Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0006-6479-2571

Date of Award

Spring 5-19-2026

Document Type

Thesis (Master's)

Department or Program

Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

First Advisor

Min Young Godley

Second Advisor

Donald E. Pease

Third Advisor

Peter DeShazo

Abstract

How do rapidly aging societies govern longevity when demographic change threatens established welfare arrangements? This thesis examines aging governance in China, Japan, and South Korea to show how states simultaneously manage aging as a public-health problem and build it into an economic sector through what I term life capitalism.

Two interpretations of East Asian aging policy are widely circulated: that it is a peripheral case of Western neoliberalism, or a residue of Confucian familism. I reject both: the neoliberal reading captures marketization but misses the state as its active builder, since these states are expanding rather than retreating; the Confucian reading cannot explain why three culturally distinct states converge on marketized long-term care insurance with similar architectures. Against demographic determinism treating aging as a neutral technical challenge, I argue that crisis discourse strategically constructs aging as catastrophe to legitimate market-oriented restructuring while foreclosing redistributive alternatives. Through Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis of policy documents from 2010 to 2025, combined with a Most Similar Systems Design comparative case study, I examine how pension and healthcare systems are being transformed. All three cases converge on universal public insurance with substantially marketized provision, yet arrive there through distinctive pathways.

The life capitalism framework engages biopower and biocapitalism scholarship and operates through four linked mechanisms: medicalization, commodification, the constitution of governable subjects, and the individualization of structural social risks. Crisis discourse legitimates pension restructuring linking retirement security to financial markets, including the Korean National Pension Service's 2026 record returns and AI-assisted investment plans; healthcare marketization produces stratified biomedicalization in which medical intervention reflects class position despite universal coverage; and states deploy selective familialism rhetoric—instrumental in China, residual in Japan, and contested in South Korea.

The thesis contributes three analytical concepts: three governance models (State-Led Experimental, Institution-Embedded Incremental, and Compressed Transformation); three familialism configurations showing how Confucian traditions function as governance instruments rather than determining variables; and stratified biomedicalization, which names the health inequalities that universal coverage cannot prevent.

The analysis challenges both cultural determinism and universalizing neoliberalization theories, providing critical resources for democratic deliberation about how societies might support longevity without exhausting workers through ever-larger insurance premiums.

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