Japan–US–China Relations during the Trump Administration and the Outlook for East Asia

Recent political events, such as the UK decision to exit the EU and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, may indicate a transition from globalism to isolationism in world politics. This article reviews Japan-US-China relations and East Asian regional cooperation during the Obama administration and contrasts them with prospects during the Trump administration in the new political climate.     

Beyond de-nuclearization: debating deterrence and North Korea in Asia’s new nuclear age

ABSTRACT

Review of : Jeffrey Lewis, The 2020 Commission report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks against the United States: a speculative novel (Mariner: New York, 2018); Van Jackson, On the Brink, Trump, Kim and the Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Sung Chull Kim and Michael D. Cohen, eds., Entering the new era of deterrence, North Korea and nuclear weapons (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017); and Victor D. Cha, and David C. Kang, Nuclear North Korea, a debate on engagement strategies, second edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).     

East Asia: Chile’s Missed Opportunity?

East Asia is regarded in Chile as an opportunity to achieve economic development, because economic integration would place it in East Asia’s value chains. This article suggests that the results of Chile’s economic strategy toward East Asia, based on trade agreements, have had a predominantly quantitative success. The value of exports toward East Asia has indeed increased impressively. However, the qualitative results are less impressive. These agreements are not adequate to achieve structural change, which would enable the Chilean economy to move along East Asia’s value chains. Statistical evidence confirms that Chile is still reduced to a commodity supplier and at the periphery of the chain. To change this situation, Chile has to design first a strategy of how to offer East Asia goods and services beyond commodities. This means looking beyond trade agreements.     

Working Overtime in East Asia: Convergence or Divergence?

Working long hours has become a routinised part of life in East Asia. The different patterns of overtime across this region are understudied, however. This study represents a first systematic attempt to analyse overtime and its determinants in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China by testing hypotheses that specify the distinctive influences of employment status and job contracts on work hours. Class exploitation, post-industrialism and flexibility theories are mobilised to identify distinctive but supplementary factors in long working hours. Using data from a recent four-country survey, a Tobit regression analysis of full-time workers’ hours reveals that employers and self-employed people work longer hours than hired workers across this region. Despite this convergence, there is a contrast across occupations. In Japan, overtime is positively associated with occupational prestige, while a reverse pattern operates in China, where low-skilled workers work more overtime. Contract workers in the private sector in South Korea and China also have longer overtime when compared to public sector employees. In sum, this study highlights more divergence than convergence of working conditions within East Asia.     

North Korea’s foreign relations: Diplomacy of promotive adaptation

Dramatic changes in East Europe and the Soviet Union resulted in North Korea’s doubling its effort to shield and defend itself from disturbances emanating from the outside. Yet, President Kim Il Sung of North Korea has also opted for new diplomatic moves of realignment in existing ties with China and the Soviet Union and is also seeking new rleations with Japan and the United States. North Korea’s diplomatic adaptation in 1990–91, such as its balancing diplomatic acts vis-à-vis the major allies and adversaries, is examined, and so is the North Korean dilemma of reconciling national interests and ideology. While Pyongyang’s nonaligned nations diplomacy is temporarily stalled, its Un diplomacy is likely to be activated as a result of the simultaneous entry into the United Nations with South Korea in 1991.     

Vietnam–Japan Relations in the Context of Building an East Asian Community

As the regionalism in East Asia has largely been characterized by networks of bilateral relations, the linkages between regional factors and bilateral relations in East Asia were clearly witnessed in the Cold War and the post-Cold War period. As a new period of regional cooperation has been ushered in under the so-called “East Asian Community” framework, it is essential to note that such interplay continues to be one of the most prominent characteristics in East Asia. The case study analysis of bilateral relations between Vietnam, a developing member in the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Japan, the region's leading economic power in Northeast Asia, provides an insightful look at the positive relationship between the regional conditions and bilateral relations in the new East Asia context. More importantly, bilateral relations can make significant contribution to shaping the regional setting, instead of being passively affected as in the past.     

Downsizing Hegemony: Alliance,Domestic Politics,and American Retrenchment in East Asia, 1969–2017

By investigating the domestic debate over the US troop reduction in Japan and South Korea for the past several decades, this article explores variation in the Asian allies’ reactions to American retrenchment. Instead of inferring regional responses solely from external security environments, this paper pays particular attention to domestic political contexts in which different political actors compete to frame the meanings and consequences of the US military presence, with implications for alliance dynamics in East Asia. I argue that along with the perceived levels of external threats, considerations of foreign policy autonomy and political legitimacy shape the ways in which the two Asian allies have responded to the US retrenchment.     

Seeking a New Role: Japan’s Middle East Policy under Shinzo Abe

With his frequent travels to the Middle East, more than all other Japanese leaders in the past, Shinzo Abe had been destined to ineluctably play a distinctive role in redefining his country’s foreign policy approach toward the region. Essentially, when Abe returned to power for a second time in late 2012, he succeeded to subsequently establish a relatively stable and long-term government which strived to critically reappraise some highly contentious elements of Japan’s internal and external policies. Reassessing Japan’s conventional low-profile orientation to the Middle East was particularly a major objective of the Abe government because the region had turned out to be closely and dubiously connected to some pivotal political and security reforms which Abe had long pursued to achieve domestically. By primarily doubling down Japan’s political engagement in different parts of the Middle East, therefore, Abe took advantage of what his country had capitalized in the region in more recent times to especially accelerate the accomplishment of some other political and security he favored ardently.     

Democratization in the Middle East and North Africa: A More Ambidextrous Process?

Democratization is always an ambidextrous process. On the one hand, it triggers a universalistic set of norms, events, processes and symbols. On the other hand, democratization involves a much more particularistic set of ‘realistic’ adaptations to the structures and circumstances of individual countries. In analysing the structures and conjunctures of countries in the Arab World during the past decades, scholars looked at them from the perspective of persistent authoritarianism. This essay exploits democratization theory – as well as its converse ? by analysing the universalistic set of events, processes and symbols of democratization elsewhere in the world, and then identifying the particularistic characteristics of timing, location and coincidence that seem likely to affect the political outcome of regime change in the countries affected by recent popular uprisings in the Arab World.     

One Thing Leads to Another: Making Sense of East Asia’s Repeated Tensions

Both the East and Southeast China Seas have been home to a series of repeated episodes of tension between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its neighbors. Much of the existing literature either treats such episodes as isolated data points or as the manifestation of underlying structural factors. In this paper, we argue that repeated tensions can have important effects on subsequent interactions, generating emergent dynamics with dangerous consequences. What is more, we believe those dynamics to already be in play in several of the disputes within East Asia today. Examining recent developments in PRC-Japan and PRC-Philippines relations, we seek to shed light on how iterated episodes of tension are shaping the trajectory of interactions in both dyads. We believe these insights can inform efforts to understand relations in the region and beyond, given the growing frequency and intensity of repeated tensions among actors.     

State building in North Korea: from a ‘self reliant’ to a ‘military-first’ state

Dr Soyoung Kwon has just obtained her doctorate at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. She is now Research Associate Fellow at the East Asia Institute, Cambridge.     

North Korea’s Resurgence and China’s Rise: Implications for the Future of Northeast Asian Security

Today, Northeast Asia’s security situation is changing rapidly. North Korea is reviving and China’s power is growing at an alarming rate. While the U.S. continues to suffer diplomatically and militarily in the Middle East and from international terrorism, China’s and North Korea’s power is likely to futher increase, polarizing the Northeast Asian security structure, with South Korea, Japan (and Taiwan) all allied with the U.S. versus North Korea allied with China. The liberal democracies should pursue peace with North Korea and China to preclude the situation from aggravating, but should be ready in the longer term to meet, in diverse ways including strengthening their alliances, the challenges posed by rising powers.

Chinese and Japanese development co-operation: South–South,North–South,or what?

This article compares the evolution and characteristics of Chinese and Japanese aid, assessing the impact of their aid policies in sub-Saharan Africa from the 1950s to the present. It argues that China and Japan's aid programmes share more similarities than dissimilarities. Both pursue aid strategies that spread allocations across a region rather than concentrating upon specific countries. The article seeks to clarify the following questions. In what way are Chinese and Japanese aid strategies different from each other and Western donors? Should their aid be seen as a form of South–South co-operation that provides an alternative to the West's hegemony in Africa? Or is aid from these donors simply another strategy to control African resources and state elites in the guise of a partnership of equals?