to whether it would be more appropriate for Roh to take up golf or jogging as president. (“Golf is actually much cheaper than jogging. Suppose Roh goes out jogging. Bodyguards must be deployed ahead of and behind him and police will have to be mobilized on the roads,” Hwang wrote in a recent entry on the club’s bulletin board.)

The club criticizes Roh’s critics, sometimes sharply. A South Korean professor who made a comment that was perceived to be critical of Roh supporters on a television talk show received hundreds of angry e-mails and was widely lambasted in the online fan club.

Roh’s opponent in the election enjoyed the bourgeois hobby of yachting despite calling himself a man of the people. A member of the club posted a photograph of Roh’s one-man boat, which cost less than $1,000, and wrote, “Look, this is a far cry from bourgeois.”

During the presidential campaign, members raised more than $7 million over the Internet, much of it through the gimmick of distributing piggy banks to prospective contributors. And instead of the usual rent-a-crowds that are the staple of political rallies here, the volunteers were able to bring out thousands of people for Roh’s stump speeches for free.

“In Korea, you used to have to pay for lunch, for bus fare to get a crowd. We didn’t pay anything,” said Huh Un Na, an assemblywoman who ran Roh’s official Internet operations during the campaign. Huh said the Internet proved faster, cheaper, easier and more responsive than other media. It also had the advantage of reaching out to precisely those people whose votes were essential to Roh’s candidacy, the 20- and 30-somethings who might have otherwise sat out the election because of cynicism about the political process.

“This was almost a revolution in politics,” Huh said. “You wouldn’t think you’d have young people gushing over a politician, but they were crazy about him.”

From the outset, Roh was a dark-horse candidate in the race to succeed Kim Dae Jung as president. A self-educated labor lawyer, he was virtually unknown outside Korea, and was so far down in the polls a few months before the election that members of his own party tried to force him out of the race.

As a liberal from Kyongsang province, the most conservative part of South Korea, he had virtually no political base and had lost more elections than he had won. (He had lost one election for mayor of Pusan and two elections for the national assembly, and had won two for the national assembly.)

But his refusal to move to a more sympathetic district, or to switch parties as did many other opposition figures, won him an almost cult-like following among young Koreans.

The online fan club, www. nosamo.org, was formed in the summer of 2000 after Roh lost his second race for the national assembly.

“I felt that if all our politicians had such integrity, Korea would be a better place,” said Hwang, who had previously turned up his nose at electoral politics, believing that all politicians were opportunists. He became an early member of the club and, last October, quit a well-paying job as a stock trader to volunteer full time for Roh’s presidential campaign.

The fan club also attracted celebrities and acquired a hip, slightly rebellious image as a youth movement challenging the political establishment.

Pundits of all political persuasions credit the Internet with assisting Roh’s surprising triumph in the election.

Min Kyung Bae, head of the Cyber Culture Research Assn. in Seoul, said Roh experimented with the Internet as early as 1995, during his run for mayor of Pusan.

“He is one of the pioneers. The Internet fits in with his political philosophy of openness and direct communication with the people,” Min said.

Roh also has used Internet communications to circumvent the mainstream press, with whom he has often had chilly relations.

“The Internet has been Roh’s secret weapon as a politician,” said Hahm Sung Deuk, a political scientist at Korea University, who says he doubts Roh could have won without the computer campaign. “It is almost a cultural revolution.”

But Roh’s use of the Internet has also received its share of criticism. The newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, in an editorial last month, complained that his cyber fan club sometimes behaves like an “Internet Red Guard,” with “violent words in cyberspace and an appeal to populism.” About a month before the December election, South Korea’s election commission barred the group from raising money for the candidate.

Roh’s online fans occasionally embarrass him. For example, some of them posted less-than-flattering comments about President Bush at a time when Roh was trying to assure the United States that he was not anti-American. And many members are also involved with a popular South Korean Internet news site that supported anti-American demonstrations after the death of two South Korean school girls who were run over by a U.S. mine-clearing vehicle.

Political scientist Hahm says that Roh, as president, will have to distance himself from his Internet enthusiasts -- but not too much, because he badly needs their support for legislative elections in April 2004.

“In order to be a successful president, he has to sell his agenda in an institutional setting and not just appeal to populism using the Internet,” Hahm said. “But he would be stupid to neglect these people when he needs them for the next election.”

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Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.