The Politics of Child Prostitution in South Africa

This paper argues that policies, interventions and discourses pertaining to child prostitution have been guided by overarching political agendas that have masked the underlying structural basis of this phenomenon. These political agendas have shifted in accordance with the locus of power, control and resistance in South Africa since the nineteenth century. On the basis of a historical analysis this paper identifies distinct periods in which child prostitution was used to legitimate policies in favour of social control rather than social development. In the colonial period, child prostitution was used to justify stricter controls on adolescent and adult women's sexuality and movement by colonial and traditional patriarchal authorities. In the colonial and Apartheid periods, policies on child prostitution were informed by fears of miscegenation and sexually transmitted diseases, which were used to support the racist and oppressive legislation of sexual behaviour. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the issue of child prostitution was ‘discovered’ in the press both to deflect attention from the incarceration of juveniles during the 1987 State of Emergency and as the basis upon which liberals attacked the Apartheid state. In the latter half of the 1990s and 2000s, it was used by the African National Congress (ANC) government to attack the moral legacy left by the Apartheid state and in turn deflect responsibility for the root causes of this phenomenon. Furthermore, child prostitution was used to support stricter controls on adult sex workers and on the movement of undocumented migrants. This politicised and sensationalist approach has undermined detailed analysis of the root causes of this phenomenon and children's motivation for engaging in prostitution. For many children in South Africa it has been one means by which they can exercise their agency and power in order to ensure their survival in the face of high levels of socio-economic deprivation and rapid socio-cultural change. This paper therefore proposes a shift from policies and interventions centred on social control to social development, based on an in-depth understanding of children's agency, risk and resilience.     

Repression and development in the periphery: South Korea

Abstract

American social scientists have recently expressed deep concern over the stare of “human rights” in the third world The source of this concern can be pinpointed precisely as the “new moralism” of the Carter Administration. Like Mr Carter, these social scientists address the problem by isolating human rights as a distinct phenomenon which can be dealt with in the abstract, detached from the root characteristics of the political economy within which it occurs. The typical analysis focuses on the individual dictator, who, ostensibly, has available to him a range of choices on the amount of social control that is to be maintained. For example, if the United States were to exert pressure and to discontinue aid, then, according to this view, the dictator would restore democratic rights.     

Neo-liberalism in post-crisis South Korea: Social conditions and outcomes

South Korea's post-war development pattern has been considered to be a developmental state model, where the basic institutional framework was the “state-banks-chaebol nexus.” Since the financial crisis of 1997, however, the country has been swiftly transformed from the developmental state model and has acquired more neo-liberal characteristics. This has been made possible through intense reforms implemented by the post-crisis South Korean government under the IMF's guidance and encouraged by domestic political, ideational, and social conditions. Among those, significant conditions for this swift transformation include chaebols' legitimacy problems, neo-liberal consensus among the domestic elite, democracy hijacked by neo-liberalism, and the role of some NGOs. As social outcomes of the transformation, we find the enlarged presence of transnational capital, increased labour flexibility, inequality and poverty, and an increasing cultural gap in the country. Huge social costs of such neo-liberal transformation necessitate an alternative path of political economy.     

布什政府的对朝政策及其影响

2001年6月6日美国总统布什发表声明宣布美国将恢复同朝鲜接触,这表明布什政府的对朝鲜政策正式出台.布什政府对朝政策构成美国全球战略调整的重要组成部分,它将对朝鲜半岛和东北亚地区形势产生重要影响.但因目前美国全球战略调整方向还不十分清晰,布什政府的对朝政策还会有许多调整空间.因而今后朝鲜半岛和东北亚局势将会经历一段不确定时期.     

朝鲜半岛永久和平机制的构建:动力与困境

建立朝鲜半岛永久和平机制是相关国家一直在努力探讨的问题.伴随着朝核问题的发生、地区安全机制的探索和东北亚地区秩序的构筑,这个问题重新引起各国的重视.特别是在朝鲜核试验之后,建立和平机制更成为紧迫问题.永久和平机制的建立与半岛南北统一问题、大国战略安排以及地区秩序重构等紧密相关,各国既存在共同利益也有难以简单调和的分歧.和平机制的建立不可能一蹴而就.对于各国来说,需要冷静思考,长期研究,共同协商,真诚行动;立足于机制的有效性,探讨机制的合法性,认识机制的局限性;不断调和矛盾,预防冲突,共同探寻缔造和平的路径.     

Regional integration: Japan and South Korea in America's Asian policy

Abstract

Ever since the late 1940s, U.S. Asian policy sought to use the southern half of the Korean peninsula and Japan to create a configuration of military and economic power which would enable the United States to contain the might of both China and the Soviet Union, while simultaneously insuring its own hegemony over Pacific-Asia. This basic strategy, which may be termed the regional integration of U.S. imperialism, turned on making industrialized Japan dependent on the U.S., and economically backward South Korea dependent, ultimately, on Japan. Its psychological roots lay in a traditional, shared Japanese-American ruling class attitude of contempt for the Koreans and the other formerly colonized peoples of Asia. If Theodore Roosevelt exemplified such an outlook early in this century, John Foster Dulles was its exemplar by the middle of the century. Dulles's first memorandum on Japan, dated June 6, 1950, and summarized by Frederick Dunn, stated that “… it might be possible to capitalize on the Japanese feeling of racial and social superiority to the Chinese, Koreans and Russians, and to convince them that as part of the free world they would be in equal fellowship with a group which is superior to the members of the Communist world.”     

China and Korea: The godfather,part three

This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the People’s Republic of China, in dealing with the situation on the Korean peninsula, rules out North Korea’s imminent collapse and continues to stabilize the Kim Chong-il regime as a buffer against U.S. and South Korean advances. It suggests that Beijing has started to view short- or medium-term reunification on Seoul’s terms as a realist scenario and has been trying to influence the accompanying shift in the Northeast Asian power equation to its advantage. If this strategy succeeds, reunification would be brought about under Chinese auspices, with anti-Japanese or anti-American sentiments in both Koreas being purposely or automatically activated so as to promote a sense of national identity.     

Democracy and development: With Special attention to Korea

Academic discussions on the relationship between regime type and economic growth of developing countries have been drawn to three linkages, the contribution of a certain type of political authoritarianism to rapid industrial transformation, the trend towards democracy after a long period of sustained economic development, and possible negative economic consequences of democratization itself. There are theoretical reasons to support the first two assertions, but the third proposition is less tenable. The case of Korea shows that democratic changes have resulted in higher consumption, have induced inflationary policy, and have led to wage increases in excess of productivity gains. However, these might well be transitional rather than steady-state phenomena. Political learning can prevent young democracies from becoming captives to distributional coalitions.     

韩国文化外交：路径与启示

韩国文化外交是其软实力的重要来源和体现。韩国文化外交卓有成效,其路径主要有政府、企业和社会组织三个方面。韩国文化外交的启示在于：经济现代化是文化外交的物质保障;政治民主化是文化外交的制度保障;完善的社会建设是文化外交可持续发展的内生力;明确的文化产业政策是文化外交的直接推动力。     

Religion and Political Tolerance in South Korea

This paper examines the relationship between individuals' religiosity and its impact on political tolerance in South Korea. Based on the results of survey data analysis, we find that there are inter-denominational as well as intra-denominational differences of religiosity that influence levels of political tolerance among South Koreans. In terms of the inter-denominational differences (the ethnoreligious thesis), we find that Buddhists tend to be more tolerant than Protestants, and Protestants tend to have the lowest level of political tolerance in South Korea. In terms of the intra-denominational differences (the culture wars thesis), religious traditionalists have a lower level of political tolerance than religious modernists in South Korea. This paper argues that there is a statistically significant relationship between individuals' religiosity and their level of political tolerance, and that a composite model (combining the ethno-religious model and the culture wars model) is the best way of investigating such a relationship in the Korean context.     

韩国劳资关系:从对抗走向协商

1987年之前,韩国政府直接扶植企业发展、压制工会。民主化运动爆发后,劳资矛盾出现井喷现象,形成了劳资对抗的传统。90年代韩国的政治、经济、社会环境开始期待协商型劳资关系,但是政府缺乏经验和能力、企业和工会没有彻底完成意识转变。1997年金融危机以及全球竞争的压力为韩国建立协商型劳资关系提供了契机。在工会较为信任的"进步阵营"执政的情况下,在全社会都认识到了劳资对抗、僵硬的劳资关系的负面影响后,韩国政府倡导建立了自上而下的劳资政协商机制。尽管韩国还未彻底走出劳资矛盾的泥潭,但劳资关系向协商转换的趋势已经非常明显,而且在2008年的经济危机中又有了发展。     

Economic voting in South Korea: The 1988 assembly elections

The 1988 Assembly elections in South Korea provide an opportunity to explore whether voting based on short-term economic fluctuations was a feature of the elections. The research design regresses party votes from a large sample of the 224 electoral districts against several well-known determinants of Korean voting behavior (regionalism, urban-rural residence, and social class), as well as district unemployment rates and levels and changes in income. With traditional explanations of voting behavior held constant, income variables had no apparent influence on the vote. However, the coefficients for unemployment rates are large, statistically significant, and in a direction entirely consistent with the theory of rational economic voting. There are grounds for including short-term economic variables in future modeling of Korean electoral behavior.