This article examines how management-labor relations and labor legislation have evolved in China since Deng Xiaoping's “Open Door” reforms were introduced in 1979 and how they have changed over the two decades since then. We reconsider the role of Chinese trade unions, enterprises and the state agencies involved, as they move from an employment system that was once called the “iron rice bowl” to a new one based on market forces. This change raises serious dilemmas and issues: are there contradictions between preserving workers' rights and at the same time, enhancing productivity? Does such a transition constitute the onset of “collective bargaining” and a labor-market in the Western sense? How are such shifts likely to be affected by China's entry into the WTO in late 2001? These and other related questions are analysed in the article.

The methodologies and assumptions that guide our acquisition of knowledge and interpretation of data are context and time bound. Academic disciplines, sub-disciplines, methodological approaches and research agendas are to a large degree conditioned by the ‘real world,’ and none more so than International Relations. Accordingly, it is important to consider the possible sociological foundations of different epistemologies and paradigms of International Relations. Surely there is more than one way of looking at the world, unless one is steadfastly married to a positivist universal truth. Yet it is interesting that East Asian scholarship and teaching in IR has seemingly not developed strong ‘indigenous’ regional characteristics, perhaps with the exception of Japan with its large market, long tradition, political freedom and economic affluence. In fact IR has absorbed and closely followed Western and particularly North American social science. This introduction and the articles that follow will explore the fortunes of IR scholarship and regional studies in East Asia in the context of national and regional environments. It will consider how IR is taught and researched in various national settings, and examine the interaction between IR as a social science and national/regional historical experiences, cultural and pedagogical traditions, and politico-ideological values. The underlining problematique concerns the idea of an East Asian ‘IR community’: why has this tended to be comparatively weak? How can we envision the development of a more rigorous East Asian IR community, one that is not exclusively judged according to external — and particularly North American — terms of reference and standards? It goes without saying that we are not attempting to antagonize our American friends and colleagues, but simply to stimulate a ‘sociology of science’ reflection of the discipline in the East Asian regional setting. Two questions serve as the organizing themes of this special issue. The first concerns the primary characteristics of the regional IR community. Many of the papers in this collection point to the dominance of US-originated ideas and theories. The second question arises from the first question: whether these predominant approaches help us to understand the region in a time of change.

This paper argues that “China threat” was largely a myth and that the China factor was not the critical factor leading to the re-affirmation process of the U.S.-Japan alliance in the mid-1990s. It took the 1994 Korean crisis for this to materialize. The China factor was important only as a general background, and the role of the U.S.-Japan alliance in dealing with the rise of China was implicit, remaining in the domain of managing shifting major power relations after the Cold War rather than being directed against the myth of a “China threat.” The paper also argues that preoccupation with Japan as an independent security pole is an important source of confusion about the nature of Japan's security policies and its profile therein, which, as before, will continue to be premised on the U.S.-Japan alliance. It explains actual records of Japanese security behaviors as a series of attempts to cope with the dual identity as a security actor. Japan's readjustment to the post-Cold War security environment, founded upon the re-affirmation of the U.S.-Japan alliance, was a clear case in point.

Mainstream International Relations teaching and scholarship is often argued to be social scientific and therefore able to generate propositions about international life that have general (even universal) explanatory value. However, the methods and research questions of IR can in part be explained by the nature of the national academies in which they develop and by a range of national and regional sociological and political circumstances. Thus, following Ole Waever, the “American approach to the study of IR” and its predominance can be explained by reference to certain cultural and structural factors. Yet if the sociological underpinnings of teaching and researching in IR are inevitable and readily apparent, why is there no distinct ‘East Asian tradition’? Why is the East Asian IR community relatively weak? In fact, the relative weakness of indigenous national and regional East Asian IR approaches can be understood as an extension of national academic environments, historical circumstances, and national political traditions.

The preconceived image of the pre-modern East Asian region order, known commonly as the tributary system, is problematic. That is because it is represented by ‘the Other’ — not only the external (Westerners) but also the internal (Asians) — and in turn the inaccurate image has gone on reproducing, expanding, and dominating. In order to solve this problem, in question, this paper will first critically review the preconceived image of the pre-modern Chinese world order and identify the problems of Orientalism and modernism. Then, in search for a real image, the paper reinterprets Confucian ideas and concepts as the principles undergirding the pre-modern East Asian regional order. The paper also discusses the Korean kyorin system, one of the subsystems of the pre-modern East Asian order. The objective is to decipher the ways in which Korea interpreted and institutionalized the Confucian ideas on foreign policy or international relationships during the Choson dynasty (1392–1910).

By doing these, we can describe a more real image of the pre-modern East Asian region order. The more “real” interstate relationship was based on li (principle) and li* (rites), and harmonized with another concept of gong (the public/publicness), as shown by pingfen or junfen (the fairly allocated). Based on such conceptions of the human world, the pre-modern East Asian regional order was divided into different territories and dominions, each with its own sovereign. Once the formality of the suzerain and tributary state was recognized, moreover, China did not intervene in the internal and external affairs of the tributary as well as hushi (a foreign trade system) states. Like interpersonal relationships, interstate ones were hierarchic, but they were also based on the idea of reciprocity, fair allocation as well as impartiality, harmony, and coexistence.

In this paper, we review and summarize recent trends of international relations studies in South Korea on three distinct dimensions and, on the basis of this, suggest future directions of research in the field. Our focus throughout the paper is on the constraints and opportunities for the development of indigenous international relations theories and models. Although the confrontational Cold War legacy on the Korean Peninsula sustains the validity of the powerful realist paradigm, we argue that critical challenges are breathing a new life into the academic field of international relations in a time of great change when a new global and regional order has been taking shape since the end of the Cold War. In order to accommodate these new changes and call attention to epistemological pluralism, we posit liberal constructivism, which combines liberalism with constructivism, as a new epistemological alternative to the existing lines of international relations theories. Given the opportunities and intellectual resources, we conclude, the future of the discipline of international relations in South Korea is quite promising.

This article compares the process of corporate structural reforms in Japan and South Korea in the late 1990s and raises two questions. Why have state-led economies such as Japan and South Korea engaged in politically costly corporate structural reforms in the late 1990s? What explains the variation in the reform process between Japan and South Korea?

I argue that the process of structural reforms in state-led economies has been the result of state mediation of global financial forces. The rise of portfolio capital inflows increases the pressure for domestic reforms, a change that is common to Japan and Korea in the late 1990s. However, the actual success of structural reforms depends on the ability of the elite bureaucracy to mediate among between global investors, domestic interest groups and the general public. In contrast to Korea, Japan exhibits a low level of bureaucratic control over the legislative agenda and a situation of tripolar deadlock.

The evidence presented here includes quantitative data, government documents, and legislative records as well as information gathered from over 100 interviews with bureaucrats, politicians, business leaders, labor leaders, and other actors in the two countries.

This article traces the evolution of international relations studies as an academic discipline in China in the last two decades or so. Almost non-existent before the 1980s, IR studies has become an increasingly dynamic, sophisticated, and popular field of social science in both teaching and research. This is reflected in the growth of institutions, degree programs, scholarship and paradigmatic debate as well as interaction with the Western intellectual community in both theory and personnel. Nevertheless, the development of IR studies in China is still in its primitive stage and it must contend with various problems such as political control, a lack of well-trained scholars, inadequate funding, and ideational uncertainty.

Taiwan is diplomatically isolated in international politics and yet it now has a thriving IR community with links the world over. As diplomatic isolation has increased, the government has felt a strong need to reach out in other spheres of the international community, and this has led to a demand for a better understanding of international relations. This can be compared to an ‘industrial policy’ — the government has supported and guided certain IR research agenda and institutions in accordance with the perceived needs of the territory. At the same time, the political science community was able to respond in kind. Since the early 1970s many of those who had received advanced degrees in American universities began to flow back to Taiwan, reversing a brain drain in political science in the previous decade. Their teachings and publications laid a firm foundation for the study of international relations in Taiwan. After three decades, this sub-field of political science has genuinely come of age. Whilst this has been on the back of US-inspired methodologies and academic role models, it is applied to challenges and problems that are unique to Taiwan and its regional environment.

South Korea and Japan responded to their financial crisis of the late 1990s by restructuring financial institutions. Also, financial authorities were created to supervise financial institutions and lead financial restructuring. Financial restructuring focused on the resolution of non-performing loans that had been contributing to financial failures and on strengthening their equity capital bases for sound management. Huge amounts of public funds were mobilized to pursue these policy goals. The Korean government took more drastic measures by closing or merging many failing financial institutions. Financial restructuring also facilitated bank concentration in Korea — and Japan — giving births to several mega banks. Both governments of Korea and Japan encouraged bank concentration by allowing the establishment of a financial holding company. The Korean government was more actively involved in merging banks while Japanese bank mergers were taken by business initiatives.

Financial restructuring is expected to bring more market oriented business practices among financial institutions and loosen cooperative ties among financial institutions, corporations, and financial bureaucracy in both countries. Close bank-corporation ties through main bank system and corporate networks within a business group are being loosened in Japan particularly since concerned parties have come to seek market rationality over loyalty. On the other hand, the intervention in financial sector and the mediation in bank-corporation relationship by financial bureaucracy are expected to be weakened in the case of Korea. Nevertheless, discretionary power of Korea's financial bureaucracy appears stronger for the time being since it took the helmsman of determining which financial institution is out of market.

Stimulated by Ole Waever's (1998) examination of American and European developments in International Relations, this article examines the growth of the discipline of international relations in Japan, focusing on the major currents of the social science tradition since 1868 and the intellectual agenda of international relations since 1945. Postwar scholarship has reflected the main themes and questions of Japanese history — the causes of war, the struggle for peace, Japan's place in the world and Asia, and Japan's role in the Cold War. To an extent, the organization and substance of IR teaching and scholarship in Japan can be explained by reference to certain sociological and historical variables. Discussions about methodology have not mirrored the “great debates” of the United States, but the younger scholars are moving closer to the American pattern. Recent exposure to and interaction with American scholarship has become increasingly visible, allowing Japanese scholars to make important contributions to debates in the US.

This paper discusses area, regional, and international relations studies as seen from the vantage point of the United States. Part I situates the issue of regionalism in the current debate about conceptualizing international relations since the end of the Cold War and at the dawn of a new millennium. Against the historical backdrop of a powerful case for area studies made soon after the end of World War II, Part II focuses attention on the crosscurrents that are affecting area studies from three different directions: (1) disciplinary-based, scientific critics who value nomothetic approaches more than contextualization; (2) cultural critiques developed from the perspective of the humanities and, at times, post-modernism; and (3) the growing emphasis on cross-regional studies that seek to blend and incorporate elements from both scientific and humanistic perspectives. Part III concludes with some brief reflections on the relations, in the classroom, between areas, regional and international studies.

A preoccupation with the US and narrow notions of area studies have obstructed scholarship on the diversity of bilateral relations and the emergence of the Northeast Asian regional community. During the Cold War, for example, this meant that Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese ties were neglected. In the 1990s the problem became more acute because many bilateral ties intensified and acquired new dimensions. There was an outpouring of new primary and secondary sources within the region, while rapidly evolving conditions made updating of insights imperative. The gap keeps widening between the claims of globalists with little area knowledge, and the opportunities to deepen understanding by applying area expertise to the flux in bilateral and regional relations. The traditions of Chinese, Japanese and Russian area studies have proven valuable, but inadequate. There is a need for scholars who will develop approaches that navigate between global and area studies. Few specialists on Northeast Asian area relations not involving the US can be found in the US, and the situation is scarcely improving. Experts must be trained for in depth, balanced bilateral analysis. Increasingly, there is a need for triangular experts as well. Indeed, working closely with centers inside the region, the US and other Western scholarly communities should be training a new generation of Northeast Asianists comfortable as area experts while also at home in the disciplines.

This article contends that the September 11th terrorist attacks have had a significant effect on the Asian regional order as well as on the global order. Globally, they have had two seemingly contradictory effects. On the one hand, the post-9.11 situation has presented the major powers of the world, including the United States, Russia and China, to build a “system of concert,” overcoming their rivalries and conflicting interests. It seems to have given new impetus to the promotion of multilateralism in international relations. On the other hand, it has helped to revive and rediscover what is known as realism in international politics, realism that recognizes the supremacy of the state and national interest as individual states become the main protector of their citizens in times of crises.

The system of concert is also evolving in East Asia which, until September 11th, 2001, had been slow in catching up with the Western world (Europe and America) in international cooperation and multilateral mechanisms. Most remarkable in this regard is the improved relations between China and the United States and, secondarily, between China and Japan. Even though sources of conflict remain among various countries, major powers such as the United States, Russia, China and Japan now place greater emphasis upon cooperation and mutual assistance in fighting global terrorism. It nevertheless seems that Asians will continue to live in a regional order where a new system of concert that evolves in the aftermath of the 9–11 attacks coexists with a traditional geopolitical and real politics order.