̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Korea

World's oldest Korean Bibles at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

sjr81 — Wed, 22 May 2019 23:25:49 +0000

̽��ֱ��library is home to one of the most significant collections of early Korean bibles anywhere in the world.

Out of the ashes of Empire

admin — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 09:27:36 +0000

Barack Obama’s resolution to kick off foreign policy for his second term with a tour of the Asia-Pacific region, at the end of 2012, was testimony not only to that area’s growing economic importance, but also to the increasing significance of its politics. East Asia, Southeast Asia and the disputed China Seas now comprise the theatre in which the world’s two superpowers meet. In the eyes of many, it is there that key decisions about supremacy, ideology – perhaps world politics as a whole – will, in future years, be made.

In the West, China’s rise is the subject of constant media analysis and it has almost become de rigueur to ask ourselves how well we really understand this new giant of the world stage. But as America begins to ‘pivot’ eastwards, by striking deals with China’s neighbours, perhaps it is as important to question how much we understand East Asia as a whole. Do we really know what drives the world view of South Korea, or Taiwan, for example? And given the growing importance of that theatre, how effective is our grasp of how these countries view one another?

Historically, the emergence (and re-emergence) of these nations after World War II is a surprisingly neglected topic. Many people are only vaguely aware that, until 1945, many parts of China, along with Taiwan, the Koreas and sections of Indochina, were at various times part of an expanding Japanese Empire that began in 1895. At its height, in 1942, this territory spanned 2.8 million square miles. Yet when two atomic bombs effectively ended the war in August 1945, the entire Empire disappeared, almost overnight.

In the wake of this collapse, new political entities appeared, but it was not always clear what the extent of their power was, or who managed which territory. “Before the Japanese Empire, nation states had not existed in East Asia the same way they had in Europe,” said Dr Barak Kushner, an historian based at the Department of East Asian Studies. ̽��ֱ��next decades would see millions of lives lost as competing forces sought to stamp their authority on parts of Japan’s former Imperial domain, with bitter conflicts in China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and spilling into Indochina, which later developed into the longer Vietnam War.

Post-war East Asian identities formed, then, not in the context of China’s rise, but Japan’s retreat. Historians, meanwhile, have tended to investigate this story from America’s viewpoint, not least because they lacked access to many first-hand sources that could tell the tale from an Asian perspective. Now that is beginning to change. Recent years have witnessed the declassification of numerous government and private archives. Even China recently opened up many of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs records up to 1965. For researchers, this is a golden opportunity to examine and understand what motivated and inspired the emergent powers of East Asia as they came into being.

Kushner is the Principal Investigator for a major new project which, over five years, will attempt to research that issue. Funded by the European Research Council, its title is ‘ ̽��ֱ��Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965’. Its main focus, however, will be the war crimes trials that took place in East Asia after the war, as the new administrations attempted to bring Japanese war criminals, and those people who were believed to have supported the Japanese regime, to justice.

̽��ֱ��records of those trials offer a perhaps unrivalled view of how political and legal authority was brokered. As these countries stepped out of the Imperial shadow, the trials became statements of whom they believed themselves to be as Chinese, Korean, or Taiwanese citizens, rather than subordinates of Japan.

This was not simply a matter of enfranchising former Imperial subjects, however. Ethnicity, let alone loyalty, in East Asia was exceptionally blurred. Millions of Japan’s own people remained in both Asia and the western Pacific. Their own stricken government did not want them back and many wanted to stay. In some countries, like China, where Chiang Kai-shek actively courted the Japanese to help him in the civil war, their expertise was still much in demand. Elsewhere, people who had for decades lived as Imperial subjects were, in the space of a few weeks, expected to abandon that way of life and all its symbols for something more ‘indigenous’. Many, not surprisingly, struggled to understand what that meant. Identity was flexible to say the least.

Against that backdrop, the trials began. “ ̽��ֱ��business of identifying who was in power and how a break with the past was to be achieved all came out in the trials,” Kushner said. “They were platforms from which the new authorities could make a statement about their emergent identities. That was not an issue that the Americans, conducting trials in Japan itself, had to worry about; for them identity was a moot point.”

For this reason, the project will not look at the US-backed ‘Tokyo Trial’ that arraigned the ‘Class A’ war criminals who had prosecuted Japan’s war. Instead, it will focus on 5,700 class B/C criminals who were tried around East Asia. These were people who had allegedly committed crimes on the ground – rape, murder, illegal incarceration, the abuse of POWs, or general ‘crimes against humanity’. Tens of thousands more were tried for treason and collaboration. In both cases, the penalty, if found guilty, was often death.

̽��ֱ��process varied across the region. In China, 30,000 people were charged from 1945–1947 and 15,000 convicted for treason alone. Such was the zeal of the Kuomintang that in the end evidence collection was capped because the courts could not cope, and the government was more concerned about the civil war with the Communists.

In Korea, by contrast, tensions along the 38th parallel induced the southern administration to ignore collaborators altogether, and set about trying Communists from the start. In Taiwan, even identifying collaborators was coloured by the trials’ function as a stage for the Chinese Nationalists as they sought legitimacy.

Kushner believes that as this process went on, over almost 20 years, 1945 became less significant as a marker for the war’s end and the dawn of a new age. As well as the trials themselves, media coverage, films, literature, monuments and memorials reinforced specific views of what had happened under the Japanese as these cultural responses emerged from the judicial process. And in Japan itself, many people adopted the stance of part-chastened aggressors and part-victims of deeply partial tribunals, in what Kushner calls a “discordant swirl of public opinion.” Little wonder that he anticipates the project will lead not only to a powerful retelling of this chapter in East Asian history, but “policy-relevant findings regarding Asian regionalism” as well.

One reason that ideology and identity during this period remain understudied is that many historians have, understandably, focused on the details of war crimes themselves rather than on the subsequent trials. Accounts of the latter have also tended to dwell on specific and personal aspects of the process, such as individual memoirs, or localised grudge-matches that played out during the hearings. Kushner hopes to move beyond this, arguing that while personal recollections are important in the historical record, the legal process was an expression of broader, large-scale ambitions that offer a genuinely transnational perspective on East Asia after the war. “ ̽��ֱ��war crimes trials are the point at which the precedents for public attitudes thereafter are set up,” he added. “They provide a written record on which a number of post-war policies about authority would be based. ̽��ֱ��time is now ripe to investigate them, and start a new historical assessment from the inside.”

̽��ֱ��new identities and ideologies that emerged in East Asia after the fall of Japan’s Empire have rarely been studied. Now, as the region again becomes a major theatre in world politics, a new project aims to tell that history from the inside.

̽��ֱ��time is now ripe to start a new historical assessment from the inside

Barak Kushner

Center for Research Libraries in Chicago

Cartoon produced as state propaganda in China during the 1950s

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23 things they don't tell you about capitalism

lw355 — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:38:04 +0000

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Dr Chang left his homeland for the first time when he moved to Cambridge as a graduate student in the 1980s. His time in Korea had coincided with an economic miracle, when the country transformed itself from being one of the poorest countries to one of the richest by the late 1980s. It was an economic transition that he now looks back on with academic interest: ‘Of course when you are living through it you don’t realise the enormity of the change,’ he says. ‘But, as an economist today, I feel extremely fortunate to have witnessed this leap, rather like a historian of mediaeval England witnessing the Battle of Hastings.’Dr Chang’s research in the Faculty of Economics encompasses trade and industrial policy issues, foreign investment and intellectual policy rights, corporate governance and the stock market. Partly shaping his research agenda is his work with the many organisations he advises, from the World Bank to Oxfam, and the Ecuadorian Presidency to Shell.‘I don’t wish to work on a permanent basis anywhere other than in academia but I have a lot of interactions with non-academic people – in government, business, international organisations, and NGOs – because much of my research is directly relevant to policies,’ he says. ‘These interactions help me to take a fresh look at economic theory and how it relates to the real world.’He is also keen to bring economics to a new audience by communicating complicated ideas in plain language. His latest book 23 Things… explains how capitalism really works by challenging such dogmas as the ‘free’ market, globalisation making the world richer, and rich countries being more entrepreneurial than poor ones, before concluding with his eight principles for rebuilding the world economy.

What might others be surprised to learn about you?

A few years ago, South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense banned my book Bad Samaritans: ̽��ֱ��Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism in the country’s military barracks as ‘seditious’ literature. Funnily enough, the incident propelled me into something of a celebratory sphere in Korea – whenever the issue was discussed, somehow my book became representative of the list of 23 banned books. I suppose you could say it was the best kind of ban. Bad Samaritans had a certain aura and yet was available everywhere except in army bookshops, with the result that sales more than doubled!

Who or what inspires you?

I’m inspired by people who have fought for a better world – the individuals we know about and also the countless, nameless people who have made sacrifices to change the world. I often get asked by my students whether, with so many things wrong with the world and so much resistance to change, it is realistic to expect any social and economic reform. But only 200 years ago people thought that abolishing slavery was totally unrealistic, and 100 years ago women were imprisoned for wanting the vote. These things were changed because people fought for them. So I tell them yes, although in the short run it’s almost impossible to change anything, in the long run it is possible.

If you could wake up tomorrow with a new skill, what would it be?

I would love to wake up having learned another language overnight because knowing another language is like knowing another world. Spanish would be the best because some of my favourite writers are from Latin America, but even if it’s a language with only three books I would gladly take it if it were given to me.

What is your favourite research tool?

It’s more a research methodology than a tool, but I’ve learned much from looking at the economics of real societies and comparing them across time and space. ̽��ֱ��real world does not operate in a way that economic models would predict – life is often stranger than fiction. My favourite example is Singapore. It’s famous for its free trade and welcoming attitude towards foreign investors but in many ways it’s a socialist country, with all the land publicly owned, 85% of housing provided by the government-owned housing corporation, and more than 20% of national output produced by state-owned enterprise. It is a perfect example of both the limitations of economic theory and the pragmatic mixture that is needed in the real world – anyone trying to invent an economic system on the basis of a particular theory would not invent Singapore’s economy. Real-world analysis wakes you up from your hidden assumptions and helps sharpen your theory.

What will the future look like in 2050?

In contrast to what is often hyped, over the past 30 years the world economy has grown more slowly and has become more unstable and more unequal than it was during the preceding 30-year period. On top of this, we are in the middle of a financial crisis the end of which is not yet in sight. Unless we reform this system we could continue to have these problems over the next 50 years. I see the challenge as restoring the balance between the market and the government, finance and the real economy, and material prosperity and environmental sustainability. Economists will need to do their bit to help find solutions.

For more information, please contact Dr Ha-Joon Chang (hjc1001@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Economics or visit www.hajoonchang.net/

Author of the recently published 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Dr Ha-Joon Chang studies how international markets succeed and fail, asking what steps might be taken to rebuild the world economy.

We are in the middle of a financial crisis the end of which is not yet in sight. Unless we reform this system we could continue to have these problems over the next 50 years."

Ha-Joon Chang

Mark Mniszko

Ha-Joon Chang

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