Chinese Communism & American Democracy
A Tale of Two Political Systems
The
new Age of Globalization that followed the end of the Cold War (which
was marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of the
Soviet Union in 1991) began on a note of exhilarating optimism for many
English-speaking people — sustained by an unprecedented decade-long
digital-revolution-fueled economic expansion in the U.S. in the 1990s —
that a so-called “Washington consensus” centering around the model
of free market capitalism had universally triumphed. Democracy, which
was popularly (though mistakenly) assumed to be almost synonymous with
capitalism, was spreading globally, and it was even predicted that “the
end of history” had been reached, as liberal democracy and free market
capitalism promised to become the final stage of human development.
Such
predictions may still prove correct in the long term, but the Great
Recession of 2008-2009 and growing economic inequality in the developed
world have somewhat dampened enthusiasm. ... [E]conomic globalization
sometimes benefits multinational corporations and technocratic
multinational organizations that are not necessarily directly
answerable to democratic electorates, while the looming rise of China —
even thought it was made possible in the first place by the
preexisting international order and in some senses validates its
triumph — still poses a challenge to the “Washington consensus,” not
least because the People’s Republic of China remains politically an
unreformed Leninist system that shows no sign of embracing multi-party
democracy. (HEA, 399)
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The North & the South
A Tale of Two Koreas
On July 27, 1953, an armistice was agreed to bring an end to a bloody
three-year war fought between a divided Korean peninsula and the
American and communist forces backing either side. Decades later, no
peace treaty has been signed. Tourists who visit the demilitarized zone,
or DMZ, that separates North and South Korea
bear witness to the last frozen battlefield of the Cold War, a conflict
that to this day defines and shapes the societies living on either side
of the 38th parallel. South Korea has emerged as an economic
powerhouse, a global trendsetter whose companies and pop stars are
celebrated across continents and whose population is perhaps the world’s
most Internet savvy. North Korea,
on the other hand, is the least-connected place on earth, a nation
built entirely on the propaganda and brutality of its totalitarian,
post-Stalinist regime. TIME spoke with Sheila Miyoshi Jager, a professor
of East Asian studies at Oberlin College in Ohio and author of the new
book Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea, on how a 20th century war continues to influence 21st century geopolitics in one of the most strategic corners of the planet. (world.time/after the war)
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[W]hile South Korea is now a noisy democracy, North Korea
is still hidebound by the rule of the Kims. Could the state exist
without the dynasty?
I don’t think North Korea can exist without the Kim dynasty.
The very fabric of its identity and sense of being is caught up in the
Kim family. Kim Il Sung died in 1994 but is still revered as the Eternal
President. Kim Jong Un is where he is today because he is Kim Il Sung’s
grandson. When Kim Jong Un was introduced to the public in 2010, he
adopted a lot of Kim Il Sung’s persona — his gestures, his hairstyle.
He’s styled as a living embodiment of his grandfather. I don’t see North
Korea actually existing without the Kim dynasty because the Kim dynasty
is North Korea. (world.time/after the war) |
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So if the Kims were to go, what prospects would there be for a kind of reconciliation and later unification?
That depends on what North Korea would look like after the Kim
dynasty, and no one can see that far into the future. As it stands now,
however, I don’t see the prospect of unification as a reality. How can
the North open up to the South without losing control over its own
people? The more the North Korean people know about the South, the less
likely they are to put up with the conditions of poverty and repression
at home. So any reforms that would push North Korea down the same path
as the South can’t be accepted because that would mean the end of the
regime. North Korea is thus in a catch-22 situation. Pyongyang needs
drastic reforms to improve the lots of the North Korean people, but any
reforms that would open up the country would lead to the demise of the
regime. The way I see the end of the Korean War happening is that China
[the North’s sole remaining major ally, which doesn’t want the North to
fall into the U.S.’s orbit of influence] would shield North Korea from
internal collapse while promoting incremental reforms under its shield.
But North Korea cannot open itself up — the more its own people know
about the outside world, the more fragile the state becomes. (world.time/after the war) |
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How does this all play out in the South? Is there much enthusiasm for unification?
If you look at internal polls, the interest in unification in
the South has drastically waned. In the 1980s, the vast majority was in
favor of it, but today, among the younger population, it’s something
like 20%. So while the South talks about unification, the reality is
that they think it’s going to be way too expensive. And among the
younger generation, there’s a sense that they shouldn’t give up anything
for the North.
This past spring, when you had all these provocations from the North —
threatening to make Seoul a “sea of fire” and so on — what you had in
the South was complete indifference. South Koreans were shopping and
going about their daily lives, not really paying attention. It was
really the Western media that got all hysterical about the North’s
blustering. That indifference extends now even to the human-rights
situation in the North. North Korean defectors complain that they feel
like second-class citizens — they’re not integrated into nor embraced by
South Koreans. They know that the legitimacy struggle has ended and the
vast majority of South Koreans are not really interested any more. This
stands in stark contrast to North Korea, which is constantly fearful of
the South. You can be sent to jail for whistling a South Korean tune or
listening to a South Korean broadcast. There’s an extreme
hypersensitivity to anything about the South in the North. (world.time/after the war) |
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Contemporary Japan
The Boiled Frog Syndrome?
Japan — here defined as the years after 1989 — faced an unusual set of
challenges. Economically, a decade of economic stagnation, originally
caused by a changing world situation and poor economic policy, appeared
to be infinitely prolonged by political paralysis. Socially, the nation
faced a disturbing youth culture, changing roles for women and a rapidly
aging older group. Internationally, Japan appeared unable to play the
major role that its huge economy might have suggested. Multiple
disasters swept the nation, and yet the basic structure of the society
remained intact. As Japan entered the 21st century, life still seemed
good enough to keep things more or less as they were. (aboutjapan/ContemporaryJapan)
 Shortly after the death of the Showa Emperor (Hirohito) in 1989, his son
performed elaborate enthronement ceremonies meant both to reaffirm old
traditions and proclaim the new reign era “Heisei” or the “achieving of
peace.” Unfortunately the death of the old emperor [did not lead] to the
desired peace. ... Almost immediately, economic problems struck. As noted in the “Postwar
Japan” essay, the world’s major trading partners had agreed in the so
called Plaza Agreement of 1985 to try and raise the value of the yen.
This, it was hoped, would help control Japan’s huge trade surpluses by
making imports to Japan cheaper and exports from that country more
expensive. The plan did not work well, partly because Japanese
manufacturers were able to buy raw materials more cheaply and improve
productivity, and partly because the Ministry of Finance greatly
increased the amount of money in the country. The result was a
speculative “bubble” in which investors took out huge loans on
overvalued property and assets, and stock prices soared. When the bubble
finally burst after 1989, the stock market lost two thirds of its
inflated value, many new homeowners had mortgages that were way too high
and banks were stuck with a huge amount of bad loans. (aboutjapan/ContemporaryJapan)Behind all these problems lay the grim fact that the world had
changed since the basic factors mentioned in the “Postwar Japan” essay’s
explanation of Japan’s “economic miracle” first brought high GDP
growth. Japan’s favorable geographic location, for example, was
obviously still there, but other Pacific Rim countries — particularly
China — were now taking advantage of the ample raw materials and rich
markets of the area to export high quality goods. Cheap, imported
technology was no longer available and markets were less open. The
exchange rate was down, and Japan’s once vaunted industrial combinations
(keiretsu) now seemed too rigid to respond to the demands of a rapidly
changing economy. Worst of all, Japan’s population, once concentrated in
the working age group, was now rapidly aging. When trying to plan how
to try and help the economy out of the recession, the government also
had to think about how it could take care of the very generation who had
created the modern economy.
The aging of Japan’s society reflected profound social changes that were
also taking place at this time. In the postwar period, Japanese women
had been expected to graduate from high school or a junior college
(rather than a more rigorous university), take a part time job until
marriage at around 25, and then become both a mother of at least two
children and a caretaker for her husband’s aging parents. Now Japanese
women were eager to have a good education and, often, a career. They
were claiming for themselves pre-marital sexual experiences once denied
to “nice girls,” marrying later (sometimes not at all), and, though
still at only one half the rate of United States couples, doubling the
divorce rate. Government planers [sic] found it most worrying that this
generation of women was having far fewer than 2 children, and hence not
replenishing the nation. Given that older Japanese now had the longest
life expectancy in the world, bureaucrats calculated that the number of
workers per retired person would drop from an average of over 4-1 to as
low as 2-1. How, then, could the government get workers to put enough of
their wages into the rapidly depleting pension funds? Who would provide
sympathetic home care for the aging? If public facilities were needed,
how could they be paid for in a time of economic recession and heavy
public debt?
Compounding this problem was a perceived crisis in education. As noted
above, Japanese were shocked to discover that some of the scientists
making the deadly gasses for the Aum Shinrikyo religious group were
graduates of elite national universities; passing these tests had always
been taken as a sign not only of ability, but also noble character. At
lower levels, school bullying (ijime), refusals to go to school and even
assaults on teachers, although low by American standards, were
worrying. Ironically, just when US educators were trying to figure out
how to raise K-12 standards, their Japanese counterparts were trying to
lighten up the curriculum, tone down the rigorous college entrance exam
requirements and end required half days on Saturday. The hope was to
make school more enjoyable and from that, more creative. Unfortunately,
many of the most ambitious students simply used the extra time to focus
their studies on what was still needed for admission to a prestigious
university.
Meanwhile a counter culture appeared to be developing. Newspapers
spoke gloomily of “free workers” (furita) who only worked for as long as
it took to get enough money to take time off and have fun. Other
stories spoke of “compensated dating” (enjo kosai) a system under which
some young female students, eager [to] have enough money to buy the latest
clothes and other fads they wanted, went out on paid dates — and often
had sex — with older men. Even the girls (let alone the men) from
seeming stable and relatively well to do families seemed to have trouble
imagining that there was anything wrong with this casual barter of sex
for material goods. Conversely, people who might be called “computer
nerds” in the US or “stay at homes” (otaku) in Japan seemed to prefer
sitting in front of a computer to having more personal interactions;
indeed, some blamed the extraterrestrial fantasy, paranoia and violence
of Aum Shinrikyo on the baleful influence of Japanese comics (manga) and
animation (anime) videos. With juvenile delinquency rates up, GDP
figures flat, official unemployment reaching at least 6%, “permanent
employment” for elite males in good firms less assured, corporation
executives forced to apologize publicly for corporate misdeeds and
political figures unable to affect real reforms, Japan hardly seemed to
be a happy place. (aboutjapan/ContemporaryJapan)
 How on earth did Japan get itself into such
trouble? Iida
Hideo, a finance lawyer, describes what he calls the Boiled Frog
syndrome: “If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, he
will
jump out immediately and be saved. If you put him in warm water,
he
feels comfortable and does not notice when you slowly raise the
temperature.” Before the frog knows what is happening, it’s
cooked.
The Boiled Frog syndrome is what
comes of failing to change as the world changes. Techniques such
as tobashi (cf. p. 106) keep the water lukewarm, hiding disastrous mistakes. The
policy of shoring up insolvent firms and wasteful government agencies
at public expense creates no incentive for those in charge to rethink
their mistakes. Meanwhile, the government croons the public to
sleep
with reassuring lullabies about Japan’s unique form of government by
bureaucracy, and its superiority over the degenerate West, exemplified
by Sakakibara Eisuke’s book Japanese-Style
Capitalism as a Civilization. ... Radical change will come only when conditions have grown
completely intolerable, and in Japan’s case that day may never
come. To put Japan’s financial troubles into context, we must remember that
it remains one of the wealthiest countries in the world; the bankrupt
banks and deflated stock market are not going to deprive most people of
their television sets, refrigerators, and cars. From this point
of
view, Japan remains a reasonably comfortable place to live. (Dogs & Demons,
370-1)
The best
word to describe Japan’s modern plight is Chuto Hanpa, which means “neither
this nor that” — in other words, mediocrity. (Dogs & Demons,
371)
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It’s a story of strengths inherited from the
industries of
the 1970s balanced against severe weaknesses in the industries of the
new millennium.
| Technology in Japan is good, but not nearly as
good as
was once thought; it’s “neither here nor there” — that
is, Chuto Hanpa. Because of this mix of qualities, Japan will not crash. There is
more
than enough industrial power to support the population at roughly
present standards. |
On the other hand, given its deep systemic
weakness
in finance and technology, Japan is not going to boom. The
long-term
prognosis is for more Chuto Hanpa,
with GNP growth slow, unemployment edging upward, and the debt burden
mounting year by year. (Dogs & Demons,
374-5)
At the
turn of the century, hopes for the future remain balanced between
revolution and stagnation. Stagnation is most likely in the
absence of a major shock to the system, such as a wholesale economic
crash. But revolution could happen. The world is full of
surprises — who would have imagined in 1985 that by
1990 the whole of Eastern Europe would have shaken off
Communism? ...
Sadly for Japan, a crash is highly unlikely. The
chances are that for the next decade or two there will never come a
moment when the nation stares disaster right in the face. The
water will remain lukewarm, and the public will sleep comfortably in a
soup of Chuto Hanpa while the
country slowly degenerates. When it comes time to carve the
epitaph for “Japanese-style capitalism as a civilization,” the legend
on the tombstone will read “Boiled Frog.” (Dogs & Demons,
378-9) |
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East Asian Civilization?
| East Asia may not be as cohesive and distinctive
a region as it once was, and perhaps there is no longer any definable “East
Asian civilization.” Modernization and Westernization shredded many East Asian
traditions beginning as early as the late nineteenth century, and the mid-twentieth
Cold War divided East Asia between competing outside ideologies and power
blocs, whose legacies linger still. Recent East Asian economic takeoff,
meanwhile, might be interpreted merely as an extension of a universally
successful modern model. … Yet, over the whole of East Asia, the ghost, not so
much of Confucius as of the entire East Asian past, still hovers, often
invisibly but nonetheless powerfully, especially in the form of the extensively
shared vocabulary among the East Asian languages. China (including Greater
China), Japan, [and] Korea … are all very different places, but they also
literally share many of the same words and ideas. And, if there is any one thing
that does seem fairly certain at the start of the twenty-first century, it is
that East Asia is once again, as it had been for much of human history prior to
the nineteenth century, a major world center. (HEA, 400) |
According
to oxforddictionaries.com, the term civilization can be defined as “The
society, culture, and way of life of a particular area.” Halcombe
sketches out arguments both for and against the proposition that it is
still meaningful to speak of “East Asian civilization.” Which argument
do you find more convincing? Using specific examples from the course,
explain why contemporary East Asia does or does not continue to share a
sense of society, culture, and/or way of life that is sufficient to
warrant the label “civilization.” Your paper should be at least 750
words and include at least three aspects of civilization that China,
Japan, and Korea do or do not share. For more details on the paper
requirements, see the Reflection on Contemporary East Asia Rubric.
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