Politics, Culture and Identities in East Asia

The following sections are included:

• Contents
• About the Editors and Contributors

There are at least two conflicting images of East Asia. One is that of turbulence featuring a clash of Chinese, Japanese and Korean nationalisms, a rising and assertive China jostling for power and influence with the US superpower bent on keeping its hegemony, and a landscape of hot spots in a nuclearising Korean peninsula, an unsettling Taiwan Strait and a tumultuous East and South China Seas. This is not to mention those bedeviled by internal ethnic conflict and armed violence in regions such as southern Thailand, Mindanao in southern Philippines and Myanmar. After the epoch of Western imperialism and colonialisation, some East Asian countries have struggled to build a national identity out of disparate ethnic groups with different access to economic, cultural and political resources. Regional institutional building also appears to have faltered. The trilateral summit among Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo appears to have stalled (at the time of writing), while the East Asian Summit looks like a talk shop with an ASEAN that is split over the South China Sea dispute. There is also the spectre of ISIS-related terrorism in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Economically, in a globalised world, East Asia is not immune to any economic slowdown or financial crisis in the United States and Europe.

There are at least four geopolitical vectors in East Asia which will shape and “remap” East Asia. Indeed, these are “mega trends” which will make East Asia more divided or integrated. The first vector is China’s astonishing rise which impacts not only East Asia but also the world. The Chinese mainland’s phenomenal economic development was possible only after paramount leader Deng Xiaoping categorically rejected Maoist autarky, embraced an “open door” policy to the world, and adopted reforms and an East Asian model of exportled economic development. This developmental model was spearheaded earlier by Japan and the newly industrialising economies of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. What is truly remarkable is the speed, scope and magnitude of China’s successful economic transformation from state central planning to an export juggernaut.

There are at least three potential flashpoints which make an East Asian Community (EAC) a pipe dream in the near future. The most serious and unpredictable hot spot in East Asia today is a divided Korean peninsula and the relentless quest by Pyongyang to become an armed nuclear power. In September 2016, North Korea detonated a nuclear device with a yield of 10 million kilotons — the most powerful of five nuclear tests to date. Presumably, Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons are a deterrent against any attempts by external powers to seek regime change in North Korea. That Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Gaddafi of Libya might not have been overthrown and lost their lives if they had had nuclear weapons is probably a salutary lesson for supreme North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. In North Korea, security of the country, the totalitarian regime and the Kim dynasty are in conflate.

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Development of Market-Driven Economic Integration in East Asia
• The Emergence of Economic Regionalism
• US Involvement in East Asian Economic Integration
• Conclusion

Against the backdrop of mounting restiveness in Hong Kong over the book publishers’ kidnapping in late 2015 and dissenting voices over press freedom in the aftermath of the Occupy Central movement came the “Fishball Revolution” in 2016. It started off quite unassumingly when the police cleared unlicensed hawkers off the streets on the eve of the Lunar New Year. The law enforcement action, however, fomented discontent. Symbolically, to pro-“localist” and pro-Hong Kong autonomy forces, hawkers were, in the past, a mainstay of Hong Kong street food scene and a feature of “old” (i.e. pre-1997) Hong Kong.

Taiwanese identity is dynamic and not easily definable by conventional wisdom and knowledge. Politics had a heavy hand in shaping identity during certain historical periods when state power was hegemonic; even today, it remains a dominating factor. The state’s impact is overwhelming and affects even the action-response dynamics of societal individuals in non-political spheres. Taiwanese identity is also volatile — highly situational and context-dependent on the outcome of Taiwanese politics which rejects the idea of political influence solely shaping Taiwanese identity.

The most advanced and successful example of regionalism in the world is arguably the European Union (EU). It was formed on the back of a coal and steel community in Western Europe based on the idea that economic cooperation and regionalism precede other forms of regional integration (political and social for example). This was set against the context of an acute need to rebuild Europe after the Great War and a political ambition that European countries would never go to war with each other again when economic interdependence deepens. By contrast, ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) has a different trajectory; it was started by non-socialist countries to unite and prevent communism from spreading beyond Indo-China to the rest of the hinterland and maritime Southeast Asia.

National identities are how states and their societies perceive themselves and “others”. Identity gives individuals, communities and nations a sense of belonging and emotional anchor in a world of flux. Identity can also be “self-ascribed” or “other-ascribed”. An individual or nation can embrace a self-image with positive attributes which may be very different from the perceptions of its neighbours. Identities can be inherently subjective if not xenophobic and delusionary in their extremes. This is especially so in Northeast Asia.

In an era of globalisation, popular cultures originating from different localities worldwide are able to reference the universalistic influences of the United States, aspects of which are hybridised with local cultures. The polycentric dispersions of the Japanese, Korean and Chinese popular cultures provide fertile materials for studying production and fandom consumption in the region. The different production centres in these three countries transcend national and traditional cultural boundaries, facilitating cultural hybridity…

South Korea, a leading OECD leading economy, has impacted the East Asian region with its soft power. Globalisation and the development of digital and internet technologies have driven the penetration of Korean popular culture into the everyday lives of East Asian societies through TV drama series, games, movies and K-pop music.

East Asia’s multiplicity of cultural linkages have transcended national boundaries and the vagaries of geopolitics. For many ethnic Chinese of different citizenries in East Asia, they develop and form a cultural connectivity through the media and the “soft” power of the Chinese script. Unlike in the days of yore when Chinese culture yielded a dominant influence over ethnic Chinese abroad, the media today enables a more “bidirectional” exchange. Indeed, the “opening up” and reforms of the mainland China, globalisation and the internet revolution have made Chinese-language media in Southeast Asia more accessible to mainland Chinese readers. One such example is the digital news portal of Singapore’s Chinese newspaper Lianhe Zaobao, which is widely read in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. When Lianhe Zaobao first launched its electronic version of the newspaper in 1995, it immediately attracted a readership of 250,000. Two decades later, the digital version of Lianhe Zaobao has garnered a strong readership of four million people.

China’s media portrayal of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has largely toed the official line. The media, or official media in China, is often regarded as the “throat and tongue” or mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter the Party). Chinese President Xi Jinping underscored this point in his February 2016 visit to the headquarters of the People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television (CCTV), exhorting all news media outlets run by the Party to speak for the Party’s will and its propositions, and protect the Party’s authority and unity.

Despite the cooling of Sino–Japanese relations brought about by disputes over the Diaoyu Islands (known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyutai in Taiwan) and the prevailing distrust among East Asian countries due to conflicting sovereignty claims over the South China Sea since 2012, intraregional tourism in East Asia is still flourishing.

According to the ICEF Monitor — a market intelligence resource for international education, there were five million students studying outside their home countries in 2014, more than doubled the 2.1 million in 2000 and tripled the number in 1990. The astounding growth in student numbers occurred in the context of an increasingly globalised world in which countries are becoming more interdependent. No other region in the world had undergone as profound a transformation as Asia during the latter half of the 20th century, which witnessed unprecedented economic growth and student mobility. The ICEF Monitor reported that 53% of all students studying abroad in 2015 were from Asia and Asia itself has become a new popular destination for international students. Indeed, many observers began to appreciate East Asia — notably Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and of course, China — as a “third pole” in the global higher education landscape that had been traditionally dominated by the United States and Western Europe.

The following section is included:

• Index