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Short abstract:

How do drones shape the visual culture of transboundary air pollution politics in China and South Korea? This paper explores the role of these new aerial media and their "vertical mediation" of toxic air in shaping public discourse on transnational air governance.

Long abstract:

This paper examines the visual cultures of transboundary air pollution politics in China and South Korea. Air pollution in Northeast Asia has become a transnational concern due to pollutants crossing borders via seasonal winds. This toxic air, carrying invisible nanoparticles, triggers various respiratory illnesses and has been a significant public health concern in both countries since the 2010s. However, the shared environmental problem has become a sensitive subject of geopolitical and ethno-racial tension between China and South Korea. As experts debate the origin of pollutants—whether they come from China or are generated within Korean territory—significant investments have been made in recent years in new technologies to surveil the flow of polluted air along the aerial border between the two countries. For example, the Korean government partnered with NASA in 2016 to develop data-driven tools for monitoring transboundary air pollution from space. I refer to these technologies that capture and visualize air as “aerial media,” which include sensor-attached drones, airplanes, satellite imagery, and others. Through an analysis of representations of air pollution in major Korean news outlets, this paper demonstrates how these new aerial media and their “vertical mediation” (Parks, 2016) of the toxic air transform public discourse on transnational air governance. Specifically, it explores how this vertical mediation of air unveils the post-Cold War geopolitics in Northeast Asia, underscoring South Korea’s profound anxiety regarding China’s ascent in global tech power—which leaves behind "toxic dust" as its material and symbolic residue.