The growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the Asia-Pacific region greatly surpasses the world average. When the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is better realized, then the world's largest free trade zone will be firmly established. It seems that this region has a very rosy outlook indeed; however, this region also faces a large number of serious problems such as: atomic energy in Japan, conflicts about East Asian regional integration, the decline of the Japanese Official Development Assistance (ODA), and the TPP's possible impact on the Japanese universal health insurance system. We now face a possible Sino-Japanese military conflict concerning the Senkaku Islands (or Diaoyutai Islands). In short, the Asia-Pacific region has both a rosy future and the potential influence from unstable and dangerous elements at work within the region at present. The main purpose of this book is to analyze historical development, whilst looking at the contemporary situation of Japan from interdisciplinary perspectives. This book asks three major questions: (1) Is this really globalization? (2) What are Japan's relations with other Asian countries? (3) Do U.S.-Japan relations still matter? Fourteen leading scholars in their fields answer these questions from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Korea has endured a "fractured, shattered twentieth century," and this updated edition brings Bruce Cumings's leading history of the modern era into the present. The small country, overshadowed in the imperial era, crammed against great powers during the Cold War, and divided and decimated by the Korean War, has recently seen the first real hints of reunification. But positive movements forward are tempered by frustrating steps backward. In the late 1990s South Korea survived its most severe economic crisis since the Korean War, forcing a successful restructuring of its political economy. Suffering through floods, droughts, and a famine that cost the lives of millions of people, North Korea has been labeled part of an "axis of evil" by the George W. Bush administration and has renewed its nuclear threats. On both sides Korea seems poised to continue its fractured existence on into the new century, with potential ramifications for the rest of the world.

This volume illuminates the relationship of China's radical past to its reformist present as China makes a way forward through very differently conceived and contested visions of the future. In the context of early twenty-first century problems and the failures of global capitalism, is China's history of revolutionary socialism an aberration that is soon to be forgotten, or can it serve as a resource for creating a more fully human and radically democratic China with implications for all of us? Ranging from the early years of China's revolutionary twentieth-century to the present, the essays collected here look at the past and present of China with a view toward better understanding the ideas, ideals, and people who have dared to imagine radical transformation of their worlds and to assess the conceptual, political, and social limitations of these visions and their implementations. The volume's chapters focus on these issues from a range of vantage points, representing a spectrum of current scholarship. The first half of the book brings new insights to understanding how early-twentieth century intellectuals interpreted ideas that allowed them to break with China's past and to envision new paths to a modern future. It treats of Chen Duxiu, a founder of the Communist party, Mao Zedong, and Mao in relation to the non-Communist Liang Shuming and with the Dalai Lama. With continuing threads of nation and nationalities, of peasants, utopias and dystopias linking the chapters, the book's second half looks broadly at the consequences of the implementations of radical ideas, at the same time critiquing our accepted frameworks of analysis. Moving up to the present, the book investigates the effects of the reforms since the 1980s on long-term environmental degradation and on the emergence of a capitalist rural economy. It gives an unsparing view into contemporary rural China through independent films. The book concludes with an analysis of the unshakable persistence of the shibboleth, "the rise of China," in popul

The growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the Asia-Pacific region greatly surpasses the world average. When the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is better realized, then the world's largest free trade zone will be firmly established. It seems that this region has a very rosy outlook indeed; however, this region also faces a large number of serious problems such as: atomic energy in Japan, conflicts about East Asian regional integration, the decline of the Japanese Official Development Assistance (ODA), and the TPP's possible impact on the Japanese universal health insurance system. We now face a possible Sino-Japanese military conflict concerning the Senkaku Islands (or Diaoyutai Islands). In short, the Asia-Pacific region has both a rosy future and the potential influence from unstable and dangerous elements at work within the region at present. The main purpose of this book is to analyze historical development, whilst looking at the contemporary situation of Japan from interdisciplinary perspectives. This book asks three major questions: (1) Is this really globalization? (2) What are Japan's relations with other Asian countries? (3) Do U.S.-Japan relations still matter? Fourteen leading scholars in their fields answer these questions from interdisciplinary perspectives.

If the past hundred years will be remembered as a century of war, Asia is surely central to that story. Tracing the course of conflicts throughout the region, this groundbreaking volume is the first to explore systematically the nexus of war and state terrorism. Challenging states' definitions of terrorism, which routinely exclude their own behavior, the book focuses especially on the nature of Japanese and American wars and crimes of war. The authors also assess significant acts of terror instigated by other Asian nations including China, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Offering a rare comparative perspective, the authors consider how state terror leads to massive civilian casualties, crimes of war, and crimes against humanity. In counterbalance, they discuss anti-war and anti-nuclear movements and international efforts to protect human rights, and the interwoven issues of responsibility, impunity, and memory. Interdisciplinary and deeply informed by global perspectives, this volume will resonate with readers searching for a deeper understanding of an epoch that has been dominated by war and terror.

The first book to explore the historical development of Belgian politics, this groundbreaking study of the rivalry between Catholicism, Socialism, and nationalism is essential reading for anyone interested in Europe before World War I.

This pathbreaking, multidisciplinary work challenges our unthinking acceptance of such terms as 'Asia Pacific' and 'Pacific Rim.' Clarifying the hidden power relationships and hegemonic struggles that are disguised by ideological constructions of the region, the contributors uncover fundamental contradictions_including the human costs and consequences_that underlie the much-celebrated economic boom. In evaluating the idea of 'Asia Pacific,' the book shifts our focus from abstract relationships between capital and commodities to the human interactions that have played a formative part in the region's constitution. The contributors agree that it is these interactions that constitute the region, rather than the physical boundaries of the Pacific. This revised and updated edition brings in additional essays focusing on conceptualizations of the Pacific, considers more fully interactions among countries, and strongly emphasizes peoples within the Pacific, who are routinely ignored in most discussions of the 'Rim.'

Depicted as an insular and forbidding police state with an insane dictator at its helm, North Korea - charter member of Bush's Axis of Evil - is a country the U.S. loves to hate. Now the CIA says it possesses nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as long-range missiles capable of delivering them to America's West Coast. But, as Bruce Cumings demonstrates in this provocative, lively read, the story of the U.S.-Korea conflict is more complex than American leaders or news media would have us believe. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Korea, and on declassified government reports, Cumings traces that story, from the brutal Korean War to the present crisis. Harboring no illusions regarding the totalitarian Kim Jong II regime, Cumings nonetheless insists on a more nuanced approach. The result is both a counter-narrative to the official U.S. - and North Korean - version and a fascinating portrayal of North Korea; a country that suffers through foreign invasions, natural disasters, and its own internal contradictions, yet somehow continues to survive.

A BRACING ACCOUNT OF A WAR THAT IS EITHER MISUNDERSTOOD, FORGOTTEN, OR WILLFULLY IGNORED
For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953. But for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long struggle that still haunts contemporary events. With access to new evidence and secret materials from both here and abroad, including an archive of captured North Korean documents, Bruce Cumings reveals the war as it was actually fought. He describes its origin as a civil war, preordained long before the first shots were fired in June 1950 by lingering fury over Japan's occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Cumings then shares the neglected history of America's post-World War II occupation of Korea, reveals untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, and tells of the United States officially entering the action on the side of the South, exposing as never before the appalling massacres and atrocities committed on all sides.
Elegantly written and blisteringly honest, "The Korean War" is, like the war it illuminates, brief, devastating, and essential.

South Korea, with its craggy hillsides, gnarled trees, and ancient temples, is steeped in tradition yet, at the same time, is thoroughly modern the tenth-ranking industrial power in the world. Its capital city, Seoul, is one of the most populous cities in the world and home to such cutting-edge buildings as the Samsung Tower Palace.The beautiful landscape and day-to-day details of life in South Korea are depicted here in images taken by the photographers of Magnum the famed cooperative whose members are among the greatest photographers of our time. Here we see a rich culture that both respects a dynamic cultural history and celebrates the latest trends in fashion, technology, and architecture. These extraordinary photographs are set in their historical context by an insightful text by historian Bruce Cumings."

At the height of the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s, John Paton Davies, Jr., was summoned to the State Department one morning and fired. His offense? The career diplomat had counseled the U.S. government during World War II that the Communist forces in China were poised to take over the country--which they did, in 1949. Davies joined the thousands of others who became the victims of a political maelstrom that engulfed the country and deprived the United States of the wisdom and guidance of an entire generation of East Asian diplomats and scholars.The son of American missionaries, Davies was born in China at the turn of the twentieth century. Educated in the United States, he joined the ranks of the newly formed Foreign Service in the 1930s and returned to China, where he would remain until nearly the end of World War II. During that time he became one of the first Americans to meet and talk with the young revolutionary known as Mao Zedong. He documented the personal excesses and political foibles of Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. As a political aide to General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, the wartime commander of the Allied forces in East and South Asia, he traveled widely in the region, meeting with colonial India's Nehru and Gandhi to gauge whether their animosity to British rule would translate into support for Japan. Davies ended the war serving in Moscow with George F. Kennan, the architect of America's policy toward the Soviet Union. Kennan found in Davies a lifelong friend and colleague. Neither, however, was immune to the virulent anticommunism of the immediate postwar years."China Hand" is the story of a man who captured with wry and judicious insight the times in which he lived, both as observer and as actor.

Paik Nak-chung is one of Korea's most incisive contemporary public intellectuals. By training a literary scholar, he is perhaps best known as an eloquent cultural and political critic. This volume represents the first book-length collection of his writings in English. Paik's distinctive theme is the notion of a "division system" on the Korean peninsula, the peculiar geopolitical and cultural logic by which one nation continues to be divided into two states, South and North. Identifying a single structure encompassing both Koreas and placing it within the framework of the contemporary world-system, Paik shows how this reality has insinuated itself into virtually every corner of modern Korean life.