The North Korea-China relationship : context and dynamics

All bilateral relationships are embedded within a wider context, but nowhere is this context more important than in the North Korea China relationship. For North Korea (the DPRK), China has been a bulwark against the United States, and in earlier periods, a counterbalance to the Soviet Union. However, North Korea has always been wary of becoming too dependent on China and one reason, though obviously not the major one, for its desire to establish normal and even friendly, relations with the United States, and Japan, is to offset Chinese influence. For China also, the United States is the main focus of attention and the relationship with North Korea is important not so much in itself, but for its impact on China’s relationship with the US and to a lesser extent with Japan (the fear that the nuclearisation of the DPRK will facilitate the remilitarisation and nuclearisation of Japan) and with South Korea. Although diplomatic relations between Beijing and Seoul have only been established for 15 years, there has been explosive growth in the economic relationship, with positive repercussions in political, sporting and cultural (eg Hallyu) linkages. China is inevitably embroiled in, and is perhaps the underlying target of, the US offensive against North Korea, and the Banco Delta Asia affair provides an illuminating example of that. The Six Party Talks framework provides a convenient way of analysing this context because not merely does it bring together the major ancillary players to the bilateral Beijing-Pyongyang relationship but its institutional existence is the prime expression of the dynamic interaction between the constituent members

The crisis in North Korea - seeds of hope

In recent years the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or DPRK (North Korea) has suffered calamitous food shortages. A recent consolidated appeal by UN agencies and NGOs (nongovernmental organisations) called for US$376 million to meet the humanitarian needs of close to 5.5 million vulnerable people in 1999. The DPRK government has laid the blame for this state of affairs on a series of natural disasters, especially flooding, which has afflicted North Korea over the last three years, and on the United States sanctions which have been in place since the Korean War (195053). Valid as these factors are, however, they are only part of the story. As this paper makes clear, the DPRK has seen much of its foreign trade dry up since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and this has led to devastating shortages of imports. The most serious shortfall, in oil imports, has had a serious impact on industry, transportation, power generation and the production of fertilisers. The paper points out that beyond this foreign trade problem lies a more fundamental issue. The DPRK has little arable land and a short growing season for agriculture. Its very successful development programmes of the 1950s1970s were based on a policy of sharply growing inputs of fertiliser, agricultural mechanisation and expansion of irrigation. The policy achieved rapid growth and selfsufficiency, but even without the present crisis it is unlikely that it would have been sustainable because of diminishing returns. This paper draws on recent studies by the World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), UNICEF and the Red Cross (IFRC see Glossary). As the paper notes, the DPRK faces a multitude of problems but the crucial one is its relationship with the outside world. This is a complex issue and goes to the heart of the DPRK's history and to its sustaining ideology, Juche, usually translated as 'selfreliance'. The driving force behind the DPRK is nationalism. Its founding myth is the struggle, led by Kim Il Sung, to expel the Japanese and to establish an independent and powerful state, even if on only part of the national territory, and to repulse American attempts to destroy that independence. The paper argues that the search for selfreliance must now be reformulated. What worked in the past with powerful and committed allies such as the Soviet Union and China, both of them to some extent competing with aid and trade, is no longer effective, and the DPRK has to come to terms with the United States, Japan and the Republic of Korea (South Korea). It has to earn foreign exchange on world markets. All this requires a lessening of tension in northeast Asia. That in turn demands growing mutual knowledge and understanding between the DPRK and the other states with which its future is interconnected. There are in fact a number of signs of such a trend emerging. The DPRK is in particular becoming much more confident and adept at dealing with foreign agencies. As the UN consolidated appeal noted, "[g]reat strides have been made building confidence with the [DPRK] Government since 1995", with increased access by foreign agencies to areas of North Korea formerly offlimits. It is this building up of mutual understanding, the disinterested provision of aid and expertise, and the acceptance of it with confidence that may plant the most fertile seeds of hope for the future

Japan\u27s Choice between Hard and Soft Power

Globalization, Localization, and Japanese Studies in the Asia-Pacific Region : Past, Present, Future, Chinese University of Hong Kong,　2005年9月30日-10月4

China's terms of trade : with special reference to Sino-British trade

China is the largest developing country in the world, and yet internationally comparable data about her economy is very scarce, to the detriment of our knowledge both of China and the Third World as a whole. This thesis attempts to piece together a crucial statistic, her terms of trade, from the 1930's when the last major Chinese series ends to the 1970's when CIA estimates become available. Because of the lack of Chinese data, the thesis constructs core unit value indexes for Sino- British trade from British returns,and subsequently adjusts the com¬ ponent weights to allow for the difference in composition between China's trade with Britain and her trade with the West. This necessitates the development of a specific methodology and the meticulous construction of the Sino-British indexes at a high level of disaggregation. Chapter One examines the available statistics and explains the strategy of using British data. Some of the problems of defining Sino- British trade, especially undeclared indirect trade via Hong Kong, are examined in Chapter Two, while Chapter Three describes the methodology and documents the structure of the sample (which incorporates some 600 commodities). Chapters Four and Five describe the intellectual and historical contexts in which the study is located. Chapters Six and Seven construct the core indexes, Chapter Eight examines the weighting modes used, Chapter Nine focuses on the 1930's and links the British indexes with the Chinese ones. Chapter Ten analyses the price movement of the components of Sino-British trade over the period and Chapter Eleven arrives at an estimate of China's terms of trade with the West and links up with the 1970's statistics, thus completing China's long-term terms of trade from 1867 to 1976. The investigation is extensively documented with some 1,000 pages of tables and figures

Harnessing user communities for website location and evaluation

The AsiaWeb Project is looking at the problem of accessing quality and relevant information on the Web. It is the product of collaboration between two disciplinary standpoints. Dr Mimi Recker is approaching the problem from a generic, systems viewpoint, seeing the information domain as a case study and Dr Tim Beal has an interest in the computer access and manipulation of information on Japan, and Asia generally. We are taking business information on Asia as the general subject and within this Japan is a priority area. However, it is considered that the techniques developed could be applied to any subject area. We are working from a number of premises: There is an explosive growth of Web information The Web lacks the validating and guidance structure of the traditional publishing/library environment There is therefore a problem in efficiently finding relevant, quality and validated information. One attempted solution is to appoint domain specialists as \u27virtual librarians\u27 who validate and categorise World Wide Web (WWW) sites. The limitations of this are discussed. Our approach is to develop an infrastructure for supporting collaborative, distributed information filtering of Web resources. The filtering comes not from librarians and traditional guardians of information, though neither librarians nor library techniques are neglected, but the user community itself

SMEs and their e-commerce Implications for training in Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract: One of the greatest challenges facing traditional small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs

Transitions: Linking People to Jobs in an Age of Welfare Reform: A Carolina Planning Forum

Editors' Note: As a result of the recent federal welfare reform legislation, welfare recipients are being forced to find jobs. At the same time, the strong growth of the economy is leaving many Americans behind. Planners need to consider new ways to connect unemployed and underemployed people to jobs. The editors of Carolina Planning hosted a forum to discuss how people in North Carolina are dealing with these issues. We brought together a panel that includes varied perspectives, from private training programs to community development corporations to state agencies. The text of this article is an edited version of the discussion, which took place at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill on November 10, 1997

A high-resolution map of human evolutionary constraint using 29 mammals.

The comparison of related genomes has emerged as a powerful lens for genome interpretation. Here we report the sequencing and comparative analysis of 29 eutherian genomes. We confirm that at least 5.5% of the human genome has undergone purifying selection, and locate constrained elements covering ∼4.2% of the genome. We use evolutionary signatures and comparisons with experimental data sets to suggest candidate functions for ∼60% of constrained bases. These elements reveal a small number of new coding exons, candidate stop codon readthrough events and over 10,000 regions of overlapping synonymous constraint within protein-coding exons. We find 220 candidate RNA structural families, and nearly a million elements overlapping potential promoter, enhancer and insulator regions. We report specific amino acid residues that have undergone positive selection, 280,000 non-coding elements exapted from mobile elements and more than 1,000 primate- and human-accelerated elements. Overlap with disease-associated variants indicates that our findings will be relevant for studies of human biology, health and disease