Proceedings of the First AfrasianInternational Symposium

コリア半島の平和とアジアの国際関係Asian International Relations and Peace in Korea

24 November 2011

Afrasian Research Centre, Ryukoku University (Phase 2)

Afrasia Symposium SeriesStudies on Multicultural Societies No.1

Edited by

O-Jung Kwon, Kosuke Shimizu, William Bradley,Masako Otaki and Takumi Honda

Mission of the Afrasian Research Centre

Today’s globalised world has witnessed astonishing political and economic growth in the regions of Asia and Africa. Such progress has been accompanied, however, with a high frequency of various types of conflicts and disputes. The Afrasian Research Centre aims to build on the achievements of its predecessor, the Afrasian Centre for Peace and Development Studies (ACPDS), by applying its great tradition of research towards Asia with the goal of building a new foundation for interdisciplinary research into multicultural societies in the fields of Immigration Studies, International Relations and Communication Theory. In addition, we seek to clarify the processes through which conflicts are resolved, reconciliation is achieved and multicultural societies are established. Building on the expertise and networks that have been accumulated in Ryukoku University in the past (listed below), we will organise research projects to tackle new and emerging issues in the age of globalisation. We aim to disseminate the results of our research internationally, through academic publications and engagement in public discourse.

1. A Tradition of Religious and Cultural Studies 2. Expertise in Participatory Research/ Inter-Civic Relation Studies 3. Expertise in Asian and Africa Studies 4. Expertise in Communication and Education Studies 5. New Approaches to the Understanding of Other Cultures in Japan 6. Domestic and International Networks with Major Research Institutes

Afrasia Symposium Series The Afrasia Symposium Series is published by the Afrasian Research Centre and presents the proceedings of international symposia organised by the Centre. For information about the Afrasian Research Centre, see http://afrasia.ryukoku.ac.jp. Other publications of the Afrasian Research Centre include Afrasia Working Paper Series: Studies on Multicultural Societies and Research Paper Series. For inquiries about publication of Afrasian Research Centre and to obtain copies, contact: Afrasian Research Centre, Ryukoku University, 1-5 Yokotani, Seta Oe-cho, Otsu, Shiga, Japan, 520-2194. Tel & FAX: +81-77-544-7173. Email: afrasian@ad.ryukoku.ac.jp Copyright © 2012 Afrasian Research Centre, Ryukoku University Published by the Afrasian Research Centre Printed by Tanaka Print Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan

© 2012 Afrasian Research Centre Ryukoku University 1-5 Yokotani, Seta Oe-cho, Otsu, Shiga, JAPAN All rights reserved. ISBN 978-4-904945-24-7 This opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Afrasian Research Centre. The publication of the Afrasia Symposium Series is supported by the Project for Strategic Research Base Formation Support at Private Universities at Ryukoku University “Research into the Possibilities of Establishing Multicultural Societies in the Asia-Pacific Region: Conflict, Negotiation and Migration” initiated and funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (2011-2013).

CONTENTS PREFACE iii

Kosuke Shimizu

KEYNOTE SPEECH

(Chung-Won Suh) 3

9

17 SESSION 1 PEACE PROCESS IN KOREA Introduction 23 Prospects for Economic Cooperation between Kim Jong Un’s Collective Leadership

System and China 25 Jong-Chol Park

Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone in East Asia 37

In-Taek Han

Unification Education in Korea: Approaches and an Alternative 47 Young-Seog Kim

Discussion 59

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SESSION2 EAST-ASIAN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Introduction 65 Materialising the “Non-Western”: Two Stories of Kyoto School Philosophers on Culture

and Politics 67 Kosuke Shimizu

The “Loss” of Ryukyu Revisited: China’s No Use of Compellence in the Sino-Japanese

Border Dispute, 1877-80 87 Ching-Chang Chen

Discussion 109 APPENDIX

Programme 115

Organising Committee 117

Participants’ List 118

Presenters’ Profiles 119

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PREFACE Here at Ryukoku University, we had a five-year joint research project to study the aforementioned subjects from 2005 to 2009, funded by a grant by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) as a Project for Advancement of Academic Research at Private Universities. The Afrasian Centre for Peace and Development Studies (ACPDS) was established at that time to act as our main research organization for the project.

While the ACPDS’s research was completed in 2009, we are delighted to have again been awarded another MEXT grant in 2011 under its Project for Strategic Research Base Formation Support at Private Universities. The Afrasian Research Centre takes over where its predecessor, the ACPDS, left off, leveraging a great tradition of research into Asia and incorporating immigration, international relations and communication theory into its efforts to build a new foundation for interdisciplinary research into multicultural society. What’s more, the Centre seeks to clarify the process by which conflicts are resolved, reconciliation is achieved and multicultural societies are born. It aims to do this through research—both theoretical and practical—needed to enable us to identify issues that need to be overcome and make policy suggestions.

We are greatly pleased to hold the first Afrasian International Symposium on the 24th of November 2011 at Seta Campus of Ryukoku University in Shiga. The theme of this Symposium is “Asian International Relations and Peace in Korea.” The symposium consists of two sessions.We will focus on the issues related to the achievement of peace in the Korean Peninsula and the critical engagement with IR theories from the Asian perspective.

We hope this symposium will contribute to the achievement of a permanent peace and the development sustainable international relations in East Asia and in the world.

Kosuke Shimizu Programme Chair of the First Afrasian International Symposium

November, 2011

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KEYNOTE SPEECH

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SESSION 1

PEACE PROCESS IN KOREA

INTRODUCTION In the first session, three scholars from South Korea made presentations under the theme of “Peace Process in Korea,” from different fields of specialization economy, security, and education. This session aimed to discuss about some important issues in today’s Korean Peninsula, the most important area for the regional security of East Asia. The presenters in this session focused on recent changes in North Korea-China economic cooperation, the possibility of nuclear-free zone in Asia, and the possible direction of the unification education in Korea.

The first presenter, Dr. Jong-Chol Park (Gyeongsang National University) reported the current situation of the economic cooperation between North Korea and China, and commented that there will be many changes in the relationship between two countries in 2012 due to significant political transformation in both countries. According to Dr. Park, China is in dilemma between securing the stability of surrounding countries to face with U.S. surrounding and the maintenance of North Korea’s current system.

Dr. In-Taek Han (Jeju Peace Institute) introduced conventional approaches to the Nuclear-Free Zone in Asia and examined the value of these approaches for an effective nuclear-free zone treaty. Addressing the lack of a regional nuclear-free zone treaty in East Asia, Dr. Han called for a new approach to realize it in Asia and proposed to see the Six Party Talks as a potential platform to discuss about the issue.

The third presenter Dr. Young-Seog Kim (Gyeongsang National University) discussed about various approaches in unification education in South Korea and proposed an alternative approach based on global perspectives. Dr. Kim said unification education in South Korea has often taken a form of “anti-communist education” which results in insufficient and biased knowledge of citizens about North Korea. Therefore, he argued, incorporating global perspectives enables to provide sufficient information to citizens to make qualified decisions on North Korea issues.

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Prospects for Economic Cooperation between Kim Jong Un’s Collective Leadership System and China

Jong-Chol Park

Associate Professor, Gyeongsang National University Introduction Analysis of the friction and strained relations between North Korea and China during the Cold War period reveals a typical asymmetric relationship between a large and a small country with a shared border. In this period, China’s economic cooperation with and support for North Korea was more of a strategic type of support aiming for ease control of U.S.-China-Soviet Union relations ( ). North Korea also took advantage of the balance of power relation and attempted to secure the greatest possible economic advantages.

China’s economic cooperation with North Korea until in the middle of 2000’s mainly took the forms of simple trading and small scale investment. The Chinese government did not approve large scale investment in North Korea. In the late 2000’s, North Korea-China economic cooperation entered a state of borderland infrastructure development and expanding industrial cooperation.

After 2009, North Korea-China economic cooperation maintained its background of China-U.S. conflict, a strengthened South Korea-U.S. alliance, serious South Korea-China conflict, and systematic crisis in North Korea. In particular, increasing tension in the Korean Peninsula, North Korea-China economic cooperation, and borderland development after the second nuclear test are strongly correlated. In order to revitalize North Korea-China economic cooperation, China’s approach is grounded in the perspective of strengthening the status quo on the Korean Peninsula while North Korea’s is rooted in the perspective of maintaining its system strategically.

Firstly, this research analyzes Hu Jintao-Xi Jinping’s governmental and policy adjustment after North Korea’s second nuclear test. Secondly, it treats the structure of economic cooperation in the borderland area and the Hu Jintao-Xi Jinping government’s economic cooperation and support of Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system ( ). Lessons have been applied from visits to and observation of the North Korea-China borderland area (as well as the Northeast China region and the Russian Far East) as well as consultation with professionals.

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1. China’s Economic Policy towards North Korea 1.1. Hu Jintao’s Global Strategy and Economic Policy towards North Korea China’s global strategy under Hu Jintao’s ( ) leadership can be summarized as the process of establishing “peaceful development,” a “harmonious world,” and a “harmonious Asia.” According to the analysis of Professor Wang Yizhou’s ( ) book Global Politics and China’s Foreign Policy ( ), Hu Jintao government’s global politics and diplomacy has the goal of developing the China-U.S. relationship in long term and for emerging in Asia-Pacific region in short term.

Professor Wang, Yizhou from Peking University summarizes China’s policy towards Korean Peninsula as follows.1 First, China is hoping to be recognized as an influential country with voice together with U.S. Secondly, China should carry out a policy that focuses on achieving a stable status, an equal and favorable relationship with South and North Korea, denuclearization, and prevention of unexpected situations.

Hu Jintao’s policy toward North Korea is summarized by the diplomatic phrase “Inherit tradition, be future-oriented, maintain friendship, and reinforce cooperation” ( ). This can be simply interpreted as a change from the ideology centered-relations of the Cold War period to national-benefit-centered relations.

Under Hu Jintao’s government, the principle of economic cooperation between North Korea and China was announced twice. In January 2006, during North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il’s visit, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao proposed: “government guidance, corporate participation, and application of market principles” ( ). This entails determining North Korean-Chinese economic cooperation based on the standards of both governments, running business based on market economic theories, and putting plans into action through joint ventures of private enterprises from both countries.2 1.2. Adjustment of the Chinese Leadership’s North Korea Strategy after North Korea’s

Second Nuclear Test On May 25th, North Korea conducted its second nuclear test. China made an official announcement and issued a complaint to the North Korean ambassador to the effect that China opposed North Korea’s nuclear test from the perspectives of peace in North East Asia, the denuclearization of Korean Peninsula, and the prevention of nuclear proliferation. However, differently from normal campaigns and compared to the situation after the first nuclear test, the Chinese government’s voice was toned down and specific actions were not revealed.

1 (2003), pp.288-289. 2 (2010)

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Number of meeting regarding China’s policy adjustments on North Korea was half opened for better understanding. I think that China explains its strategic intension from the half open China government’s strategy.

In a closed forum for current affairs that was held at Beijing University on June 6th, Chinese scholars gave various opinions regarding North Korea-China relations, and there were some interesting developments. Professor Chung, Kiyul (2009) stated that Chinese scholars’ opinions were divided into six different groups, described as follows.3

1. Westernization group ( ): This group has the same opinions as the U.S. It

wishes to abandon the 1961 Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty and impose sanctions such as by “searching ships,” among other measures.

2. Spectator group ( ): This group claims that it is not necessary for China to intervene, but would rather allow North Korea to “rise and break” by itself.

3. Six-party talks group (6 ): This group would like to to have North Korea return to the 6-party talks and realize “the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

4. Objective process group ( ): This group holds the opinion that it is not necessary to overreact to the North Korea nuclear issue, and that an arms race is not likely to develop.

5. Chosun (North Korea) support group ( ): This group claims that the U.S. is responsible for the “North Korea nuclear issue,” and thus China should support North Korea, initiate new resistance to U.S. aggression, and aid North Korea. This represents the stance of Chinese intellectuals and the general public during the Cold War.

6. Full restrictions on Chosun group ( ): This group claims that China should stop aiding Chosun (North Korea) and place full restrictions on Chosun (North Korea) in order to serve China’s national interests.

On July 15th, 2009, a meeting of the Chinese Community Party Central Foreign Affairs

Leading Group ( ) was held.3 China’s ruling party and major policy decision makers from the Foreign Ministry attended the “Conference on China’s Policy towards North Korea,” and strategic policy adjustment took place at the conference.

“The North Korean issue and the North Korean nuclear issue should be with dealt separately. The U.S. is fundamentally responsible for North Korea’s nuclear issue, and it would be hard for North Korea to give up nuclear arms unless they were able to secure safety. Therefore, the systemic crisis is in a crucial state, and it is unlikely to give up under Kim, Jong Il - Kim, Jong Un system. The U.S. also just looked on the couple of nuclear tests and revising their policy from North Korea’s denuclearization to nuclear nonproliferation.”

3 (2010)

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It can be interpreted that China is dealing separately with North Korea in terms of the nuclear issue and economic cooperation. The Chinese leadership’s changed strategy regarding North Korea after the second nuclear test can be seen from the change in mutual communication and principles by the North Korean and Chinese leadership. Comparing Wen Jiabao’s principles of economic cooperation with North Korea from January 2006, and Hu Jintao’s from August 2010, it can be seen that China’s policies of economic cooperation towards North Korea have been dramatically revised. With the government’s active intervention for economic cooperation for North Korea, major government enterprises are expected to be on the first line in energy and resource-related industries. It also means that previous supportive aid for North Korea is shifting to support North Korea’s economic reconstruction.

In this context, it can be concluded that China pushed ahead to cooperate economically with North Korea separately from the management of the North Korean nuclear issue during this period. The Chinese government’s North Korea economic strategy revision after the second nuclear test can be seen from the change in Chinese leadership’s principles. There was a great difference between Hu Jintao’s North Korea economic cooperation principles in August 2010 and Wen Jiabao’s North Korea economic cooperation principles in January 2006.

In August 2010, during a meeting with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, the Chinese president Hu Jintao proposed a new China-North Korea cooperation principle characterized as “the government leads, corporations are centered, and market principles are applied for mutual benefit” ( ), while pointing out that broad-based economic cooperation for mutual benefit would result in basic gains for people in both countries. The China-North Korea economic cooperation principle ameliorated drawbacks of the 2006 North Korea-China economic cooperation. It suggested an operating principle that would result in mutual benefit, development, win-win cooperation, and better economic cooperation for both countries. In other words, the government would lead, and based on investment in/by government companies, the goal of economic cooperation would shift to North Korea’s self-rehabilitation.4

Hu Jintao’s North Korea economic principal emphasizes the government’s role, and it contains the meaning of transformation of economic cooperation for North Korea’s self-rehabilitation based on government enterprises’ investment and private enterprises’ cooperation.5 It can be forecasted that government enterprises would be involved in energy and resource-related fields amid a background of initiating strategic economic cooperation by the government with North Korea. This means that previous consuming North Korea support would be transformed to result in economic cooperation and support for North Korea’s economic reconstruction.

4 (2011) 5 (2011)

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China’s governing political party, government, and military have shared control over North Korea policy. The International Department of the Communist Party of China was at the center of all exchanges with socialist countries, including North Korea, as “interparty diplomacy” during the Cold War. The International Department of the Central Committee of the CPC ( ) has the function of conducting foreign maneuvers for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. The Asia Bureau of the International Department is in charge of North-Korea-related matters. During the Cold War, political party relationship was considered to be more important than government diplomacy, and thus the International Department became more important for North Korea-China exchange. Currently, the International Department is at the center of North Korea-China economic cooperation, support, leadership succession, and strategic material support. The nuclear test issue, ballistic missile (satellite) issue, and other sudden issues are controlled mainly by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the People’s Liberation Army ( ), and Foreign Ministry is likely to care 6-party talks, the Cheonan Ship issue, and other conflicts. The vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of the Workers’ Party of Korea, (China part:

) has jurisdiction over North Korea-China economic cooperation.6 2. Current Status and Structure of Economic Cooperation 2.1. Economic Cooperation and Border Development Plan Status after North Korea’s

Second Nuclear Test Immediately after the second nuclear test, along with mutual visits of North Korean and Chinese leadership management from June 2009 to August 2009, China’s interesting North East development plan was considered to be very important, and that it was approved by the state council (central government).

In July and August 2009, an economic development program for Liaoning province and Jilin Province ( ), which are on the border of North Korea, was approved by the state council of the central government ( ), and was selected as a national project. The Liaoning project, to which Korea is paying attention, is a project for a city near the Yellow Sea coast, and the biggest border city, Dandong ( ) is also included in its scope. East Sea access from the mouth of Tumen River ( ) and North Korea-China border development are included in the Jilin project. Regarding this plan, open-door of Naseon province has attracted attention. In particular, developmental activities for Naseon have become very active since 2010.

6 Immediately after the Third Workers’ Party Representatives Meeting ( ), Jang Sung-Taek’s close personnel, J, Jae-Ryoung was appointed as the ambassador to China on October 26, 2010. The ambassador has authority, but it can be concluded that the Foreign Affairs Department of the Workers’ Party has greater authority over North Korea-China economic cooperation. Currently, Lee Seok-Beom is chairman of the North Korea-China Culture Economy Center and vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of the Workers’ Party, and he is the right hand man of Jang Sung-Taek ( ).

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For 3 days from October 3rd, restoration of the two countries’ relationship was at a peak based on Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s North Korea visit. On October 4th, China and North Korea signed an economic technology cooperation agreement. The “New Amnokgang Bridge” ( ) is a size of more than two hundred million and is based on the premise that the cost would be paid for by China. 70% to 80% of North Korea-China land route trade is carried out through Dandong-Sinuiju, and illegal imports are active in the region. When the New Amnokgang Bridge is constructed, North Korea-China trade and exchange will become more active. The New Amnokgang Bridge means for the open-door of Shinuiju which is the main gate to Pyongyang. It is a symbol of North Korea-China fellowship, and at the same time, it also represents China’s cooperation with and intervention in North Korea. It was reported that 10-year access to Najin Port Pier 1 has been confirmed.

Military tensions on the Korean Peninsula mounted from the sinking of the Cheonan ( ) in March 2010 and the shelling of Yeonpyeongdo ( ) in November. The Korea-U.S. alliance strengthened amid the military tension, and the North Korea-China relationship seemed to become tighter.

Although the South Korean government officially spoke tough words to North Korea, a mood of thawing between North Korea and the U.S. was generated in April and May 2011. In April, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited North Korea as a special envoy. In May 2011, high ranking government officers of the Blue House and the Nation Intelligence Service attended secret talks between South Korea and North Korea. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il also made an unofficial visit to China in May. On June 1st, the North Korea government opened secret talks in May. Due to North Korea’s disclosure, the possibility of South-North cooperation before political turnover became lower, and it was expected that North Korea-China relations would be reinforced. China’s influence on North Korea strengthened, and the disclosure can be broadly interpreted as meaning that North Korea was showing confidence based on the talks between Kim Jong Il and Hu Jintao regarding industrial development concerning matters such as energy, coal, and iron ore.

However, I believe that the level that China is expecting for the open-door is very different regarding the North Korea-China economic cooperation accomplishments since 2009 from Kim Jong Il’s 4 time China visits. For North Korea’s lack of ability for economy reconstruction, China is expected to support North Korea with minimal food, energy, and industrial aid, and China will secure coal, iron ore, and rear earth resources for Chinese industry.

Although Chinese leadership suggested open doors in the Nampo and Wonsan area, the North Korean leadership pointed to Hwanggumpyong ( ) and Wihwa Island ( ) as special economic zones in which there are no bridges to Sinuiju. The Naseon ( ) area is also a controllable area for the ripple effect throughout all of Hamgyung-do ( ) with China and Russia logistics pass through the East Sea.

However, when the New Amnokgang Bridge ( ) between Shinuiju ( ) and Dandong ( ) is fully constructed, it will have an influence on North Korea’s economic structure and opening. The distance between Pyongyang and China will be very

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close, and it is expected to have a somewhat positive effect on the opening of North Korea. It will also maximize China’s influence on North Korea. 2.2. Hu Jintao-Xi Jinping System’s Cooperation for Collective Leadership System After Kim Jong Il’s death, North Korea’s power structure has been expected to maintain the status quo in the short run based on “Kim Jong Un plus power sharing structure (2 strong plus 2 weak)” which is strategically designed to be “advantageous for Kim Jong Un.” Jang Sung-Taek from Political Affairs ( ), Lee Young-Ho ( ) from the North Korean People’s Army, and Kim Ki-Nam ( ), who has less authority than the other two, from the Korean Workers’ Party, are the people who should be focused upon in terms of power sharing, in addition to Kim Jong Un, descendent of the former leader. Moreover, Choe Ryong-Hae (Commander of the Pyongyang Defense Command, ), a member of the second generation following the revolution, is in charge of the defense of the capital city of Pyongyang, where 60% of the North Korean military force is stationed to prevent any disturbances or coups. He should also be given attention due to his ability to exercise control, his leadership role, and his loyalty. These men have very close relationships (as relatives, and in relation to the revolution) and have been very loyal to the Kim Il Sung-Jong Il-Jong Un family since the anti-Japan struggle. Now they are aged men kept in line with mutual checks and balances. The present power struggle doesn’t show major power group and its power structure is difficult to take over political party, government and military at the same time for any power group. All the power groups need leadership descendant like Kim Jong Un and justification. It can be analyzed that the collective leadership system is structured with the leadership heir Kim Jong Un at the center.

The 2012 collective leadership system of North Korean economy under Kim Jong Un needs to be analyzed taking into account the key term “flames of Hamnam.” ( ). One of North Korea’s one of major projects in 2012 involves economic construction and measures to deal with the food shortage. The 2012 New Year’s address emphasized the “flames of Hamnam,” and among the greatest economic achievements of Kim Jong Il in 2011 were the Heuicheon Power Plant ( ) and the completion of the Hamhung fertilizer factory ( ). It is forecast that North Korea’s food production will increase this year as the Hamhung fertilizer factory is expected to produce two hundred thousand tons of fertilizer. It can be concluded that major promotion of “flames of fire” means that they are trying to achieve economic reconstruction with the Hamgyeong-do area in the center.

It is becoming clearer that economic cooperation between North Korea and China has been strengthening in the two months since Kim Jong Il’s death. China issued statements of support for North Korea’s stabilization and the Kim Jong Un regime. In particular, they also announced the free supply of a million tons of rice, a half million tons of oil, and a half million tons of fertilizer. They have already supplied a half million tons of rice and a half million tons of oil from Shenyang in January 2012. It is possible that a half million tons of rice and a half million tons of fertilizer will be supplied during the first half of 2012.

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North Korea-China border trading was halted for about a week after Kim Jong Il’s death, and the number of North Korean defectors decreased due to strict North Korean border restrictions in January and February. However, North Korean expatriates in China have been increasing that North Korea-China economic cooperation and smuggling become more active.7 2.3. Structure of Economic Cooperation China is approaching matters from the perspective of strengthening the Korean Peninsula status quo plus, while the North Korean approach is rooted in the perspective of maintaining its strategic system.

The structure of North Korea-China economic cooperation is summarized as follows according to Hu Jintao-Xi Jinping’s North Korea economic policy and the status of North Korea-China economic cooperation. First, it can be concluded that since the second nuclear test, China is approaching issues based on a perspective of strengthening the Korean Peninsula status, while the North Korean approach is grounded in the perspective of maintaining its strategic system. Even during the Cold War, North Korea-China economic cooperation had its strategic character for international relations considering relationship of powerful countries. Therefore, further China-U.S. relationship and political changes relating to the Korea Peninsula, such as those resulting from the upcoming presidential election, will act as major factors for North Korea-China economic cooperation, and it can be strongly expected that North Korea-China economic cooperation would result in the potential for change.

Second, North Korea-China economic strategy contains strategic character. After Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994, China’s North Korea policy showed characteristics of humanitarian economic cooperation and passive aid in order to maintain the North Korean system. However, after the second nuclear test, China’s North Korea economic policy shifted to strategic economic cooperation in order to maintain the status quo more strongly with the fact that China-U.S. conflict is deeper. For example, the oil pipeline from Dandong to Sinuiju, known as the “China-North Korea Friendship Pipeline ( ),” symbolizes the strategic character of economic cooperation with North Korea. This pipeline is a symbol of China-North Korea friendship, but when it was needed to restrict North Korea economically, China stopped oil supply under the excuse of pipeline repair.

Third, the Sunshine Policy of Korea from 1998 to 2008 allowed private enterprises to lead in the vitalization of economic cooperation according to the principle of separation of political matters from economic matters. However, China’s North Korea economic policy from 2008 exhibits a strategic character of the unification of politics and economics. The government and government enterprises are taking the lead in vitalization of economic cooperation based on closed-door negotiations between government leadership. Moreover, 7 For analysis of the power-sharing structure of Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system, the economic development strategy represented by the expression “Flames of Hamnam,” and analysis of foreign economic relations with the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, please refer to following material: (2012)

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the local government of China’s borderland (the northeast region) exhibits strong will for development and the participation of private enterprises, which has a synergetic effect on economic cooperation. Thus, economic cooperation involves a wide range of variables based on the direction taken by Chinese leadership. Also, China’s North Korea economic policy is closely correlated with the political and military situations in the Korean Peninsula and the systemic stabilization of North Korea. As North Korea-China economic cooperation revitalizes, China is likely to have more influence on North Korea, and would tend to replace the decreasing influence of South Korea through economic sanctions on North Korea.

Fourth, Hu Jintao announced new North Korea-China economic cooperation principles in August 2010. This has the meaning of “process from emergency transfusion (economic support, ) to sanguification (economic independence, ).” Since South Korea and China established diplomatic relations, simple trading and small scale investment have been the central for China’s economic cooperation, and China did not allow large scale investment in North Korea. Recent strategic economic cooperation between North Korea and China is growing through borderland area infrastructure (on the Chinese side) and industrial cooperation.

In relation with China’s northeast revitalizing policy, China’s domestic development, North Korea-China economic cooperation, and borderland development are complimentary and have Plus-Sum effect. Also, China’s government enterprises and major enterprises have exclusive positions for primary industry development in areas such as North Korea’s mineral and fisheries resources. China is focusing more on primary industry development such as Musan iron mine, rather than other facilities that need constant investment such as the Kaesong industrial complex. It can be analyzed that North Korea-China economic cooperation has a mutually manageable strategic character. If approached from the perspective of North Korea-China borderland development from Northeast revitalizing plan for China’s domestic development, North Korea industrial infrastructure can only be developed in line with limitations based on Chinese demand.

Currently, in early 2012, a variety of North Korea-China economic cooperation measures are actively in progress in all regions from the Amnok River to the Duman River. In particular, there are significant efforts underway to establish a gateway to the sea in Jilin ( ). Attention should be paid to the fact that the Chinese government and enterprises are hesitating to invest in facilities, except on in the Nason border are and few other locations. Also, there seem to be significant differences in opinions among North Korean and Chinese leadership since there are development crises underway in Hwanggumpyong and Wihwa Island. Hwanggumpyong and the Nason area are comparatively isolated locations in which the North Korea government can exercise control, so it can be concluded that North Korea wants to open restrictively. Therefore, it can be said that the goal of Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system is to stably manage the issue of opening the nation over the long term.

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Conclusion: Dilemma of Economic Cooperation After the second nuclear test, North Korea-China economic cooperation has a background characterized by the emergence of China, China-U.S. conflict, the South Korea-U.S. alliance on the Korean Peninsula, discussion of Korea-Japan military cooperation, deepening Korea-China conflict, and North Korea’s systemic crisis. In particular, borderland development and increasing tensions on the Korean Peninsula after the second nuclear test have close interrelations. For example, China considered South Korea-U.S. joint military exercises and discussion of South Korea-Japan military cooperation as more harmful issues than the Cheonan Ship issue, the Yeonpyeongdo shelling, and the succession issue, and they strengthened North Korea-China economic cooperation. North Korea-China economic cooperation has been maintaining the status quo under Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system following Kim Jong Il’s death.

Regarding the China-U.S. conflict situation, China cares about North Korea geopolitically as a “buffer zone” and geo-economically as “cooperation partner.” As Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system is experiencing systemic crisis, it is at the stage of accepting the reality that its powerful socialist brother country’s support is becoming an essential element for maintaining the system and for survival.

One of the Hu Jintao-Xi Jinping system’s major gains for surrounding countries’ stabilization is Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system stabilization. Therefore, the Hu Jintao-Xi Jinping system is experiencing a dilemma characterized by reaching for contradictory goals in order to stabilize Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system politically and sociologically, resist military provocations such as light weight nuclear and missile tests, and to carry out economic reform and opening up.

At the same time, Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system is also experiencing a serious dilemma as North Korea-China economic cooperation strengthens. North Korea’s pro-China economic policy led the North Korean economy to become dependent on China. Microscopically, Pyongyang and the border area are able to use the Chinese yuan and North Korea-China economic cooperation as it seems like resources are taken away, it frets away possibility and foundation of North Korea economy. This means Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system has the difficult tasks of efficiently blocking off the Hu Jintao-Xi Jinping administration’s intervention and interference, preventing South Korea-U.S.-Japan’s economic sanctions against North Korea using China effectively, and securing maximum economic profit from China.

A variety of elements, such as a power struggle within Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system, South Korea’s general election, the presidential election in April, policy changes from elections in U.S. and Japan, pressures from the international community, North Korean economic sanctions, and China’s investment style, range, and process in North Korea will have effects on economic cooperation between the Hu Jintao-Xi Jinping system and Kim Jong Un’s collective leadership system.

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References

International Crisis Group. 2009. Shade of Red: China’s Debate over North Korea, Asia

Report No.179.

. 2011. KDI(2011, 9).

2012. KDI(2012, 2)

2003. .

2011. KDI (2011, 11)

2010. 5 2 .

2010.

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Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone in East Asia1

In-Taek Han

Associate Research Fellow, Jeju Peace Institute

Introduction My presentation deals with the idea of establishing a nuclear weapon-free zone in East Asia. In this presentation, I will explain why it may be the right time to seriously consider a nuclear weapon-free zone in East Asia. In order to find the implications for East Asia, I will examine nuclear weapon-free zone treaties in other regions. I will also look into nuclear weapon-free zone proposals for East Asia and discuss some of the qualities required for a successful nuclear weapon-free zone treaty in East Asia. I will conclude this presentation by arguing that a nuclear weapon-free zone is an idea worth a close look, but it would not be a panacea. 1. Momentum towards a Nuclear Weapon-Free World2 For last several years, momentum has been building up towards a nuclear weapon-free world. In 2007 and again in 2008, for instance, four prominent American statesmen—George Schultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn—called for a nuclear weapon-free world in their famous op-eds in the Wall Street Journal. More importantly, then candidate Barack Obama ran a successful presidential election campaign, advocating a nuclear weapon-free world. As president, President Obama reaffirmed his vision for a nuclear weapon-free world in his April 2009 speech in Prague, the Czech Republic, and also by announcing the hosting of the Global Nuclear Security Summit in April 2010. President Obama is not alone in his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. The Norwegian Nobel Committee certainly embraced his vision when it decided to award him the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Furthermore, then Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama of Japan also proposed a nuclear weapon-free Northeast Asia. In addition, the 64th session of the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly adopted a draft resolution on nuclear disarmament, “Renewed determination towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons,” supported by a record number of countries (170) in the history of UN disarmament. Clearly, a new momentum for nuclear disarmament is building up. South Korea will do its share by hosting 1 This presentation is based on the author’s previous study, “Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Treaties: An Analysis of Existing Treaties and Their Implications for East Asia (in Korean),” Jeju Peace Institute, 2010. 2 This section borrows liberally from (Han 2009).

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the Second Global Nuclear Security Summit in 2012. But will this translate into momentum towards a nuclear weapon-free zone in East Asia, the topic of this presentation? Specifically, how strong is the support for a nuclear weapon-free world in South Korea and Japan? This is the question I will turn to next. 2. Public Opinion in South Korea and Japan For an idea to become a reality, it requires broad support. A nuclear weapon-free zone treaty in East Asia is no exception. In Japan, a nuclear weapon-free zone treaty is not likely to be a hard sell, since the general public is largely anti-nuclear. The story is very different in South Korea, however. About 60 to 70 percent of South Koreans think that their country should develop nuclear weapons. In terms of military strategy, this is understandable: South Korea needs to deter nuclear-armed North Korea, and in a state-to-state relationship at least, the best deterrent to nuclear weapons is, in fact, the possession of nuclear weapons. Still, popular support for nuclear weapons among South Koreans is unsettling to say the least, especially to the Japanese. I do not think, however, that South Korea will go nuclear any time soon. More accurately, South Korea cannot become a nuclear state—not because it lacks popular support or the required technology, but because it is heavily dependent on international trade. If South Korea became a nuclear state, it would become the target of economic sanctions. Economic sanctions would make it virtually impossible for South Korea to import the products and commodities it needed for survival, including oil and grain; it would also be very difficult for South Korea to export its products and services such as automobiles, electronics, and K-pop. In other words, the South Korean economy would collapse if the country went nuclear. This may be an outcome that North Koreans would like to see, but no right-minded South Korean would desire such an outcome.

What intrigues me—if not actually worries me—is the possibility of Japan becoming a nuclear state. Admittedly, it is merely a theoretical possibility at this point. Still, a lot can happen in the long term, so we should at least give the possibility some thought. Unlike in South Korea, public support for nuclear armament in Japan is weak. From the point of view of popular support, therefore, Japan is unlikely to become a nuclear state. It is also a trading country, though not to the same extent as South Korea. Therefore, it would be hard to imagine Japan developing nuclear weapons in the face of its anti-nuclear public opinion, not to mention the risk of economic sanctions. However, public opinion can change. So can the risk of economic sanctions. What would happen if Japan became a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council one day? This is obviously a big “if” question, but Japan has long sought permanent membership. And Japan, together with Germany, has come closer to that position than any other country. As a permanent member, Japan would enjoy the power to veto any UN sanctions against it, i.e., Japan would be in a better position than any other non-nuclear power to develop nuclear weapons without being punished for it economically. But would Japan go nuclear just because it could? The answer is clearly no at this point, particularly because of the strong anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan. Public opinion, however,

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can change. If, for instance, China became a threat to Japan’s national security and North Korea developed nuclear-tipped missiles that could reach Japan, public opinion in Japan might change in favor of nuclear development. If such a day came, a nuclear Japan would no longer be a mere theoretical possibility: Japan already has the technology and materials required to develop nuclear weapons. If it were also a UN Security Council permanent member, it would be able to reduce the risk of sanctions against it. If Japan became a nuclear state, it might be just a matter of days before South Korea went nuclear too, since Japan’s nuclearization would give South Korea both a strong reason and excuse to develop its own nuclear arsenal. A nuclear domino effect would be triggered in East Asia. This, of course, is far-fetched imagination at this point but it is sometimes important to be able to imagine such scenarios. In fact, a nuclear weapon-free treaty in East Asia, the very topic of today’s presentation, is also a product of the imagination.

If South Koreans favor nuclear development and even Japan has the potential to go nuclear under certain circumstances, how relevant is the idea of a nuclear weapon-free zone in East Asia? This is the question I will turn to next. 3. Why the Time May Have Come for Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Treaty? Despite every effort by South Korea and the international community, including the Sunshine policy, financial sanctions, the Six Party Talks, and UN resolutions, North Korea formally announced its possession of nuclear weapons in 2005, which it followed up with two rounds of nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009. What North Korea’s announcement and subsequent nuclear tests mean is that the nonproliferation policy toward North Korea has apparently failed. Add to this North Korea’s shelling of Yeonpyong Island; not only have nonproliferation efforts failed but also military deterrence against North Korea.

If current and past efforts have been failures, it may be time to try a different approach. A nuclear weapon-free zone treaty is a novel approach worth a close look. A nuclear weapon-free zone treaty is a legally binding agreement among states that creates a zone free of nuclear weapons. While each nuclear-weapon free zone treaty is different, they all require the absence of nuclear weapons within their respective zones. So far, five nuclear weapon-free zone treaties are in force, covering 116 countries and 33 percent of the world’s population.

East Asia currently lacks a nuclear weapon-free zone treaty, while Latin America, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Africa each have their own nuclear weapon-free treaties. Even more discouraging is the fact that there is not much interest in, let alone debates about, a nuclear weapon-free zone treaty in East Asia. One of the reasons for this unpopularity and the near absence of nuclear weapon-free zone treaty discussions in East Asia is the fact that two nuclear superpowers—China and Russia—are located in East Asia, while the United States, although an out-of-region nuclear superpower, is strategically involved in the region. Another obvious reason is that North Korea is now a de facto nuclear state. Furthermore, while they are not currently nuclear states, South Korea, Japan, and

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possibly Taiwan are at the “nuclear threshold”; they have the capability to obtain nuclear weapons in a relative short period of time if they intend to. In sum, East Asia is a region consisting of nuclear superpowers—in and out of region—a de facto nuclear state, and several nuclear threshold states. 4. Morals of Existing Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Treaties It is, however, unwarranted to conclude that a nuclear weapon-free zone treaty would be destined to fail in East Asia, simply because the region comprises nuclear superpowers and nuclear threshold states. If one actually looks at the history of existing nuclear weapon-free zone treaties, they each began by dealing with nuclear states or nuclear threshold states located or strategically involved in their respective regions. For instance, the push for the Latin American nuclear weapon-free zone treaty, also known as the Tlatelolco Treaty, began in response to the Cuban missile crisis. Cuba, which was at the center of the crisis, eventually became a party to the Tlatelolco Treaty. As another example, the momentum for the South Pacific nuclear weapon-free zone treaty, also known as the Rarotonga Treaty, began when France conducted a nuclear test in the South Pacific. An additional example would be the African nuclear weapon-free zone treaty, also known as the Pelindaba Treaty, which began in response to South Africa’s nuclear program. In the end, South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons and became a party to the Pelindaba Treaty. The lesson of these treaties is that a nuclear weapon-free zone treaty is not destined to fail simply because of the existence or involvement of nuclear states or nuclear threshold states. Rather, nuclear weapon-free zone treaties were conceived to deal with such states in the first place, and the existing treaties have all successfully dealt with them in one way or another.

There are now five nuclear weapon-free zone treaties in force. While they have all succeeded in creating nuclear weapon-free zones, they differ in their details. Elsewhere, I have examined various aspects of the existing nuclear weapon-free zone treaties to identify features that have contributed to faster enforcement of the treaty or to stronger support from member states and the five official nuclear weapons states. Unfortunately, it was not possible to identify any such features. Simply put, there were no silver bullets in the creation of the nuclear weapon-free zones. 5. “Unique” Realities of East Asia Even if such silver bullets did exist, or some magical features that could contribute to faster enforcement of a treaty or to stronger support from its member states, they may not work in the same positive way for East Asia. This is because East Asia differs from other regions in some crucial ways. Certain aspects of existing nuclear weapon-free zone treaties that were unproblematic or even conducive to faster enforcement or stronger support in their respective regions may not be so effective in the case of East Asia. For a nuclear weapon-free zone treaty to be accepted and enforced, it needs to take into consideration the “unique” realities of

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East Asia.3 Every nuclear weapon-free zone proposal for East Asia has tried to address the uniqueness of East Asia in one way or another. At the core of East Asia’s unique realities lies the existence of China and Russia and the strategic involvement of the United States in the region. Unless their statuses as nuclear states are respected, they are unlikely to support an East Asian nuclear weapon-free zone treaty. However, if their nuclear weapons are not constrained, non-nuclear states are also unlikely to accept the nuclear weapon-free zone treaty. Hence the key to a successful nuclear weapon-free treaty for East Asia is to find a way to respect the status of the existing nuclear states at the same time as guaranteeing non-nuclear states safety from nuclear attacks. 6. Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Proposals for East Asia The nuclear weapon-free zone proposals so far put forward have all tried to accommodate the seemingly conflicting needs of the nuclear states and the non-nuclear states in the region. As such, these proposals are limited in that they all respect the status of the existing nuclear states. In other words, they allow the possession of nuclear weapons by the existing nuclear states in a way or another. However, as far as non-nuclear weapon states are concerned, they are just like any other nuclear weapon-free zone proposals: they prohibit the development, possession, and use of nuclear weapons by non-nuclear states. Below, we will examine proposals by two leading advocates of a nuclear weapon-free zone for East Asia: John Endicott and Hiromichi Umebayashi. John Endicott John Endicott’s proposals call for a limited nuclear weapon-free zone in East Asia (Endicott 2008; Endicott and Gorowitz 1999). In his original proposal (see Map 1), Endicott drew a circle centered on Panmunjom, located on the border between North and South Korea. His circle covered the whole of North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. It partially covered China, Russia, and Mongolia. (Mongolia is currently a nuclear weapon-free country.)

While his circle does not cover the United States, it does include the U.S. bases in South Korea and Japan. So his original proposal in fact includes the United States in an indirect way. In his later proposal (see Map 2), Endicott drew an ellipse in place of a circle to include part of U.S. territory.

3 An important study that has closely examined the uniqueness of East Asia is (Cheon 2001).

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Map 1: Circular Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone

Source: Endicott (2008), p. 17.

Another notable feature of Endicott’s proposals is that while they prohibit every kind of nuclear weapon for non-nuclear weapon states, they prohibit only tactical nuclear weapons for nuclear weapons states. In other words, China, Russia, and the United States are allowed to maintain their strategic nuclear weapons within Endicott’s nuclear weapon-free zones. Thus Endicott’s nuclear weapon-free zones are limited not just in terms of the areas covered but also in terms of the weapons prohibited in the case of the nuclear weapons states. Nevertheless, such limitations are clever adaptations to the unique realities of East Asia and can be seen as strengths as much as weaknesses. If he had tried to prohibit both the strategic and tactical weapons of China, Russia, and the United States, the prospects of their supporting a nuclear weapon-free zone in East Asia would be far dimmer. It is also worth mentioning here that strategic nuclear weapons do not pose a threat to the non-nuclear states in the region in a practical manner. For instance, China would not use their ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) to attack South Korea or Japan. Rather, they would choose tactical nuclear weapons, which have a shorter range and smaller destructive power, for that purpose.

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Map 2: Elliptical Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone

Source: Endicott (2008), p. 17.

Hiromichi Umebayashi Hiromichi Umebayashi has proposed that North Korea, South Korea, and Japan create a nuclear weapon-free zone covering their three countries, and also that China, Russia, and the United States give the two Koreas and Japan a negative security guarantee, i.e., safety from nuclear attacks from the three nuclear weapons states (Umebayashi 2004). His proposal is also known as the 3+3 proposal (see Map 3).

When Umebayashi first made his proposal, North Korea and South Korea had agreed to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and Japan had been maintaining its traditional three non-nuclear principles. Since then, North Korea has developed and tested nuclear weapons and the agreement to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula is no longer effective. Thus the prospects of Umebayashi’s 3+3 proposals are now dimmer than before. What is encouraging, however, is that we now have institutionalized dialogues among the 3+3 countries through the Six Party Talks. So, not all has been lost.

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Map 3: 3+3 Proposal

Source: Umebayashi (2004), p. 5.

7. Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Proposals: Ideas Ripe for Action? While imperfect, nuclear weapon-free zone proposals for East Asia, particularly those put forward by Endicott and Umebayashi, are ideas worth close attention. One obvious reason is that all other efforts to solve the North Korean nuclear issue have failed. It is now time to consider approaches that have not been tried before. Another reason is that nuclear weapon-free zone proposals for East Asia, again particularly those of Endicott and Umebayashi, are clever adaptations to the realities of East Asia. They are much more realistic than the existing nuclear weapon-free zone treaties without necessarily being less effective in practical terms than the existing ones. What is more, we now have both a potential platform from which to negotiate an East Asian nuclear weapon-free zone treaty, the Six Party Talks, and the important momentum towards a nuclear weapon-free world both internationally and regionally.

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8. Risks of a Nuclear Weapon-Free East Asia4 Nuclear disarmament is a dream that mankind has pursued ever since the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the United Nations General Assembly adopted its first resolution on January 24, 1946, its main focus was none other than the elimination of atomic and other weapons of mass destruction. We have not come close to the dream since then, however; if anything, we have moved away from it. Today, a nuclear weapon weapon-free world is considered an unreachable utopia. But really, what would it be like? More importantly, what would a nuclear weapon-free East Asia be like?

When it comes to a nuclear weapon-free world, the truth is that we have already been there. We lived in a nuclear weapon-free world until 1945, and during that time we had two World Wars, not to mention numerous smaller wars. There is nothing particularly utopian about a nuclear weapon-free world except that we probably cannot go back to it, at least in our lifetimes. Make no mistake—a nuclear weapon-free world would not be a conflict-free world, despite what nuclear abolitionists and pacifists may say about it. There would still be invasions and aggressions in a nuclear weapon-free world. In fact, in the absence of nuclear deterrence, both core and extended, invasions and aggressions would be likely to be more frequent rather than less frequent. Alliance systems built on the concept of a “nuclear umbrella” would be destined to collapse if all nuclear weapons were eliminated, even if the underlying security risks that gave rise to the alliances in the first place remained unchanged. To the extent that an alliance contributes to stability, its collapse would bring instability. Aside from such instability, another difference or “benefit” of a nuclear weapon-free world would be that if a major war broke out, millions would die slowly rather than billions dying in an instant in a nuclear world. But even this “benefit” needs to put in the proper context. Given the wide availability of nuclear technology today, it would require a tremendous amount of monitoring and regulation to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. An Orwellian international authority may well be needed for such a job. However, even an Orwellian world government would be powerless if a rogue state managed to acquire nuclear weapons while the rest of the world remained nuclear weapon-free. In the absence of nuclear deterrence, the rogue state could freely engage in nuclear blackmail or even use its nuclear weapons without fearing a retaliatory nuclear strike. To prevent instances such as this, the non-proliferation regime would have to be universal, non-discriminatory, verifiable, and irreversible, a tall order for an international authority and almost certainly a threat to national sovereignty.

In a nuclear weapon-free world, states would seek to ensure security with conventional weapons instead of nuclear weapons. Conventional weapons are costlier than nuclear weapons, and far more subject to arms races, as such weapons tend to cancel each other out. Also, unlike nuclear weapons, conventional weapons are likely to be used. A nuclear weapon-free world could therefore be more prone to wars fought at the conventional level. Increased propensity for war implies that for a nuclear weapon-free world to be stable, a

4 This section also borrows liberally from Han (2009).

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security regime of some sort would be needed in addition to an airtight nonproliferation regime. In fact, a robust security regime may be an essential prerequisite for nuclear disarmament, since, for instance, a country like Pakistan would most likely refuse to dismantle its nuclear weapons unless its security vis-à-vis its archenemy India were guaranteed through a security arrangement of one sort or another.

What does this mean for a nuclear weapon-free East Asia? The most important message is that denuclearization, in addition to being extraordinarily difficult to achieve, would not be a panacea. Unless underlying conflicts are resolved or reduced in one way or another, denuclearization could actually be destabilizing, especially if the denuclearization involved the nuclear superpowers. Also, a peaceful regional nuclear weapon-free zone depends on, rather than substitutes, a successful nonproliferation regime as well as a functional security regime. References

Cheon, Seong-Whun. 2001. A Limited Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone in Northeast Asia: Its

Limits and the Road Ahead. International Journal of Korean Unification Studies 10(2): 199-220.

Endicott, John. 2008. Limited Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones: The Time Has Come. The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 20(1): 13-26.

Endicott, John and Alan Gorowitz. 1999. Track-II Cooperative Regional Security Efforts: Lessons from the Limited Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone for Northeast Asia. Pacifica Review 11(3): 293-323.

Han, In-Taek. 2009. Nuclear Disarmament: Logic, Illogic, and Dilemmas of a Nuclear Weapon-Free World. IFANS Review, December: 29-48.

Umebayashi, Hiromichi. 2004. A Northeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (NEA-NWFZ). Peace Depot & Pacific Campaign for Disarmament and Security Briefing Paper, April.<http://www.peacedepot.org/e-news/nwfz/NWFZtext.with.colormap.Dec.13.with%20Map2.pdf.>

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Unification Education in Korea: Approaches and an Alternative

Young-Seog Kim Professor, Gyeongsang National University

Introduction Unification education is an issue which has caused a long-term controversy in Korea (Choi 2011; Choi 2007). It seems that there is widespread consensus regarding the necessity of unification education. However, the expression “unification education” has different meanings depending on the ideological justification of its necessity (Choi 2007). For example, what conservative groups mean by unification education may be such educational activities as encouraging students to have critical perspectives on the North Korean regime and providing reasons why the reunified Korea should be a free-democratic country in which anti-communism is the priority. On the other hand, radical nationalist groups advocate a unification education which helps to persuade students that the major obstacle to national unity is foreign intervention by countries including the United States. They put the highest priority on the autonomy of the Korean nation in regaining the unification of Korea. In this way, there have been continuing battles over the purposes, content, and foundations of unification education among ideologically-competing groups. The major competing camps of unification education include not only extreme conservatives and radical nationalists, but also moderate conservatives who just want to advertise South Korean governments’ efforts to promote peace and reunification, idealists who see unification education as peace education and liberal pragmatists who emphasize practical benefits of unification and mutual exchange between the South and the North (KINU 2003; Byun 2011; Choi 2007; Choi 2011). Recently, influenced by the increase of North Korean defectors and the rising popularity of multiculturalism, some educators advocate unification education as multicultural education (Chu 2011; Kim 2011). These competing camps present different interpretations and approaches to unification education.

The purpose of this paper is to identify various approaches of unification education presented by different groups. This paper will describe ideological assumptions, strategies, and implications of each approach as well as their shortcomings. Further, this paper will present an alternative perspective based on the interpretation of unification education as global citizenship education. The concept of global citizenship education in this paper originates from Robert G. Hanvey’s concept of “education for global perspectives” (1976).

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1. Major Approaches of Unification Education 1.1. Unification Education as Free Democracy Education Advocators of education for free democracy claim that the reunification of Korea should be achieved in a way founded on free democratic order (Kwon et al. 1994). They consider free democracy to be the only qualified governmental system of the unified Korea and refuse other forms of government such as confederation and federation. The meaning of “free” democracy is not the same as that of liberal democracy, which has been known as constitutional democracy. To define the meaning of free democracy, we need to look at its historical context. The reason that the adjective “free” was attached to democracy was to distinguish South Korean democracy from North Korean “people’s democracy.” North Korean people’s democracy refers to a regime represented by one party dictatorship. In that sense, free democracy represents any type of ideological or governmental system that is in opposition to one party dictatorship. However, in historical periods such as the Korean War and military regimes, free democracy was defined in a much narrower way. Anti-communism or anti-North Korean sentiments were considered to be pivotal traits of free democracy. This interpretation of free democracy is still shared by some conservative groups including the “New Right.”

Unification education based on the idea of free democracy often takes a form of “anti-communist education” (Kwon et al. 1994). Typical themes of anti-communist education include the immoral hereditary succession of power in North Korea, oppression and starvation imposed on people, human rights violations, and so on. Introduction of these themes intends to provide students with information on problematic aspects of North Korean regime. However, the bigger intention of the anti-communist education is to give ideological guidance for students to have a critical attitude toward not only the North Korean regime but also the South Korean groups who support an appeasement policy toward North Korea. 1.2. Unification Education as National Security Education The position taken up by those who see unification education as education for national security is similar to that of free democracy educators. Advocators of national security education believe that the most serious threats to national security are posed by North Korea (Kwon et al. 1994). They want to warn students of potential or realistic dangers of military and ideological attacks by North Korea. They believe that the crisis of national security is caused by internal conflicts over ideological issues, too. They suppose that internal threat arises from political instability caused by progressive or communist groups who receive instructions from North Korea. By attributing domestic problems to North Korea, national security educators want to provide students with a simplified version of interpretation on various controversial issues mostly caused by value conflicts.

National security education has been included in school curricula. Kyoryon (High School Military Drill) was taught to high school students from 1969 up until 2010. Major themes of Kyoryon included national security and military science. In the 1970s and 1980s,

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Kyoryon teachers gave basic military training to students. Moral education also incorporates content relevant to national security. Recently, national security education relies more on extra-curricular activities such as field trips and guest lectures (KINU 2003; Byun 2011). 1.3. Unification Education as Education for Government Public Relations Korean governments have considered education as an important vehicle for political socialization. This was especially the case during military regimes. However, the efforts to influence students to have positive attitudes toward government have been continued even by recent liberal administrations (Kim 2005). Moral education and social studies textbooks have allocated a good deal of space to the introduction of government policies on various social issues. The government’s efforts to establish a peaceful relationship with North Korea and introduce policies to regain national unity have been included into major themes of social studies and moral education. Textbooks in the era of liberal administrations put more weight on unification issues such as South-North summit meetings, Nobel peace prize awards, and inter-Korean economic cooperation.

When textbooks introduce government policies on unification issues, they develop a typical narrative plot that organizes historical events in the form of a story. The outline of the story plot on unification issues is as follows: North Korea has always acted with a warlike attitude, posing the threat of crisis in the Korean Peninsula. North Korea’s reckless brinkmanship continues to create barriers preventing the formation of a cooperative relationship in the Korean Peninsula. To resolve the crisis peacefully, South Korean government has put forth efforts to open dialogue with North Korea. Also, it has pursued various policies for reconciliation and cooperation over the decades to improve prospects for peaceful reunification. 1.4. Unification Education as Education for Independent Reunification Radical nationalist groups in Korea put the highest priority on the principle of national self-determination or “autonomy” that guarantees unification via the Korean people’s own decision without any intervention and obstruction from other countries. The National Liberation (NL) group in the Democratic Labor Party, one of the leftist parties in Korea, represents these radical nationalist activists. The NL group thinks that South Korea’s problems are due to the division of the country and believes South Korea is still a colony under American imperialism. Their main enemy is the U.S. Additionally, they emphasize “Uriminjokkiri (being among our nation)” and support independent national reunification. Some members of Korean Teachers & Educational Workers Union share the worldview presented by the NL group.

Critical pedagogy is the representative approach employed by these radical nationalists (Ahn 2008). Critical pedagogy can be defined as an educational practice to help students develop critical consciousness, allowing for the knowledge and perception of social and political contradiction. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one’s life. Social and political contradiction, or oppressive elements in

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students’ lives, according to radical nationalists, are the result of a neocolonial relationship between Korea and the U.S. The purpose of unification education for them is to make students see the oppressive reality of the Korean nation and to motivate students to take action to transform this reality. Some radical teachers have been accused by the government of using ideologically-biased teaching materials based on anti-Americanism or taking students to an anti-America political rally.

1.5. Unification Education as Peace Education Nationalism has provided an ideological base for the reunification movement in Korea. Such a motto as “One Korea” represents a form of ‘unification nationalism’ pursuing the merger of politically divided, but culturally homogenous, regions and territories under one state (Hechter 2000). The older generations who experienced the Korean War have sympathy for such problems as “divided families” and are consequently motivated to work for national integration. Also, the “386 generation,” now in their 40s and 50s, who led student activism and left wing nationalist movements in the 1980s, support a policy setting priority on unification. However, post-386 generations tend to be less interested in the unification issue. In a recent survey conducted by the Peace Research Institute, 44.1% of respondents said that they are beginning to identify North Korea as a different state (Jeong 2011). In regard to ethnic solidarity, 30.2% of respondents chose “now I am beginning to feel that they are foreigners.” An additional 9% said that “North Koreans are as foreign as Chinese.” Some people, by contrast, worry that the nationalism of younger generations is becoming more active as seen in the enthusiasm displayed in the 2002 World Cup Soccer Game held by Korea and Japan. The new trend of nationalism can be characterized as a transition from “Korean Nationalism” to “South Korean Nationalism.” These young nationalists are sensitive to the issue of historical conflicts with China and Japan, as well as with North Korea.

The new aspects of nationalism call for alternative approaches to unification education. Some educators advocate peace education as an alternative for unification education (Chu 2003). Peace education aims to foster values and knowledge to contribute to peace in Northeast Asia as well as the Korean Peninsula. Instead of nationalism, reconciliation and reciprocity between the two Koreas are emphasized as core principles of peace education. 1.6. Unification Education as Multi-Cultural Education The number of North Korean defectors has steadily increased since the great flood in 1995. The government has run training programs to help defectors overcome barriers of cultural heterogeneity and to offer practical training for earning a livelihood in the South. However, defectors have reported that they have serious adaptation difficulties related to cultural differences and prejudice (International Crisis Group 2011). According to a survey presented by the National Human Rights Commission, more than 67% of North Korean defectors say they have suffered workplace discrimination in the South. In the case of students, 20% of the young defectors experienced bullying because they are defectors, while 48% of the students attend schools without revealing they are from the North. Despite their common race and

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ethnicity, stereotypes, discrimination, feelings of hostility and indifference, and fear of mistreatment plague the relationship between North and South Koreans. This phenomenon offers a preview of the potential problems involved in integrating North Koreans into a reunified Korea.

To be prepared for the time after reunification, a multicultural education is required for South Koreans to have a greater cultural understanding of North Koreans (Chu 2011). South Koreans tend to underestimate the cultural differences between two the Koreas and over-estimate defectors’ abilities to adapt. Cultural knowledge on North Korean defectors would contribute not only to reducing prejudice and stereotypes of domestic minority groups but also to promoting social integration and relief of conflicts in the reunified Korea. 2. Neglected Area in Unification Education: Education for Decision-Making Based on

Factual Information The advocators of different kinds of unification education have assumed that the purpose of education is to transmit cultural values so that the important elements of certain ideological perspectives are shared by students. Anyone who tries to transmit ideological perspectives uncritically, however, finds themself in a difficult position of competing with others who want to transmit their own perspectives in the same manner. Uncritical transmission of all of those perspectives is not possible and does little but increase confusion and intensify conflicts. Instead of indoctrinating certain values, democratic societies tend to provide citizens with opportunities to make their own decisions on various issues.

However, most students grow up with few chances to closely examine important social issues. A specific issue gains public attention only when a dramatic event happens, in the way that a volcano is of interest to the public only when it erupts. According to Robert G. Hanvey, the public sees only those manifestations that are novel enough to rise above the media’s threshold of excitability (Hanvey 1976). As a result, general perception of important phenomena could be limited and distorted.

Effective democratic citizenship requires citizens to be well informed and to reason reflectively about various social issues because the quality of citizens’ beliefs about public issues constrains how leaders define and frame issues and what options those leaders can choose to address those issues. Because the media are event-centered and possibly biased, according to Hanvey, the schools must stake out a niche that balances and corrects the media. If media directs attention to events, the schools must look beneath the apparent event at the phenomena really involved. Effective citizen’s reactions to reports in the media should be minimally, “There may be more than what it looks like, and other eyes might see it differently.”

National unification and North Korean issues are complicated enough to expose various types of controversies. Public opinion is roughly divided on the approaches to unification and relations with North Korea. However, due to the limited sources of information, citizens of Korea have insufficient knowledge to make appropriate decisions on

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policies related to North Korea. Also, there is significant concern that media in Korea, especially newspapers, is politically biased in its reporting on various social issues. Citizens’ insufficient and biased knowledge leads to poor reasoning and poor decision-making. To improve the quality of reasoning, as Hanvey argues, schools must encourage students to engage in critical examination of an event to look beneath the surface of the phenomena. Hanvey proposed certain modes of thought, called “global perspectives,” aiming to give students a better understanding of other countries. Global perspectives can have implementations in unification education in that unification education pursues a better understanding of North Korea and provides sufficient information to make qualified decisions on North Korea issues. 3. Five Dimensions of Global Perspectives 3.1. Perspective Consciousness Perspective awareness means the recognition or awareness that others have views of the world that are not universally shared. Achieving perspective consciousness seems to be an easy accomplishment; it could be argued that most people are very aware of differences in perspectives. However, Hanvey urges that a distinction should be made between opinion and perspective. Opinion is the surface layer, the conscious outcropping of perspectives. There are deep and hidden layers of perspective that may be more important in orienting behavior. In such deep layers lies the South Korean view of North Korean defectors. For example, the notions of North Korean “laziness” and “bad communist habits” are not matters of opinion to South Koreans. Those notions are profoundly assumed and thus not recognized as prejudice or discrimination. Once it is surfaced and made visible, however, it may become the focus of discussion as a matter of opinion. Students can learn how to tolerate differences of opinion through such activities as public debate. Value clarification activities also help to heighten awareness of unrevealed aspects of perspectives. 3.2. “State of the Planet” Awareness State of the planet awareness refers to awareness of prevailing world conditions and developments including emergent conditions and trends. Attention to such issues as North Korean nuclear tests, the long standing starvation of people, human rights issue, North Korea-China relations or North Korea-U.S. relations can be parts of the awareness of world conditions. The major source of gaining awareness of other countries is the massive amount of information conveyed throughout the world by communication media. However, as discussed earlier, information transmitted by media includes distortions or political bias. In addition, in the age of the Internet, a certain level of training is required to process unprecedented resources of information and to see the significance of data. For that, school programs need to be organized for such a task. Students need to engage in critical analysis of issues in world problems, positions held by different groups, and factual data supporting those positions. A core curriculum can be proposed to organize contents around various issues.

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Issues related to North Korea and unification policies would be parts of the core curriculum. 3.3. Cross-Cultural Awareness Cross cultural awareness is the diversity of ideas and practices to be found in human societies around the world, and of how such ideas and practices might be viewed from other vantage points. This dimension is difficult to attain and requires a long-term involvement. Contact with different cultures is not enough to get the understanding to put oneself into the head of a person from a completely different world. There must be a readiness to respect and accept and a capacity to participate. And, the participation must be sustained for a long period of time. The key elements of in-depth cultural understanding are respect and participation.

Cultural immersion, the level of awareness of how another culture feels from the standpoint of an insider, is hardly achieved given limited time and resources. Instead, in school education, it is reasonable to employ intellectual analysis to attain a capacity to identify significant cultural traits that contrast markedly with one’s own. Materials describing cultural traits and perspectives of North Koreans would be appropriate for this purpose. 3.4. Knowledge of Global Dynamics The aims of this dimension are modest comprehension of key traits and mechanisms of the world system. Understanding the world as a system in which various factors are inter-connected requires the ability to handle long chains of reasoning. First, students should be sensitized to global consequences of certain decisions. For example, students must be encouraged to imagine what consequences North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons would bring about in East Asia. Students anticipate reactions of each country to the action made by North Korea; national interests are the most important considerations in predicting possible reactions made by each country. Then, students define desired consequences. Finally, students model an international system in which each member influences one another and works together. Simulation games can help students understand dynamics of a global system. 3.5. Awareness of Human Choices Hanvey introduces this dimension as an awareness of the problem of choice confronting individuals, nations and human species as consciousness and the global system expands. This kind of awareness involves assessing proposed alternatives in consideration of the likely consequences of different policies, and particularly the differences between short-term and long-term consequences. To achieve such awareness, new cognition, called the global cognition, is required. The meaning of global cognition can be clear by contrasting it with pre-global cognition. Pre-global cognition is characterized by a relatively simple theory of linkages between events, a linear theory in which some things are causes and other things are effects. This theory leads to the conclusion that conditions are the result of single causes, sometimes personified. For example, in considering the problem of North Korean starvation, naïve students may think that the problem is food deficit; and the solution is more food. However, a simple theory of cause and effect should be set aside in favor of more complex

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theories. Solutions produced by global cognition evolve from the simple rescue of people in immediate trouble to the raising of agricultural productivity or the development of a market economy. Further, the single nation as the main actor in policy making is challenged in favor of coordinated international planning. After practicing global cognition, students would be able to produce more solutions, including some that rest on nonlinear theories of social dynamics and that incorporate a concern for the human race. Conclusion This paper described various patterns of unification education and suggested an alternative approach based on Robert G. Hanvey’s idea of global perspectives (1976). The five dimensions of global perspectives provide useful tools that enhance students’ understanding of North Korean people from a different culture. In addition to cultural understanding, awareness of global dynamics and human choice guide students to reflect carefully on inter-Korean problems and make rational decisions among policy alternatives. To give students decision-making opportunities in classroom, the quantity of factual information on North Korean issues needs to be increased so that students can deal in the context of reaching reasoned conclusions about problems. Finally, education for unification supported by global perspectives requires an issue-centered curriculum in which reflective inquiries on controversial issues are encouraged. To conclude, unification education should not be reduced to mere indoctrination of certain ideological views, but instead be a project that helps students grow up to be well-informed citizens. References Ahn, S. 2008. Paulo Freire and Reflective Unification Education. The Journal of Korean

Education 35(2): 3-28.

Byun, C. 2011. The Issues and Courses in Unification Education. Unification Strategies 10(2): 9-35.

Choi, J. 2007. The Issues and Tasks in Education for National Integration. Unification Policy Studies 16(2): 285-306.

Choi, W. 2011. The Polarization in the Unification Education of Non-governmental Organizations during the Kim Dae-jung Administration. North Korean Studies 15(1): 279-308.

Chu, B. 2003. Peace Education Approach in Unification Education. Study on the Unification Issues 39: 103-125.

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Chu, B. 2011. Teaching Strategies for Reducing Students’ Stereotypes toward North Korean Refugee. Study on the Unification Issues 55: 29-62.

Hanvey, R. G. 1976. An Attainable Global Perspective. In Next Steps in Global Education: A Handbook for Curriculum Development, ed. William Kniep. New York: The American Forum.

Hechter, M. 2000. Containing Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

International Crisis Group. 2011. Strangers at Home: North Koreans in the South. Asia Report 208.

Jeong, H. 2011. Transition of Unification Education and its Direction. Unification Strategies 10(2): 37-92.

Kim, C. 2011. Social Adjustment of North Korean Defectors in South Korea and Unification Education. Ethics Study 80: 137-169.

Korea Institute for National Unification. 2003. Unification Education in Schools and Society: Status Quo and Achievements. KINU Studies Series 3-5.

Kwon, O., Shin, J. & Shin, Y. 1994. Democratic Citizenship Education in the Era of National Unification. Seoul: Tamgudang.

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SESSION 1

DISCUSSION

Robert G. Hanvey

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SESSION 2

EAST-ASIAN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

INTRODUCTION The second session focused on analyzing conflict and conflict resolution in the field of International Relations. This session, entitled “East-Asian International Relations,” three presenters provided analyses of East Asia phenomena and Asian theories of International Relations. The objective of the session was to reexamine the discourse of non-western IR including the perspectives of Kyoto School’s theory, historical perspectives of Ryukyu and the aims to achieve multicultural society.

The first paper presented by Dr. Kosuke Shimizu (Ryukoku University) focused on political and cultural theories of Kitaro Nishida, Jun Tosaka and other Kyoto School’s intellectuals during WWII. He especially investigated theories of Jun Tosaka, a left-wing activist/intellectual, and asked why Tosaka ended up with a different or opposite viewpoint from that of Nishida, despite their common understanding of philosophy and politics.

The second presenter Dr. Shiro Sato (Kyoto University) introduced the argument of Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, who posed a provocative question about the reason for the absence of a non-Western IR theory. He pointed out that current IR scholars should give back valuable resources of Asia and African Studies to the theories and practices of IR.

Dr. Ching-Chang Chen (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University) presented an overview of the issues relating to why China did not resort to coercive diplomacy to prevent the Ryukyu Kingdom from becoming part of Japan. He argued that the “loss” of Ryukyu illustrates more about the extent to which China had followed a logic of appropriateness regarding whether their actions were considered legitimate in the tributary system.

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Materialising the “Non-Western”: Two Stories of Kyoto School Philosophers on Culture and Politics

Kosuke Shimizu

Director of the Afrasian Research Centre Professor, Ryukoku University

Introduction Any discussion about non-Western international relations theories (IRT) runs the risk of being co-opted into the Western Enlightenment project which it strives to criticize.1 When we formulate an idea and implement policies based on it, we do not see the world from any place on the earth. We often detach ourselves from the ground, climb up to the sky, and look down on where we were (Pettman 1991). In other words, we objectify the world as a place in which we presume that we do not exist, or at least regard ourselves as possible to ignore—a process called objectification. As Hannah Arendt succinctly put it in her explication in The Life of the Mind, in the process of thinking of the world, we are physically there, but mentally nowhere (Arendt 1971, 11). Needless to say, this is an important element of modern knowledge construction that is based upon the Enlightenment tradition. This supposedly guarantees theories to be unloaded and unbiased, because the theories that emerge from this mental practice supposedly produce universal truth (Pettman 2004). We are indeed disciplined to mentally speak from nowhere, while physically from where we actually are in the world, for the sake of impartial and objective theory. But are we really nowhere when we think of IR?

When we attempt to objectively understand the world, we often categorise each element and arrange them all in a series of dichotomies. However, when narrating stories of dichotomised identities in IR, one always becomes entangled with power relations. The post-structuralists were arguably the first to focus upon the power relations embedded in IR, and critical theorists followed, particularly the (neo-) Gramscians and post-colonialists. Now, it seems that contemporary IR is taking a non-Western turn. However, the main body of non-Western IRT work has not shed sufficient light on the relationship between power relations and modernity, with a few exceptions (Shani 2007, 2008, 723; Behera 2007; Chen 2011). Rather, they automatically and uncritically accepted rational modernist assumptions of unloaded narratives based upon the idea of a geographically divided world—the “West” and 1 In this article, I consciously pose a distinction between “non-Western IRT” and “post-Western IRT.” While the former refers to IRT that manifests itself in a form resulting from a geographic difference from the West, the latter term refers to an IRT that strives to critically transcend Western IRT (Shani 2008).

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the “non-West”—and tried to “enrich” the Western IRT “with the addition of more voices and a wider rooting not just in world history but also in informed representations of both core and periphery perspectives” (Acharya and Buzan 2007c, 427-8).

Although we cannot be sure at this stage what the consequence of a renaissance of non-Western knowledge in world affairs would be like, we might be able to find similar historical events that may give us some ideas of the results. This paper aims to investigate the risk seemingly embedded in contemporary narratives of non-Western IRT by focusing on the case of the Kyoto School in Japan, and it attempts to reveal the uncritically accepted modernist knowledge of objectification in non-Western narratives. To clarify these points, I focus on the story of the Kyoto School and its Theory of World History in the first half of the paper. The philosophers of the School devoted themselves to the development of a theory of the non-Western style, which was supposed to “overcome” the limitations of Western civilization and industrialisation. However, they are also infamous for their involvement in the wartime regime, which was indeed in the process of aggressive invasion that shattered and devastated lives in the Asian region. They provided a justification not only for Japan’s war against the U.S., but indeed for its aggression on the Asian continent. Why were they involved in this aggression, and why were they supportive of it? What is the connection between their alleged global-level philosophy and their support for the imperialist regime? If there is a connection between their philosophy and their war involvement, is there any possibility of the resurrection of a similar tale in the case of non-Western IRT?

This paper also introduces another story of anti-modernism towards its end. Here, I am concerned with Tosaka Jun, a Kyoto School philosopher deeply influenced by historical materialism who strongly rejected the political order provided by the Japanese imperialist regime and severely criticised the mainstream arguments of the Kyoto School, Nishida Kitaro’s in particular. Because of Tosaka’s determination to critically engage politics and to reject imperialism, he was later arrested by the regime and died in prison before the war ended. In contrasting the consequences of the political engagements of Nishida and Tosaka, I argue that ideational argument of non-Western discourses runs the risk of being easily drawn back into mainstream modernist discourses because of the uncritical acceptance of modern ideas about the world and the lack of epistemological concern on the basis of the objectifying theorisation practices.

It may appear to some readers that criticising the modernist project and objectifying theorisation is obsolete and beside the point in the discussion of non-Western IRT. However, this seems to be appropriate to the contemporary West/non-West debate because a large number of non-Western IRT theories do not reflect the critique of mainstream IR by postmodernism in the 1990s. If we do not pay sufficient attention to it, IRT literature may leave the epistemological and ontological issues behind in theorising about world affairs. This is all fine if does not affect lives of everyday people. However, what the intellectual history of the Kyoto School tells us is unfortunately very much to the contrary.

This paper sets off by introducing a brief explanation of post-Western IRT by focusing on its theoretical similarities with the Kyoto School philosophy. Secondly, mainstream

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perspectives of the Kyoto School and its philosophy, Nishida Kitaro’s in particular, will be explained in detail. Thirdly, I will focus on the School’s involvement in the wartime regime, how it got started, and how it developed. Fourthly, the possible reasons for the involvement will be discussed in order to make sense of the phenomenon. Here, my focus is particularly on the relationship between the mainstream Kyoto School multiculturalist discourse and the position of the privileged “self.” Fifthly, I will concentrate on the political thought of Tosaka Jun to see if there are possibilities of a way out of the modernist canon. Lastly, I will give some brief concluding remarks. 1. Non-Western IRT and Its Lack of Critical Epistemology It seems that there is rapid growth in IRT literature on culture and identity in the recent IRT discourse. This comes after the attack of poststructuralism on mainstream IRT for its lack of attention towards power and knowledge emanating from an epistemological and ontological deficiency. Later, this was taken up by postcolonialists to reveal the Eurocentric nature of IRT. The discourse of non-Western IRT seems to be following this movement and is being given considerable attention not only by non-Western but also by Western IR scholars. Needless to say, Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan’s edited volume, initially in the form of a special issue of The International Relations of Asia-Pacific, and later published as a book, contains articles by IR scholars from all over the world who provide their own ways of looking at the world (Acharya and Buzan 2010). Similarly, Robbie Shilliam published an edited book with arguments and discourses on non-Western IRT from a slightly different angle, focusing more on critical engagement in IRT (Shilliam 2010).

As this phenomenon took place after a series of critical attempts by poststructuralist discourses of the mainstream male-centred IRT of Anglophone world, non-Western IRT is supposed to be constructed upon, or at least reflect, the poststructuralist critique of modernism. The poststructuralists and critical theorists argued for giving voices to the silenced, or “Others,” including feminists, environmentalists, indigenous peoples, and sexual minorities. However, the “Others” given voices were still limited to those of the West in this attempt, and non-Western IRT can be interpreted as following this challenge of expanding the ontological space for contemporary IR literature. Similarly, critical theorists are Eurocentric. Because of the Enlightenment tradition, they strive to defend by which they attempt to achieve the “dialogic community,” their attempt to develop a “thin conception of cosmopolitanism,” which presumably respects difference but ends up excluding some important factors in non-Western communities, such as religion, from their understanding of contemporary world affairs (Shani 2007).

Non-Western scholars of IRT are well aware that putting forward modernist knowledge often results in shattering and devastating the lives of those who are referred to as “Others” in narratives. This is because the modernist understanding of world affairs is based upon a series of dichotomies, between the West and the rest, the rational and the emotional, the logical and the exotic, the scientific and the cultural, the secular and the religious, the developed and the

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underdeveloped, the temporal and the historical, the objective and the subjective, the individualised and the collective, and so forth. All of these all are presumably based upon objective analysis, and thus are seen to provide universal truth. In each dichotomy, the former is often associated with modernity, and the later with pre-modernity. The former is supposed to be granted more intellectual and scientific power, and destined to discipline the latter. As postcolonialists argue, the rational West has narrated the stories of the world in this way, and the rest of the world was always assigned an inferior position as subjects of narration.

The series of dichotomies, however, also provide some opportunities for those who have been the subjects of narration to reformulate IRT in their own terms. There seem to be four different approaches regarding these opportunities. First, there are some non-Western IRT scholars simply pointing out that there are different interpretations of world affairs from those of Western mainstream IRT. They do not make explicit arguments regarding the political and intellectual meanings of stating different ways of looking at the world, whether or not they implicitly aim to connect this issue to the second approach (Hamashita and Kawakatsu 2003). In this sense, this approach can be categorised as empirical.

The second is to argue that including voices long disregarded by Western IR in mainstream IRT literature will “enrich” the discipline (Acharya and Buzan 2007c, 427-8). The scholars who take this approach do recognise its obvious implications, and it is usually well received by Western audiences. Some of them argue that bringing different standpoints into IR literature will enrich the epistemology of the discipline, while others contend that it will diversify the intersubjective IR space, thus leading us to a more democratic theorisation of world affairs (Sato 2011).

The third is to fight against the domination of the mainstream narrators of IRT. While it is true that we easily run the risk of objectification in formulating theories and discourse, this means that we can also fight against hegemonic narratives and discourses by consciously accepting the prevailing methodology of objectification, and consequently the dichotomy of “their” version of “us” and “them.” They strive to render power relations the other way around, with the understanding that such relationships have been embedded in the narratives of mainstream IR in order to create “our” version of “us” and “them.” Some “Asian values” theorists seem to provide typical examples of this approach (Marukusu 1991; Ogura 1993; Zakaria 1994). This approach has often been mistakenly interpreted as postmodern in the sense that it criticizes Western modernity and questions the power relations embedded in social constructions in the modernist international relations.

The last, but not the least, approach is to sublate the dichotomy of the Western and non-Western IRT by problematizing “the basic formulation and idiom of our query.” This is not an attempt to establish a new school of IR in non-Western regions, but to redefine IR itself (Behera 2007, 342). Obviously, this approach involves critical engagement with IR as an academic discipline and strives to contribute to the diversified contemporary world affairs. This approach is the only approach in the post-Western literature, which reflects the epistemological and ontological arguments of the 1990s.

This series of attempts relating to non-Western IRT, however, is not entirely new to IR

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historians, particularly those working on IRT in Japanese history. There were many similar attempts formulated in the first half of the twentieth century aiming at providing an alternative to the Western perception of world affairs. The Kyoto School is probably one of the most typical examples of such an attempt, and the main figure of the school, Nishida Kitaro, has been often cited insofar as he attempted to provide a different interpretation of the world on the basis of constructivism (Inoguchi 2007; Shimizu 2011).

In what way does the Kyoto School philosophy resemble contemporary non-Western IRT? First, we need to focus on political economic circumstances. In 1918, Oswald Spengler published a book titled The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World History, which had a substantial impact on academia in Japan. He criticised the Western-centred worldview by arguing that Western history has repeatedly caused wars and devastations of the natural environment (Spengler 1918). It was obviously inspired by the perception that the West, and Britain’s hegemony in particular, was in the process of decline in terms of political power and economic ascendancy (Goto-Jones 2005, 180). The world was, according to Gilpin’s famous stability theory of hegemony, moving towards instability (Gilpin 1987). Although universality of Gilpin’s hegemonic instability theory is often questioned, it was a time in which many established norms and values were relativized, thus becoming fragile. This meant that the border between the centre and periphery of world history was blurred, new actors of world politics emerged, and the perception towards the world was in need of reformulation. The relative decline of the hegemony is also noticeable in the contemporary world (Kennedy 1989; Gilpin 2001; Alagappa 2011, 217). Although the U.S. seemed to have maintained overwhelming political and economic power after the Cold War, it is visibly losing its hegemonic status due mainly to the stagnating economy and the financial crisis, now giving us the impression, as one commentator succinctly notes, that it is directing the world towards a more diversified multipolarity rather than striving to maintain the unipolar world order (Tanaka 2011). Accordingly, in terms of international political economic circumstances, the Kyoto School and non-Western IRT share the common backdrop of declining hegemony, and both appeared like shooting stars.

Another similarity we should focus upon is a concentration on the cultural aspect of the world as well as political and economic aspects. It seems that cultural factors in non-Western IRT discourses are assigned an important role in Acharya and Buzan’s contemplation of the absence of non-Western IRT (Acharya and Buzan 2007a, 2007b, 2007c). What is culture in contemporary non-Western IRT discourse? According to Acharya and Buzan, it involves “ways of thinking” and “conceptions of inside/outside” (Acharya and Buzan 2007c, 432). In distinguishing one culture from another, this interpretation of culture often leads us to an attempt to “parochialize” the West. As this term straightforwardly reminds us of the geographical and territorial division of the world, the cultural understanding of IRT is immediately and spontaneously connected to geographical regions. As a consequence, Acharya and Buzan successively declare that “area studies should be the main location for subsystemic theorizing” in non-Western IRT literature (Acharya and Buzan 2007b, 291). This geographical parochialization of the West is also noticeable in the Kyoto School’s discourse

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regarding world history. In a roundtable discussion titled “Overcoming Modernity” (Kindai no Chokoku), the Kyoto School philosophers repeatedly contended that the West is just one of the many regions on earth, but the prevailing order of modernity was unfortunately based upon this particular culture (Kawakami et al. 1979, 176). Therefore, the Western dominance of the world should be questioned from different cultural standpoints. In doing so, the concept of culture bore a prominent importance. To them, local cultures appeared to be facing the danger of exploitation and extinction because of the overwhelming ascendance of Western civilization. Successively, they demanded that this state of world affairs should be altered in one way or another. Here the geographical contrast of the West and East is entangled with a series of dichotomies such as universality/particularity and civilization/culture.

In this way, the discourses of non-Western IRT and the Kyoto School show some similarities in terms of the international political economic circumstances and their focus on culture in contrast with civilization on the basis of territorial division. This means that the School comes very close to the aforementioned first and second approaches to non-Western IRT. They partly attempted to enrich the philosophy of the Western tradition, and partly tried to subvert the West/East hierarchy. However, they never attempted to problematize the philosophy itself. We cannot be sure at this stage what the consequences of non-Western IRT would be like. However, we are obviously able to discern the political economic results of the Kyoto School philosophy and its Theory of World History. Now we turn our focus to the story of the School and the lessons we are able to draw from it. 2. The Kyoto School and Its Philosophy The Kyoto School is supposedly the most prominent Japanese philosophical school in Japan’s intellectual history. The main body of its thought is based on the concept of “nothingness” in opposition to “being” originally instigated and promoted by Nishida Kitaro, the alleged founder of the School. Those involved developed the concept of “nothingness” not directly from an isolated and purely indigenous knowledge arrangement, but through incorporation with Western philosophy, with a particular emphasis on William James’s “pure experience.” Nishida argued, using the concept of “pure experience,” that “individuals are not prerequisite to experiences, but rather experiences constitute individuals” (Nishida 1965, 4). This is a typical constructivist position, and this constructivist understanding of individuals led Nishida to reach an intellectual stage allowing him to state that “the good of an individual is self-realisation.” By this he referred to the full realization of the process by which individuals and their circumstances or history are mutually constructed (Nishida 1965, 145; Shimizu 2011).

Nishida was conscious of the importance of using theories and philosophies, regardless of their origins, in developing his philosophical inquiry. He indeed mentioned such names as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, and James in his philosophical inquiry (Shimizu 2011, 163). In this sense, his philosophy was not purely indigenous but rather a

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hybrid in which he connected Western philosophy with Eastern thought, and Buddhism in particular. Despite his hybrid style, which represents Nishida’s universalist orientation in formulating the philosophy, his followers in the Kyoto School moved towards a more anti-Western orientation by simply regarding Nishida’s philosophy as “oriental” (Sakai and Nishitani 1999, 188).

Nishida later directed his philosophy in a political direction, developing his “Theory of World History” under the strong influence of such European philosophers and historians as Hegel, Ranke, and Spengler. The theory was supposedly formulated to achieve the goal of “transcending modernity,” or Western modernity, and thus providing an opportunity for the advent of a new global era after the decline of the West (Uemura 2007, 45). In this sense, his theory of the world was postmodern and non-Western from the very beginning.

The Theory of World History primarily emanated from Nishida’s concept of “place of nothingness,” and it was later inherited by Nishitani Keiji, Kosaka Masaaki, Koyama Iwao, and Suzuki Shigenari, who were direct disciples of Nishida at Kyoto Imperial University. While recognising that a large part of the region was still under the control of the Western imperial powers and that this state of affairs should be ended sooner or later, the Kyoto School philosophers tried to establish a more democratic, multicultural, and multiethnic political area in Asia as well as throughout the world. The Theory of World History was designed to include all different cultures and histories under the common value of conviviality, which would presumably guarantee a more peaceful world. In other words, the version of the Theory of World History was supposed to be achieved in a way such that particular local values and universal common values simultaneously apply. Thus, the space of the Theory of World History was supposed to be a place of tolerance, mutual understanding, and coexistence. In sum, the Kyoto School’s discourse of World History comes very close to what is today called multiculturalism (Mori 2004, 227).

This Theory of World History was initially developed as an antithesis to the supposed “Western” understanding of history. The Kyoto School philosophers argued by implicitly drawing upon Spengler’s Decline of the West that Western civilisation was facing an unavoidable dead-end because it was constructed with the assumption of a linear, unified, materialistic, and universalised idea of history exclusively based upon liberalism, capitalism, and democracy (Kawakami et al. 1979, 176). Thus there had been only one type of history within the Western understanding—so-called “Universal History.” The Kyoto School philosophers contended that Western intellectuals had been simply projecting this universalised Western version of history on those who were objectified and analysed. This process took place on the basis of the perception that the West held the exclusive right to narrate history. In this sense, it presupposes an a priori subject, objectively constructing the world from a godlike standpoint available only to the Western intellectuals.

However, the world was facing obvious dangers, according to the Kyoto School philosophers—the danger of wars among the Western imperialists who wished to govern and discipline the rest of the world, the danger of minorities, and the danger of workers becoming slaves to uncontrollable capitalism (Nishida 1950a, 427; Uemura 2007, 45). This state of the

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world was, at least partly, caused by the Western perception of history, which assumes that there is only one universal and transcending history and disregards differences among eras and nations in comparison with which the West was supposedly running far ahead. In other words, a global danger was presented because there was only one narrator of history who decided what had happened in the past and would thus decide what would happen in the future. This single narrator situation of the Western universalism was the cause of global turmoil, because the liberal world order that the League of Nations established in order to avoid wars among imperial powers was merely based upon a presupposed Western assumption of politically equal rational human beings, imperialist domination over the rest was based upon the myth of the linear development of civilization, and uncontrollable capitalism and overdevelopment of consumer society was based upon the presumption of profit-pursuing rational individuals (again involving Western preconceptions about human nature).

However, the “Eastern” subject is constructive and structural, thus totally different from that arising from the Western perception of human nature, according to the Kyoto School philosophers. It is constructed taking into account historical circumstances in interactions with other beings and, in turn, becomes the subject of construction of history. In this sense there is no one true history, but rather plural and parallel histories. This is because the way in which the subjects and circumstances mutually construct one another varies according to time and space. History is not something universal or pre-given, but rather appears in plural form (“histories”), representing particularities on the basis of multiple subject-circumstance constructions.

The Kyoto School philosophers did not stop here, however; they moved on to transcend the gap between the Western interpretation of history and that of the East in order to establish a more comprehensive, and thus more convincing, theory of World History. According to their argument, thanks to swift progress in transportation and communication technologies, the world was getting smaller and smaller day-by-day. Thus the particular was becoming closer to the universal, and the universal was becoming closer to the particular. They would not merge with each other, however; rather, they would coexist in a state of contradiction. To embrace the two opposite forces, the world space should be infinite—or, in other words, a form of nothingness. Nothingness embraces, in this way, particular and universal, local and global, and finite and infinite.

The real world, however, presented great differences from the Kyoto thinkers’ vision of “World History.” State borders divided the world, and thus it was full of sovereign particularities, some of which were self-proclaimed bearers of the universal. The Kyoto School philosophers severely criticised the “universal” of the time as merely a materialisation of the vested interests of particular states—Britain and the European powers. As a result, the philosophers found themselves in need of providing another version of the true universal theory of history that transcends the particular/universal dichotomy.

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3. The Kyoto School’s Involvement in the Wartime Regime In understanding the Kyoto School philosophy, it is important to note that the School was deeply involved in Japan’s wartime imperialist regime. It provided justifications for the “Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere,” which in reality entailed the blatant invasion and colonisation of other Asian countries by Japan. It is said that soldiers of the Army and Navy frequently read the political discourses of the School before they were sent to the battlefields because they provided convincing and satisfying justification for fighting against the enemies. The battle was to achieve a just world in which no one would be privileged or hegemonic, and it was to democratize the world by launching counter-hegemonic movements, regardless the locations of the battles. This was even more the case after the government launched the University Student Conscription in December 1943.

The Kyoto School philosophers were initially against the advancement of the Japan-China War, which is now widely recognised in Japan as the “Fifteen Year War.” According to Ueda, they repeatedly articulated their concerns and sometimes oppositions to Japan’s territorial expansion by military force (Ueda 1995). Thus they were in general regarded as left-wing intellectuals at the beginning of the war, and the conflict between the Kyoto School philosophers and right-wing social and political activists intensified in due course. As a result, the philosophers became the primary target of extreme right-wing critics of the time, such as Minoda Muneki, who was the leader of the private right wing organisation Genri Nihon, and the attacks on the philosophers were exceedingly tough and ceaseless (Ohashi 2001; Uemura 2007). Those who attacked the Kyoto School philosophers were, of course, not confined to right-wing political activists, and it is reported that government officials and military officers never hesitated to refer to the Kyoto School by name in counting “enemies.”

The transformation which led the Kyoto School philosophers to changed their political orientation and started supporting militaristic policies was defined by two infamous roundtable events titled “Kindai no Chokoku” (Overcoming Modernity) and “Sekaishi no Riron” (the Theory of World History) held in the 1940s in which several well-known intellectuals and novelists took part. These meetings were held about the time when the war with the U.S. was launched. This excited the roundtable participants tremendously and it was the moment at which the philosophers appeared as active supporters of Japan’s involvement in the Pacific War.

In the 1942, a transcript of the “Kindai no Chokoku” roundtable discussion was published in the journal Bungakkai. The journal was published by a group of novelists also named Bungakkai, in which many well-known left-wing writers participated (Hiromatsu 1989, Chap.1). The roundtable participants were not confined to the Kyoto School philosophers and novelists of Bungakkai; novelists of the Japan Romantic School were invited, some of whom were also members of Bungakkai, such as Katsuichiro Kamei, Hayashi Fusao, and Kawakami Tetsutaro, and thus a romanticist tendency was also perceptible at the roundtable discussion. Kyoto School philosophers—Nishitani, Suzuki, and

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others—took part in the discussion, and somehow appeared as supporters for Japan’s war against the U.S. (Kawakami et al. 1979, iv-v).

The Kyoto School’s support for the warfare against the U.S. was even more discernible in the other roundtable discussion of the time titled “Sekaishi no Riron,” the transcript of which was also published in 1942. At this roundtable discussion, Kyoto School maintained their political position that the war with the U.S. had a just cause, although it was not all that clear whether the war with China was justifiable (Nishida and Nishitani 2000).2

The Kyoto School philosophers were also involved in undisclosed meetings established by the Navy. It is widely known that the Navy was said to be in conflict with the Army in the Second World War, particularly towards the end of it. The Army was regarded as enjoying a more dominant position than the Navy in the imperial government at that moment, and the Navy held undisclosed meetings in order initially to regain power over the direction of the government. This discussion continued for a few years, and was later developed into an attempt for a settlement of the war with the U.S.

The main areas of military engagement of the Army were on the Asian continent, and it was therefore received fewer notifications and updates concerning the condition of the war in the Pacific. Unlike the Army, the Navy was presumably well aware of the great military imbalance between Japan and the U.S. Consequently, they sought a way to negotiate with the enemies so as to reduce conflict and thus avoid complete defeat and unconditional surrender. To do so, the Navy approached the Kyoto School and tried to consult with its members about a possible settlement proposal (Ohashi 2001). The philosophers immediately responded to the request, and as a result Nishitani, Koyama, Kosaka, Suzuki, and others actively participated in the series of discussions. It is also reported that Hajime Tanabe, who was regarded as the second-most important professor of the Kyoto School philosophy next to Nishida, was occasionally present at such meetings (Ohashi 2001, 15).

Although the details of the discussions in the series of meetings were not revealed until recently, the close association with the Navy was a well-known fact. This became one of the reasons why the Kyoto School philosophers were regarded as active supporters of Japan’s imperial regime in the post-war era, despite the fact that the discussions that took place in the meetings could not easily be categorised as endorsements of the war. In fact, some researchers argue that the aim of the secret meetings was to alter the course of Japan’s foreign relations and establish a more liberal direction (Ohashi 2001). In order to achieve that goal, the discussions were oriented so as to provide new definitions of the words frequently used by mainstream policy makers, such as “Daitoa Kyoeiken” (Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere) and “Hakko Ichiu” (Eight Directions under One Roof) (Ohashi 2001). Their discussions often touched upon the two different dimensions of the war (the war with China and the war with the U.S.), and there was a clear indication of disapproval of the former and a positive interpretation of the latter.

2 For a detailed examination of the roundtable discussions, see Hiromatsu (1989, Chap. 3).

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4. Possible Causes of War Involvement This gap in perceptions of the differences between the war with the U.S. and the war with China provides an important reference point here for understanding the meanings of the Kyoto School’s political involvement. The enthusiastic support of Japanese intellectuals for the Pacific War in the 1940s was mainly a result of feelings of guilt that originated in connection with Japan’s war with China. They thought that the war with China was not reasonable or justifiable by any means. To them, it was a blunt expression of Japan’s expanding territorial dominance and exploitation of other nations’ natural resources. Thus, many intellectuals of the time in Japan were uneasy about the war of aggression on the Asian continent until the Pacific War had been waged. However, the war with the U.S. was a justifiable war, according to their interpretation, in the sense that it was a direct fight against a Western imperial power, which, they thought, was an ultimate origin of injustice and violence in the world at the time. They did not have to hesitate to support the violent acts of the country any longer, and they believed that the justification they provided for the war with China allegedly a part of the war against Western imperialism) was validated by the breakout of the war against the U.S. In a sense, the Pacific War saved the Japanese intellectuals from feelings of guilt (Koyasu 2008, 119-138; Isomae 2010, 33).

Can we conclude that the Kyoto School philosophers were justified in their two-dimensional interpretation of the war? Unfortunately, we cannot. There is more to investigate. It was very clear that the Kyoto School philosophers did not intend to support the imperialist military expansion of territory of Japan on the Asian continent, and gave support for the dominant regime only in relation to the Pacific War. However, in supporting the Pacific War, they also mentioned the reason why they thought the Pacific War was justifiable, and argued that Japan had a superior political principle on the basis of the Theory of World History. The Theory of World History is more inclusive and tolerant of others, and thus preferable to Western exclusivist history which, it was presumed, had resulted in devastating effects on “Others.”

In other words, it was impossible to distinguish the war with China from the war with the U.S., because both had been justified in the name of the war against the West. Indeed, the war against China had been generally justified, though not by the Kyoto School philosophers, because it guaranteed the political position of Japan as a coloniser, not the colonised. It was also justified for its ability to secure natural resources that Japan was lacking. These resources were seen as imperative for fighting against the Western imperial powers, which often seemed to be interfering with Japan’s energy supply.

What is more important in our investigation of theory and practice of IR is the fact that the possible reason for Kyoto School involvement in the military regime was the use of the term “culture” in their configuration of the world. The Kyoto School philosophers, particularly Nishida, were obsessed with the term “culture” in making sense of world history. Nishida saw culture as the origin of socio-political changes and creativity, based on the philosophical perception of Hegelian constructivism. Nishida argued in his Nihonbunka no

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Mondai (The Question of Japanese Culture) for acceptance of the Hegelian constructivist understanding of subject and surroundings that human beings create the environment, and the environment, in turn, creates human beings. However, this cycle is not just a repetition of a consistent structure; rather, it involves changes. There are differences between the environment that creates human beings and the environment that is created by human beings. The environment created by human beings differs from the initial environment because there is undicidability in repetition. These differences create changes, and the changes accumulate and formulate culture (Nishida 1950b). Thus, the history of civilization, according to Nishida, is not one of development along a certain path, but rather it consists of unexpected happenings and irregularities. Therefore, the fact that there are different cultures with different histories directs us to a pluralistic world configuration.

The term “culture” also refers to a place in which human creativity flourishes. Nishida contended that it is like a container in which human beings interact with each other. On the one hand, interactions produce the dynamism of social transformation, and on the other, change the form of the container itself. In this way, culture is a flexible space in which interaction and transformation occur. Nishida connected culture with state. Culture was, according to him, not intrinsically rational—it was without laws and institutions. In order to achieve rationality, the nation-state was necessary (Nishida 1965).

What is the result? Culture is inherently changeable and never ceases transformation. It never stops providing forces for social and political transformation, or being subject to the construction of agency and structure. However, the nation-state is an institution, which rather stops, or strives for stopping, the changes and transformations that take place within its state borders. Thus, there is a contradiction in the relationship between culture and the nation-state.

Nishida regarded culture as opposed to the nation-state (Nishida 1950a). He expressed his preference using the somewhat unusual term Kokka Minzoku (state-nation) for the concept of “nation” in his article “Sekai Shinchitsujo no Genri” (The Principles of the New World Order). Although there are different interpretations of this article (Arisaka 1996), it was clear here that he deliberately inverted the term “nation-state” in order to show that he regarded culture as more important than the state for making sense of world history.

His attempt to invert the meanings implied the concept of “nation-state” was in vain, however. His argument on the nation-state was used, or abused, by the military government, without mentioning Nishida’s intention of favouring culture over state, in justifying its legitimacy and the aggressive attitude towards other Asian countries. The “Genri” article was drafted as a manuscript for PM Hideki Tojo’s speech at the “Great East Asian Conference,” which was set up to justify Japan’s colonisation and domination of the Asian continent. Nishida intended to “steal” meanings of the vocabulary in the manuscript in order to shift the government’s foreign policy towards a more multicultural direction, but he was ultimately unsuccessful. This was another reason why the Kyoto School philosophers have been regarded as active supporters of the military government.

What lessons can we derive from this story, then? One lesson is that there is always a temptation in narration about non-Western issues or non-modernity to touch upon

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non-institutionalisation or post-institutionalisation, and this post-institutionalisation often ends up with re-institutionalisation that in fact reinforces the institutions. Why do narratives of post-institutionalisation shift to become narratives of re-institutionalisation? It is because the nation-state always needs to legitimate its governance of certain geographical territories and tries to exploit whatever it sees as useful. But how was the Kyoto School philosophy or the Theory of World History targeted by such exploitative practices?

The School’s theories were indeed exclusively supportive of coexistence and multiculturalism, and it assigned maximum importance to mutual understanding and diversity among members, while not imposing alleged universal values upon them. Thus it seems at a glance quite unlikely that the theories could become used and twisted by such institutions as the nation-state, which allegedly holds and reifies transcendent universal values.

The reason why the theories were targeted and exploited was related to the issue of subject—the narrator of the theory. It is obvious that all stories need narrators, even if the stories are based on pluralism and multiculturalism. Usually, this narrator is regarded as enjoying a godlike status that transcends any vested interests or influences of power of the substantive world. Hannah Arendt once asked herself the question “Where are we when we think?” She answered that we are nowhere. When she said so, she was exclusively concerned about “the life of the mind” (Arendt 1971). This is a typical explanation of the mental practice of objectification. However, the narrator is physically in the world in which he/she does not exist mentally. In other words, the body is always in the world while the mind is not.

The narrative of the Kyoto School regarding pluralism and multiculturalism had the same problem. It was generated by minds and allegedly without bodies. Thus, the narrators were destined to enjoy a godlike perspective, and indeed they did. But their bodies intervened in their abstract narrative in a way such that the bodies limited the freedom of the mind and the process of objectification. As a result, the bodies inevitably biased the narrative that was created exclusively by their minds.

However, what did this mean in the history of the Kyoto School? It meant that their theories of World History on the basis of “nothingness” (in terms of location) were narrated from a supposedly godlike perspective, while the reality in which the Kyoto School philosophers were situated—Japan as a nation-state—intervened in the place of such “nothingness.” The pluralism and multiculturalism they advocated was indeed formulated for themselves. Robert Cox’s old maxim “theory is always for someone for some purpose” is obviously applicable here.

This imperfect separation of body and mind gave the nation-state an opportunity for exploitation of the Kyoto School’s narrative. Indeed, Nishida’s wordings on “Japan” and “Japanese culture” were constructed on the basis of its political economic position in the world of the time. An Asian country that once defeated a European power, Russia, and was full of national pride, was well represented in his texts. For example, Nishida wrote, in comparing Japan with China, that Japan had had a long imperial tradition and national history, which was supposed to stem from alleged national creativity. This continuity, he argued, made Japanese history superior to the history of China, which had developed in the form of

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teaching rather than creativity (Nishida 1950a, 339). He did not ask himself if his perception was biased by his identity, or if his

interpretation of the world political economy was formulated in accordance only with the limited information he received from possible sources, and thus inevitably biased. This bias was consequently embedded in the narrative of the subject, and had similarity with narratives of the nation-state in the sense that both presuppose the clear and strong demarcation of subject and object in the form of state borders.

In sum, Nishida ignored the question of subject and power of narration. He did not give serious thought to the possible consequences of the fact that the minds and bodies of narrators were simultaneously divided and unified. This contradiction usually has an inevitable result in the formulation of theories or discourse. Thus, the contradiction itself was not the problem. It was rather Nishida’s attitude towards this inevitability—he simply ignored it. He had a strong belief that he was speaking in favour of Japan and other Asian nations, but he did not become aware that he was putting himself in a privileged and godlike position.

Institutional divisions based on state borders and regional segregation, as exemplified by the concepts “East” and “West,” are always attractive and hold the power of temptation. We easily characterise things in terms of geography, such as “Western” philosophy or “Asian” international relations. It is a clear-cut explanation of world affairs that is very convincing and appealing, and our identities, as listeners of the stories, are also constructed upon the same divisions. This is too self-evident to deny. However, it is also clear that these divisions are too essentialised and purified. These processes of essentialisation and purification easily create not only the “Others” in “their” regions, but also those within “our” own community—Asia. 5. Tosaka Jun’s Theory of Cultural Resistance: What Prevented Him from

Incorporation with the Power? Unlike Nishida, Tosaka Jun, another Kyoto School philosopher, never provided justification for either the war with China or that with the U.S. He was the harshest critic of the imperial regime, capitalist modernity, and the mainstream Kyoto School discourses. Tosaka was born in Tokyo in 1900, and studied at the Kyoto Imperial University under the supervision of Tanabe Hajime, a philosopher who was regarded as important as Nishida in the Kyoto School. Tosaka has not been focused upon or discussed, with the notable exception of Harry Harootunian (2000a, 2000b), to the same degree as Nishida by intellectuals (either domestically or internationally), but his writings are still worth reading, particularly when we investigate the Kyoto School’s political discourses. This is because he was certainly under the profound influence of the Kyoto School philosophy (and the work of Nishida and Tanabe in particular) as he studied at the Kyoto Imperial University, although his actual political engagement was completely different from, and in fact almost opposite to, that of Nishida. Tosaka was a well-known Marxist. He wrote extensively on fascism, culture, and people’s everyday life customs (fuzoku) in the 1930s. As his critique of the imperial government made

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him conspicuous, he was later arrested and died in prison a week before the war ended. Because of his tragic death, Tosaka has been frequently referred to as Japan’s Antonio Gramsci.

Tosaka criticized the mainstream Kyoto School philosophy from his own materialist standpoint for a lack of interest in the material and substantive political economy. He thus criticized power relations among the agents involved, particularly regarding their Theory of World History. His critique was mainly directed at Nishida, as he was presumably the prominent figure of the Kyoto School. Tosaka argued that although it superficially appeared as though Nishida was focusing on history, his philosophy lacked an historical and materialistic analysis of society. Thus, the argument went, Nishida failed to be aware that his selection of issues and topics was also the consequence of political economic history. Choosing topics and issues in any theory is itself a historical event, according to Tosaka, and cannot be separated from the location in which the narrator of the theory places himself or herself. If the narrator is presuming that all issues and topics can be the object of analysis, this is actually proof of a failure to achieve consistent understanding of issues and topics (Tosaka 1966, 25; Yoshida 2011, 139). Ignoring this dimension of a theory leads the narrator to be untheoretical simply because he or she is unaware of the way in which theories are constructed with a dependence on political economic history.

This claim of Tosaka’s, of course, reminds us of Robert Cox’s well-known statement that “theory is always for someone for some purpose” (Cox 1981). While Cox’s contention mainly shed light on a critique of the naive acceptance of unloaded theory and scientific discourses of IR, Tosaka’s argument more directly focused on the mainstream philosopher’s assumption of the objectifying subject that is supposed to reside outside of the influence of the historical forces of political economy.

Tosaka insisted that characterisation of individual things, or social phenomena, is an important element in understanding contemporary political discourses. He contrasted character with “essence” in explaining his argument on political ideologies, and explicated the existence of this essence in a manner that is not dependent on time or space. Thus, the essence of things and a phenomenon does not change unless the essence changes in itself, while character is considered to include relationships to other things and phenomena. The original meaning of “character” is a “seal” (kokuin), he said. The character of ordinary things is a “seal” that the things have been given to the things. The seal, of course, changes in accordance with the sealers. Thus, a thing has a number of seals and appears as an existence having different characters. Therefore it can never be separated from the socio-political position of the sealers, and it is destined to be bound up with its relations to populaces (Tosaka 1966, 7-8).

The character among different characters that is given to a thing becomes salient depending on the relationship of the thing with other things. Even if a particular character is feeble and subtle, it becomes salient, or said to be salient and peculiar, when other things do not have such characters. Similarly, even if a character is robust and explicit, this character does not become prominent when it is common among other things. Therefore, the character

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of a thing is circumstantial, and it very much depends on the rise and fall of social forces, which Tosaka called “historical movements” (Tosaka 1966, 9-11).

Tosaka’s theory of ideology developed this understanding of character into the issue of the “problematic” (mondai). Tosaka attributed the moment of theory to “standpoint” and the “problematic.” What makes a discourse a theory is not the contents of the discourse, but how it grasps the “problematic.” According Tosaka, “problematic” comes ahead of the standpoint, and the former is more important than the latter (Tosaka 1966, 23). The selection process of the “problematic” takes place in a moment in which historical and social forces manifest themselves, and thus it is never free from history. In other words, a problematic issue that does not have to be solved has never been, and never will be, socially or intellectually regarded as a problematic. Therefore selecting a problematic, and consequently providing its solution, is inevitably a historical process in which one accepts an inevitability, strives to disentangle it, and arouses another historical inevitability (Tosaka 1966, 36).

Tosaka’s theory of historical materialism appears to be very similar to Nishida’s understanding of “Goodness.” Nishida contended that “Goodness” resides in individual actions and movements that come out of the process of understanding history, internalising its mission, and contributing to history (Nishida 1965, 162-3). Tosaka appears to be similar in articulating his theory of character and the problematic. What distinguishes Tosaka from Nishida is Tosaka’s total commitment to history that did not allow even himself to enjoy the godlike status of the intellectual. While Nishida was indeed aware of this historical binding of individuals, he did not bind himself with the history he articulated. In other words, while Nishida criticised the tradition of Western rationalism, he was in fact drawn into the subject/object dichotomy of the Western tradition, and ended up with articulating the strict geographical demarcation of the East and West. On the other hand, Tosaka concentrated on the people’s lives in the substantive world and engaged himself in this area, and he became aware of the danger of the godlike status of the intellectuals of his time. Although this does not mean that the difference was the only reason that led both intellectuals in opposite directions, it was certainly one of the main reasons, among other differences.

The two stories I introduced in this article are from the past. Thus it is not clear to what extent these stories are able to provide lessons for understanding contemporary world affairs. However, when we focus upon a philosophical question of the relationship between subject and object, particularly in comprehending world affairs in the “non-Western” age, they seem to offer important lessons. Conclusion It seems that both Nishida and Tosaka were against the Western modernist political project. However, while Nishida was directly engaged in the political discussions of the time (although trying to alter the meaning of words and clichés widely used by the imperialist regime), Tosaka unswervingly criticised the prevailing narratives from the standpoint of historical materialism. The results were Nishida’s unwilling provision of justification for

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Japan’s aggressive policies towards the Asian continent and Tosaka’s tragic death in prison. The most important reason for this difference between the two cases depends on

whether they maintained a conscientious approach with regard to the position of the narration of history. It is very clear that Nishida narrated his theory of World History from a godlike perspective of modernist objectification, while Tosaka was well aware of his own place in the context of contemporary politics. This difference in the recognition of the standpoint of the narrator leads us to scepticism regarding the possibility of an unloaded theory free from values.

Nishida and his disciples in the Kyoto School started their theoretical endeavour with a strong will to transcend the confinement of Western philosophy as well as political thought and with a critical perception of the West similar to that of contemporary non-Western IRT discourses. It is unfortunate that they ended up becoming involved in the very core of modernist thinking in terms of objectification. Their discourse was as a consequence built on the basis of an essentialised and purified identity of “Japan,” conceived of as being in opposition to the West. This shows us that we always face the risk of godlike narration, even in the cases of postmodern theories and post-Western IRT. References

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Yomiuri Shimbun. 24 October, 2006. http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/entertainment /ghibli/cnt_eventnews_ 20061024a.htm (Accessed 15/2/2010)

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The “Loss” of Ryukyu Revisited: China’s No Use of Compellence in the Sino-Japanese Border Dispute, 1877-801

Ching-Chang Chen*

Assistant Professor, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University

Introduction: Understanding China’s “Failure to Act” The Senkaku/Diaoyu islands have been among one of the most protracted and conflict-prone flashpoints in East Asia that involve competing claims of territorial sovereignty. In September 2010, a Chinese trawler collided with a Japan Coast Guard patrol boat in waters near the contested islands; to press for the release of the detained captain, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) allegedly delayed the export of rare earth metals to Japan. Following Tokyo’s naming of some islets that belong to the Senkakus in January 2012, the Japanese media noted that an earlier piece in the People’s Daily had called for the Diaoyus to be designated as part of China’s “core national interest” alongside Tibet and Taiwan “for the first time.”2 Although this call has not yet become the official position of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the growing number of incidents involving Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea (between fishing boats or otherwise) especially since 2011, and the introduction of the aircraft carrier Varyag into its aspiring “blue-water navy” have led many to conclude that China is likely to be more assertive regarding its maritime presence within and beyond the so-called first island chain. Specifically, it is believed that Beijing may be more willing to apply limited coercion in disputes with neighboring Asian countries over (potential) energy resources and fisheries. 1 This research has received financial support from Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University Academic Research Subsidy, Global COE Program “In Search of Sustainable Humanosphere in Asia and Africa” administered by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, and the Afrasian Research Center, Ryukoku University. Earlier ideas for the research were presented at Kyung Hee, Ryukoku, O.P. Jindal Global Universities, and the International Studies Association annual convention in 2011-12. Special thanks go to William Bradley, Young Chul Cho, Takumi Honda, Dahui Huang, Josuke Ikeda, Satoko Kawamura, Hitomi Koyama, L.H.M. Ling, Sachio Nakato, Zhongying Pang, Mustapha Pasha, Shiro Sato, Yuanhua Shi, Chih-yu Shih, Kosuke Shimizu, and Hidetaka Yoshimatsu for their constructive comments and/or logistical support. Surnames precede given names for all East Asian individuals in the main text, unless their cited works are published in English. * Ching-Chang Chen (Ph.D. Aberystwyth) is currently working on a book manuscript that analyzes the relationship between threat perception and national identity construction in post-Cold War Taiwan. His research also focuses on the theories and practices of non-Western international relations in Asia. Dr. Chen’s recent journal articles appeared in Issues & Studies, Journal of Chinese Political Science, and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific. He can be reached at <ccchen01@apu.ac.jp>. 2 Sankei Shimbun, January 31, 2012.

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This brings us back to a historical puzzle: Why did China not resort to coercive diplomacy to prevent the Ryukyu Kingdom from falling under Japan’s full control during the 1870s? In a retrospective thought experiment, a more proactive Chinese intervention at that particular juncture might have altered the island kingdom’s fate as well as prevented the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue from becoming an issue in the first place. To be sure, Ryukyu had been under the strict control of the Satsuma clan since 1609, but it maintained an ambiguous status as a “double tributary state” (ryozoku no kuni) to both Japan and China in East Asian international society; it was not until the kingdom being formally annexed and turned into Okinawa Prefecture in the late 1870s that the border dispute between China and Japan broke out. At a time when the 40th anniversary of the normalization of Japan-PRC diplomatic relations is still being shadowed by the “history problem,”3 systematic inquiries into this dispute will help to illuminate how historical roots might affect contemporary Sino-Japanese relations, but it has not received due attention in the study of International Relations (IR).

This paper seeks to make sense of China’s underactive response (if not inaction) to Japan’s gradual incorporation of Ryukyu in the 1870s, with a focus on the absence of compellence in Chinese strategic behavior. In IR jargon, compellence refers to a specific type of coercion that threatens to use force to make another actor do (or undo) some action. The Qing dynasty did not resort to any military threat to get the Meiji government to change course at several junctures wherein the Ryukyu Kingdom was first reduced to a clan in 1872, then prohibited from sending tribute embassies to the Qing in 1875, and eventually abolished in 1879. Three possible explanations stand out. First, from the perspective of the coercion literature, compellence was simply not a credible policy for the declining Qing to adopt in its dealings with a modernizing Japan. This materialist view and the mainstream scholarly works on Chinese strategic culture are complementary, for both maintain that the pacifist rhetoric and the principle of minimal use of force was no more than a temporary measure to compensate for China’s material inferiority. Third, in contemporary Chinese nationalist discourse, the “failure to act” is attributable to the corruption and incompetence of late Qing leaders who were unable to comprehend the perils China was facing in the age of imperialism. While China’s lack of hard power at that time did limit the Qing court’s ability to effectively respond to the fait accompli in Okinawa, I argue that material constraints (military capabilities) or strategic ignorance (having no knowledge of “realism”) alone are not strong explanations and together do not make the puzzle more intelligible to us.

The alternative explanation proposed here is based on the premise that the norms and institutions originating from European international society (e.g. equality among members demonstrating their sovereignty, balance-of-power politics, etc.) should not be treated as a universally valid starting point when analyzing the strategic behavior of political entities outside the West.4 Unlike the typical epistemological orientation in social science and history

3 The suspension of city exchanges between Nagoya and Nanjing following Mayor Kawamura Takashi’s comments on the “Nanjing Incident” was one recent example. Asahi Shimbun, February 22, 2012. 4 While this premise may be rather obvious for some, it has taken decades for mainstream IR to recognize it. See, for example, William C. Wohlforth, Richard Little, Stuart J. Kaufman, David Kang, Charles A. Jones, Victoria

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that treats China as a distinctive, substantive entity (be it tangible or not), this analysis is informed by Mizoguchi Yuzo’s concept of kitai or base substance, which proposes China as a method by which China scholars learn how to understand a different country based on the former’s own historical subjectivity, without taking any specific standpoint.5 From this perspective, studying China itself is no longer the purpose; rather, it is to reconsider the structural questions of human history through studying China.6 The aim of this paper, accordingly, is not to examine whether Qing officials’ “crisis management” was successful or not based on any national (Chinese or Japanese) or civilizational (Confucian or Western) standpoint, but rather, to appreciate why they acted in the way they did, as well as to reflect on the consequences of the expansion of a particular type of international society over another. In so doing, this study also seeks to contribute to the development of a post-Western IR that no longer reproduces a pervasive narrative that reduces the origins of international society to the Peace of Westphalia (1648) while resisting the “Hegelian trap.”7

Careful inquiry into Sino-Japanese diplomatic history suggests that top Chinese officials such as Li Hongzhang (1823-1901) were not unaware of the consequences of their passive approach to the dispute, which includes not exploiting Japan’s weakness during the Satsuma Rebellion (1877) and not acquiring the southern parts of Okinawa as offered by Japanese negotiators following the U.S. mediation (1879-80). Rather than following the logic of consequences that attributes action to the anticipated costs and benefits, various letters to Tin-Bor Hui, Arthur Eckstein, Daniel Deudney, and William L. Brenner, “Testing Balance-of-Power Theory in World History,” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 13, no. 2 (June 2007), 155-185. With the growing interest in creating a truly “international” discipline through developing non-Western or post-Western IR theory, I do hope that one day it will be no longer necessary for researchers to add such a footnote. See Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, eds. Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives on and Beyond Asia (London: Routledge, 2010); Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Wæver, eds. International Relations Scholarship Around the World (London: Routledge, 2009); Robbie Shilliam, ed. International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010); Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney, eds. Thinking International Relations Differently (London: Routledge, 2012). As I have indicated elsewhere, however, the difficulty of overcoming Eurocentrism in IR theorizing should not (and cannot) be underestimated. Ching-Chang Chen, “The Absence of Non-Western IR Theory in Asia Reconsidered,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, vol. 11, no. 1 (January 2011), 1-23; and Ching-Chang Chen, “The Im/possibility of Building Indigenous Theories in a Hegemonic Discipline: The Case of Japanese International Relations,” Asian Perspective, vol. 36, no. 3 (July-September 2012), forthcoming. 5 For a thought-provoking application of the kitai concept, see Chih-yu Shih, “From Sinic World to Multiple International Relations in East Asia: Between Outsider Japan and Insider Korea,” paper presented at the International Studies Association annual convention, San Diego, USA, April 1-4, 2012. 6 Mizoguchi Yuzo, Houhou to shite no Chugoku [China as Method] (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1989); and Chen Kuang-hsing, Ge Sun, and Ya-fang Liu, eds. Chongxin sikao Zhongguo geming: Mizoguchi Yuzo de sixiang fangfa [Chinese Revolution Reconsidered: Mizoguchi Yuzo’s Mode of Thought] (Taipei: Taiwan shehui yanjiu zazhishe, 2010). 7 For a penetrating critique of the Westphalian narrative, see Turan Kayaogulu, “Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Relations Theory,” International Studies Review, vol. 12, no. 2 (June 2010), 193-217. By the “Hegalian trap” I mean that the simple reversal of East/Asia and West/Europe only ensures the continuation of the unwanted master-slave relationship, in which the slave triumphs over the master by oppressing his oppressor and thereby himself becoming the new master/oppressor. See Hiroyuki Tosa, “Rethinking the Project of Overcoming the Western ‘Universalism’: A Hegelian Trap?” paper presented at the symposium on “Democratizing International Relations: New Thinking, Doing and Being for a New Century,” National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, March 11-12, 2009.

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the throne by Qing officials reveal that opponents of the partition of Ryukyu (hence “losing” it to Japan altogether) were mostly informed by a logic of appropriateness, concerning whether their actions were considered legitimate in the tribute system. As a foundational institution of East Asian international society, the tribute system emphasized a formal hierarchy among its members. Within this hierarchical order, China sat highest and subordinate states were ranked by their proficiency with Confucian norms, values and practices, not by their relative power (including territorial possessions). As such, the legitimacy of this hierarchy entailed a credible commitment on the part of the dominant state not to exploit the secondary states.8 Employing compellence against Japan over Ryukyu or dividing up the islands with Japan, however, would violate this key aspect of status hierarchy and call into question China’s position as the center within Confucian cosmology and the assumed moral superiority of its leadership. China’s difficulty in establishing clearly defined, exclusive borders enshrined in international legal treaties (instead of the Confucian influence of ritual protocol) at the expense of the secondary states, then, illustrates more about the extent to which it had been socialized into East Asian international society over centuries than how “misguided” or “incompetent” Qing leaders were in failing to turn China into a modern, sovereign state.

This paper is divided into four sections. The following section offers common explanations for the Ryukyu debacle from the literature on coercion and Chinese strategic culture as well as the nationalist discourse in the PRC. To advance an account that does not force China and other regional actors into the Westphalian straitjacket, the second section examines the constitutional structures and institutions of East Asian international society before the arrival of the Western powers. Using primary Chinese sources, the third section retraces how Qing officials had debated various options and how Li Hongzhang’s argument that China’s reaction should not “start with a just cause but end up with satisfying self-interest” (yishi lizhong) prevailed. The concluding section discusses the implications of my analysis for IR theorizing, the notion of international society in particular, and for understanding contemporary territorial disputes in East Asia. 1. Coercion, Strategic Culture, and Nationalist Discourse Coercion as a foreign policy tool is about using threats to influence the behavior of another state or non-state actor. These threats can be both deterrent (in order to prevent the target from taking a certain action) and compellent (in order to make the target either stop/undo an action already taken or undertake a particular action).9 The recent literature has sought to examine the generally low success rates of coercive strategies,10 but little attention has been

8 David C. Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 9 Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966) remains a classic. 10 Patrick Bratton, “When Is Coercion Successful? And Why Can’t We Agree on It?” Naval War College Review, vol. 58, no. 3 (summer 2005), 99-120; Patrick Bratton, “Signals and Orchestration: India’s Use of Compellence

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paid to the factors that might lead states to forgo such strategies in their security competition with their potential targets of coercion. It could be simply because state leaders do not want to engage in coercive diplomacy when they know that it is unlikely to succeed. For coercion to be successful, it does not necessarily require an overwhelming gap between the sender’s and the receiver’s military power. Rather, the key is to make the target believe that the threat is real and consequential (e.g. a coercer may succeed by exploiting the vulnerability of its target even when it does not possess a decisive military advantage). To be more specific, it is about how to send clear signals to a target and orchestrate these messages of resolve (within the same government or alliance) over a sustained period of time. Following this logic, the fact that China did not employ coercive diplomacy over the Ryukyu question might be because of the recognition on the part of Qing officials that threats made by China would not be credible enough for the Meiji government to concede. In other words, without the backing of adequate hard power, China could not make its threats credible and thus would not proceed to coerce Japan.

But this explanation overlooks the possibility that Chinese leaders might have chosen not to adopt coercive strategies mainly for non-material reasons. Maybe certain “social standards of self-restraint” had been developed in China,11 Confucian culture for instance, in dealing with some (if not all) of its neighbors until the nineteenth century? Such reasons, however, find little support in Alastair Iain Johnston’s Cultural Realism, a quintessential work on Chinese strategic culture.12 According to his analysis of the Seven Military Classics (wu jing qi shu), Johnston identifies two paradigms of strategic culture: the “Confucian-Mencian” paradigm, which calls for the minimal use of force (only when it is unavoidable and necessary for the restoration of a moral-political order), and the “parabellum” paradigm, which considers that military destruction of the adversary is essential for state security (the latter does not imply that offensive or expansionist strategies are always preferred; rather, the judgment should be made based on the notion of absolute flexibility or quan bian). Using the Ming dynasty’s (1368-1644) policy toward the Mongols as a case study, he argues that the “parabellum” paradigm acquired the dominant status in traditional Chinese strategic thought. More recently, Yuan-kang Wang goes so far as to declare that “the popular belief that Confucian pacifism has guided China’s security policy is therefore a myth.”13 Wang does not dismiss the role of culture in influencing China’s use of force against in the 2001-02 Crisis,” Strategic Analysis, vol. 34, no. 4 (July 2010), 594-610; and Thomas J. Christensen, Worse than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 11 Based on Norbert Elias’s process sociology, this term is developed by Andrew Linklater and used to explain civilizing processes in the Western states-systems. Andrew Linklater, “Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems,” paper presented at the symposium on “The English School Today: Order, Justice, and Multiculturalism,” Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan, March 26, 2012. 12 Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). For an example of its influence outside the American/Western IR communities, see Asano Ryo, “Chugoku no senryaku anzen hosyo bunka [Strategic Culture of China],” Kokusai Seiji, vol. 167 (January 2012), 27-41. 13 Yuan-kang Wang, Harmony and War: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 182.

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external security threats, but he maintains that culture works best as an auxiliary concept that supplements (not supplants) structural realism; Confucian culture, especially, served as an acceptable justification for low-coercive policies or non-use of force in times of China’s relative weakness.14 In short, both Johnston and Wang concur with the materialist perspective that China’s strategic choice was mostly shaped by its power position, adopting an offensive posture when relatively strong and a defensive one when relatively weak “attacking and defending depending on opportunity.”15

Regardless of the actual feasibility of a Chinese coercive diplomacy in the late 1870s, one may suspect that the Qing court did not pay enough attention to the Ryukyu question, which has so much bearing on the PRC’s “core national interests” in the East China Sea today. Indeed, the pervasive discourse of the “century of national humiliation” (1839-1949) in the PRC is not just about how the Chinese people suffered at the hands of the Western and Japanese imperialist powers. The various invasions, wars, occupations, lootings, and unequal treaties occurring during this period had as much to do with domestic corruption as with foreign aggression. A textbook on national humiliation puts it bluntly: “The invasion of the imperialist powers and the domestic reactionary ruling class’s corrupt stupidity together created the roots of this catastrophe.”16 It is not difficult to comprehend that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) regime legitimacy in part depends on the assumed corrupt nature of the regimes before it. Also, not all strains of Chinese nationalism subscribe to the official line that sees the Qing in an entirely negative light. Nevertheless, as long as the national humiliation discourse continues to be reproduced and disseminated, Qing leaders’ “failure” to defend China’s national interest over Ryukyu will still be taken as self-evident proof of their incompetence or ignorance.

The immediate problem with the above three explanations is that they have not been demonstrated empirically in the IR literature as far as China’s response to the fall of the Ryukyu Kingdom is concerned.17 At the minimum, whether Qing officials believed that accommodation (allowing Japan to absorb Ryukyu completely) was the best (or only feasible) strategy for a bad situation, or whether they were too strategically ignorant to deal with their Japanese counterparts should not be assumed; it must be supported by relevant empirical evidence. Moreover, it is methodologically problematic (time- and space- insensitive) to analyze the Sino-Japanese dispute over Ryukyu from a modern theoretical

14 Ibid, 186-188. Wang draws three more possible ways of “supplementing” structural realism (explaining the lag between structural change and adjustments in actual state behavior, explaining some “irrational” state behavior, and accounting for structurally indeterminate situations) from Michael C. Desch, “Cultural Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies,” International Security, vol. 23, no. 1 (Summer 1998), 141-170. 15 Johnston, Cultural Realism, 250. 16 Guo Qifu, ed., Wuwang guochi: Zaichuang huihaung [Never Forget National Humiliation: Recreating the Glory] (Wuhan: Wuhan University Press, 1996), 126. 17 In his Harmony and War, Wang includes a chapter on the Ming’s tribute system which omits Ryukyu. Moreover, as will be seen in the next section, he fails to notice that the ways China interacted with tributary states (including the use of military force in their intercourse) depended largely on the latters’ positions in the hierarchic Sinocentric world order.

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framework (e.g. structural realism) derived exclusively from the Euro-American experience. In fact, in his later work Johnston also acknowledges, quite rightly, that many bad analogies in scholarly writings about the contemporary “China threat” are imprecise about “why Chinese conditions at time t that are identical to analogical conditions in time t-n are not corrupted, altered, or constrained by obviously new and different conditions.”18 Old and different conditions deserve equally serious treatment, too. In one of the few studies that seek to do so, Jonathan R. Adelman and Chih-yu Shih indicate that China’s normally limited capabilities can at best explain the style of fighting and its outcome, but the initiation of war cannot be understood without first appreciating Chinese cultural norms and their self-perceptions.19 The remainder of this paper attempts to show that the same can be said regarding China’s no use of compellence against Japan in the late 1870s. 2. East Asian International Society Before the West This section discusses the constitutional structures and key institutions of the Sinocentric East Asian international society, and how they informed the members’ identities and interests. Unlike Martin Wight’s famous categorization of the Sinocentric world order as the product of a “suzerain system” rather than of an international society,20 the term “East Asian international society” has been consciously employed throughout this research to avoid the implication that only Europeans were capable of addressing the anarchy problem but East Asians were not. Given that there were only two major wars in this part of the world from the founding of the Ming dynasty (1368) to the Opium War (1839-42), it is not convincing that East Asian countries managed to maintain their “long peace” without resorting to any sophisticated institutions but chance, or that the impressive stability simply reflected the power asymmetry between China and its neighbors.21 More sustained inquiries into the composition of East Asian international society are needed.

Using concepts informed by the English School theory,22 Shogo Suzuki has helpfully identified the constitutional structures of East Asian international society in terms of its three normative dimensions: the “moral purpose of the state” (the reasons for establishing a political entity to serve the common good), the “organizing principle of sovereignty” (which

18 Alastair Iain Johnston, “Beijing’s Security Behavior in the Asia-Pacific: Is China a Dissatisfied Power?” in J.J. Suh, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson, eds., Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 51. 19 Jonathan R. Adelman and Chih-yu Shih, Symbolic War: The Chinese Use of Force, 1840-1980 (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1993). 20 Martin Wight, Power Politics, 2nd edn. (Harmondsworth: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1979). 21 Under the influence of the “Westphalian narrative,” English School scholars tend to share Wight’s view that tributary relations were indicative of an unequal distribution of power but nothing else. See, for example, Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 234. 22 Chris Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Yongjin Zhang, “System, Empire, and State in Chinese International Relations,” Review of International Studies, vol. 27, special issue (2001), 43-63.

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legitimizes the entity’s possession of sovereignty), and the “norm of procedural justice” (the implementation of the above principles must also follow certain procedures).23 In the case of European international society, a legitimate state was expected to enable its citizens to pursue their individual happiness and achieve their potential. As a result, the state’s internal affairs was to be free from foreign intervention so long as it commanded popular support. The principle of sovereign equality, in turn, was safeguarded through legislation (i.e. legislative justice) and embodied in institutions such as positive international law and diplomacy. By contrast, the “moral purpose of the state” in East Asian international society was to promote social and cosmic harmony. Such harmony was maintained when member states could conform to their “rightful” positions within this hierarchical society. The principle of sovereign hierarchy meant that states (both suzerains and vassals) had to perform appropriate Confucian rituals to acknowledge their relative positions (i.e. ritual justice) if their legitimacy was to be respected, which led to the creation of the tribute system as the fundamental institution. Paying tribute to the suzerain, then, was more than a bribe to “buy” security; the participating states’ identities (and hence their interests) were inevitably shaped by their entering into tributary relations.24 Three interrelated points follow the above discussion. First, in principle, it was possible for a foreign people (yi or “barbarians”) to become a member of East Asian international society or even part of the “middle kingdom” or virtuous state (hwa), provided that they participated in the totality of Confucian civilization food, dress, language, rituals, and so on beyond their symbolic participation in tributary protocol. Second, while member states competed for the highest possible positions in the society, a state would run the risk of being “downgraded” or even losing its membership should it fail to perform the necessary rituals pertinent to its place in the hierarchical order. Third, although China normally took on the role of the “middle kingdom” at the apex of that order, it was also possible for other states to assert their “superior” moral status and demonstrate their ability to promote social harmony by constructing their own alternative, non-Sinocentric tribute system.25

What was the underlying logic that informed the functioning of East Asian international society? “Civilization” seems to be a useful keyword here.26 According to D. R. Howland, Chinese conceptions of civilization consisted of three elements.27 First, wenming literally meant a desired state of human society made luminous (ming) through writing or “patterning” (wen); when all was in harmony in the world, there was no need to resort to military subjugation (wugong) and the world was wenming. This ideal stage was possible 23 Shogo Suzuki, Civilization and Empire: China and Japan’s Encounter with European International Society (London: Routledge, 2009), 34-35ff. 24 Contra Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History, 234. 25 Hamashita Takeshi, Choko sisutemu to kindai Ajia [The Tribute System and Modern Asia] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997); Suzuki, Civilization and Empire, 43-49. 26 Recall Wight’s argument that all known states-systems emerged among peoples who considered themselves belonging to the same civilization, which, in turn, differentiated them from other less “advanced” peoples. See Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), ch. 1. 27 D. R. Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empire’s End (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 13-15.

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because of the highest virtue exhibited by the emperor (“Son of Heaven,” who was supposed to have direct access to the will of the heavenly bodies) following the examples provided by history and the classics. Second, to the extent that a man could pattern his behavior in accordance with the expectations of the Confucian texts, submitting to his rightful lord (jun) in particular (e.g. ruler-servant, father-son, etc.), he too was wenming or “civilizing.” Civilization, then, ultimately signified a “spatially expansive and ideologically infinite” process of Chinese imperial lordship.28 Third, based on the idea of proximity (jin) that connects space to morality, humankind would approximate moral behavior in proportion to their proximity to the emperor, whose benevolent rule could bring the people close and cherish them. Accordingly, a concentric and hierarchical world order emerged with the emperor at the center; the civilizational realm was instantiated by various regional bureaucratic offices, by the voyages of imperial envoys to and from the capital, and by those outside peoples who responded to the imperial virtue by sending tribute missions to the court. Tributary relations thus represented an act of reciprocity through which outsiders accepted the nominal lordship of the Son of Heaven and his calendar; on the other hand, the foreign lord received Chinese investiture as legitimate ruler of his domain.

China’s response to Japan’s incorporation of Ryukyu during the 1870s cannot be adequately analyzed without understanding the aforementioned norms and institutions. As Hamashita Takeshi has noted, it would be remiss if one too readily assumes that East Asian international society collapsed completely soon after the intrusion of the Western powers:29

Considering the fact that the history of East Asian international relations was founded upon the principle of a tributary relationship sustainable for over a thousand years, it is difficult to assume that its demise could be brought about by a single event, such as the Opium War… Rather, it is conceivably more acceptable to view it as a demise that was caused by internal change within the tribute system itself.

In this regard, the extinguishment of the Ryukyu Kingdom can be seen as a first step of

such internal change that prepared the ground for the region-wide adoption of Westphalian norms and institutions. The next section will illustrate this change that led to rising Sino-Japanese rivalry in the following decades. 3. Extinguishment of the Ryukyu Kingdom and China’s Response With the expansion of European international society in the nineteenth century and Japan’s decision to be recognized as a qualified member of that society for the sake of its survival, the existence of tributary states in East Asia following ritualistic, hierarchical Confucian norms 28 Ibid, 14. This seems to echo the Eliasian theme that civilization is a process rather than a condition. See Linklater, “Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems.” 29 Hamashita, Choko sisutemu to kindai Ajia, 8-9.

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also became increasingly hard to tolerate in the eyes of the Meiji leaders and intellectuals alike. Now ritualistic procedural norms of the East were to be replaced by legal procedural norms of the West. As a result, tributary states had to either turn themselves into sovereign independent states or be absorbed by such sovereign entities.

The Ryukyu Kingdom’s ambiguous status as a part of Japan and China’s tributary state, then, looked rather embarrassing and even dangerous for the Meiji government. As Suzuki puts it:30

The Ryukyu Kingdom’s participation in the Tribute System could potentially highlight Japan’s inability to conform [to] international law, and consequently its lack of commitment to fully join the international order as defined by European International Society. This would, in turn, jeopardize Japan’s quest to attain the status of a “civilized” power as defined by the members of European International Society.

Japan’s move to abolish the kingdom was therefore as much a realist act of securing its

southern periphery as a political demonstration of underscoring its commitment to attaining international recognition as a qualified member of the European society of states.31 The move was an incremental one. In 1872, the Ryukyu king Sho Tai received investiture as “lord of the Ryukyu fief,” and the kingdom’s treaty and diplomatic matters were henceforth taken over by Japan’s foreign ministry. This was followed by Japan’s success in getting China to admit that the former’s 1874 expedition to punish “Taiwanese savages” was a “just act” to redress the murdering of Japanese citizens.32 Then, in 1875, the kingdom was prohibited from sending tributary envoys to, and receiving investiture from, China, its trading mission in Fuzhou was abolished, and the islands came under the administration of Japan’s home ministry.

The crisis escalated into a Sino-Japanese diplomatic dispute after Chinese officials received petitions from Ryukyuan secret envoys in 1877. Seen from their memorials to the court, it is hard to sustain the charge that these officials were completely ignorant of the geopolitical/geostrategical implications of the demise of this tributary state or incapable of formulating feasible policy options. Viceroy of Fujian-Zhejiang and Fuzhou general, He Jing, for instance, did not consider Ryukyu in itself crucial to the defense of China’s periphery, but he was aware of the consequences of failing to protect the islands from foreign intrusions. He thus suggested that the Qing court should take advantage of the Satsuma Rebellion and apply diplomatic pressure on the Meiji government to deal with the dispute in accord with

30 Suzuki, Civilization and Empire, 155. 31 Ibid, 156. 32 In 1871, 54 Ryukyuans were murdered by a native tribe (Mudanshe in Chinese or Botansha in Japanese) following their shipwreck in southern Taiwan. The survivors were rescued by local Chinese officials and escorted to the Ryukyuan trading mission in Fuzhou in 1872. From the perspective of international law, it was a misstep indeed for China to admit that the Ryukyuans were Japanese citizens; nevertheless, admitting Japan’s effective governance over Ryukyu did not necessarily imply that China henceforth had lost Ryukyu as a vassal as far as their tributary relations were concerned. Suzuki, ibid, 158-159.

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international law.33 Diplomat Huang Zunxian warned in “On the Liuqiu [Ryukyu] Affairs” (Lun liu shi shu) that tolerating Japan at that time amounted to “feeding a tiger which China can no longer rein in”: “given Liuqiu’s proximity to Taiwan, it would not be possible to maintain even one peaceful night in Taiwan and Penghu should Japan establish exclusive control over Liuqiu, turn it into a prefecture, train its soldiers and arm them to harass China’s periphery.”34

The Chinese minister to Japan He Ruzhang predicted that the Japanese would not only prevent Ryukyu from sending tribute but also seek to eliminate the kingdom, and after that they would turn to Korea. To preempt Japan’s expansion, He presented three options to the court: his first and best solution was to dispatch battleships to demand Ryukyu’s resumption of tribute missions while negotiating with Japan. The second was that, when persuasion failed, China could support Ryukyu’s armed resistance with auxiliary troops should Japan use force against the Ryukyuans. The third resorted to international law, inviting Western diplomats to condemn the Japanese government.35 He Ruzhang admitted that China was not in good shape to use force, but he still recommended the first two options as “Japan’s recent situation [the Satsuma Rebellion] was even worse than ours.”36 Although the Zongli yamen’s (International Office) subsequent decision not to engage in coercive diplomacy against Japan could not be separated from China’s concurrent dispute with Russia in Xinjiang, concerns over the northwestern border were not the only reason for the Qing’s forgoing of this rare “window of opportunity;” indeed, they might not even have been the strongest one. Viceroy of Zhili and minister of Beiyang, Li Hongzhang, one of the most influential officials in charge of Qing diplomacy, would not have felt the need to offer the embattled Meiji government 100,000 rifle bullets made by the Tianjin Arsenal had his purpose been simply to appease Tokyo or to prevent Japan from leaning towards Russia. Despite the Qing officials’ increasing realization that Meiji leaders would only yield to international law (a hallmark of European international society) or superior military might (a necessary instrument for any “civilized” state in the age of imperialism), Li apparently believed that the offer was what “ought to be done” for China’s harmonious intercourse with Japan (jiaoji zhong yinyozhiyi).37

That Chinese leaders started using the language of Western international law yet continued to embrace the constitutional structures of East Asian international society cannot be overlooked in a letter of understanding to Shishido Tamaki, then Japanese minister to China, by Prince Gong (who headed the Zongli yamen) in 1879, which emphasized the significance of Sino-Ryukyuan tributary relations and Chinese investiture while

33 Qing guangxuchao zhongri jiaoshe shiliao, vol. 1, 21. 34 Li Wenzhong gong (Hongzhang) quan ji, yishu hangao, vol. 8, 3-4. 35 Liang Chia-bin, “Liuqiu wangguo zhongri zhengchi kaoshi [An Inquiry of the Sino-Japanese Dispute Over the Extinguishment of the Ryukyu Kingdom],” in Executive Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Culture Renaissance ed., Zhongguo jindai xiandaishi lunji, vol. 15 (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1986), 115-117. 36 Ibid. 37 Li Wenzhong gong (Hongzhang) quan ji, yishu hangao, vol. 7, 3-4.

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acknowledging the Ryukyu Kingdom’s status as a “double tributary state.”38 The letter repeatedly stressed that Ryukyu was a part of China and recognized as an independent state by all countries (Liuqiu jiwei Zhongguo bin geguo renqi ziwei yiguo); the abolishment of the kingdom might have thus breached article 1 of the Sino-Japanese friendship treaty (which stipulated that their respective territories should be “treated with propriety”) and international law.39 Moreover, as a “weak and small” double tributary state, Price Gong lamented, the Ryukyu Kingdom should have been protected rather than swallowed up by Japan (which went against the “moral purpose of the state,” i.e. promoting cosmic harmony, in East Asian international society). Shishido countered that it was not possible for the islanders to be subjects of Japan and China at the same time. Furthermore, the islands could only be an independent state or part of such a state; the two possibilities were mutually exclusive. By rebuffing the relevance of Chinese investiture and declaring the abolition of the “fief” as a domestic issue based on Japan’s effective control over the islands, Shishido thus rejected ritual justice as the “systemic norm of procedural justice” in favor of legislative justice grounded in positive international law.

The turning point for this dialogue of the deaf came when former U.S. president Ulysses Simpson Grant was visiting China and Japan in mid-1879. Grant agreed to mediate the dispute at the request of Li Hongzhang and Prince Gong, and offered a proposal with American diplomats in Japan as a basis for negotiation. The proposal suggested dividing the Ryukyu islands into three parts:40 the central part would belong to the residual Ryukyu Kingdom protected by Chinese and Japanese consuls, the southern part would belong to China, being close to Taiwan, and the northern part would belong to Japan, being close to Satsuma (Kagoshima). The Japanese government agreed to come to the negotiating table, but demanded that China recognize that the Okinawa main island and the above belonged to Japan (Miyako and Yaeyama islands would belong to China, as proposed by Grant) and that the 1871 treaty of trade and friendship be revised (allowing Japan to enjoy the privileges granted to the Western powers, especially inland trade). Considering that this compromise solution could help preserve the kingdom and avoid pushing Japan to the Russian side (with which Beijing was also trying to conclude a border dispute in Xinjiang), the Zongli yamen signed an agreement with Shishido Tamaki in October 1880. However, due to Li Hongzhang’s objection at the last minute, the agreement was never ratified and was forfeited in January 1881. Whether the legal status of Ryukyu was settled or not remains a contentious issue between China and Japan today, but one thing is certain: the familiar dispute over Senkaku/Diaoyu islands that has plagued Sino-Japanese relations for decades would not have become an issue as it is now had the 1880 agreement been ratified.

Why did Li oppose (and effectively block) the deal? Contemporary Chinese historians have indicated that the progress in the concurrent negotiation with Russia led him to conclude

38 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Japan), Nippon gaiko bunsho, vol. 12, 178-179. 39 Ibid. 40 Qingji waijiao shiliao, vol. 16, 21.

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that China should not make such a big concession to Japan over the Ryukyu question.41 Some suspect that “inter-agency rivalry” had also played a part, for Li was in charge of the signing of the 1871 treaty but was not involved in the Zongli yamen’s negotiation with the Japanese delegation over revision of the treaty.42 This personal issue aside, Li still needed to make his case compelling enough for the Qing court. The question, then, is what kind of concession was too big to make for the Chinese leaders? In his letter to the emperor, Li made two main points to support his claim that the conclusion of the Ryukyu question should be “postponed” (yandang): 43 First, the Ryukyuan elite would not be willing to reestablish the kingdom in Miyako and Yaeyama, which were relatively impoverished (and historically peripheral). If so, it would be too expensive for China to administer and station troops on these remote islands. In addition to this demerit, he argued, granting Japan rights to inland trade would not be in China’s interest.

On the surface, Li seemed to have based his case on the costs and benefits of not ratifying the agreement. Under scrutiny, however, his calculation was not driven by pure material interests. In fact, the article that gave Japan preferential treatment was not the same as that which had allowed China’s unequal treaties with the Western powers in the 19th century; it required Japan to give China equivalent treatment as well.44 Like He Jing and Huang Zunxian, Li was also keenly aware that abandoning those “impoverished” islands to the Japanese or Westerners would lead them to control China’s Pacific choke points (e wo taipingyang yanhou, yifei Zhongguo zhili); the consequences of doing nothing clearly outweighed the costs of administering the islands. Furthermore, Li must have recognized that time was running out for China as the Japanese fait accompli had continued to take root in Okinawa ever since He Ruzhang’s call for coercive diplomacy. A wise statesman would have reaped what was left on the negotiating table. To make sense of Li’s puzzling (in)action, one must understand that his inclination against yishi lizhong (i.e. China’s response to the annexation of Ryukyu should not “start with a just cause but end up with satisfying self-interest”) was more a result of China’s century-old socialization into East Asian international society than a Confucian pretense. Likewise, his reluctance to allow Japan to enjoy the same benefits granted to the Western powers (liyi junzhan) was not so much that he was worried about Japanese economic penetration into China’s inland (after all, it would have been hard, in 1880, to foresee Japan’s emergence as a world economic powerhouse) but rather that treating Japan like a Western country would not reflect its supposed place in East Asian international society (hence disrupting the society’s organizing principle). Indeed, as Howland has noted, the treaty of trade and friendship itself revealed how Japan was placed in an ambivalent position in the eyes of Chinese leaders during the 1870s, which was “neither as

41 Shi Yuanhua, Jindai Zhongguo zhoubian waijiao shilun (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2006), 272. 42 Liang, “Liuqiu wangguo zhongri zhengchi kaoshi,” 143, 145-46. 43 Qing guangxuchao zhongri jiaoshe shiliao, vol. 2, 15-17. 44 Ibid, 9-10.

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distant and different as the Westerners, nor as close and commensurate as China’s dependencies.”45

Imagine China assuming the role of father in the East Asian family. Ryukyu, like Korea, was highly regarded within the family for his filial behavior and resemblance to the father. Under the surface, however, Ryukyu had been forced by Japan, an “outlier” of the family who had not come back to see China for a long time, to pay a “protection fee.” With his newly developed muscles trained in Europe, one day Japan broke into Ryukyu’s house and threatened to take Ryukyu’s property and life. Astonished, China tried to stop Japan but found that there was little he could do, not necessarily because he was not able to fight Japan but more because the use of force would expose his failure to keep the family in harmony. China had almost agreed with his American neighbor’s suggestion to divide Ryukyu’s property with Japan in order to keep Ryukyu alive; in the end, China chose to accept Ryukyu’s death, for the proposed solution would inevitably undermine his moral authority as the father at home. This shocking experience does not mean that Chinese strategic behavior would remain largely shaped by the rules and norms of East Asian international society when facing further challenges from Japan. Rather, Qing officials learned from the Ryukyu fiasco that the normative restraints that had sustained the order of East Asian international society for centuries should no longer be applied to “treacherous” Japan, now an outsider. This was evident in diplomat Yao Wendong’s assignment to compile a geography of Japan upon the arrival of the second Chinese minister to Japan in 1882. Despite his popularity among the major poetry societies in Tokyo and his ability to communicate with his hosts outside of “brushtalking,” Yao never referred to Japan as a country sharing a common civilization (tong wen zhi guo) and completed The Military Essentials of Japanese Geography (Riben dili bingyao) with the express purpose to enable China’s military preparations “in case of some unexpected emergency.”46 In this sense, the path leading to the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) over Korea had already been paved at the time when China “lost” Ryukyu.

4. Theoretical and Policy Implications The theoretical and policy implications of this analysis are four-fold. First of all, it shows that the failure to “get China right” often has to do with the taken-for-granted assumptions that concepts and theories derived from the Westphalian states-system and European experiences are valid across time and space and can be readily applied to East Asia. However, inquiry into the “loss” of Ryukyu indicates that China’s strategic behavior was constrained as much by its limited military capabilities as by its normative self-expectation as the paternal figure of the concentric East Asian “family” that was not supposed to abuse those in the lower ranks. On the other hand, criticizing Qing leaders for failing to defend China’s “national interest” as seen through a modern, nationalist lens is both anachronistic and complicit in justifying the

45 Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization, 35. 46 Ibid, 233.

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“expansion” of European international society that subjected millions of colonial peoples in Asia and elsewhere to misery.47

Second, against an old myth in IR that treats the Peace of Westphalia as the emergence of an international society that removed the problem of religious conflict and affirmed a commitment to peaceful coexistence among sovereign states, this study adds to recent challenges to the “Westphalian narrative”48 which naturalizes the Eurocentric conception of international society while equating other forms of arrangement outside of Europe with political disorder and religious intolerance. Considering that East Asian states had maintained largely peaceful relations among themselves for centuries until they were forced to enter into European international society, intellectual production in IR needs to re-imagine the notion of international society that has thus far been too narrowly defined by mainstream theories, in order to accommodate diverse needs and voices in a globalizing world. This should not lead us to a nativist intervention boasting that East Asian international society was more superior than the European one (power relations still existed between China and its neighbors, for instance); rather, the point is that it is imperative for Asians and other Third World peoples to recognize and reclaim their role as co-inventors of international society.

Third, if the arrival of Western powers only added the Westphalian states-system onto the tribute system rather than replacing the latter altogether as Hamashita has indicated,49 it is of academic interest and policy importance to explore the conditions under which contemporary East Asian states’ behavior may be shaped by the residual rules and norms of the century-old tribute system alongside the Westphalian states-system.50 For example, the conclusion of an FTA-like economic agreement between the PRC and Taiwan in June 2010 can be understood as the island’s increasing incorporation into Sinocentric cosmology. Hierarchical relations were confirmed when Taiwan (“vassal state”) submitted to the paternal Chinese state (“suzerain”) by upholding the so-called “1992 consensus” (i.e. presenting “tribute”);51 in return, the Taiwanese were granted generous trade privileges as gifts from Beijing (“son-of-heaven”). Since secondary political entities historically enjoyed immense latitude within the tributary order regarding their economic, cultural, and even military affairs, this perspective helps to understand why Chinese leaders formulated the “one country, two systems” proposal in dealing with Taiwan in the way they did (which precludes Beijing from exerting domestic control over the island), and why they have been willing to entertain issues

47 Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds. The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). 48 Kayaoglu, “Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Relations Theory.” 49 Hamashita, Choko sisutemu to kindai Ajia. 50 Regarding the consequences of institutional isomorphism and the internationalization of norms, even conventional constructivists would agree that if states look alike it does not necessarily mean that they act alike. See Michael Barnett, “Social Constructivism,” in The Globalization of World Politics, ed. John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 170. 51 The “1992 consensus” refers to a modus operandi under which Taipei neither openly challenges Beijing’s “One China Principle” (there is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it) nor accepts the latter’s definition of China (PRC). As such, Chinese leaders would not have demanded the “1992 consensus” as the foundation of cross-Strait exchanges had their mindset been fully and only under the influence of Westphalian norms.

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pertaining to Taiwan’s “international space” so long as Taipei adheres to the “1992 consensus.”

Finally, since the members of East Asian international society were informed by a worldview different from that of the West, as well as what counts as valid representations of their world, the diplomatic problems Asian countries experienced in their dealings with the Western powers and between themselves in the second half of the nineteenth century were not simply outcomes of “power transition” as described in the realist literature; indeed, they were inherently problems of knowledge and representations. As Howland points out, the earliest Chinese diplomats to Japan had hoped to mingle with like-minded Confucian gentry upon their arrival; far from being a tong wen zhi guo (a country sharing common civilization), by the 1880s their perception was that Japan had deeply inundated itself with Western ideas and things, hence turning itself into a rival more on the side of the Western powers than on the side of Confucian civilization.52 While the current IR literature on Sino-Japanese relations tends to focus on either “power” or “interest,” this study has illustrated how the Ryukyu debacle paved the way for transforming Chinese perceptions of Japan, or, to put it another way, the borders of a once-shared civilization. In the early twenty-first century, it is no easy task to conceive an alternative, more inclusive bordering practice (another “1992 consensus” may be neither feasible nor desirable for China and Japan) that can help reconcile the two countries without falling into the “Hegalian trap” (e.g. pre-1945 pan-Asianism that treated the West as an evil, and ultimately inferior, enemy). Nevertheless, in the spirit of Mizoguchi, it is time to reconsider territorial disputes such as the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue as a structural problem of human history wherein no victor can emerge without addressing the consequences of imposing one particular type of international society on another. References

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Sankei Shimbun, 31 January, 2012.

Asahi Shimbun, 22 February, 2012.

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SESSION 2

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION Bradley: I would like to thank Professors Sato, Chen, and Shimizu for their provocative talks and papers. I would now like to speak to some general points that I think are common to all three papers, and end with one big question.

Discussion of the Westphalia Consensus is both constituted and is the marker of rules in IR. We are now challenging that idea of Westphalia. At the same time, this is Kokusai Bunka (Intercultural Communication). So we believe in the interdisciplinary approach. The ranges of issues addressed are common to anthropologists as well as sociologists, geographers, historians, and perhaps even and especially, to area studies, although area studies have perhaps outlived its rationale with its origin in the Cold War.

I’d especially like to applaud Professors Shimizu and Chen for their historical analyses in this attempt to create a decolonized IR, or in their terminology, a post-Western IR. This attempt works on two levels. One is to put forward proposals for a non-Western IR, but at the time same critique those models as re-inscribing the pattern of hierarchy and hegemony that are evident in normative IR, whether we call that Western, or universalizing, or IR within the pathology of modernity. This contributes to what post-colonial scholar Vivek Dhareshwar has called the double movement, a meta-theory of Western theories that at the same time is constructing a narrative epistemology of non-Western experience. This relativized the West and its failure inevitable, some might say to adequately grasp the range of others in East Asia and elsewhere and help make them intelligible, while at the same time contributing to a cognitive production of non-Western IR.

The historicizing aspects of Professors Chen and Shimizu’s papers contribute to this while indicating the concept of heterogeneous time first discussed by another post-colonial scholar Partha Chatterjee, and which represents more simply these multiple aspects of modernity and tradition. In this schema, the resistance to the global neo-liberalization and capital market expansion is usually associated with the pre-modern. For example, Japanese farmers are the symbolic resistance to the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement. Here we have a kind of identification of pre-modern resistance, when in fact many segments of Japan’s population are resisting or at least questioning this agreement.

Another Taiwanese scholar, Kuan-Hsing Chen, has recently written about what he calls a triple movement of de-colonization, de-imperialization, and de-Cold War, and points out that it only comes about in this era we call globalization, which means the past 20 years. In his book Asia as Method, Chen makes many interesting observations. The main point, I think, is to suggest although this is also clear, I hope, from Professors Chen and Shimizu’s papers that although we are talking about events and analyses from quite a long time ago,

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these issues have not gone away. We have not yet completely de-colonized these relations in Asia.

According to Chen, the U.S. has historically been the symbolic liberator and hegemon in Asia due to its relative lack of colonies in the lead-up to World War II, a 50-year pattern that is presumably coming to an end with this disastrous, probably inconclusive ending to the war on terror in Western Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and increasingly Pakistan. So in turn, we now can look more optimistically to the possibility of this decolonization of knowledge structures, terminology, disciplines, academic divisions of labor, resources, methodologies, and so on.

The final point was prominently pointed out by Professor Sato but addressed by all three presenters. I think it brings these three papers together, and the attempt to create this post-Western IR by addressing aspects of colonial history that are now coming into view more clearly with the rise of China’s power in East Asia, and relates directly to the role of hegemony.

The term hegemony comes from the Italian scholar Antonio Gramsci, who wrote about it in prison during the 1930s. Gramsci’s writings are rather incomplete. There is a story that some of it was even written on toilet paper. We can believe that because he was in prison, and of course his jailors didn’t want to give him materials to write down his ideas, being the very dangerous man that he was. He managed to write some three thousand pages of material and introduced this idea of hegemony.

It is clear that his idea of hegemony was more than ideological control, but also included consent. Consent is molded by civil society through schools, media, and other types of institutions. He probably should have also included nation states as well, as has been pointed out by other commentators more recently. But the key point I would like to address to our three presenters is that he did mean it as something positive, not only negative control, or power, or domination as Professor Sato mentioned. He was looking for a positive form of resistance that could develop in the face of this kind of domination. The concept was dynamic and both historical and relational. So my question for all these papers is, how is it that hegemony continuously molded into this normative and structurally limited and delimiting nostalgia for nation states? Why is it that we still feel compelled in our world to pay allegiance to nation states in a world that we claim is increasingly globalized?

A recent article in Anthropology started me thinking about a similar problem, the problem of race (Japanese jinsh ). This concept has been critiqued perhaps I should say attacked in anthropology for the last 50 years, yet it still retains strong resonance with most people as a framing category. So in many contexts locally and globally, we seem unable to move beyond the idea of race. And the article was called The Remainders of Race by an author Ash Amin. It is this idea of remainders of races that maybe we can pose similarly for the nation state. What are the remainders of the nation state that militate against this creation of post-Western IR?

I believe that each of the authors has made a strong case that there is a necessity to push discussion in such a direction. I would urge them to make clear: what are the roadblocks? Is it complacent or compromised academic enterprises? Are we ourselves not aggressive enough

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in promoting our ideas? Or is it the lack of what Gramsci called organic intellectuals, intellectuals who have a kind of strong attachment to some sort of base of support in the working class or something else? Or is it the power of media that continually reinforces this idea of nation states aggressively competing against each other? Or is it just expedience that keeps us from moving beyond West and East into this more deeply decolonized IR, one that puts East Asia and its historical struggles in the center while simultaneous challenging those theories, power structures, and common sense that are inherited from the divisions of the world during the Cold War and its aftermath?

Chair:

Chen: Thank you, Professor Bradley. Your comment could perhaps be extended into a presentation in itself, but it’s also a kind of response to our three papers as a whole. I might need some time to incorporate the advice you offered here, especially on how we can achieve a deeper understanding of hegemony and its role in bringing about a less ethnocentric and more international study of IR.

I believe our three papers share a common concern with the production of knowledge. This discipline, compared to others such as the arts and humanities, has been relatively slow to address the problem of Eurocentrism. As far as I know, some subjects from communication studies to psychology and also international education have paid attention to essentially the same problem much earlier than IR people have. So what we are trying to do here is not just to increase the awareness of how knowledge is produced in this discipline and what kind of bias it contains, but also to see how such a bias becomes possible in the first place and how we might be able to resist it. The strategies we are trying to articulate are still somewhat fragmented, and this is something we need to think through when we start our third project, so we hope we can continue to seek advice and insight from you. I think it is a good strategy for IR researchers to consider the triple movement you quoted from Chatterjee. Shimizu: One underlying concern I have is, why do we have this particular need to understand international relations in terms of spatial metaphors? In post-Western IRT, non-Western IRT, or whatever we discuss about diversity in terms of knowledge construction, it’s always spatial. Are there any other ways we can imagine the world? Because we have gotten used to this pure process of spatialization, nation states are always at the center in geographical divisions. This of course gives you a clear focus and clear boundaries when you formulate the understanding of international relations, but one of the consequences is the virtualization of nation states. We regard nation states as if they have been here for ages, but actually it has only been something like 350 years.

We take nation states as given. It’s as if you were a small insect that lives just one day, and it happened to be raining that day, so you think the world is rainy. Nation states are like that, and the problem is we can’t arrive at any other reformulation or perspective, and we are

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struggling with that. We are in an era of rapid change in the structures of hegemony, but we are still not sure what exactly we are talking about. It’s easy to refer to American interests or Western interests, but they are all based upon geographical divisions. I think it is really important to move to something else in terms of formulating international relations, but still we’re not quite there.

Sato: Thank you very much for your stimulating comments. It’s especially interesting that you mention hegemony. One of the reasons we are trying to talk about international relations theory is related to China. Now China is beginning to talk about international relations by using terms based on their own frame of reference. That is why I say power produces knowledge and knowledge produces power.

Chair

Audience

Sato

Chair:

Bradley: Thank you very much for coming. We couldn’t have this symposium without the audience so thank you for staying long and interesting presentations I hope in a long day. Some of us are here all the way from the morning and I’d like to thank for Yawata-sensei. He did a hard work. Of course I’d like to thank for Afrasia stuff. They organized everything. We hope you’ll come for a next symposium in next year. We will continue this project for three years so please come back.

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APPENDIX

PROGRAMME

24 November, 2011 Thursday 10:30 Registration OPENNING REMARKS 11:05 - 11:10 Kosuke Shimizu (Director, Afrasian Research Centre) KEYNOTE SPEECH Chair Koichi Yawata (Ryukoku University) 11:15 -12:15 Chung-Won Suh (Former Chair, Han-Nara Party)

“Positive Proposal for Peace Process in Korea” 12:15 - 12:35 Discussion 12:35 - 13:20 Lunch Break SESSION 1 PEACE PROCESS IN KOREA Chair Koichi Yawata Discussant Sachio Nakato (Ritsumeikan University) 13:40 - 14:00 Jong-Chol Park (Gyeongsang National University)

“North Korea-China Economic Cooperation and the Current Situation of Border Development”

14:00 - 14:20 In-Taek Han (Jeju Peace Institute)

“Nuclear-Free Zone in North-East Asia: Old Ideas, New Possibilities” 14:20 - 14:40 Young-Seog Kim (Gyeongsang National University)

“Education for Unification in Korea: Approach from the Perspectives of Multiculturalism”

14:40 - 15:05 Discussion 15:05 - 15:20 Coffee Break

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SESSION 2 EAST-ASIAN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Chair Koichi Yawata Discussant William Bradley (Ryukoku University) 15:25 - 15:45 Kosuke Shimizu (Ryukoku University)

“Materializing ‘Non-Westernness’: The Kyoto School’s Struggles for Post Modernity and Their Consequences”

15:45 - 16:05 Shiro Sato (Kyoto University)

“Towards ‘Diversification’ of IR Theory from Asian and African Perspectives”

16:05 - 16:25 Ching-Chang Chen (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University)

“The ‘Loss’ of Ryukyu Revisited: China’s No Use of Compellence in the Sino-Japanese Dispute, 1879-1880”

16:25 - 16:35 Discussion CLOSING REMARKS 16:50 - 17:00 O-Jung Kwon (Ryukoku University)

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ORAGNISING COMMITTEE

The First Afrasian International Symposium Afrasian Research Centre

Ryukoku University

William Bradley Maria Reinaruth D. Carlos Takumi Honda Satoko Kawamura Viktoriya Kim O-Jung Kwon Shincha Park Kosuke Shimizu Koichi Yawata

Note: The names are in alphabetical order of the surnames.

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PARTICIPATIONS’ LIST

William Bradley Ryukoku University Ching-Chang Chen Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University In-Taek Han Jeju Peace Institute Young-Soeg Kim Gyeongsang National University O-Jung Kwon Ryukoku University Sachio Nakato Ritsumeikan University Jong-Chol Park Gyeongsang National University Shiro Sato Kyoto University Kosuke Shimizu Ryukoku University Chung-Won Suh Future Hope Alliance Koichi Yawata Ryukoku University

Note: The names are in alphabetical order of the surname. The institutional affiliations of the symposium

participants are as of 24 November 2011, when the event was held.

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PRESENTERS’ PROFILES Chung-Won SUH Former Chair, Han-Nara Party Chung-Won Suh is a chair of Future Hope Alliance, South Korea. Mr. Suh graduated from Department of Political Science and International Relations, Chung-Ang University in Soul, South Korea, 1967. Mr. Suh was a reporter of Chosun Ilbo (The Korea Daily News). Since 1981, he has been elected as a member of the 11th Korean National Assembly in Democratic Party of Korea (1981-83), a member of the 13th in Democratic Party of Unity (1988-92), and a member of the 14th in New Korea Party (1992-96). He was a member of 15th, worked as a floor leader of New Korea Party (1996-97) and the Secretary-General of Party of Han-Nara Party (1998). When he was a member of 16th, he served as a Chief of Campaign Headquarters (2000) and a chair of Han-Nara Party (2002-2003). He was a member of 18th, worked as a chair of Pro-Park Coalition (2008- ) (Pro-Park Coalition’s name changed to the Future Hope Alliance in 2010). He is a visiting professor, Ryukoku University in 2012.

His publications include A Promise Still a Long Way (in Korean), 1992, Over an Era of Charismatic (in Korean), 1998 and so on. He was awarded the Medal of Chungjo-Geunjung Hunjang in 1995. Jong-Chol PARK Department of Social Studies Education, Gyeongsang National University Jong-Chol Park is Associate Professor at Department of Social Studies Education, Gyeongsang National University, in Jinju, South Korea. Dr. Park has been conducting research on the history of Sino-North Korea Relations, IR of East Asia, and Area Studies of North Korea.

His recent publications include “How did Chinese Volunteer Army Withdraw from North Korea (1953-58),” “Joint Struggle of Sino-North Korea against Modern Revisionism (1962-64),” “A study on the Process of Normalization of Sino-North Korea Relations (1969-70)” and so on. Previously, Dr. Park held professorships at Chonnam National University and Chonbuk National University.

Dr. Park holds B.A.in Political Science from Chonbuk National University, Korea and M.A. degrees in Political Science from Tohoku University, Japan. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Chinese Academy of Social Science (Thesis Advisor: Prof. Wang Yizhou).

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In-Taek HANJeju Peace Institute In-Taek Han is Associate Research Fellow at the Jeju Peace Institute, an independent, non-profit think tank located in Jeju, South Korea. He is also Policy Advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Originally trained as an international political economy specialist, Dr. Han has been conducting research on nuclear strategy and public diplomacy. His recent publications include “US-Asia Relations beyond the Global Financial Crisis,” in A Pacific Nation (Japan Center for International Exchange, 2011), “Nuclear Rollback: Implications and Limitations of the South Africa Case” (in Korean), in Korea and World Politics, Spring 2011, and “Towards a Korean Model of Public Diplomacy: The Case for Country-specific, Scientific Public Diplomacy” (in Korean), in the Korea-Foundation commissioned report, 2010. Prior to joining the Jeju Peace Institute, he taught at Ewha Womans University, the University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of California, Davis.

Dr. Han received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley (Thesis Advisor: Prof. Barry Eichengreen), and both his M.A. in political science and B.A. in economics from Seoul National University. Young-Seog KIMDepartment of Social Science Education, Gyeongsang National University Young-Seog Kim is Professor at Department of Social Science Education, Gyeongsang National University. Dr. Kim received Ph.D. in Social Science Education from the University of Georgia, and his research interest includes Social Studies Curriculum Design, Higher-Order Thinking and Informal Reasoning, and Educational Policy. He has authored “Classroom culture and informal reasoning abilities among Korean high school students” (Award from American Educational Research Association, 2006), and The Hierarchal System of the Korean Universities: Diagnosis and Alternatives (Outstanding Books of the Year Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Republic of Korea, 2004). He also received Outstanding Social Studies Research Paper with Dr. Ronald, L. VanSickle,

Dr Kim currently services to Gyeongsang National University and Professional Associations as Vice Dean of the Planning Department (2011- ), Vice Dean of the College of Education (2007- ), and Member of Directory Board of the Korean Association for the Social Studies Education (2005- ).

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Kosuke SHIMIZUFaculty of Intercultural Communication, Ryukoku University Kosuke Shimizu is a director of the Afrasian Research Centre. Dr. Shimizu is also a professor of international relations at the faculty of Intercultural Communication in Ryukoku University, Japan. His major research is on International Political Economy (IPE), Political Philosophy, and Modern Japanese History.

His current research focuses on Japanese IR theory, and political theories of Nishida Kitaro and other intellectuals during the WWII. His work includes “Human security, governmentality, and sovereignty” in The Geopolitics of American Insecurity (Eds, Francois Debrix and Mark Lacy. Routledge, 2009), and “Nishida Kitaro and Japan’s Interwar Foreign Policies: War Involvement and Culturalist Political Discourses,” International Relations of Asia-Pacific 11(1), 2011. Shiro SATOCenter for Southeast Asian Studies, KyotoUniversity Shiro Sato is a researcher at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University, Japan. Dr. Sato received his M.A. in International Politics and Security Studies from the Department of Peace Studies at University of Bradford, U.K. (2003), and Ph.D. in International Relations from the Graduate School of International Relations, Ritsumeikan University (2007).

His research interests are nuclear issues in the context of Japan-U.S. alliance, and ‘Non-Western’ International Relations theory from Asian/African perspectives. He was a post-doctoral research fellow of the Afrasian Centre for Peace and Development Studies at Ryukoku University (2007-10), and a visiting research fellow at Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, Netherlands (2011). Ching-Chang CHEN The College of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University Ching-Chang Chen is an assistant professor at the College of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU), Japan. Before joining APU, Dr. Chen had served in one of Taiwan’s offshore islands near the People’s Republic of China as an army officer and obtained his PhD (International Politics, 2008) from Aberystwyth University, Wales.

His current research focuses on the relationship between threat perception and national identity construction in the Taiwanese context and the theories and practices of “non-Western” international relations in Asia. His recent journal articles can be found in Issues & Studies, Journal of Chinese Political Science, and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific.

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******************************************************** 2012 3 9

Afrasia Symposium Series Studies on Multicultural Societies No.1

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ISBN 978-4-904945-24-7

Afrasia Symposium Series Studies on Multicultural Societies No.1

Proceedings of the First Afrasian International Symposium

Asian International Relations and Peace in Korea

Edited by O-Jung Kwon, Kosuke Shimizu, William Bradley,

Masako Otaki and Takumi Honda

24 November 2011

Afrasian Research Centre Ryukoku Univerity (Phase 2), Shiga

ISBN 978-4-904945-24-7

Afrasian Research Centre, Ryukoku University

1-5 Yokotani, Seta Oe-cho, Otsu, ShigaJapan 520-2194