When discussing Korea's "Chinese Decade," roughly defined as the dozen or so years prior to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, most of the attention is focused on the heavy-handed activities of Yuan Shikai in Seoul.  Less well known is that part of this Chinese effort to bind Korea more closely to China involved the absorption of Korea's newly-formed Maritime Customs Service.  Several scholars have looked at this period and the actions of some of the key players such as Sir Robert Hart, Li Hongzhang, Henry F. Merrill, and Paul Georg von Mollendorff.  Using the recently-discovered correspondence of the first commissioner of customs in Pusan, this talk will discuss some heretofore unknown aspects of this attempted takeover by China.

Wayne Patterson received his undergraduate degree in history from Swarthmore College, and his graduate degrees in history and international relations from the University of Pennsylvania.  He has authored or edited eleven books on modern Korea, including The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896-1910 (1994) and The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawaii, 1903-1973 (2000).  He has taught Korean history at a number of institutions in the United States, including Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of South Carolina, the University of Kansas, and the University of Pennsylvania.  He has also taught Korean history abroad, including Ewha University, Korea University, Yonsei University, as Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, and most recently, at the University of the Philippines, as Korea Foundation Visiting Professor.  His home institution is St. Norbert College in Wisconsin, where he is professor of history.  He is currently teaching Korean history as a visiting professor at the University of California - Berkeley.

Brian Myers will talk about his new book The Cleanest Race: How the North Korean See Themselves and Why it Matters (January 2010).

Myers was born in New Jersey and raised in Bermuda, South Africa, and Germany.  He has a Ph.D. in North Korean Studies from the University of Tubingen, Germany.  His books include Han Sorya and North Korean Literature (1994) and A Reader's Manifesto (2002).

In addition to writing literary criticism for The Atlantic, of which he is a contributing editor, Myers regularly contributes articles on North Korea to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and academic journals. He is a contributor to a book First Drafts of Korea: The U.S. Media and Perceptions of the Last Cold War Frontier (2009) published by The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center of Stanford University.

This seminar is supported by the generous grant from Koret Foundation.

Although South Korea is recovering relatively quickly from the worldwide recession in the wake of the U.S. financial sector crisis, it must address major structural weaknesses if it is to sustain growth over the long term. The Korean manufacturing sector is one of the world’s strongest and most efficient, but the services and (much smaller) agriculture sectors remain weak. Former senior South Korean economic policy official Byongwon Bahk argues that only by benchmarking the near miraculous success of its manufacturing sector can Korea convert traditionally weak sectors into new sources of job creation and foreign currency earnings. He will explain the necessity of, and obstacles to, inducing capital, technologies, and marketing from advanced companies in advanced countries; supporting R&D activities and education and training in weak sectors; and opening weak sectors to domestic and foreign competition.

Byongwon Bahk, a former senior South Korean government official, is the Korean Studies Program’s 2009-2010 Koret Fellow. During the past decade, he was in charge of the management of Korean macro-economic policy at the Ministry of Finance and Economy, including as vice minister. Most recently, he served in the Blue House as the senior economic advisor to President Lee Myung-bak. He received a BA and an MA in Law from Seoul National University, an MA in Industrial Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Korea, and an MA in Economics from University of Washington.

This event is supported by a generous grant from the Koret Foundation.

Over the years, Kim Jong Il has pursued four inter-related goals that together might be considered as an implicit national security strategy:

1. reviving the economy; 
2. buttressing domestic support at a time of leadership transition; 
3. widening North Korea's "diplomatic space" through 360-degree diplomacy; and
4. shoring up the country´s aging military.  

These goals are tightly linked but also involve significant trade-offs that may offer greater possibilities than ususally supposed for solving the issue of its nuclear weapons program.

Dr. John Merrill is the head of the Northeast Asia Division of U.S. State Department´s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and Adjunct Professor in the School of International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University.  He is the author of Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War, 1945-50 and The Cheju-do Rebellion as well as numerous journal articles.