Studying North Korea through North Korean migrants: lessons from the field

This article examines the use of North Korean defectors’ accounts as a source of information for studying the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Information from defectors fills a vital knowledge gap and improves our understanding of North Korean politics, economics, and society. Witness accounts and interview data collected from people who were born in North Korea but have since left have been widely used by journalists, government agencies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and academics. There are, however, serious methodological issues in collecting, organizing, and interpreting information derived from defectors’ accounts. Selection and demographic biases, power relations between researchers and interviewees, monetary incentives, and language barriers are among those issues. We propose focus group discussions and participatory observation as complementary methods of data collection to mitigate the shortfalls of relying on individual interviews.     

NORTH KOREA’S PERSPECTIVES IN ITS ARGUMENT FOR A PEACE TREATY

In recent years, North Korea’s military provocations have been making the headlines. Beyond its harsh actions and remarks, North Korea persistently mentions ‘peace’ through a demand for a ‘peace treaty’. This may sound paradoxical. However, the origin of the North Korean argument for a peace treaty dates back to the Korean War (1950–53). Since then, North Korea has continued to raise the issue of a peace treaty in a consistent manner and the arguments have displayed similar logic and terminology throughout. It is this consistency and similarity that this article examines: through reviewing North Korea’s original texts, this article attempts to undercover North Korea's perspectives reflected in its argument for a peace treaty.     

South Korean views on Japan's constitutional reform under the Abe government

In this Special Section, this article reviews South Korean views on Japan's ‘peace’ Constitution and the Abe government's attempts at constitutional reform. It identifies three different understandings among South Korean academics on why Japan is escalating attempts to revise the Constitution under the Abe government. An in-depth analysis demonstrates that all three perspectives pay specific attention to Japan's constitutional reform in relation to security policy changes. However, they differ in assessing the impact of Japan's constitutional reform on South Korea as well as how South Korea should deal with such a change. A minority opinion considers Japan's ‘remilitarisation’ through constitutional revision as conducive to South Korean security interests by increasing deterrence against North Korea, whereas the dominant opinion is that any attempt to revise the Constitution could be in and of itself a potential threat to South Korea's security due to a lack of trust attributed to unresolved historical conflicts between Korea and Japan. However, all three approaches pay hardly any attention to the positive role of Japan's peace Constitution while Japan's peace Constitution might provide a regional peace model in Northeast Asia.     

韩国文化产业的发展及启示

在新经济时代背景下,整个人类社会环境发生了极为深刻的变化,文化在综合国力竞争中的地位和作用更加凸显,发展文化产业也是推进现代经济社会可持续发展的必然要求。当前,很多国家都把文化产业作为核心产业来发展,把文化贸易作为国家战略来推进。其中,韩国自亚洲金融危机以来,十分重视文化产业的发展,视之为支柱产业。韩国的文化产业管理与发展模式,是政府诱导、私人兴办。实践证明,这种模式取得了巨大的成功,为韩国创造了巨大的经济价值,赢得了国际声誉。因此,深入分析韩国文化产业的发展机制,并加以借鉴,对创新和发展我国文化产业具有重要的现实意义。     

RISE OF THE DISLOYAL: INCREASING RESENTMENT IN NORTH KOREA

Why has loyalty to the Kim Family Regime and the Worker’s Party diminished over the past twenty years despite a rise in the average standard of living, greater social mobility, and a regime policy of benign neglect towards marketization? Unthinkable in the Kim Il Sung era, the increase in expressions of resentment toward the North Korean authorities represents a shift in the ideology, behavior, and motivation of the population. Four critical factors have heightened tensions between state and society in North Korea, leading to a reduction in loyalty among the general population. The author considers the impact of labor mobilizations, the declining importance of party membership, the influence of foreign media, and the rise of rent seeking and extractive policies. While all play a role, it is important and possible to identify the primary cause. Extractive policies and rent-seeking position the regime and the people in a directly adversarial relationship. All tiers and agencies of the government have become complicit in efforts to siphon off profits, control market actors through crony capitalism, rent seek, over-regulate, and compete against private market actors, causing the residents to express frustration and resentment towards a government that does not have their interests at heart.     

Lessons from “Around the world with Oprah”: Neoliberalism,race, and the (geo)politics of beauty

On 6 October 2004, viewers went “Around the world with Oprah” and received a rare glimpse inside the lives of 30-year-old women from 17 different countries. When Oprah turned her gaze (and that of middle-class American housewives) eastward, she highlighted South Korean women's penchart for plastic surgery. Oprah's “trip” to South Korea is emblematic of Western discourse surrounding South Korean Women's plastic surgery consumption, most of which focuses on cosmetic eyelid surgery or the sangapul procedure as it is called in South Korea. Given its widespread popularity, the sangapul procedure has come to signify South Korean women's acquiescence to not only patriarchal oppression but racial oppression as well. This essay goes beyond the psychologization of South Korean women in order to ask what such psychological musings obscure about the very political nature of beauty itself. Using “Around the world with Oprah” as a starting point, then, this essay examines beauty at the intersection of race, technology, and (geo)politics in order to show that, in an era of neoliberalism, plastic surgery is often rationalized as an investment in the self towards a more normal, if not better future. As this essay suggests, such a framing of plastic surgery is contingent on Oprah's production of neoliberal feminism based on liberal notions of choice. Given her global reach, these neoliberal feminist subjects are not produced equally, however, but are discursively constructed along a First World/Third World divide.     

美国战略调整背景下朝鲜半岛地缘战略困境的演变与突破

作为美国全球战略的重要一环,美国亚太再平衡战略引发东北亚地缘战略形势的陡然紧张,也使朝鲜半岛局势在一波三折中日趋扑朔迷离。围绕朝鲜第三次核试验出现的中美日俄韩朝的双边和多边博弈不断升温,朝鲜半岛无核化的传统安全与非传统安全风险相互交织。要突破朝鲜半岛地缘紧张加剧和战略困境加深的窘况,必须坚持多边框架解决原则、努力落实安全承诺和不断深化经贸合作。     

韩国农村行政管理及制度建设的启示

本文结合作者的出访考察，从多个层面介绍并分析了韩国农村行政管理与制度建设，包括行政管理体系、郡政府的主要职能、管理权的制衡和约束机制，由此展示了韩国农村行政管理制度改革和建设的丰富成果，这是韩国农村社会和谐稳定发展的重要原因，其中有些成功经验值得学习和借鉴。     

Family strategy of economic inequality among brothers in Korean rural society, 1690–1795

This article examines how inequality among brothers was practised as a family strategy in Korean south-eastern rural society from the end of the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century as a response to local economic changes. The Wolchon area experienced a process of downward levelling in this period. Using the household registers and land registers, the authors reconstituted 58 families with brothers who held land and 406 families who possessed nobi (‘serfs’ or ‘slaves’) for further examination. As a family strategy, most of these families attempted a strategy of unequal inheritance that resulted in maintaining high economic status for only one of the children among all the brothers. This child, in most cases, would be the eldest son, but also could be another son. The degree of inequality among brothers with regard to nobi-holding declined over time. Most families successfully maintained inequality, and through this family status, by efficiently practising the unequal inheritance strategy, while some families failed to keep the same level of inequality by the end of the eighteenth century. The degree of inequality among brothers is intimately connected to family property size. Each family sought its own strategy to suit the actual economic condition of the family. While very wealthy families attempted to give a similar inheritance to all brothers to provide an equal chance to each of them, less wealthy families reduced the survival chances of some children by the concentration of property given to only one child.     

中日甲午战争与东北亚国际关系的变化

中日甲午战争中清朝的惨败给中国社会带来空前严重的社会危机,大大加深了中国社会半殖民地化的程度。而战胜国日本则国力日益强大,跻身于资本主义列强的行列。甲午战争后,日本的崛起和扩张加剧了东亚地区国家关系的变化,给这一地区的国际关系带来直接而深远的影响。东亚国际秩序由以中国为中心的传统宗藩朝贡体系向近代殖民条约体系转型,中朝日近代新型的国家关系逐渐建立起来,传统的宗藩体系土崩瓦解。本文以中日甲午战争的爆发与传统华夷秩序的瓦解为切入点,探讨甲午战争后东亚传统邻邦中朝日三国新型近代国家关系建立始末及其对三国关系产生的影响。