This is a Special Seminar within the CDDRL Taiwan Democracy Program (co-sponsored with Shorenstein APARC).

Tang Fei was the first premier of Republic of China on Taiwan under the current Chen Shui-bian Government in 2000. Before he was appointed premier, Tang served as minister of national defense (1999-2000), chairman (1998) and vice chairman (1995-98) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and commander-in-chief of the Air Force. He also served overseas as a deputy military attaché to the United States (1972-75) and as chief military attaché to South Africa (1979-82).

Premier Tang was a visiting scholar with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 2002.

In this special seminar, Premier Tang will address the internal conflicts and external challenges that Taiwan has faced since power transition in 2000.

For many Koreans, their country's "northern regions" are locked in memory and even mystery. Families that once lived in North Korea still think of their lost hometowns with longing and nostalgia. Wherever they have ended up--in South Korea, America, Europe or elsewhere--and in succeeding generations, there remains an unceasing sense of unrequited loss.

It may seem strange, but Westerners who once lived in North Korea--as missionaries, traders, and, oddly enough, refugees--also share something of these sentiments. They think of missionary childhoods, lost stakes in business, Korean friends, and the special physical qualities of the landscape as part of their own emotional experience.

Donald Clark addressed this foreign experience in his book entitled Living Dangerously in Korea: the Western Experience, 1900-1950 (EastBridge, 2003). This lecture is based on materials in the chapters that deal with foreign life in the north, particularly P'yongyang, in the gold mines in the Unsan district, and in the Russian refugee colony on the northeast coast. It is illustrated from family albums of people who lived there in the 1930s.

Using his personal recollections of his life in the Peace Corps, Michael Robinson will discuss the issues of an evolution of Korean national identity and reflect as well on how political attitudes, perceptions of the U.S., ROK strategic policy, U.S. Cold War posturing, and Peace Corps idealism coexisted and produced its own baffling mix of political, cultural, and social cleavages.

His discussion will continue on how the disconnection of Korean youth from their parents' experience in the ambiguous political culture fostered by Cold War ideology during the late 1960s frees them to be a new kind of patriot and global citizen.

Michael Robinson earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Washington in 1979. He taught at the University of Southern California for sixteen years after which he moved to Indiana University where he is Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and an adjunct Professor of History. He has written extensively on the origins and evolution of Korean nationalism. His first book, "Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea" focused on nationalist ideology formation during the 1920s. More recently he has become interested in popular culture and the origins and development of modernity in Korea. With Gi-Wook Shin his "Colonial Modernity in Korea" examined a number of nodes of modernity appearing during the period of Japanese occupation. He has just finished a new book, "Korea's Twentieth Century Odyssey: a Short History" that will be published by the University of Hawaii Press in spring 2007.

One aspect of globalization that is receiving increasing scholarly attention is international migration, especially the transnational migration of workers. Practically every country of the world is affected in one way or another as either a sending or a receiving country. There are reportedly more than 500,000 foreigners residing in South Korea, with unskilled transnational migrant workers accounting for about a half of these.

Although the country's reliance on imported foreign labor is likely to continue unabated, the Korean government and society as a whole have been generally intolerant of foreigners living in Korea.

This paper examines various social factors, including the country's record-low fertility rate and rapid aging of its population, that all point to the continuation of labor importation. Such immigration will contribute to the making of a multiethnic Korean society.

The paper then analyzes the cultural factors that account for Koreans' low receptivity to foreigners and argues that it is the cultural ideology of ethnic homogeneity, based on the "one ancestor myth," that fuels an intense pride and stake in cultural uniqueness, linguistic homogeneity, and historical collectivity-sensibilities that government policy reinforces.

Andrew Eungi Kim is an Associate Professor in the Division of International Studies at Korea University and is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph. D. in sociology from the University of Toronto in 1996. His primary research interests pertain to cultural studies, sociology of religion, social change, sociology of work, and comparative sociology.

Currently, he is revising two book-length manuscripts for publication: "The Rise of Protestant Christianity in South Korea: Religious and Non-Religious Factors in Conversion" and "Understanding Korean Culture: The Persistence of Shamanistic and Confucian Values in Contemporary Korea."