As the new academic year draws near, visiting scholars and fellows are arriving to prepare for their time at Stanford. This year, KSP will see a number of visiting scholars and fellows arriving to spend a year or two to do their research in their areas of specialty within Korean Studies.

KSP welcomes two new fellows in the Pantech Fellowship for mid-career professionals. Donald MacIntyre and Xiyu Yang will join the program succeeding Dan Sneider and Scott Snyder. Donald has been working as a Bureau Chief in Seoul for Time Inc. since 1998. Donald's research will focus on the issues between Japan and Korea, focusing Japan's actions during the 35 years of colonial rule of Korea. Xiyu Yang was Director of the Office for Korean Peninsula Issues in the Chinese Foreign Ministry before coming to Stanford. His research will focus on prospects for security cooperation in the Northeast Asian region.

KSP also welcomes Myung-Koo Kang as a new postdoctoral fellow, joining Chiho Sawada who has been postodoctoral fellow at KSP since 2003. Myung-Koo holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley with a major in political science. His research interests include comparative political economy in East Asia.

This year, KSP especially welcomes two POSCO NGO fellows, Doo-Hyon Choi, Korean Federation for Environmental Movements, and Mi-Sun Kim, Migrant Workers Health Association in Korea, who were selected as Stanford's inaugural POSCO NGO Fellows. The POSCO NGO Fellowship was established last year and sees ten POSCO NGO Fellows spending a year doing research projects across five North American universities. Doo-Hyon's research will focus on the context of social capital formation and expansion in American society and Mi-Sun's research will explore advocacy networks for immigrant communities in the Bay Area.

In addition to the scholars and fellows named above, the Korean Studies Program will welcome a number of visiting scholars from different fields who will also actively participate in KSP seminars and programs. This year's incoming visiting scholars include Ki-Hyung Lee, Chairman and CEO of Interpark Corp; Doo-yeong Choi, Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs; Sei-Hoon Won, Deputy Mayor of Seoul City; Byung Woo Min, Deputy Director of Munhwa Broadcasting Corp.; and HakSek Kim, Prosecutor, Seoul Central Public Prosecutors' Office.

Koreans have developed a sense of nation based on shared blood and ancestry. The Korean nation was "racialized" through a belief in a common prehistoric origin, producing an intense sense of collective oneness. Ethnicity is generally regarded as a cultural phenomenon based on a common language and history, and race understood as a collectivity defined by innate and immutable phenotypic and genotypic characteristics.

But historically, Koreans have not differentiated between the two. Instead, race served as a marker that strengthened ethnic identity, which in turn was instrumental in defining the nation. Koreans thus believe that they all belong to a "unitary nation" (danil minjok), one that is ethnically homogeneous and racially distinctive.

Despite 1,000 years of political, linguistic, and geographic continuity - and contrary to popular belief - this sense of ethnic homogeneity took root only in the early 20th century.

Faced with imperialist encroachments, Koreans developed the notion of a unitary nation to show its autonomy and uniqueness. They stressed the ethnic base, rather than civic elements, in defining the Korean nation.

Shin Chae-ho, a leading nationalist, for instance, presented Korean history as one of the "ethnic nation" (minjoksa) and traced it to the mythical figure Dangun. According to him, the Korean people were descendants of Dangun Joseon, who merged with Buyo of Manchuria to form the Goguryeo people. This original blend, Shin contended, remained the ethnic or racial core of the Korean nation, a nation preserved through defense and warfare against outside forces. The nation was defined as "an organic body formed out of the spirit of a people ... descended through a single pure bloodline" that would last even after losing political sovereignty.

The need to assert the distinctiveness and purity of the Korean nation grew even more important under colonial rule, especially as Japan attempted to assimilate Koreans into their empire as "imperial subjects." The Japanese assimilation policy was based on colonial racism, which claimed that Koreans and Japanese were of common origin but the former always subordinate.

The theory was used to justify colonialist policies to replace Korean cultural traditions with Japanese ones in order to supposedly get rid of all distinctions and achieve equality between Koreans and inlanders. Colonial assimilation policy included changing Korean names into Japanese, exclusive use of Japanese language, school instruction in the Japanese ethical system, and Shinto worship.

Koreans resisted by asserting their unique and great national heritage. Yi Kwang-su, a key figure during colonial rule, claimed that "hyeoltong" (bloodline), "seonggyeok" (personality), and "munhwa" (culture) are three fundamental elements of a nation and that "Koreans are without a doubt a unitary nation (danil han minjok) in blood and culture." Such a view was widely accepted among Koreans: To impugn the natural and unique character of the Korean ethnic nation during colonial rule would have been tantamount to betraying Koreanness in the face of the imperial challenge of an alien ethnic nation. Japanese rule did not erase Koreans' national consciousness but rather reinforced their claim to a truly distinct and homogeneous ethnic identity.

After independence in 1945, and despite peninsular division into North and South, the unity of the Korean ethnic nation or race was largely taken for granted. Neither side disputed the ethnic homogeneity of the Korean nation, spanning thousands of years, based on a single bloodline of the great Han race. Instead, both sides contested for the sole representation of the ethnically homogeneous Korean nation. Even today, Koreans maintain a strong sense of ethnic homogeneity based on shared blood and ancestry, and nationalism continues to function as a key resource in Korean politics and foreign relations.

Ethnic national identity has been a crucial source of pride and inspiration for people during the turbulent years of Korea's transition to modernity that involved colonialism, territorial division, war, and authoritarian politics. It has also enhanced collective consciousness and internal solidarity against external threats and has served Korea's modernization project as an effective resource.

At the same time, such a blood-based ethnic national identity became a totalitarian force in politics, culture, and society. It came to override other competing identities and led to the poverty of modern thought, including liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism. It has hindered cultural and social diversity and tolerance in Korean society.

Ethnic nationalism will remain an important organizing principle of Korean society. We cannot ignore ethnic national identity or treat it as a mere myth or fantasy. But neither can we remain simply content with its current role.

Instead, it should be recognized that ethnic nationalism has become a considerable force in Korean society and politics and that it can be dangerous and oppressive when fused with racism and other essentialist ideologies. Koreans must thus strive to find ways to use ethnic nationalism constructively and mitigate its potential harmful effects.

In particular, Koreans must seriously consider the establishment of a democratic

institution that can contain the repressive, essentialist elements of nationalism.

The principle of bloodline or "jus sanguinis" still defines the notion of Korean nationhood and citizenship, which are often inseparable in the mind of Koreans. In its formative years Koreans developed the ethnic base of nation without a corresponding

attention to the political notion of citizenship.

After colonial rule, neither state paid adequate attention or made any serious effort to develop a more inclusive notion of citizenship. Social institutions that can address issues of discrimination against ethnic non-Koreans (for example, ethnic Chinese known as "hwagyo" in Korea) have been largely overlooked. The Korean nationality law is still based on jus sanguinis and legitimizes, consciously or unconsciously, ethnic discrimination against foreign migrant workers.

In this context, most Koreans have stronger attachment to "ethnic Koreans living in foreign countries" than to "ethnic non-Koreans living in Korea." It is also much easier for a Korean-American who supposedly has "Korean blood" to "recover" Korean citizenship than for an Indonesian migrant worker living in Korea to obtain Korean citizenship. This is true even if the Indonesian worker might be more culturally and linguistically Korean than a Korean-American.

Korea needs to institutionalize a legal system that mitigates unfair practices and discrimination against those who do not supposedly share the Korean blood. Koreans need an institutional framework to promote a democratic national identity that would allow for more diversity and tolerance among the populace, rather than simply appeal to an ethnic consciousness that tends to encourage false uniformity and enforce conformity to it.

They should envision a society in which they can live together, not simply as fellow ethnic Koreans but as equal citizens of a democratic polity. It should be an integral part of democratic consolidation processes that Korea is currently undergoing. Otherwise, it would be hard to expect Korea to become "Asia's hub," which will require the accommodation of cultural and ethnic diversity and flexibility.

Discussion of unification is premature and can even be considered dangerous if unification occurs without such change. As the German unification experience shows, a

shared ethnic identity alone will not be able to prevent North Koreans from becoming "second-class citizens" in a unified Korea. Even worse, because of higher expectations resulting from a shared sense of ethnic unity, a gap between identity (ethnic homogeneity) and practice (second-class citizens) will add more confusion and tension to the unification process.

Thus, it will be a major challenge for Koreans to develop democratic institutions that can treat people living in Korea as equal citizens of a democratic polity. This task will be all the more important and urgent as Korea becomes more democratic, globalizes, and also prepares for national unification.

North Korea's response to the United Nations resolution demanding that it suspend its ballistic missile program and resume a moratorium on launches was typically belligerent. But like the multiple launch of seven missiles earlier this month, the North Korean vow to continue to fire off its missiles should not be dismissed as mere political theater.

The missile tests were neither a gesture of defiance nor a desperate bid for negotiations. Nor can they be dismissed as the impulsive act of an irrational leader. It was, as Pyongyang itself so succinctly put it, a "military exercise."

The launches are only the latest evidence of a decadeslong effort by Pyongyang to redress the military balance in its favor. For North Korea, missiles are an attempt to compensate for weakness. The communist state has a large but technologically backward army, lacking the air power to compete with the United States and its South Korean ally. Rockets give it the firepower to back an assault on the South and to hold U.S. forces in Japan, the rear base for Korea, at bay.

The late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung set this goal as far back as 1965 when he established an academy to develop missiles and other modern weaponry.

"If war breaks out, the U.S. and Japan will also be involved," he said. "In order to prevent their involvement, we have to be able to produce rockets which fly as far as Japan."

I encountered one crucial tentacle of Kim's program some 14 years ago, in late October of 1992.

A group of 64 Russian rocket scientists, accompanied by their wives and children, were stopped just as they were about to board a flight to North Korea. The scientists were employees of a super-secret facility in the Urals, the V.P. Makeyev Design Bureau, responsible for the development of the Soviet Union's submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

As the bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor, I pieced the story together later from Russian press accounts and interviews with the scientists and others. A middleman with apparent official backing had offered the bureau, starving for orders and left adrift by the sudden end of the Cold War, work in North Korea.

Scientists who were making the equivalent of $15 a month jumped at offers of up to $4,000 a month to help a former Soviet ally. In the spring, a group of 10 scientists had gone for an initial foray. The Koreans, one of the scientists told me, initially never directly asked about nuclear warheads or missile designs. They claimed only to be interested in rocket science.

The Russians came home that fall and signed up dozens of their comrades as recruits. But the project was not officially sanctioned, and the KGB held them outside of Moscow for two months while the broker tried to re-negotiate their departure. Russian officials later described the North Koreans' aim, without mentioning them by name, as an attempt to build "combat missile complexes that could carry nuclear weapons."

North Korea began with copies of Soviet short-range Scud missiles and moved on to medium-range "Nodong" missiles, but they lacked the range and accuracy to meet Kim's target. A decade after the airport incident, in 2003, credible reports emerged that the North Koreans were deploying a new, far more accurate missile based on the Soviet SS-N-6, a submarine-launched rocket developed by Makeyev in the 1960s. The Nodong-2, as some labeled it, could reach all U.S. bases in Japan and possibly even to Guam.

In the 1990s, the North Koreans developed a long-range missile, potentially reaching U.S. territory, to lend credence to claims they could deter a pre-emptive strike on their nuclear or missile facilities. Some experts believe the Nodong-2 also functions as the second stage of this missile. American intelligence officials believe an otherwise inexplicable leap in missile technology was thanks to the help of Russian scientists.

Still the self-imposed missile test moratorium that Pyongyang agreed to in 1999 made it difficult to move ahead. Late last year, according to a recent Wall Street Journal story, the North Koreans delivered a dozen Nodong-2 missiles to Iran, a close collaborator on missiles since the 1980s. Unconfirmed reports from Germany say Iran tested the missile in January.

The Nodong-2 may have been tested this month, one of the six short- and medium-range missiles set off in a wave or as a stage of the long-range missile. Data from the launch is not yet conclusive, according to U.S. and South Korean officials. Despite the failure of the long-range attempt, it may be more significant that Pyongyang carried out the first successful launch of a Nodong since 1993 and a nighttime barrage of Scuds and Nodongs.

The display of diplomatic unity at the United Nations may give Pyongyang pause. But the relentless nature of North Korea's pursuit of its ballistic missile strength suggests that this is not a bargaining chip that will be readily traded away.

BEIJING - A message from President Bush to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il will be delivered Monday in Pyongyang -- via two Chinese officials. Beijing now meets quarterly with Mr. Kim, the most contact the unpredictable North has with any outside party. Whether Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei and Vice Premier Hui Liangyu will surprise Kim Jong Il and exert real pressure is unclear.

With an international diplomatic effort under way a week after North Korea tested seven missiles, China has proposed informal six-party talks as a way to move the process along.

That is less than the US hoped for from China. But since China insists that it will veto any UN sanctions against the North, the US will accept such talks, according to envoy Christopher Hill.

All told, Beijing would appear key to shaping how the world deals with the defiant Kim. Yet from the moment Kim launched his missiles, China has denied it has clout; it politely insists that the US has the central role.

Since 2003, China has embarked on a historic effort to prop up and aid North Korea -- a state it had the frostiest relations with for more a decade. Now, $2 billion in aid gives Beijing unprecedented access -- something China is reluctant to squander, to "mix aid and diplomacy," as a Chinese scholar here puts it.

"China's influence on North Korea is more than it is willing to admit, but far less than outsiders tend to believe," says a recent report by the Seoul branch of the International Crisis Group.

To outsiders, it appears that a rising China -- running a lifeline of energy and food to its poor comrade - ought to have clout in Korea, as it holds more carrots and sticks than anyone. It seems axiomatic that Beijing can simply apply ancient Chinese wisdom and modern Chinese might to stop Kim's nuclear ambition. Both states are communist, wear green and red uniforms, fought the US together, and share borders and history. China is the only country with easy access, as well as trade and tourism, to the North.

"China does have leverage, but it is afraid it may overplay its hand," says Joseph Cheng, head of the political science department at City University in Hong Kong.

Since Kim Jong Il's July 4 missile shots, voices from Sandy Berger, President Clinton's security adviser, to John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN, have argued that "China is the key" to dealing with North Korean belligerence. It has become nearly a mantra in Washington. Twelve months ago, it was an article of faith in senior White House circles, misplaced or not, that China would deliver a deal with Kim to dismantle his nuclear program. Yet this did not happen.

Instead, with the US preoccupied in Iraq, China embarked on a quiet policy of self-interest: to strengthen North Korea. That policy helps to maintain the North as a "buffer state" between China and South Korea.

China does not want the North to collapse, and for US troops to fill the vacuum and appear on its northeast border. China has hosted Kim, and moved relations away from a bad patch in the 1990s, during the North's epic famine, when China asked for cash payments for food instead of barter.

In the past two years, Chinese officials have told Kim that he can reform his state along socialist lines just as China did. China has indicated it will help with economic aid, while he retains complete political control. To now castigate Kim could wreck that formula, sources say.

In the larger sense, Kim's launch of missiles, most of which could hit long-time nemesis Japan or US bases in East Asia, puts China in the position of choosing between its North Korean comrade and an evolving consensus in the international community. So far, China has tried to please both sides.

"I'm concerned that China isn't recognizing how serious this issue is," says Zhang Liangui, head of foreign studies at the Central Party School in Beijing, in a rare dissent. "China is taking a rigid position. Yet we have long said that if China wants to be viewed as a responsible superpower, it must not be isolated in the international community."

Adding to Beijing's problems is an unresolved ideological struggle in China -- where "neo-orthodox" hard-liners who maintain contact with North Korea want China to support its revolutionary posture. There is also genuine puzzlement in Beijing over how to deal with Kim, whose founder-father, Kim Il Sung, reputedly warned him many times that China would attempt to take over his regime one day.

"I hear often that China is the key, which involves a set of policy steps Beijing can take that will bring about the outcome the allies want," says Russell Leigh Moses of People's University. "But I have yet to see anyone show how if China does X, Pyongyang will do Y."

The White House seems to have abandoned its 2003 optimism that China will harness Kim. China may agree that a nuclear peninsula and a regime that test-fires rockets is not desirable. But it isn't clear on how to force Kim to open his highly controlled state and allow international inspectors to flood in, witness his system of gulags, and bring in potentially subversive material -- all to dismantle a nuclear program he's cherished for decades. The White House seems to understand this.

Scott Snyder of Stanford University argues the US is using the same strategy that it used with China in closing down Kim's accounts in Macau. China was forced to choose between the international regulatory authority, or North Korean money-laundering behavior.

Sunday, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns argued on FOX News Sunday that "It's time for China to exert its influence that it does have on North Korea." Also on Sunday programs, US and Japanese officials claimed they might have the votes to support a Japan-backed resolution for sanctions against the North.

WASHINGTON - Despite its threat of severe consequences, the Bush administration has little leverage to use on North Korea to keep it from testing a long-range missile and few ways to punish the nuclear-armed nation if it proceeds.

The United States has no diplomatic or economic ties with North Korea, the rudimentary U.S. missile-defense system is untested in real-world conditions and Pyongyang is regarded as having a right to test missiles, making any American attack to forestall a launch an act of war with potentially explosive consequences.

"The United States could try to shoot down the rocket, but good luck,'' said Wonhyuk Lim of the Brookings Institution, a policy-research organization in Washington.

The dearth of options illustrates the limits of the administration's pre-emption strategy and its need to rely on the cooperation of others -- especially given the strains on the U.S. military from Iraq and Afghanistan -- to contain threats.

Washington hopes that the world's only Stalinist regime will heed demands by the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China to uphold a self-imposed 1999 moratorium on missile tests and rejoin talks on curbing its nuclear program in return for security guarantees and economic and political benefits.

At the same time, the administration is reviewing its options should the Kim Jong Il regime test-fire what U.S. officials describe as a multi-stage Taepodong-2 missile, thought to be capable of reaching Alaska.

"The launch of a missile would be a provocation,'' Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman said Thursday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing. "If such a launch took place, we would seek to impose some cost on North Korea.''

Rodman declined to say what Washington would do. Experts said that even the imposition of sanctions by the United States would be largely symbolic.

They think that North Korea would not have readied the missile for flight unless it had decided it could live with the consequences.

"It probably means they are not worried about the American reaction,'' said Daniel C. Sneider of Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. "There is nothing that the United States can do to them.''

The United States has no diplomatic relations or financial assistance it can threaten to cut, and it suspended contributions to international food aid for North Korea last year.

The administration has moved against Pyongyang by trying to halt its missile sales to other countries, its alleged international narcotics trafficking, and its alleged counterfeiting of U.S. currency, cigarettes and over-the-counter drugs.

Under American pressure, banking regulators in February froze North Korean accounts at the Banco Delta Asia, a Macao bank that the U.S. Treasury Department accused of laundering North Korea's ill-gotten gains.

Other banks, anxious to avoid American scrutiny, reportedly have curtailed business with North Korea.

David L. Asher, a former Treasury Department official who oversaw the crackdown on North Korea's alleged illicit dealings, said the United States could respond to a test with an intensified campaign against Pyongyang's alleged international criminal activities that would hurt the ruling elite.

"Do not underestimate the impact of the financial pressure we could put on them,'' said Asher, a scholar with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a policy-research organization.

Washington is counting on Japan, which also is threatened by Pyongyang's nuclear arms and missile programs, to react to a launch by closing ports to North Korean ships and shutting off remittances by ethnic Koreans to relatives in North Korea. But those measures are expected to have limited impact.

A North Korean missile test in 1998 prompted Japan to boost missile-defense cooperation with the United States, and experts said a new launch probably would prompt Washington and Tokyo to forge even closer military ties.

The only nations that could tighten the screws significantly are China and South Korea, North Korea's main foreign trading partners and aid donors.

But while Seoul and Beijing would be outraged, because a missile test would effectively kill hopes of restarting talks on containing North Korea's nuclear arms program, they are unlikely to take any step that could rock Pyongyang.

Both are anxious to avoid destabilizing their neighbor of 26 million people. China doesn't want to be overwhelmed by North Korean refugees, and South Korea would be unable to bear the economic and social costs of sudden reunification.

They also fear that Kim's government could lash out with its million-member army against the South, igniting a conflict that would drag in the United States and devastate the Asian-Pacific economy.

"China and South Korea fear instability more than they fear a nuclear North Korea,'' said Marcus Noland, an expert at the Economic Policy Institute.

Moreover, Beijing probably would be unwilling to jeopardize the budding commercial ties it has been pursuing with North Korea.

"China opposes sanctions on North Korea because it believes they would lead to instability, would not dislodge the regime but would damage the nascent process of market reforms and harm the most vulnerable,'' said a February report by the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organization.

South Korea has been pursuing a policy of economic engagement and political exchanges with North Korea.

The United States has been consulting with members of the U.N. Security Council on a response to a North Korean test. But North Korea has the right under international law to test-fire missiles, making it tough for the United States to win more than words of chastisement of North Korea from the council.