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Individual Papers: International Relations and International Norms
Organizer and Chair: Paul Hutchcroft, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Meeting at the Summit: Regional Institutions and Transnational Activism in East Asia
Kim Reimann, Georgia State University
This paper looks at the role of regional multilateral organizations and summits in instigating and mobilizing transnational activism at the regional level in East Asia. It argues that in the past ten years regional political summits and annual meetings of regional institutions have become important focal points for activists from different countries within a geographical region, bringing them together and providing opportunities to promote their various causes. Through a survey of key regional summits and official meetings East Asia in the past decade, the paper analyzes how regional organizations have become a rallying point for contentious politics and a location where NGOs, labor organizations and grassroots groups from different countries in East Asia gather and present their claims. The paper examines transnational mobilization efforts by NGOs and other civil society organizations centered on the meetings and summits of the following institutions: the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM). It describes and explores the relatively new phenomenon of social activism at the regional level in East Asia.
Globalization Directed by Past: The Results of the Economic Boom in the 1920s in Iida -Shimoina Area, Nagano Prefecture, Japan
Hiroshi Onitsuka, Iida City Institute of Historical Research, Japan
This paper discusses the fact that the migration patterns of Iida-Shimoina Area during both W.W.II and the present time were strongly affected by its economic boom of the 1920s caused by Japanese silk export to the world market. As the area produced the largest amount of silk in Japan, it enjoyed prosperity and changed into a consuming society; people’s life became extravagant and the numbers of brothels and bars increased. But the Great Depression damaged its economy. Statistically the damage was less serious than the national average for its high agricultural productivity. People just felt so for the gap between before and after. Following the wartime national policy, the local governments strongly pushed Manchurian emigration from 1930s. They told residents that Manchuria was a paradise and that Iida-Shimoina was impoverished for its scarce of land. The campaign took advantage of the “poorness” they felt, and the area sent the largest number of Manchuria emigrants in Japan and many of them were left there after the war. Only after Japan and China resumed a diplomatic relation they could come back to Japan, accompanying their spouses and their relatives. The amusement area formed during the 1920s economic boom started to hire Filipinas as hostesses. Now three percent of the residents of Iida City are foreign citizens (twice of the national average), and Chinese and Filipinos have taken the second largest share and the third respectively among them. Thus the globalization of the area has been strongly influenced by the past.
The Abolitionist Movement in Death Penalty-friendly Asia: Comparing Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan
Sangmin Bae, Northeastern Illinois University
This paper discusses how and to what extent the international norm concerning the prohibition of the death penalty plays a role in East Asian democracies. In stark contrast to the worldwide abolitionist trend, the death penalty remains most entrenched in Asia, where more than 90 percent of all known executions take place. Asian countries appear to emulate each other in adopting a zero-tolerance approach to crime and robustly embracing the death penalty. As Franklin Zimring put it, contrary to Europe, which is a “death-penalty-free zone,” the Asian continent is almost an “abolition-free zone.” Why does the norm against the death penalty, which is apparently so important for most parts of the world, seem to have no impact on East Asia? How do domestic factors – political leadership, public opinion, and institutional structures – contribute to the rejection of the universally promoted human rights norm? With regard to the three major democracies in East Asia at different stages of the anti-death penalty movement (South Korea, most active in the abolitionist movement; Taiwan in the middle; and Japan least active), it investigates what accounts for the current varying impact of the norm in the same region. Analyzing how public and elite opinion interact with each other on capital punishment and what roles domestic institutional structures play, this paper aims to assess norm diffusion and to measure the norm’s capabilities and limitations for helping to shape new death penalty policy in this region.
Mutual Suspicions, Strategic Competition, Trading Partners or Wary Neighbors—A Realistic Assessment of India-China Relations
Srini Sitaraman, Clark University
India-China relations have been frosty and conflictual since the ill-fated 1962 militarized border conflict. Mutual relations particularly took a precarious turn after India conducted nuclear tests in 1998. However, over the last few years Sino-Indian relations seems to have matured greatly. This is reflected in the near disappearance of accusative rhetoric and negative commentary in both countries. Moreover, both nations have conducted high-level diplomatic exchanges and decided to pursue a series of formal dialogues to resolve outstanding territorial disputes. Bilateral trade between India and China has grown to 20 billion dollars in 2006 from only 1 billion few years back. However, mutual suspicions remain, India’s global ambitions, particularly its desire to secure a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, modernize its nuclear arsenal with the help of US assistance, strategic competition to acquire overseas oil production facilities, and India’s moral support to the Tibetan independence movement continues to irk China. Similarly, China’s support of the Maoist rebels in Nepal and Northeast India, its military relationship with Pakistan, and the People’s Republic growing economic, political, and military stature continue to produce deep anxiety among the Indian foreign policy community. This paper seeks to analyze the current status of Sino-Indian relations with a specific focus on the recent rapprochement. Importantly, this paper aims to understand whether India and China will remain wary neighbors and strategic competitors or become genuine Asian partners with focus on trade, development, and cooperation.
The Administrative Law of the Qing Empire and Its Incomprehensible China: Law and the Hybridized Modernity under the Japanese Colonialism
Cheng-Yi Huang, University of Chicago
Japanese colonialism has provided abundant resource to examine the nuanced correlation of the circulation of western legal knowledge and the informal influence of Japanese Empire in East Asia. In this paper, I am going to articulate the relation between Japanese colonial investigation into Taiwanese old customs and the ambition of Meiji intellectual and politicians to modernize China by redefining traditional Chinese law and institution. By analyzing the producing process of the “Administrative Law of Qing Empire” (Shinkoku Gyoseiho), we would realize that the colonial enterprise of customary investigation in fact had been intertwined with a much greater project of civilizing Chinese everyday life by Japanese interpretation of the modern European law. Meanwhile, we would see how an original legal sensibility had been reformulated and given new meaning to conform to the new politico-juridical order. The effort of Japanese colonial enlightenment project was actually trying to reorient the East Asian legal sensibility which has been dominated by traditional Chinese law over generations to a locus of the hybridized modernity. To some extent, the analysis of Shinkoku Gyoseiho has gone beyond the translation of terminology or certain ideas like liberty or constitutional state from the West. Rather, we would see a multi-facet confrontation of different “worlds of meaning” in this monumental work. Last but not least, the confession of the Japanese legal scholars lamenting the incomprehensibility of China after they completing the investigation would lead us to a deeper contemplation on how Japanese represented themselves by such ambitious works and reinforced/reinformed the Japanese consciousness during the formation of Japanese Empire. The paths of redefining Chinese administration and reformulating Japaneseness had crossed each other at this moment.