The Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is pleased to welcome Robert R. King and Victor Cha as Koret fellows in Korean studies during the 2019-20 academic year. Supported by the Koret Foundation, the Koret Fellowship brings leading professionals to Stanford to conduct research on contemporary Korean affairs with the broad aim of strengthening ties between the United States and Korea.​

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Robert R. King will join the Korea Program as Koret Fellow during the fall quarter of 2019. King served as special envoy for North Korean human rights Issues, an ambassadorial ranked position at the Department of State (2009-2017). The role was established by Congress in the North Korea Human Rights Act with a mandate to “coordinate and promote efforts to improve respect for the fundamental human rights of the people of North Korea.” Since leaving the Department of State, Ambassador King has been senior advisor to the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a senior fellow at the Korea Economic Institute (KEI), and a board member of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK).

Earlier, Ambassador King served for 25 years (1983-2008) on Capitol Hill as chief of staff to Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California), and as staff director and minority staff director of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (2001-2008). King received a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University and a B.A. from Brigham Young University.

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Victor Cha, professor of government and international affairs at Georgetown University, will join the Korea Program as the Koret Fellow through the winter quarter of 2020. He is the author of five books, including The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (Haper Collins, 2012) and Powerplay: Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia (Princeton University Press, 2016). He holds Georgetown's Dean's Award for teaching for 2010, the Distinguished Research Award for 2011, and a Distinguished Principal Investigator Award for 2016.

Professor Cha left the White House in 2007 after serving since 2004 as Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, where he was responsible for Japan, the Korean peninsula, Australia/New Zealand, and Pacific Island affairs. He serves as Senior Advisor at CSIS, and is a non-resident Fellow in Human Freedom at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, Texas. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University, M.A. from the University of Oxford, and MIA and B.A. from Columbia University.

Taehwa Hong (BA '21 International Relations) has been awarded the 8th annual Korea Program Prize for Writing in Korean Studies for his paper, "North Korea in the Soviet-Albanian Dispute." Yong Suk Lee, deputy director of the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC, says, "Hong's paper is an outstanding piece of research and writing." "The paper delves into a rather novel topic - how North Korea diplomatically responded to the Albanian Crisis between two socialist powers, the Soviet Union and China." The details of the announcement may be viewed here.

Sponsored by the Korea Program and the Center for East Asian Studies, the writing prize recognizes and rewards outstanding examples of writing by Stanford students in an essay, term paper or thesis produced during the current academic year in any discipline within the area of Korean studies, broadly defined. The competition is open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Past Recipients:

7th Annual Prize (2018)

6th Annual Prize (2017)

On the centennial of the March First Independence Movement of Korea, APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin and Rennie Moon, associate professor at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College and former Koret fellow in Korean studies at APARC, discuss the origins of the movement and its impact and legacy for anti-imperialist movements in Asia and beyond.

The year 2019 is the centennial of several anti-colonialist movements that emerged in Asia, including the March First Movement of Korea. On that day a century ago, protesters shouting “Mansei!” (“Long live Korean independence!”) gathered in Seoul and formed what would become the first nationwide political protest in Korea under Japanese colonial rule. Although the movement failed to achieve national sovereignty, it left important legacies for Korea and other parts of Asia under foreign dominance.

In a new essay for The Journal of Asian Studies, “1919 in Korea: National Resistance and Contending Legacies,” APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin and Rennie Moon, associate professor at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College and former Koret fellow in Korean studies at APARC, discuss the origins of the March First Movement, its impact on colonial Korea and other parts of Asia that fought against imperialist dominance, and its implications for postcolonial and contemporary Korea, North and South. Their essay is part of the journal’s special forum entitled “Anti-colonialism in Asia: The Centenary of 1919,” which explains why 1919 was not only a single year of important events in Asia, but also a center point for the larger movements of anti-colonialism that emerged globally in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Korea became Japan's protectorate in 1905 and was “annexed” to Imperial Japan five years later. Soon after, Koreans experienced a decade of severe suppression and minimal rights under a brutal military colonial regime. In the aftermath of World War I, however, Shin and Moon write, the international geopolitical climate began to shift. Inspired by the Russian revolution of 1917 and by Wilsonian ideals of national self-determination, Korean intellectuals and leaders began secretly collaborating both inside Korea and abroad, with support from religious leaders and their nationwide mobilizing networks.

On March 1, 1919, twenty-nine leaders gathered in downtown Seoul and read aloud a declaration for Korean independence, sparking a movement that spread quickly from Seoul and Pyongyang throughout the country, with more than one million people protesting. The Japanese, who were caught by surprise, responded with brutal crackdown on protestors.

The March First Movement eventually did not achieve national independence from Japanese rule, but it forced Japan to shift from the earlier military rule to a colonial policy known as bunka seiji (cultural rule), which selectively accommodated Korean demands in nonpolitical spheres and gave rise to many cultural, educational, and media organizations and activities.

It also left Korean leaders divided over what to do next, leading to a schism between moderates, who were willing to work with the new cultural policy in preparation for future national independence, and the socialist radicals, who rejected compromise and went on to establish the Korean Communist Party in 1925. This bifurcation, note Shin and Moon, is seen by many scholars “as the primary origin of the postcolonial national division that would incite a civil war in 1950.”

South Korea recognizes the March First Movement as the basis of the founding of the republic, though conservatives and progressives still disagree about its founding date. When the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was established in the North, however, it downgraded and rewrote the movement in various ways to fit it into its own version of history that traces the legitimacy of the regime to an anti-imperialist, democratic revolution spearheaded by Kim Il-Sung, who became the leader of the DPRK after 1945.

Beyond Korea, explain Shin and Moon, the March First Movement influenced the rise of the anti-imperialist May Fourth Movement in China two months later, inspired the 1919 anti-imperialist resistance that took place in the Philippines and Egypt, and was an impetus that can be seen in the Satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance in India. “By considering the March First and other political movements of 1919 in other Asian countries from a comparative, transnational perspective,” Shin and Moon say, “we can recognize interrelationships and diffusion processes traditionally ignored in historical writings prior to the ‘historiographic revolution’ in the 1990s.”

Read the full article in The Journal of Asian Studies >>

27 April 2019 marked the first anniversary of the historic Panmunjom summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean leader Moon Jae-in.

The meeting jumpstarted the whirlwind of North Korea’s summit diplomacy and prompted a new wave of hope that diplomacy could be effective after years of confrontation and tensions.

But the anniversary was marked with mixed messages and dissonant attitudes — it was celebrated by the South Koreans alone. North Korea remained unresponsive to the South’s invitation to the anniversary ceremony, and North Korea’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country openly demanded that the South explore ‘more active measures’ to improve inter-Korean ties. The inter-Korean rapprochement efforts borne out of Panmunjom are stranded by the stalemate on the nuclear track...

Read the full article on East Asia Forum

Scholar Andray Abrahamian organized many projects to promote economic change in North Korea over the past decade, including that country’s first two ultimate frisbee tournaments. So when he spoke at Carleton College in Northfield last week, the first thing Abrahamian did was acknowledge the school’s prominence in the sport. [Its intercollegiate team is a perennial power and most of the school’s students play in intramural leagues.]

“It’s really fun for me to come to one of the spiritual homes of ultimate frisbee,” he said. When the U.S. lifts a travel ban on North Korea, he added, he’d like to organize another tournament there.

Abrahamian was a co-founder of Chosen Exchange, a Singapore-based organization that for years taught business and marketing skills to North Koreans with programs inside the country and classes in other countries. Its activities declined after the North’s nuclear tests in 2016 prompted an international backlash that included a widening of sanctions.

This academic year, he’s [the 2018-2019 Koret Fellow] in the Korea program at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, but he was in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, early last month...

Read the full article in the StarTribune.

On the heels of the abrupt ending of the Hanoi summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, with the future of the diplomacy of denuclearization in question, the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC convened the 11th Koret Workshop, appropriately titled this year “North Korea and the World in Flux.”

The workshop, an annual gathering made possible through generous funding from the Koret Foundation, brought together international experts in Korean affairs for a full day of panel discussions. Participants assessed the U.S.-DPRK summit diplomacy, examined the challenges and opportunities in media coverage related to the negotiations between the two countries, and considered the prospects and pitfalls for summitry with North Korea in the near term. A report on the workshop proceedings is forthcoming.

At a midday public keynote, General Vincent Brooks, U.S. Army (Ret.), spoke before a packed audience about the challenges and opportunities in Korea. Brooks, who recently retired from active duty as the four-star general in command of all U.S. Forces in Korea, provided his unique and very-timely assessment of the situation on the Korean peninsula, and offered his insights on where the diplomacy of denuclearization may go next.

Gen. Brooks’ public address was followed by a conversation with Karl Eikenberry, director of APARC’s U.S.-Asia Security Initative.

Watch the video recording of Gen. Brooks’ remarks: