On August 15, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will publish a short statement to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II. This follows similar practices of his predecessors. Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama started by delivering a short statement on the fiftieth anniversary in 1995. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi followed in 2005 with the statement on the sixtieth anniversary.
8月15日、安倍首相は第2次大戦終結70周年を記念する談話を発表する。戦後50周年(1995年)の村山談話、そして60周年(2005年)の小泉談話に続くものだ。
ショーレンスタイン・アジア太平洋研究センター (APARC) とフリーマン・スポグリ国際研究所 (FSI) に所属する8人の学者が、自分が日本の首相だったら発表するであろう談話を書き上げた。
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Big changes are ahead for China, probably abrupt ones. The economy has grown so rapidly for many years, over 30 years at an average of 9 percent a year, that its size makes it a major player in trade and finance and increasingly in political and military matters. This growth is not only of great importance internationally, it is already having profound domestic social effects and it is bound to have internal political ones — sooner or later.
Will China come to dominate global high-tech innovation?
In the future, perhaps. Today, however, Greater China—Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—is focused on the quest for innovation. The dominant paradigm on the Mainland is one of execution, not innovation. Beijing now aims to turn China—historically an adopter of technologies from elsewhere—into a major technology creator. Self-reliance has become the government’s watchword and its ultimate goal.
Clusters of craftsmen have existed as long as people have lived in substantial settlements— certainly since they have lived in cities. Modern examples include diamond cutters in Antwerp, knife makers in Sheffield, sock makers in Yiwu, and the cinematic entertainers in Mumbai. This phenomenon is widely present in Asia’s information technology (it) industry.
Little more than a decade ago, Rowen's answer to the question posed by this essay's title was the year 2015.
In 2003, consumption of IT goods worldwide was $1.5 trillion. Asia represented twenty percent of this total. Even more telling, Asia produced about forty percent of these goods. The continued rise of Asian IT innovation will pose a challenge to the eminence of traditional IT centers, notably Silicon Valley.
Ten years ago, in the summer of 1995, it was fashionable in Washington and Seoul to predict the imminent collapse of North Korea's political and economic systems, and even the state itself. While clearly an errant forecast, it is easy to see why pundits and analysts thought as they did. Kim Il-Sung had died. Kim's son and successor, Kim Jong-Il, was failing to lead just as the country suffered a massive agricultural failure. A nuclear-weapons dispute with the United States had forced a costly full-scale mobilization of the country's million-man army.
Prospects for Peace in South Asia, the inaugural title in a new series of "Studies of the Asia-Pacific Research Center" published by Stanford University Press, addresses the largely hostile, often violent relations between India and Pakistan that date from their independence in 1947. The persistent conflict between the two neighboring countries over Kashmir has defied numerous international attempts at resolution and entered its most dangerous phase when both India and Pakistan became nuclear powers in 1998.
North Korea's nuclear-weapons programs confront us with hard choices. They create a sense of urgency to make another deal with the North, but experience tells us that any new agreement will not stem the flow of crises. However we handle the immediate crisis, we will do better if we do so while having in mind an end position -- something we have not done since the end of the Korean War 50 years ago. The argument here is that there should be different leadership in Pyongyang as a step towards the political unification of the peninsula.
(Excerpt) China is becoming the workplace of the world, so we are increasingly told. Jeffrey Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management, writes, "Will China's importance to global manufacturing soon resemble Saudi Arabia's position in world oil markets?" And the world economy might "soon become dangerously vulnerable to a major supply disruption [in China] caused by war, terrorism, social unrest, or a natural disaster" (Business Week, June 17, 2002).
How much does it matter that Japan creates relatively few new high technology companies? Many observers estimate, or at least assume, that entrepreneurial dynamism and its associated innovations promote economic growth and in the long run are necessary for it. In recent years there has been much attention devoted to fostering such new firms in many countries, including Japan, with much of this interest derived from the example of Silicon Valley.
Relations between North and South Korea have been one of the most important and vexing topics in Asia for over fifty years. The historic June 2000 summit meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and the South's Kim Dae Jung seemed to mark the first real progress in relations in many years, and set off a search for realistic ways to solidify the nascent cooperation between the two. All at once, formulating a sensible strategy for economic cooperation between North and South became an urgent policy issue rather than an abstract intellectual exercise.
My argument in this paper is that the people of the People's Republic of China have acquired greater freedoms over the past twenty years, and that if China 's impressive rate of economic development continues,so will their liberties.
The enormous and sustained success of Silicon Valley has excited interest around the globe. Startup companies the world over are attempting to emulate its high tech businesses, and many governments are changing their institutions in order to foster Silicon Valleys of their own. What accounts for the Valley's leading edge in innovation and entrepreneurship?
Why Poor Countries Are Becoming Richer, Democratic, Increasingly Peaceable, and Sometimes More Dangerous
It is easy to be confused about the world’s prospect. On the one hand, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, many millions of people have been freed from economic and political shackles that had long kept them under authoritarian rule and in poverty—or at least far poorer than they should be. On the other hand, several parts of the world are beset by political turmoil and conflicts, rapid population increases, and falling incomes.
Reprint from Behind East Asian Growth, edited by Henry S. Rowen (London: Routledge, Inc., 1998).
Reprint from The National Interest (Summer 1997).
Reprint from The National Interest (Fall 1996).