Bruce Cumings

The origins and development of the Northeast Asian political economy: industrial sectors, product cycles, and political consequences

Theories of the product cycle, hegemony, and the world system are used to analyze the creation and development of the Northeast Asian political economy in this century. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have each developed in a particular relationship with the others; the three taken together form a hierarchical, constantly interacting political-economic unit. During the period of colonial rule Japan was unique in building an imperial economic unit marked by a strong role for the state (whether in Tokyo or Taipei), by a tight, integral Unking of all three nations into a communications and transport network running toward the metropole, and by a strategy of both using the colonies for agricultural surpluses and then locating industries there. After 1945 a diffuse American hegemony replaced Japans unilateral system, but elements of the prewar model have survived: strong states direct economic development in South Korea and Taiwan (here termed “bureaucratic-authoritarian industrializing regimes†); both countries are receptacles for Japans declining industries; and both countries develop in tandem, if in competition, with each other. The most recent export-led competition has seen Taiwan succeed where South Korea has (temporarily?) failed, leaving Seoul in an export-led “trap,†burdened with rapidly increasing external debt. Taiwan, furthermore, has industrialized relatively free of social disruption, whereas Korean society resisted its transformation at Japanese hands and remains more rebellious today. There can be one Japan and one Taiwan, but not two or many of either, in the world economy.

Corporatism in North Korea

The proud heroic epic recorded in the annals of Juche Korea is the great history which can be created by none other dian the respected and beloved leader Comrade Kim Il Sung possessed of unexcelled extraordinary wisdom and outstanding art of leadership. His steadfast stand of Juche and revolutionary principle and unshakable iron will have been die source of the inexhaustible strengdi that adorned the history of the Korean revolution, most arduous and rigorous ever known, widi heroic events.

Historical dictionary of the Korean War

Preface Acronyms Maps The Dictionary Appendix A: Statistical Information Appendix B: Summary of Personnel Changes Appendix C: Chronology of the Korean War Selective Bibliography Index

Political Participation in Liberated Korea: Mobilization and Revolt in the Kyŏngsang Provinces, 1945-1950

Iolitical participation is not an easy concept to define, because the meaning it connotes depends on ones definition of politics and the political. Is the act of voting a sort of political participation? Of course it is, but is it a meaningful form of participation, and would not a determination of meaning resolve to ones understanding of the political? Is it participation when masses of peasants are trundled off to the polls under the watchful, and often coercive, ministrations of local police and government functionaries? Or does a peasant participate when he picks up an implement of his trade and beats a representative of central bureaucratic power over the head? Such are the questions that trouble the mind of the observer of South Korea in the late 1940s, years when nation-wide elections proceeded amidst elemental peasant violence against the organs of the state. Much of the recent literature in political science has tended to limit the concept of political participation to discrete acts such as voting, or to joining a group with the goal of influencing public policy. The focus has been on participation in more or less legitimated, democratic, Western systems; the presumption has been that the political system within which participation occurs is relatively stable and enduring, and that acceptance of basic rules of the game places certain outer limits on the behavior of participants. The analyst takes a reading of political participation by means of voting or survey data, but gen-

The Road to Confrontation: American Policy Toward China and Korea, 1947-1950.@@@The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947.

The Description for this book, The Origins of the Korean War, Volume I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947, will be forthcoming.

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) occupies the northern 55 per cent of the Korean peninsula, bordering on the People’s Republic of China and the USSR to the north, the Yellow Sea to the west, the Japan Sea to the east, and the Republic of Korea to the south. The peninsula’s position between three great powers has made it a bone of contention in strategic politics in North-east Asia for the past century; great-power rivalry caused the division of the country in the aftermath of the Second World War. Occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945, North Korea maintained a close relationship with Moscow until the Korean War began in 1950. The major Chinese commitment to the war in the autumn of 1950 raised the possibility of securing relative North Korean independence by playing upon Sino-Soviet rivalry; this strategy emerged in full bloom in the early 1960s, with open North Korean-Soviet polemics. Since then, the DPRK has maintained correct relations with both socialist powers, zig-zagging between them, although with a bias toward China.

The Failure of Democracy in South Korea, and: The Widening Gulf: Asian Nationalism and American Policy, and: Korean Phoenix: A Nation from the Ashes, and: Divided Korea: The Politics of Development, 1945-1972 (review)

Sungjoo Han, The Failure of Democracy in South Korea, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, 240 pp.

Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History

10. Selig S. Harrison, The Widening Gulf: Asian Nationalism and American Policy, New York: The Free Press, 1978, 468 pp.

The Origins of the Korean War

15.95. Michael Keon, Korean Phoenix: A Nation from the Ashes, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall International, 1977, 234 pp. Joungwon Alexander Kim, Divided Korea: The Politics ofDevelopment, 1945-1972, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard East Asian Monographs, distributed by Harvard University Press, 1975, 471 pp.,

North Korea: Another Country

8.50.