Strategic Culture and National Personality: A Comparative Study of China, Japan and Korea

The three key countries in Northeast Asia are in different economic stages: China is developing, Korea is already developed, and Japan is in a post-development stage. Japan’s early modernization, which encompassed economic, social, and political reforms, raised the country to a position of Asian leadership for a century, up to the 1980s. Korea copied the Japanese model beginning in the 1960s, and China began its own serious economic reforms in the early 1980s. By the 2000s, Korea had surpassed Japan in some economic sectors, and China’s economy, by dint of its scale, now threatens to overwhelm its neighbors’. At the same time, all three societies share deep roots in Chinese civilization and Confucian culture. Yet, as modernity and globalization increasingly affect all of Asia, that traditional culture is gradually being modified. In the process of these economic and cultural changes, three new and different strategic cultures and national personalities are emerging. Asia scholar and author Katy Oh will examine the changes among the countries of Northeast Asia and how they are affecting their relationships with one another.

Dr. Kongdan (Katy) Oh Hassig is a Senior Asian Scholar at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).  She was formerly a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Bookings Institution and a member of the political science department of the RAND Corporation and has taught courses at a number of universities. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the board of directors of the United States Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, and the co-founder and former co-director of The Korea Club of Washington, D.C. She is the co-author of North Korea through the Looking Glass (2000) and The Hidden People of North Korea (2009), and is currently working on a new book on China, Japan and Korea. She received a BA from Sogang University and an MA from Seoul National University in Korea, and an MA and a PhD in Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

This public event is made possible through the generous support of the Koret Foundation.