East Asia

About: East Asia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 17591 publications have been published within this topic receiving 274073 citations. The topic is also known as: Eastern Asia.

Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American–East Asian Relations at the End of the Century

Abstract: In a work that synthesizes crucial developments in international relations at the close of the twentieth century, Bruce Cumings—a leading historian of contemporary East Asia—provides a nuanced understanding of how the United States has loomed over the modern history and culture of East Asia. By offering correctives to widely held yet largely inaccurate assessments of the affairs of this region, Parallax Visions shows how relations between the United States, Japan, Vietnam, North and South Korea, China, and Taiwan have been structured by their perceptions and misperceptions of each other. Using information based on thirty years of research, Cumings offers a new perspective on a wide range of issues that originated with the cold war—with particular focus on the possibly inappropriate collaboration between universities, foundations, and intelligence agencies. Seeking to explode the presuppositions that Americans usually bring to the understanding of our relations with East Asia, the study ranges over much of the history of the twentieth century in East Asian–American relations—Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Korean War, and more recent difficulties in U.S. relations with China and Japan. Cumings also rebuts U.S. media coverage of North Korea’s nuclear diplomacy in the 1990s and examines how experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism have had varying effects on economic development in each of these countries. Positing that the central defining experience of twentieth-century East Asia has been its entanglement first with British and Japanese imperialism, and then with the United States, Cumings ends with a discussion of how the situation could change over the next century as the economic and political global clout of the United States declines. Illuminating the sometimes self-deluded ideology of cold war America, Parallax Visions will engage historians, political scientists, and students and scholars of comparative politics and social theory, as well as readers interested in questions of modernity and the role of the United States in shaping the destinies of modernizing societies in Asia.

Public diplomacy and soft power in East Asia

Abstract: The Theory and Reality of Soft Power: Practical Approaches in East Asia S.Lee Soft Power as Productive Power Y.Lee Measuring Soft Power in East Asia: An Overview of Soft Power in East Asia on Affective and Normative Dimensions B.Jhee & N.Lee Modern Japan and the Quest for Attractive Power A.Fukushima Soft Power and Public Diplomacy: The Case of Indonesia R.Sukma Taiwan's Soft Power and the Future of Cross-Strait Relations: Can the Tail Wag the Dog? Y.Chu South Korean Soft Power and How South Korea Views the Soft Power of Others S.J.Lee The Limits of China's Soft Power in Europe: Beijing's Public Diplomacy Puzzle I.D'Hooghe Asian Perceptions of American Soft Power M.M.Bouton & G.Holyk The Complexities of Economic Soft Power: The US-China Case B.I.Page & T.Xie Concluding Reflections on Soft Power and Public Diplomacy in East Asia J.Melissen

Regional Paths of Development

Abstract: Development is the key challenge facing human society. The essence of development is to improve the quality of life, yet the striking technological revolutions of recent years have not resulted in better living conditions for most of the world’s population. These contrasts are not limited to comparisons between advanced industrial and developing societies; they are also reflected in starkly differing patterns of development within the third world. Five broad theoretical perspectives frame much of the literature on regional paths of development: neoclassical economics, world-systems/dependency theories, the developmental state, institutional analysis, and marxism. While these approaches are general in nature, there are marked affinities between individual theories and the experience of particular regions in the third word. Our review focuses on four third-word regions: Latin America, East Asia, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. East Asia comes out on top according to almost all indicators of economic and...

New Television, Globalisation, and the East Asian Cultural Imagination

Abstract: Challenging assumptions that have underpinned critiques of globalization and combining cultural theory with media industry analysis, Keane, Fung and Moran give a groundbreaking account of the evolution of television in the post-broadcasting era, and how programming ideas are creatively redeveloped and franchised in East Asia. In this first comprehensive study of television program adaptation across cultures, the authors argue that adaptation, transfer, and recycling of content are multiplying to the point of marginalising other economic and cultural practices. This is happening in television, but also in many other media and related areas of cultural production. Looking at China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, this study details practices that are variously referred to as formatting, franchising, imitation, adaptation, hybridity, bricolage, and even emulation. The authors show that significant re-modelling of local TV production practices occur when adaptation is genuinely responsive to local values. Examples of East Asian format adaptations include Survivor, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, The Weakest Link, Coronation Street, and Idol. The book offers alternatives models of media flow that demonstrate how Hollywood is losing its global grip. It deals with the history of the TV format trade, a movement that has coincided with the rise of alternative centres of television production and distribution outside the US.

Fashioning a New Korean Model out of the Crisis: The Rebuilding of Institutional Capabilities

Abstract: The financial meltdown in East Asia in 1997–8 had dramatic effects not only on the countries of the region itself, but on the scholarly debates over the sources and limits of the ‘East Asian Miracle’ model of development as well.1 The achievements of the fast-growing East Asian economies are not in question: as Joseph Stiglitz put it, the East Asian Miracle was real.2 But the methods used by the East Asians in constructing this miracle were cast in a pitiless spotlight through the financial chain-reactions of 1997, and, in many cases, were found wanting. Positions adopted before the crisis have thus had to be revised.