History has become both a source and focus of rising tensions in East Asia in recent decades, revolving around controversies over ‘distorted’ interpretations of the past, most notoriously over ‘revisionist’ histories of invasion and the whitewashing or denial of atrocities. Japan has, unsurprisingly, been regarded by its neighbors as the primary perpetrator, both in history and in its retelling in revisionist textbooks, but it has by no means been the only offender, and ‘history wars’ have become increasingly common within and between other countries in the region. In this paper, Alisa Jones examines the phenomenon of ‘historical revisionism’ in East Asian textbooks and the  - primarily domestic - ideological, political and pedagogical purposes it serves. Analyzing often contradictory depictions of victims and perpetrators, heroes and villains, winners and losers, she demonstrates how textbooks convey (others’) guilt/inferiority and (our) innocence/superiority, and how they attempt to defend or legitimize present political projects and territorial claims, win hearts and minds, and shape the values and beliefs of future citizens.

Alisa Jones is the Northeast Asia History Fellow at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University. She received her degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the University of Leeds, specializing in the history and politics of modern and contemporary China. Her research and scholarly publications focus on the politics and practice of historiography and history education in East Asia, in particular on the ways in which the past has been commemorated, revised and contested in both domestic and international arenas. She is currently working on several related projects, examining the goals and content of history and citizenship education as well as the ways in which other public and private mechanisms (such as the legal system, patriotic campaigns, the media, the internet) have been used and abused to define the parameters of acceptable debate about the past and the claims on the citizens of the present and future it represents.

While representations of history are very common in Western film and television, in East Asia we find the perhaps unique genre of history ‘soap operas’ that portray influential political figures of the past rather than fictitious characters, describing their lives in intimate personal detail in the format of a lengthy ‘soap’, often broadcast daily. Some use their heroes and heroines/villains and villainesses simply as a set on which to stage romantic or other interesting stories (historic settings are extremely popular in East Asia); others claim to present ‘authentic’ history, and may lead to considerable controversy, especially in authoritarian states, such as the People’s Republic of China, where history is an extremely sensitive subject. In recent years in particular, some of these soaps have drastically revised official verdicts on a number of historical figures, stirring intense public debate and triggering government interference and censorship.

Matthias Niedenführ analyzes East Asian history soap operas, especially those from China, both in light of recent political and social changes and in comparison with “histotainment” (history entertainment) on German television, where historical dramas tend to come in the form of miniseries and to be paired with documentary broadcasts. While there is clearly less official scrutiny in the case of German television productions than in those of China, it is shown that revisiting hitherto accepted ‘truths’ or problematizing the personalities and actions of history’s ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ may be highly contested in both totalitarian states and multi-party democracies.

Matthias Niedenführ is the Director of the European Centre for Chinese Studies, a consortium of four German and Danish universities based at Peking University. Prior to his move to Beijing, he was the co-ordinator for the Confucius Institute in Nuremberg and a research fellow at the University of Erlangen, working on a major international project on national identities and historical revisionism in East Asia. He has degrees in Asian Studies and Economics, with a particular interest in the Chinese and Japanese media. His current research projects focus on the representation of history in the mass media, and on the internationalization of the Chinese economy.

What is the role of apologies in international reconciliation? Jennifer Lind finds that while denying or glorifying past violence is indeed inimical to reconciliation, apologies that prove to be domestically polarizing may be diplomatically counterproductive.  Moreover, apologies were not necessary in many cases of successful reconciliation.  What then is the relationship between historical memory and international reconciliation?

Jennifer Lind is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government, Dartmouth College. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master's in Pacific International Affairs from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Lind is the author of Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics, a book that examines the effect of war memory on international reconciliation (Cornell University Press, 2008). She has also authored scholarly articles in International Security and Security Studies, and has written for wider audiences within the Atlantic and Foreign Policy. Professor Lind has worked as a consultant for RAND and for the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Defense, and has lived and worked in Japan. Her current research interests include the resilience of the North Korean regime, planning for U.S. military missions in the event of North Korean collapse, energy competition and its security implications for East Asia, and democratization and stability in East Asia.

Asia’s economies have been hard hit by the current global financial crisis, despite in most cases enjoying strong macroeconomic fundamentals and stable financial systems.  Early hopes were that the region might be “decoupled” from the Western world’s financial woes and even able to lend the West a hand through high growth and the investment of large foreign exchange reserves.  But that optimism has been dashed by slumping exports, plunging commodity prices, and capital outflows.  The region’s most open, advanced and globally-integrated economies—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan—are already in severe recession, with Japan, Korea and Malaysia not far behind, and dramatic slowdowns are underway in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.  What role did Asian countries play in the genesis of the global crisis, and why have they been so severely impacted?  How is their recovery likely to be shaped by market developments and institutional changes in the West, and in Asia itself in response to the crisis?  Will the region’s embrace of accelerated globalization and marketization following the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis now be retarded or reversed?

Linda Lim is a leading authority on Asian economies, Asian business, and the impacts of the current global financial crisis on Asia, and she has published widely on these topics. Her current research is on the ASEAN countries’ growing economic linkages with China.

Forthcoming in 2009 are Globalizing State, Disappearing Nation: The Impact of Foreign Participation in the Singapore Economy (with Lee Soo Ann) and Rethinking Singapore’s Economic Growth Model. She serves on the executive committees of the Center for Chinese Studies and the Center for International Business Education at the University of Michigan, where formerly she headed the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Before coming to Michigan, she taught economic development and political economy at Swarthmore. A native of Singapore, she obtained her degrees in economics from Cambridge (BA), Yale (MA), and Michigan (PhD).

The U.S. financial crisis has spread around the globe. Financial globalization means that most countries and regions are not immune to the contagious effects of a financial crisis that originates in one country.

East Asian countries had already experienced the contagious effects of a financial crisis in 1997. That year, a financial crisis that broke out in Thailand and Indonesia reached Malaysia and then South Korea. Each of these countries reacted differently to the crisis. South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand accepted International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities that required neoliberal economic restructuring in return for emergency loans, while Malaysia rejected the IMF offer and instead encouraged the inflow of speculative financial capital, while reforming the banking and financial system. In the aftermath of the East Asian financial crisis, regional economic, financial and security cooperation were discussed among East Asian countries. These efforts resulted in the Chiang Mai Initiative, the Bond Initiative, the East Asian Summit, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Six Party Talks.

Thus, regionalism in East Asia was revived in response to external shocks, such as global financial volatility, endogenous opportunities such as East Asian market compatibility (Pempel, 2008), endogenous security threats such as the North Korean nuclear development, and exogenous opportunities such as "bringing in the U.S." (Pempel, 2008).

Nonetheless, East Asian regionalism is still at a low level of institutionalization compared to Europe. East Asian regionalism is still basically "bottom-up, corporate (market)-driven regionalism" (Pempel, 2005). 

I will discuss the obstacles and the opportunities that Northeast Asian countries are facing since the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalization.

Hyug Baeg Im is Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea. He is Dean at the Graduate School of Policy Studies and Director at Institute for Peace Studies. He received B.A. in political science from Seoul National University, M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He was visiting professor at Georgetown University (1995-1996), Duke University (1997), Stanford University (2002-2003) and visiting fellow at International Forum for Democratic Studies, National Endowment for Democracy, Washington DC (1995-1996). He served as a presidential adviser of both Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun presidency. His current research focuses on the impact of IT revolution and globalization on Korean democracy. His publications include “The Rise of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism in South Korea,” World Politics, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1987), “South Korean Democratic Consolidation in Comparative Perspective” in Consolidating Democracy in South Korea (Lynne Rienner, 2000) and “’Crony Capitalism’ in South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan: Myth and Reality,” (co-authored with Kim, Byung Kook) Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2001), “Faltering Democratic Consolidation in South Korea: Democracy at the End of Three Kims Era” Democratization, Vol. 11, No. 5(2004), “Christian Churches and Democratization in South Korea” in Tun-jen Cheng and Deborah A. Brown (eds.), Religious Organizations and Democratization: Comparative Case Studies in Contemporary Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006) and “The US Role in Korean Democracy and Security since Cold War Era,” International Relations of the Asia Pacific, Vol. 6, No.2 (2006).

Recent analyses of U.S.-Korea relations have tended to focus on rising anti-American sentiments in South Korea and the changing nature of the overall alliance relationship. Either attributed to a case of Korean exceptionalism or U.S. exceptionalism, the current trend of anti-Americanism in Korea is treated as a unique watershed moment that portends the transformation of bilateral relations. Park argues that mobilization of anti-Americanism in Korea, however, is also a manifestation of anti-Great Power-ism, which is not new in the history of Korean politics. In fact, President Roh’s election platform of finding autonomy and self-reliance demonstrates close parallels with the anti-Qing mobilization in turn-of-the-century Korea. Anti-Great Power-ism (anti-sadae) emerged as a potent tool of political mobilization in the late 19th century, when the newly created Reform/Enlightenment Party made their criticism of the existing policy of “revering Great Powers” (sadae) the centerpiece of their attack against the conservative establishment. Even though sadae was originally a pragmatic policy of accommodating the powerful Qing, marking a departure from a cultural-ideological emulation of Ming China, it was stigmatized during 19th century politics as subservient and Great Power-dependent.

By comparing the progressives’ political mobilization processes in the late 19th century and in 2002-2006, the speaker argues that today’s anti-Americanism is actually a continuation of anti-China-ism seen from a broader historical perspective. At the same time, such anti-Great-Power mobilizations demonstrate the importance attached to relations with the “Great Powers” in Korean politics. Korean leaders have historically sought to generate political legitimacy by achieving different types of status in relations with the region’s dominant power in the context of regional hierarchy. A key implication of this study is that the social context of hierarchy continues to play an important role in alliance politics as well as East Asian security.

Seo-Hyun Park is an acting instructor in the Korean Studies Program at APARC and a PhD candidate in the Government Department at Cornell University. Her dissertation project explores enduring patterns of strategic thinking and behavior in East Asia, examining how the hierarchical regional order has conditioned conceptions of state sovereignty and domestic security politics through comparative case studies of Japanese and Korean relations with China in the traditional East Asian order and with the United States in the post-1945 regional alliance system.

Park received a B.A. in Communications from Yonsei Universitiy in Korea and an M.A. in Government from Cornell University.