As the world’s most dynamic and rapidly advancing region, the Asia-Pacific has commanded global attention. Business and policy leaders alike have been focused on the rise of China, tensions on the Korean peninsula, Japan’s economic recovery and political assertiveness, globalization and the outsourcing of jobs to South Asia, Indonesia’s multiple transitions, competing forces of nationalism vs. regionalism, and the future of U.S.-Asia relations.

What is the near-term outlook for change in the region? How might developments in the economic, political, or security sphere affect Asia’s expected trajectory? And how will a changing Asia impact the United States? These were among the complex and challenging issues addressed by a faculty panel from the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) and the Eurasia Group at the Asia Society in New York on January 23, 2006.

Moderated by director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Coit D. Blacker, the Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, the panel included Michael H. Armacost, the Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and former Ambassador to Japan and the Philippines; Donald K. Emmerson, the director of the Southeast Asia Forum at Shorenstein APARC and noted expert on Indonesia; Harry Harding, the director of research and analysis at the Eurasia Group in New York and University Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University; and Gi-Wook Shin, the director of Shorenstein APARC, founding director of the Korean Studies Program, and associate professor of sociology at Stanford.

Q. COIT BLACKER: WHAT IS THE MOST DIFFICULT, CHALLENGING ISSUE YOU SEE?

A. HARRY HARDING:

In China, we are seeing a darker side of the Chinese success story. Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, China's role in international affairs is on the rise, and China is an increasingly responsible stakeholder in an open, liberal global economy. Yet, the world is now seeing the problems China's reform program has failed to resolve. China's new five-year plan seeks to address a number of these issues, providing a plan for sustainable economic development that is environmentally
responsible and addresses chronic pollution problems, for a harmonious society that
addresses inequalities and inadequacies in the provision of medical care, insurance
and pension systems, and for continuing technological innovation, as part of China's
quest to become an exporter of capital and technology.

A. GI-WOOK SHIN:

The world should be deeply concerned about developments on the Korean peninsula. Two pressing issues are U.S. relations with South Korea and the nuclear crisis with the North. It is not clear when or whether we will see a solution. Time may be against the United States on the issue. China and South Korea are not necessarily willing to follow the U.S. approach; without their cooperation, it is difficult to secure a successful solution. The younger generation emerging in South Korea does not see North Korea as a threat. Our own relations with South Korea are strained and we are viewed as preoccupied with Iraq and Iran, as North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons.

A. DONALD EMMERSON:

In Southeast Asia, a key problem is uneven development, both in and between the political and economic spheres. Potentially volatile contrasts are seen throughout the region. Vietnam is growing at 8 percent per year, but will it become a democracy? It has not yet. Indonesia has shifted to democracy, but absent faster economic growth, that political gain could erode. Indonesia's media are among the freest in the region;
multiple peaceful elections have been held--a remarkable achievement--and nearly all Islamists shun terrorism. Older Indonesians remember, however, that the economy
performed well without democracy under President Suharto. Nowadays, corruption
scandals break out almost daily, nationalist and Islamist feelings are strong, and the
climate is not especially favorable to foreign investment. While Burma's economy
lags, its repressive polity embarrasses the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN). How long can the generals in Rangoon hold on? Disparities are also
international: dire poverty marks Laos and Cambodia, for example, while the
Malaysian and Thai economies have done well.

A. MICHAEL ARMACOST:

Japan is a "good news/bad news" story. The good news is that Japan has found a new security niche since the end of the Cold War. Previously, when a security problem loomed "over the horizon," they expected us to take care of it while, if prodded, they increased their financial support for U.S. troops stationed in Japan. During the first post-Cold War conflict in the Persian Gulf, Japan had neither the political consensus nor the legal framework to permit a sharing of the risks, as well as the costs, and this cost them politically. Since then, they have passed legislation that permits them to participate in U.N. peacekeeping activities, contribute noncombat, logistic, and other services to "coalition of the willing" operations, and even dispatch troops to join reconstruction activities in Iraq. Clearly, their more ambitious role is helping to make the U.S.-Japan alliance more balanced and more global.The bad news is a reemergence of stronger nationalist sentiment in Japan and more generally in Northeast Asia. In part this is attributable to the collapse of the Left in Japanese politics since the mid-1990s. This has left the Conservatives more dominant, and they are less apologetic about Japanese conduct in the 1930s and 1940s, more inclined to regard North Korea and China as potential threats, more assertive with respect to territorial issues, less sensitive to their neighbors’ reactions to Prime Ministerial visits to Yasukuni Shrine, and more eager to be regarded as a “normal” nation. Many Asians see the United States as pushing Japan to take on a more active security role and, in the context of rising Japanese nationalism, are less inclined to view the U.S.-Japan alliance as a source of reassurance.

Q. COIT BLACKER: WHAT ARE THE COMPETING AND CONFLICTING TENSIONS BETWEEN REGIONALISM AND NATIONALISM?

A. HARRY HARDING:

In China, there has been a resurgence of nationalism over the past 10 to 15 years. Since the end of the Maoist era and the beginning of the reform movement, the leadership has embraced nationalism as a source of legitimacy, but this is a double-edged sword. It places demands on the government to stand up for China’s face, rights, and prestige in international affairs, especially vis-à-vis Japan, the United States, and Taiwan, at times pushing Beijing in directions it does not wish to go.

A. DONALD EMMERSON:

In Indonesia, it is important to distinguish between inward and outward nationalism. Outward nationalism was manifest in Sukarno’s policy of confrontation with Malaysia. ASEAN is predicated on inward nationalism and outward cooperation. Nationalist feelings can be used inwardly to motivate reform and spur development. But there are potential drawbacks. Take the aftermath of the conflict in Aceh. The former rebels want their own political party. Hard-line nationalists in the Indonesian parliament, however, are loath to go along, and that could jeopardize stability in a province already exhausted by civil war and damaged by the 2004 tsunami.

A. GI-WOOK SHIN:

Korea is a nation of some 70 million people, large by European standards, but small in comparison to the giants of Asia, especially China, India, and Russia, making Korea very concerned about what other countries are doing and saying. Korea is currently undergoing an identity crisis. Until the 1980s, the United States was seen as a “savior” from Communism and avid supporter of modernization. Since then, many Koreans have come to challenge this view, arguing that the United States supported Korean dictatorship. Koreans are also rethinking their attitudes toward North Korea, seeing Koreans as belonging to one nation. This shift has contributed to negative attitudes toward both the United States and Japan

Q. COIT BLACKER: GENERATIONAL CHANGE IS ALSO A MAJOR ISSUE IN CHINA, THE DPRK, AND JAPAN. WHAT DOES IT BODE FOR POLITICAL CHANGE?

A. MICHAEL ARMACOST:

Japan has had a “one and a half party system” for more than half a century. Yet the Liberal Democratic Party has proven to be remarkably adaptive, cleverly co-opting many issues that might have been exploited by the opposition parties. It is clearly a democratic country, but its politics have not been as competitive as many other democracies. As for the United States, we have promoted lively democracies throughout the region. But we should not suppose that more democratic regimes will necessarily define their national interests in ways that are invariably compatible with ours. In both Taiwan and South Korea, to the contrary, democratic leaderships have emerged which pursue security policies that display less sensitivity to Washington’s concerns, and certainly exhibit little deference to U.S. leadership.

A. GI-WOOK SHIN:

In both North and South Korea, a marked evolution is under way. In the South, many new members of the parliament have little knowledge of the United States. Promoting mutual understanding is urgently needed on both sides. In the North, the big question is who will succeed Kim Jong Il—an issue with enormous implications for the United States.

A. DONALD EMMERSON:

Indonesians have a noisy, brawling democracy. What they don’t have is the rule of law. Judges can be bought, and laws are inconsistently applied. The Philippines enjoyed democracy for most of the 20th century, but poverty and underdevelopment remain rife, leading many Filipinos to ask just where democracy has taken their nation.

A. HARRY HARDING:

China has seen a significant increase in rural protests. There has been an increase in both the number of incidents and the level of violence. People are being killed, not just in rural areas, but also in major cities like Chengdu. We are seeing a new wave of political participation by professional groups, such as lawyers and journalists, galvanizing public support on such issues as environmental protection, failure to pay pensions, confiscation of land, and corruption. A new generation has been exposed to the Internet, the outside world, and greater choice, but it is not yet clear at what point they will demand greater choice in their own political life.

 

WHAT WOULD YOU ADVISE THE PRESIDENT ON U.S. POLICY TOWARDS ASIA?

In the lively question-and-answer session, panelists were asked, "Given the chance to talk to the U.S. President about change and improvement in U.S.-Asia policy, what would you say?"

MICHAEL ARMACOST: I am struck by a mismatch between our interests and our strategy in Asia. In some respects our Asia policy has become something of an adjunct of our policy toward the Middle East-where we confront perhaps more urgent, if not more consequential, concerns. Asia is still the most dynamic economic zone in the world; it is the region in which the most significant new powers are emerging; and it is where the interests of the Great Powers intersect most directly. Also, it is an area where profound change is taking place swiftly. We are adapting our policies in Asia to accommodate current preoccupations in the Muslim world, rather than with an eye to preserving our power and relevance in Asia.

HARRY HARDING: It is striking how much Asian nations still want us around- as an offshore balancer and a source of economic growth. Yet they want us to understand the priorities on their agenda as well as our own. We are seen as obsessed with terrorism and China. We should exhibit more support for Asian institution building, as we have with the European Union. We also need to get our own economic act together-promoting education, stimulating scientific research and technological innovation, and reducing our budget deficits-and quit resting on past laurels. Requiring Japan to accept U.S. beef exports and then sending them meat that did not meet the agreed-upon standards has been a setback for our relations, since the Japanese public regards the safety of its food supply as critically important.

DONALD EMMERSON: Most opinion-makers in Southeast Asia are tired of Washington's preoccupation with terrorism. To be effective in the region, we must deal-and appear to be dealing-with a wider array of economic, social, and political issues, and not just bilaterally. The United States is absent at the creation of East Asian regionalism. For various reasons, we were not invited to participate in the recent East Asia Summit. Meanwhile, China's "smile diplomacy" has yielded 27 different frameworks of cooperation between that country and ASEAN. We need to be more, and more broadly, engaged.

MICHAEL ARMACOST: The establishment of today's European community began with the historic reconciliation between France and Germany. I doubt that a viable Asian community can be created without a comparable accommodation between China and Japan. Some observers believe that current tensions between Tokyo and Beijing are advantageous insofar as they facilitate closer defense cooperation between the United States and Japan. I do not share that view. A drift toward Sino-Japanese strategic rivalry would complicate our choices as well as theirs, and I hope we can find ways of attenuating current tensions.

“You should remove ‘agricultural worker’ from the list of options of parents’ occupations in Question 11,” said the senior government bureaucrat. He explained, “It is impossible for the child of a farm laborer to enter an engineering college.” That statement was made on May 8 in Delhi this year, while he – the chief advisor on higher education to the national government – reviewed a questionnaire for final year engineering students. The questionnaire is to be filled by the graduating cohort of engineering students at various Indian universities this coming year. Its purpose is to discover job mobility across generations and relate that to the cost of education, location, public versus private provision, and various other factors. It is part of a broader study supported by FSI that colleagues at Stanford University and I, along with research groups in India, China and Russia, have initiated to compare the quality of the engineering workforce in three countries – China, India and Russia – with each other and with the United States.

A few days later, on May 14, I was with the head of a medium-sized private college in Bangalore, which had administered the pilot version of the questionnaire to graduating students. As he handed me 450 completed forms, I glanced at the first few. There, right on top, I read the first student’s response to Question 11. A female, she had chosen “agricultural worker” as the father’s occupation. Combined with information on her family’s income (which was in the lowest tier), this was clearly someone who contradicted the bureaucrat’s assumption.

As heartwarming as it was to see that response on the questionnaire, it reminded me, not for the first time, about how little government officials can sometimes know about their constituents. In 2004, I had studied, jointly with a division of the Ministry of Information Technology, how rural users might best use information technology. Our expectation (prior to the study) was that e-mail for personal and business purposes and Internet searches and transactions for farm work would be the main uses.

Instead, what people wanted was government services – health care and other welfare services, postal services, accessing titles and other official records, and government jobs. When I presented our findings to the country’s Minister for Information Technology, he insisted that we were wrong and that our initial hypotheses were correct. It was only when his own division head, who had conducted the study jointly with me, stated (firmly) that he stood by the results that the Minister started to change his views.

Perhaps one should not be too harsh on a bureaucrat when a political master, the minister, could be so ignorant! But, there is another reason for leniency: the higher education revolution in India has still not been understood, even within India, perhaps because of the speed of its happening. A revolution it undoubtedly is. For example, in engineering studies, the number of students enrolled in full-time 4-year undergraduate degree programs has risen from 250,000 in 1997 to 1.5 million in 2007, and is currently growing at 25% annually. Most surprisingly, the higher education sector has moved from a primarily state-provided service to private provision within a decade. 95 per cent of the above increase comes from enrollment in privately-run colleges, which now account for 80% of total enrolment. The storied state-owned Indian Institutes of Technology, which made up 10% of national engineering enrolment in 1990, now account for less than 2%, and graduate 5,000 students a year.

How this happened is too long a story to go into here. Briefly, the national government has increasingly yielded control over higher education to the individual states over the past ten years. The states have, in turn, allowed the private sector in, something that the national government resisted when it was in charge.

One of the desirable outcomes is, as demonstrated by the response to Question 11 above, increased access. Ten years ago, the child of an agricultural worker was, if educated through secondary school, likely to have studied only in the vernacular – and would thus have been excluded from the higher education engineering degree, which is taught only in English. Even if there was money in the family till to pay for tuition, the nearest college was probably too far to allow the student to stay at home; even if she had the money for staying away from home, competition for the limited number of available seats would likely exclude her from even the least meritorious college.

Today, even though the private colleges charge, on average, fifty thousand rupees ($1250) a year for tuition, which is three times the tuition fees at the comparable state college, affordability has increased. This is for two reasons. First is the proliferation of colleges. Thanks to the blanket coverage being provided by the private sector, there is a college, most likely two or three, in most small towns. Bangalore, with 290 engineering colleges – almost all private – tells the story of the rest of the country.

So, even small-town students no longer need to live away from home, thus saving on living costs. This can be a significant savings: in Bangalore, rent for a single room more than makes up the difference in private and state tuition fees. Second, the private colleges have built linkages with banks, so bank loans will usually cover half the tuition costs.

The democratization of higher education in India has removed the impending shortage of talent for the IT exporting sector. It has also brought into question the importance of the IITs to the eco-system, which – according to the recruiters I have interviewed over the years – was always overstated. Let’s examine both of these in the current context.

For the top IT exporting firms in India, such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro, the private providers are a boon. Together, the top three firms will, even in today’s difficult global economic environment, add 70,000 persons to their payrolls (net of attrition) in 2008. 70 per cent of these recruits will be fresh graduates. Private college graduates will account for the overwhelming majority of their recruits, followed by state colleges (not IITs).

Of course, these firms would like to recruit the top IIT graduates. However, the best IIT graduates either go abroad to study or work (a third do so, though that ratio is declining), another third join an MBA program in India, and the rest are recruited by the Indian operations of western firms like Google or Yahoo!, or join Indian startups like Tejas Networks or Telsima. Such firms pay starting salaries that are double the $7,500 starting wage offered by the Indian IT majors.

Is this a big loss for the Indian IT industry? No, say the recruiters, pointing out that the IIT graduating cohort was always a small proportion of their recruits because of overseas migration. What is important, they point out, is that other providers are rapidly catching up with the IITs in quality. Given their reliance on fresh graduates and their scale of recruitment (for example, between June and August of this year, TCS will make one thousand job offers a week and recruit 85% of its offerees), the Indian IT firms make precise calibrations of schools and rank them. The top quartile of the graduates of the top local private colleges in Bangalore are now considered equal in quality to those at the 50th percentile in the IITs. The top quartile at national colleges, such as the National Institutes of Technology, are deemed equal to the 75th percentile of the IITs.

The rank is based on various factors: alumni recruited by them in earlier years, internal factors such as laboratory and library infrastructure, and course content, their interaction with faculty in research projects, and student performance in internships. A thousand colleges (of the four thousand that offer engineering degrees in India) are deemed to meet the standards of the top three IT firms and their graduates are thus eligible for recruitment. According to one of the IT firms I spoke to, a decade ago, there were only fifty colleges that met their standards.

In consequence, in states where they are concentrated, eg., Infosys and Wipro in the state of Karnataka (whose capital is Bangalore) and TCS in Tamil Nadu (whose capital is Chennai), the ranking by the top 3 IT firms is critical for the colleges. A corporate recruiter from a smaller firm seeking IT talent from a Chennai college will demand to know its “TCS ranking."

This, in turn, is invaluable information to incoming students, which, in its turn, influences how colleges invest in faculty and infrastructure. As a result, in a way that was unforeseen by government planners and even the World Bank (which, in 2000, argued that market failure was likely in case private provision in India became important), a thriving market for engineering education has been created and quality has improved.

As recently as 2001, a report on IT education (which included a study of the IITs) by the Ministry of Human Resource Development noted that “The barest minimum laboratory facilities are available in many of the institutions and very little research activity is undertaken…Engineering institutions have not succeeded in developing strong linkages with industry…The curriculum offered is outdated and does not meet the needs of the labor market.” Around that time, when I had interviewed the director of one of the IITs, he had supported this finding, noting that almost all the engineering students at that IIT did their final year thesis projects in laboratories within the IIT (rather than, as intended, in companies).

Today, an engineering graduate from any of the thousand colleges that the IT services industry deems eligible for recruitment will always have completed several internships with industry prior to graduation, including the final semester thesis project – in other words, this is a sea change from just a few years ago.

Of course, there are caveats to the story of higher education. One of the concerns stated by regulators is that, as control has shifted from New Delhi to the states, the weak states have not been able to keep up with the strong states, thus increasing the intellectual gap between them. This appears to be true, on first impression. My conversations with recruiters of IT firms in Bangalore in May indicated increasing regional selectivity. Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Maharashtra and West Bengal were the regions of choice, while weak states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were falling behind.

A second genuine concern of policymakers is that the private colleges have no research agenda. Of course, what policymakers do not state is that the IITs have historically had no research agenda either. The good part of the present situation is that, with the burden of providing mass education off its backs, the national government is using its limited resources to support centers of excellence for research.

A final caution is on replicability in other countries. The higher education system that has resulted in India was not foreseen and caught the nation’s education planners by surprise. No one expected that the private sector would respond as it did. Planners designed the system to allow only non-profit private providers. Planners expected that those private providers that would enter the system would be philanthropic. They would exist at the margins of the then larger state-system. Accordingly, planners encouraged them, through incentives, to set up their institutions in smaller towns.

Instead, the private providers stormed into the big cities first, preferring to ignore the incentives, and have only recently spread to smaller towns. They have made profits through the back-door (by charging an upfront fee, the capitation fee).

A key factor was rising federalism: strong states like Karnataka and Tamil Nadu were able to provide the regulatory support that made private sector entry possible. The second key factor was the IT industry’s willingness to be the market maker, as described above. In this, the role of the large Indian IT firms, as noted, was critical. It is unlikely that an industry characterized by a large numbers of small firms would have been able to play the role of market maker.

So, there are some unique factors in India. China offers an alternative, perhaps more replicable, model: an entirely state-run system in which tuition fees, which average $800 per annum, pay for 50 per cent of costs. It, too, has grown rapidly: for example, 5 million students are currently enrolled in undergraduate engineering programs. The share of the burden per student appears to be higher in India. In India, the state and “aided” private colleges (these are privately owned and managed, but accept state-aid to pay for costs such as infrastructure and faculty salaries – in return, they must charge the same tuition fees as state-run institutions) account for 40% of total enrollment and charge fees that cover 30 per cent of costs. The unaided schools, as noted earlier, recover full costs through tuitions (endowments insignificant). Hence, the share of total national costs of education borne by students in the system is over 70%. This may be important for achieving long-term sustainability, although, in the short-term, it may adversely affect enrollment.

For the moment, though, the Indian IT industry, earlier starved of talent, has been saved by one of its own – the for-profit private education sector.

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-cultural Education (SPICE) serves as a bridge between FSI’s research centers and elementary and secondary schools throughout the United States. Over the past year, SPICE curriculum writer Rylan Sekiguchi and Joon Seok Hong (MA, East Asian Studies, 2007) have been developing a curriculum unit for secondary schools called “U.S.–South Korean Relations” in consultation with Professor Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Korean Studies Program (KSP). The KSP was formally established in 2001 at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center with the appointment of Professor Shin as the founding director. “U.S.–South Korean Relations” is the result of SPICE’s first formal collaboration with the KSP.

For more than half a century, the United States and South Korea have been close and strong allies, a relationship nurtured under war and the pursuit of common interests. Despite this long and established alliance, U.S.–South Korean relations and Korean history are not adequately taught in American secondary schools. “U.S.–South Korean Relations” seeks to fill the gap by exposing students to the four core pillars of the alliance: democracy, economic prosperity, security, and sociocultural interaction. Each pillar supports the U.S.–South Korean relationship in a different and important way.

Lesson One examines South Korea’s maturing democracy, providing students an overview of South Korean democratization and engaging them on the concept of democracy. Students also study how the U.S.–South Korean relationship affected South Korea’s democratization and vice versa. Ultimately, students consider how common political and social values serve to strengthen relations between two countries and societies.

Lesson Two introduces students to the economic aspect of the U.S.–South Korean relationship and encourages them to recognize how economic interdependence between the two countries has served to draw them closer together. Students examine modern-day trade,such as the recently concluded U.S.–South Korean Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), and also learn about the historical role the United States played in helping South Korea industrialize after the Korean War.

Lesson Three outlines the security concerns that South Korea and the United States have shared since the Korean War and the signing of the Mutual Defense Treaty in 1953 to the recent nuclear weapons issue with North Korea. Students study the history of the U.S.–South Korean security alliance and evaluate why both Seoul and Washington have considered the alliance so important and beneficial.

Lesson Four complements the broad country-tocountry perspective of the first three lessons and encourages students to consider how the U.S.–South Korean relationship has influenced the individual lives of Koreans and Americans. Students contemplate how the cultural interactions between the two countries have influenced both societies and changed the lives of their people.

The U.S.–South Korean relationship is one of the most successful bilateral relationships in the world. SPICE hopes that the curriculum unit, “U.S.–South Korean Relations,” not only offers U.S. secondary students a broad overview of this relationship but also inspires students to enroll in college courses on Korea through programs such as the KSP.

The 70th anniversary of the 1937 Japanese attack on the Chinese capital of Nanjing, and the mass atrocities that followed, were marked in relatively low-key fashion in China. At a time when the Chinese government is anxious to improve its ties with Japan, it sent only junior officials to the commemoration ceremony unveiling a refurbished museum that attempts to document an event that has become emblematic, for the Chinese at least, of the war with Japan.

Despite the decision to downplay the anniversary, a wave of films, many of them backed by the Chinese government, had already been set in motion, begun at a time when Sino-Japanese tensions were high. Almost a dozen new movies on the “Nanjing Massacre,” including some supported by U.S. and European money, are in production. In Japan, a documentary supported by a group of conservative lawmakers and academics that claims there is no evidence of a Japanese massacre is also slated for release.

This is the latest indication of how Asia’s wartime past bedevils its present. From relations between governments to the interactions of ordinary citizens, disputes over past wrongs continue to occupy newspapers, cinema screens, and school textbooks. All nations in the region, rather than taking responsibility, have some sense of victimization and often blame others. Anti-Japanese sentiments seem undiminished in China and Korea, even among the younger generation with no experience of war or colonialism. The Japanese suffer from “apology fatigue,” questioning why they must continue to repent for events that took place six or seven decades ago.

The failure to address historical injustice and to reconcile differing views of the past has strained Sino-Japanese relations and friction between Japan and South Korea about Japan’s colonial past remains intense. Even South Korea and China are sparring over the history of the ancient kingdom of Koguryo . Taiwan as well is immersed in a re-examination of the historical past. The history question touches upon the most sensitive issues of national identity and now fuels the fires of nationalism in Northeast Asia.

There is widespread recognition of the need for reconciliation and the final resolution of historical injustices. But the existence of divided, even conflicting, historical memories is a fundamental obstacle to such reconciliation. All of the nations involved are bound by distinct, often contradictory perceptions of history and separated by different accounts of past events. These perceptions are deeply imbedded in public consciousness, transmitted by education, popular culture, and the mass media.

At the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, we have embarked on the “Divided Memories and Reconciliation” project that seeks to tackle the history issue from a comparative perspective. Rather than trying to forge a common historical account or to reach a consensus among scholars on specific events, we believe that a more fruitful approach lies in understanding how historical memory is formed in each country. Recognizing how each country engages in the selective creation of its own, divided memory can lead to mutual understanding. Ironically, the very realization that there is no absolute historical truth on which everyone can agree creates a path to reconciliation.

These divided memories are a foundation of national identity—and the formation of national myths that have a powerful role to this day. Whether it is Japanese atrocities in China or the decision to drop atomic weapons on Japan, no nation is immune from the charge that they have formed a less than complete view of the past. All share a reluctance to fully confront the complexity of that past and tend to blame others.

The United States is no less guilty of forming its own divided memory of these historical events—witness the response to the controversy surrounding the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. And the United States had a key role to play in shaping the failure to confront these historical issues in a timely fashion, through its handling of the postwar justice issues for example and the troubling legacy of the problems left unresolved by the 1951 San Francisco Treaty.

Our research project compares the formation of these divided memories in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. The project has begun with a comparative examination of high school history textbooks in those five places, focusing on the period from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war in 1931 until the formal conclusion of the Pacific war with the San Francisco Peace Treaty. This will be followed by a second comparative study of popular cinema dealing with historical subjects from roughly the same period. In parallel with these two comparative studies, Shorenstein APARC plans to design and carry out a comprehensive survey of the views of elite opinion-makers in all five countries on these historical issues. The project has garnered important support from donors in Asia and the United States, among them Korea’s Northeast Asia History Foundation, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, and the U.S.-Japan Foundation.

The translations of the most widely circulated high school history textbooks— both national and world history textbooks—have been completed. In February 2008, Shorenstein APARC will convene an international conference of historians and other scholars to conduct a comparative analysis of the textbooks and to discuss, from personal experience, the process of textbook writing and revision. Stanford historians Peter Duus and Mark Peattie, the authors of numerous volumes on this historical period, will lead the comparative analysis. Textbook authors from all five countries will also offer their views.

Textbooks have been a subject of particular controversy in Asia since the 1950s, though focused almost entirely on the content of Japanese textbooks and complaints from China, Korea, and elsewhere that they offer a distorted account of wartime events. One approach to solving this problem has been to form joint committees to study history and to create jointly written textbooks. These efforts are ongoing but they have proved so far to be a very difficult path to reconciliation. A Japan-South Korea joint committee to create a shared history was launched in 2001 but has made little real headway. A similar Sino-Japanese joint committee of 20 prominent historians was formed in October 2006 but it also quickly bogged down in disagreements over what to include in a joint history.

These official efforts only reinforce the value of the “Divided Memories and Reconciliation” project. As an effort by scholars, without official involvement, and as the first attempt to treat this issue comparatively, with the inclusion of the United States, it breaks new ground. The February conference will produce not only a book but also will be reproduced in workshops in all the participating Asian countries, held in collaboration with scholarly institutions. Together with our partners, Shorenstein APARC hopes to generate a public dialogue, not only with scholars but also with the general public through media and other venues. The project is also intended to provide policymakers in Northeast Asia and the United States with data and analysis that will aid their own efforts at easing tensions over the history issue.

Ten 2008 POSCO NGO Fellows were selected by the Fellowship admission committee during the second POSCO NGO Fellowship Conference held on May 1 and 2 at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

George Washington University:

Ms. Gyung Lan Jung, Center for Peaceful Future of Korea

Mr. Hyun-Mo Choi, Korea Migrant Workers' Human Rights

Indiana University:

Mr. Seoung-Hwan Jeon, National Council of YMCAs of Korea

Mr. Jae-Seok Kim, Gwangju Citizen's Coalition for Economic Justice

Columbia University:

Mr. Tae Ho Lee, People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy

Mr. Boyoun Joung, Korea Youth Corps

University of British Columbia:

Ms. Jeong Sook Park, Korean Women Link

Ms. Hee-Seon Jeong, Seocho Volunteer Center

Stanford University:

Ms. Hye-Jeong Kim, Korea Federation for Environmental Movement

Mr. Hyun Gon Jung, Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation