The 4th JEF-KRA Global Risk Symposium‘Global risks and opportunities under the “With-Corona” global order’
17:00 -19:00 (JST), Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 October
Japan Economic Foundation (JEF) and Komatsu Research & Advisory (KRA) coorganised the fourth Global Risk Symposium to analyse the current rapidly changing
international climate from a multifaceted perspective. Given the pandemic, for the
first time, it would be held as an online conference (with simultaneous interpreters)
over two consecutive days. Speakers joined from 4 countries: Japan, South Korea,
the United Kingdom and South Africa. The symposium was held under the Chatham
House Rule to encourage frank discussion among the speakers and the audience.
An exclusive audience of 50 people including government officials, businesspersons,researchers, scholars and media personnel attended the event.
The following is a summary of the symposium produced with the permission of the
speakers.
Opening Remarksby Mr. Kazumasa Kusaka, Chairman and CEO, Japan Economic Foundation
Mr. Kusaka thanked the audience for joining the online symposium and briefly
explained JEF’s recent activities and the thinking behind holding the annual
symposium.
When businesses actively operate globally, they may not be able to make goodbusiness decisions unless they become sensitive to global risks beyond businessinherent risks. To address these challenges, it is extremely important to understandthe structure of risks and its backgrounds. The top people from industry, academia
and the government are participating to discuss not only their areas of expertise, but
taking interest in economy, security and geopolitical risks. Discussions are held tocultivate capabilities to grasp things comprehensively, to enable a holistic approach.
1Otherwise, business communities or security experts will not be able to understandthe other field and may take action in a one-sided way with only partial knowledge.
This year, the theme of the global risk symposium is, what changes is the global
pandemic bringing. While we have been trying to keep it under control, what does itmean to live “with Corona”, to coexist with COVID-19. How would the world moveand what does it mean for global risks, these are themes that will be covered in thisyear’s symposium.
We hope to hear from each perspective, how to not only passively but actively
respond to the risks and opportunities even with the limitations of “with Corona”.
While the COVID-19 pandemic is a clear and present danger in front of us, we hope
this symposium would be able to contribute to improving our response towards therisks presented by the coming global challenge through hearing how world-class toplevel practitioners and thinkers think through and take action.

Guest Speechby Professor Yoriko Kawaguchi, Minister for Foreign Affairs (2002-2004), Ministerof the Environment (2000-2002), Visiting Professor, Musashino University, Fellow,
Musashino Institute for Global Affairs
COVID-19 has upended the world for almost 10 months. The economy, education,no field was free from the impact of COVID-19 and unfortunately the future is quite
uncertain. The task given to me today is to discuss the risks and opportunities forinternational politics from COVID-19.
The international community was already facing a multitude of problems before theoutbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent pandemic aggravated these issues.
There were various frictions associated with the rise of China, in particular, risingtensions between the US and China in political, economic and military areas. Afterthe inauguration of US President Trump, the America-first policy became very
evident, Brexit and conflicts in Syria and other areas, poverty, deterioration in2

international co-operation, fragmentation of international community, the lack ofleadership, and the list goes on. According to the poll by the US Pew ResearchCentre on 6 October 2020, which was conducted in 14 advanced economies, itshows a lack of trust in leaders in world-leading countries which is very unfortunate.
The fact that COVID-19 became a rapid aggravating factor in a way cannot be
helped because of the nature of the pandemic. The pandemic countermeasures aremostly domestic, such as closing of borders, and reducing dependency on foreigncountries including supply chains. As a reflection of the constraints on domestic
politics, diplomacy is also constrained for both the US and China and they cannot
but take hardliner policies against each other. Having said so, the problem is how to
reduce the risk that has increased. The root of the problem is in the difference inprinciples of governance between China and countries including the US, Europe andJapan, such as the rule of law, freedom of speech and democracy. Therefore, theimprovement of the situation is extremely difficult for the short-term.
Regarding the competing relationships between the two major powers, the US andChina, so long as the competition is healthy and based on rules, it can be a stabilising
factor from the perspective of international politics, in comparison to a case where
one hegemonic state is taking the leadership. It is against the interest of Japan tohave poor relations with its ally and its neighbour, so what Japan needs to do interms of its role is to contribute to smoothe communication between the US andChina and make sure that there are no misunderstandings between these twocountries. It doesn’t mean that Japan should be equidistant in its diplomacy; Japanneeds to maintain solidly the position of US ally but also support mutual
understanding between the US and China by understanding both countries better.
Another impact from COVID-19 on international politics is a greater importance ofinternational co-operation. The pandemic crosses borders and thus the infections
cannot be controlled without international co-operation. The pandemic also willburden more on the vulnerable in the international community; international
assistance and resource reallocation are therefore needed more than ever.

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From the experience of the pandemic this time, we learnt that there are risks anduncertainties that are not foreseeable and controllable. Human beings must humbly
coexist with the earth to survive. It is important to achieve SDGs, strengtheninternational regimes, climate change, biodiversity, infectious disease control andabolition of weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons. We muststrengthen such international regimes. Regarding this point, the thinking of the EUreconstruction fund provides a useful reference.
Professor Kawaguchi believes that this suggests a possible role for Japan to takeleadership to advance effective international co-operation with likeminded countries.
To fulfil that role, Japan must maintain an international status respected by othercountries, make efforts to constantly reform, to energise the Japanese economy,
internationalise Japanese people and society, and to maintain and develop its soft
power.
It is clear that now is not an abnormal time, and we cannot expect to go back to preCOVID-19 days and this is both a risk and opportunity. That is all the more reason
why we have to take action to use these opportunities to realise the desirable newnormal. That is our responsibility.

The concept of this symposium explained by the moderator
Dr. Keiichiro Komatsu, Principal, Komatsu Research & Advisory (KRA)
With regards to the concept of the symposium, the reason the theme is “With-Corona”
and not “Post- Corona” is that this COVID-19 is not going to be like SARS, there is
not going to be a clear exit. With this as the starting point, discussions on both risks
and opportunities will be held during this symposium. In previous years at the annual
symposium, the term “New Normal” has been used to explain this phenomenon.
Even before the pandemic there were issues, but with this pandemic, some issues
have accelerated while other issues have newly arisen. We hope to hear someinsightful hints from the speakers.
On day 1, Sir Paul Collier, Professor from the University of Oxford, is the first speaker4with a talk about the implications of the pandemic on capitalism and democracy
versus autocracy, not just from economics and politics, not just looking from a narrow
theme, but from a broader perspective including philosophical points of view as wellas values.
The second speaker is Professor Hassan Omari Kaya from University of KwaZuluNatal in Durban, South Africa. The Western healthcare system is not well developedin most African countries. There was, therefore, a fear and expectation that if COVID19 spreads, the continent would be severely affected, with dead bodies scatteredacross the streets or patients with severe symptoms. However, that is actually nothappening. While different from the perspective of industrialised nations including
Japan and South Korea, African local communities have over many millennia
developed their own indigenous knowledge and traditional healthcare systems,
which perhaps have been working much better than expected. From this perspective,
the African continent may be able to provide some solutions towards global
challenges.
On day 2, the first speaker is Mr. Nigel Inkster CMG, IISS Senior Adviser, and former
no 2 at the so-called MI6. Speaking of MI6, in Japan and elsewhere, we think ofJames Bond and he was actually in that world. He specialises in China so we hopeto hear about the future US-China relationship, and he is also an expert on cybersecurity so that would be another theme we could hear from him.
Our second speaker is Dr. Dong Yong Sueng, who was a member of the Council of
Policy Advisors to the President of the Republic of Korea as well as a member of theCouncil of Advisors on foreign and security policy to the Blue House, the South
Korean Presidential Office. He is now the Secretary General of Good Farmers. He
will be talking about the impact of the pandemic on the Korean peninsula as well as
the surrounding East Asia, not from a medical perspective but from a comparative
view of different political structures.
The symposium is held under Chatham House Rule to encourage frank discussions.

5Presentation Title: “Democracy VS Autocracy” in the context of tackling a new crisis
Speaker: Sir Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik
School of Government, University of Oxford and a Director of the International
Growth Centre, and the ESRC research network, Social Macroeconomics.
Note: This presentation was made in English and simultaneously translated into Japanese for
the Japanese speaking audience.

Sir Paul Collier raised the question of “Democracy VS Autocracy” in the context oftackling a new crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. He started by explaining thethree characteristics that a successful society needs.
The first characteristic is a degree of social cohesion. It is possible to have any
amount of difference within the society as long as there is some overarching conceptof shared identity, shared purpose, shared understanding about how things work anddon’t work, and shared obligations. Social cohesion is enormously important inbuilding willing compliance not only for individual citizens but also for firms, families
and local communities around some common purpose and some common
understanding of the strategy that is needed. The genius of social cohesion is acommunity in which people are able to have a dialogue, a conversation between
equals and can search together for a common understanding.
The second characteristic is an ability to discover, the capacity to learn as you go.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of what is called in economics “radical
uncertainty” where if you asked anybody back in January “What should we do?”, thehonest true answer was “we don’t know”. There was no knowledge of how to deal
with COVID-19, because nobody had ever had to dealt with it, it was something new.
Such situations are very common. There are two massive global examples in thelast twelve years; the global financial crisis and now the COVID-19 pandemic. To
find out what to do as quickly as possible, you need a very different approach, fromtop down.
When it is clear what to do, a hierarchical structure works, but when we do not know
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what to do, a hierarchical structure is very dangerous because the top is inclined toclaim that they know best and insist everybody does the same thing, whereas if you
do not know what to do, what you need is experiments in parallel. For that it isnecessary to decentralise, devolve the power of decision down to the bottom ofsociety and devolving the agency to try come up with solutions in a team, and it isvery useful because it merges two different types of knowledge.
All good decisions in any context rest on the fusion between expert knowledge andtacit knowledge. What is needed is to push the relatively shareable expert knowledge
down towards the people, while at the same time practitioners who have practicalknowledge, which is much harder to share because it is particular to context andtime and more than often unwritten, try and push that practical knowledge up towards
the people at the top. By devolving a system, it not only facilitates rapid learning but
also creates a structure that empowers the people on the ground and creates anactive participatory community dialogue.
The third characteristic of a successful society is that you need leaders who can betrusted. A trusted leader is not “commander in chief” issuing orders but a“communicator in chief”. In a situation like this pandemic, what the leader needs to
do is to communicate a sense of common purpose; we all need to struggle to findout a solution to this problem; we all need to do our best. Since the answer is notknown, we must expect sometimes to fail and there is no disgrace in experimenting
and failing. In top down societies, there is a terrible fear of failing.
Professor Collier then applied this concept to the question of “Democracy vsAutocracy”. He pointed out that China is not a great successful autocracy but that its
remarkable success over the last 40 years is a result of previous investments insocial cohesion and rapid experiment built over 2000 years and made worse by the
recent move to top down. The old emperors had responsibilities towards citizens andthe leader earned the Mandate of Heaven by working towards a common purpose.
For 40 years, until recently China not only had this social cohesion, but it also
acknowledged that it did not have all the answers. Repeatedly the Chinese
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leadership tried to build common goals, typically objectives lasting over the next 4
years. The leadership would say that this is what we are trying to do, and then they
decentralised and experimented by sending young bright party officials to regional
governments and saying: “you experiment, you try something”, and that created very
rapid experiment in parallel and hence they learned from both failures and fromsuccesses. China has recently moved to a very top down centralized system andthat has actually amplified the COVID-19 problem. It took a long time for news of
COVID-19 in Wuhan to move up the system because people were scared of failure
so there were delays in the first instance. If you are scared, you hide failure and do
not report it.
In East Asia, in the face of COVID-19 Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan
all shared these features of having very strong social cohesion and trusted
leadership and ability to build new common purposes very rapidly. In Western
democracies, what was happening over the last 40 years was actually a widespread
derailment of capitalism. Capitalism can work for everybody if there is good public
policy that enhances the innovations that capitalism generates whilst compensating
for those who lose out, so that people still trust the whole system. In much of Europe
and America that did not happen and social cohesion was lost. There were huge new
spatial rifts, a big divergence between the successful metropolis and broken
provincial cities, as well as new educational divergence, a new class system. The
tragedy politically was that nothing was done about this because the people losing
out from the system also lost their voice and it was no longer a community in dialogue.
Insider groups of the successful did not even notice that the less successful were
suffering. Drawing on examples, Professor Collier then explained the need forleaders whom the people listen to when the word “we” is used, instead of half thesociety saying, “you are not ‘we’, you are an enemy”.
To conclude, Professor Collier pointed out that what we need is a balance withinhierarchy. We need leaders who at times would set rules for us and say: “this is what
you need to do”. But we also need an adaptive community because so much of theknowledge of what to do is at the bottom of the society, not at the top.

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Presentation Title: Africa Building On Indigenous Knowledge Systems In Global
Challenges: The Case of COVID-19
Speaker: Professor Hassan Kaya, Ph.D. in Sociology of Development andInternational Political Economy, Director of the DSI-NRF Centre in Indigenous
Knowledge Systems, the University of KwaZulu-Natal
Note: This presentation was made in English and simultaneously translated into Japanese for
the Japanese speaking audience.

Professor Hassan O. Kaya pointed out the fact that the impact of the COVID-19
pandemic in Africa has been less, compared to other global regions, and that thisdemonstrated the efficacy of African indigenous knowledge systems and thephilosophy of people working together as a community.
There is a tendency to look at Africa as a country, while of course Africa is a continent
covering 30 million square kilometres with diverse indigenous knowledge systems
based on over 2000 distinct languages and cultures, 54 countries and a populationof over 1.2 billion. Throughout colonisation, Africa’s diversity was looked at as aproblem of development, while in the context of African indigenous knowledge
systems (AIKS), cultural diversity is an asset. This is based on the holistic and multitransdisciplinary nature of the AIKS which advances the complementarity anddemocracy of knowledge systems in combating global challenges such as COVID19 pandemic.
Professor Kaya defines African indigenous knowledge systems as bodies ofknowledge, technologies and innovations, belief systems and value systems which
communities in diverse cultures and ecosystems produce in order to sustain life. In
contrast, western ways of looking at knowledge tend to be limited to explicit
knowledge that can be written, while African indigenous knowledge is often tacit andexists in different ways such as oral knowledge, artistic, spiritual forms, and is more
holistic. For instance, when looking at the issue of land, in African indigenous
societies, land is not something you own, because there is a symbiotic relationship9between nature and human beings. They depend upon one another.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon that affects all sections of society.
It is not only biological but also has social, economic, environmental, cultural andpolitical dimensions. This means that it needs a complementarity of knowledge
systems for sustainable solutions. In most African societies, indigenous forms ofknowledge on traditional medicines and healing systems are used. These are not
only about treating the biological aspect of health, but also involve the holistic
dimensions of health embedded and articulated in indigenous languages andphilosophies. For instance, in South Africa, there is an African indigenous philosophy
called “Ubuntu”, which promotes solidarity, compassion, human dignity, consensus
and respect, to mitigate common challenges.
What colonialism and apartheid did, was to destroy a sense of confidence among
African people towards their own cultures, including value and knowledge systems.
The concept of building on the indigenous as articulated in this presentation, is notnecessarily what is traditional but whatever the African people themselves in theirdiverse cultures and ecosystems, consider to be an authentic expression ofthemselves. Building on the indigenous creates confidence and thereby,active
citizenry. The success of African communities in dealing with the pandemic showsthat African indigenous knowledge systems can contribute towards the global poolof knowledge in order to tackle global challenges. What COVID-19 is showing is thatwhen Africa, like other regions in the world including East Asia and Europe, builds
on the indigenous and mobilises grassroots knowledge and innovation systems,
home-grown philosophies and indigneous languages so people become actively
involved in mitigating global and community challenges. It creates a common
purpose in which communities build a sense of confidence and self-reliance in alllevels of societies.
Contrary to Western thought, that before colonisation African people had no social
institutions nor history, African historical and archeological testimonies such as theremains of the ancient city of Gede in Kenya, Great Zimbabwe, the Great Pyramids,
Timbuktu and other historical landmarks, show that Africa is the cradle of humankind
10and is where the oldest record of scientific and technological achievements arelocated. These historical achievements could have only been guided by highlysophisticated African indigenous socio-economic, political, spiritual and cultural
institutions developed by African people’s themselves. However, post-colonial
African countries have not managed to leverage these Indigenous Knowledge
Systems, including historical scientific and technological achievements andresources for sustainable development.
For instance, the African continent is positioned in the strategic global navigationroutes, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and theMediterranean Sea. Recently there is the free and open Indo-Pacific Economic zone,
which is not just an economic zone but also a cultural zone that connects the Pacific,
the Indian Ocean, both in Africa and in Asia. Therefore, African countries can harness
the rich potentialities of the blue economy, agricultural, wildlife, mineral and humanresources, cultural and linguistic diversity, together with its historical legacy andheritage as sustainable developmental assets in the global economy.
The important thing to recognise is that these cultural diversities are notcharacteristics of African countries only, they exist everywhere, within the UK,
Europe, Japan, Korea and China. Each has its own diversity of indigenous
knowledge, value systems, which communities use in all aspects of life to mitigate
against different life challenges.
Building on the indigenous and advancing complementarity of knowledge systems
as an asset paves the way for: (i) creating high-level multilateral platforms andstrategic partnerships that advance international human understanding, mutual
cooperation, social and epistemic justice; (ii) development of strategic programmes
and partnership to produce unique products and services for competitive advantage
in the global market economy through the interface of AIKS and resources with otherknowledge and technological systems; (iii) building a new generation of global
human capital conversant in the significance of Indigenous Knowledge Systems forinternational peace-building, sustainable and dynamic global market economy; and(iv) develop global educational programmes to promote knowledge and awareness11

on Africa’s rich cultural diversity and historical contribution to the global pool ofknowledge;
Professor Kaya concluded that when diversity is seen as an asset these could be
harnessed for the benefit of humankind and to mitigate global challenges.

12Presentation Title: British perspective of the impact of the pandemic on US-China
relations and its implications
Speaker: Mr. Nigel Inkster CMG, Senior Adviser to IISS and former Assistant Chiefand Director of Operations and Intelligence at the British SIS (also known as MI6)
Note: This presentation was made in English and simultaneously translated into Japanese for
the Japanese speaking audience.

Mr. Inkster CMG opened his talk by explaining that it is probably too early to say how
the change brought by the COVID-19 pandemic will manifest itself over the long term,
while what we can say with greater confidence is that this pandemic has exerciseda catalytic effect on trends that were already apparent. He then explained, from a
British perspective, the impact of the pandemic on US-China relations, which werealready undergoing a period of significant deterioration - from strategic alignment to
one of strategic competition. This was a trend that was driven by China’s rising power,
which the US perceived as a challenge to its role as global hegemon, and thecompetition has been playing out in the realms of trade, finance and technology but
always with the potential to turn kinetic. He then elaborated on the role technology,
in particular ICTs, have played in the way this relationship has developed.
He explained how of particular concern for America was China’s technology
ambitions and the Chinese state’s efforts to reengineer the global internet, and to
become the standard-setter of a gateway technology, fifth-generation mobile
technologies (5G), massively investing in the areas of advanced technology
including quantum computing, quantum encryption, and biotechnology. He pointed
out that US concerns were a complex mixture of economic, national security, andgeo-political and boiled down to a conviction that telecommunications networks
critical to national security and national prosperity should not be in the hands of acompany so closely linked with and susceptible to control by the Chinese Party-state.
US concerns about China’s national ICT champion Huawei were further enhanced
by a set of scenarios by Australia’s signals intelligence agency, which showed thatin the event of a conflict with China, reliance on Huawei-enabled technology would
present serious challenges.
13Meanwhile, the pandemic tipped already tense Sino-US relations over the edge andeventually led to the US national security complex banning any companies anywherein the world seeking to sell to China large technologies based on US intellectual
property, by requiring them to first obtain a licence from the US Department ofCommerce. The ban on the sale of the advanced microchips on which Huawei is still
dependent for its 5G systems and which China is unable to manufacture for itself ispotentially very consequential.
The corona virus pandemic came at a time when globalisation had peaked and the
pandemic highlighted the vulnerabilities of global supply chains that were highly
efficient but not resilient and in which certain countries, particularly China, had
become single points of failure in the supply chain. Already before the Pandemic,
companies had begun to address these concerns by moving some manufacturing
away from China to achieve greater resilience and to escape an increasingly
restrictive environment within China.
This process is what has been termed “The Great Decoupling” and it has economic,
financial and technology components. It is very hard to predict how this process
plays out because the US and China, technologically speaking, have become soclosely entangled that a complete untangling seems difficult to imagine. But thegeneral direction seems to point towards an eventual technology and economic
decoupling involving a global bifurcation in which other states will find themselvespressed to choose sides, as the UK was recently forced to do. But it is clear that themeasurable costs of any such decoupling would be high and the intangible costs
even higher. While China’s contributions thus far in these technologies have notbeen in the area of foundational science but rather in the development of existing
technologies, it seems highly probable that in due course the focus and resources
China is devoting to hi-tech programmes will produce genuine innovation.
The challenge we are facing in the technology area is between a laissez-faire
approach and an all-of-nation approach. It is the sort of dilemma that Britain faced in
the early stages of World War I, when it rapidly became clear that the laissez-faire
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approach to munitions production was no match for the all-of-nation approach towarfare of Imperial Germany. It remains to be seen how the USA will respond to this,whether it might actually move in the direction of developing something like anindustrial strategy fit for the 21st century. We could end up with a kind of technology
bifurcation, in which some countries are using one model of communications
technology and the others a different one, the Chinese one. There are questions
here of technical compatibility and the risk that actually countries in the middle areforced to reduplicate and actually operate both sets of technology with all the
additional burdens that this composes.

Mr. Inkster CMG concluded his remarks by asking the question of what is to be done.
He noted that it is hard to make predictions because the progress of technologies is
hard to anticipate but in geo-politics, the shift of power from West to East ishappening and the US appears to be losing its appetite for exercising the role ofglobal hegemon but is not yet ready to relinquish that role, nor is China yet ready toassume it. We could find ourselves in the “Kindleberger trap”, a reference to theglobal situation in between the two World Wars during which the US had implicitly
assumed the hegemonic role previously exercised by Britain but then failed toexercise it, thereby giving rise to an international climate of instability that resulted in
the Second World War. Even if the US does continue to play the role of hegemon,
its allies are going to have to learn to take greater responsibility for their own security,
including in the realm of technology, and are going to have to adapt to a reality inwhich great power contestation conditions all facets of life.
He highlighted the need to acknowledge that we live in a world of uncertainty byreferring to his own former profession. He pointed out that the profession of
intelligence is about managing uncertainty. He shared that he always used to say toyoung colleagues entering the organisation: if you like a world coloured in black andwhite this is not the profession for you, because we only ever deal in grey. We areconstantly operating in a situation where we don’t know what the answer is, where
we have to make pragmatic judgments based on evidence, and where conviction,zeal and ideology are anything other than helpful. This is something that all countries
are going to have to learn to adapt to, to become comfortable with uncertainty, to15

recognise its inevitability and for governments to be honest with their populations interms of acknowledging that this is the case.

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Presentation Title: The Impact of pandemic on Korean Peninsula and East Asia
Speaker: Dr. Dong Yong Sueng, Former member of Council of Policy Advisors to
the President of the Republic of Korea as well as a member of Council of Advisors
on foreign and security policy to the BLUE HOUSE; Secretary General of Good
Farmers (NGO)
Note: This presentation was made in Korean and simultaneously translated into English andJapanese for the non-Korean speaking audience.

Dr Dong Yong Sueng started his talk by pointing out 3 kinds of changes brought
about by the COVID-19 pandemic which were likely to stay even after vaccines anddrugs are developed to tackle it. 1) The expansion of non-face-to-facecommunication, including using IT and AI, 2) Changes in the Global Value Chain(GVC), turning from a global supply chain to a more regionalised one, and 3)
Strengthening of central government functions. He then explained the impact of thepandemic on the Korean peninsula and on East Asia.
Dr Dong then examined the situation of North Korea before and after the pandemic.
Pre-pandemic, after the Kim Jong-un administration was established in 2012, foreign
relations were severed and the focus was on the development of nuclear weapons
until November 2017 when they declared the completion of a nuclear programme,
together with the improvement of relations with South Korea and the US. Meanwhile,
between 2012 and 2017, there were two major changes taking place domestically:
1) Reform and 2) Opening of the country. Reform was known as the socialist
corporate responsibility management system and ownership changed from state
ownership to a more communal ownership. This operational policy has been clarified
in the April 2019 revision of the constitution. In order to open the country, 4 central
special economic zones and 23 regional economic development zones were
designated in order to attract foreign capital. Furthermore, in 2016, they created andadvanced a five-year economic development strategy for the first time since the Cold
War ended. In this way, the North Korean policies were very ambitious. However,after the collapse of the February 2019 Hanoi summit between North Korea and the
US the policies changed dramatically and North Korea declared that if the US would
17not be moving in the direction it wanted, it would be moving to a new path. Until then
North Korea was moving with the improvement of relations with the US in mind, but
after the collapse of the summit, it shifted to “frontal breakthrough strategy with themight of self-reliance”. Since then, North Korea severed relation with the US andSouth Korea, strengthened relations with China and Russia and switched to aninternal self-reliance strategy. They also declared that nuclear weapons are nolonger on the table for the negotiations advocated for the sophistication of nuclear
weapons.
After the pandemic started, in terms of non-face-to-face communication, North Korea
closed its national borders, imposed a voluntary ban on assemblies, and mask
wearing became mandatory. In terms of changes in the Global Value Chain, North
Korea used the pandemic to their advantage and accelerated the self-reliancestrategy. Meanwhile, it was acknowledged that the very ambitious five-year
economic development plan was a failure and it was declared that a new five-year
economic development plan is to be implemented starting in 2021.These aredevelopments that may suggest a switch to self-reliance strategy; instead ofglobalisation, more of a regionalisation or centering on its own country. Dr Dong also
explained the attempts to solve the energy problem, food security under self-reliance,
swift recovery from natural disasters as well as North Korea’s attempts to combat
the weakening market functions.
Dr Dong then elaborated on South Korea’s efforts under the Moon Administration toreopen dialogue with North Korea through proposals including joint epidemic
prevention, proposals to start from small trade, and exploring leads for thedeclaration of the end of the war. However, North Korea has consistently not
responded and with the pandemic response and the dramatic shooting incident of aSouth Korean government officer in the Yellow Sea, there is a slowdown of thereconciliation momentum. There is concern in South Korea that it will be forced tochoose sides between the US or China, or risk alienation. He also noted the fact thatsome point to the stubborn attachment to the pre-Hanoi Summit methodology in spiteof the change in environment after the collapse of the Summit.

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When looking from the East Asian point of view, there was a world centering around
China before the 15th century and it turned to a West-centric society after the
beginning of that century, when Admiral Zheng He of the Ming Dynasty went on eightoverseas expeditions to connect with the Eurasian continent, but because ofdomestic issues this was not successful. 50 years or so later Europeans adventured
into East Asia. The concept of “the Pacific” probably did not exist at that time,
however, and Columbus tried to reach China through the Atlantic resulting in the
discovery of a new continent. From the 16th to 20th century, China, South Korea andJapan remained regional powers. Europe was trying to connect East and West anda Western centric world order was established. In the West, Europe did not try to go
through the Eurasian continent to enter the East because there was the Ottoman
Empire, so Europe had to advance through the Pacific. In the 20th century, after theSecond World War and the Cold War, it has become a US-centric world. Today China,
though dormant for a few centuries, is once again expanding and trying to enjoy thebenefits of economic advances through opening markets and technologicaladvances. China is trying again to reconnect the continent, to achieve what it triedin the 15th century. It also has the ambitious objective of venturing out into the Pacific.
With China trying to expand both continents and oceans, the US is trying to checkand curb those moves.
Dr Dong noted that after the pandemic started, with non-face-to-face and borderclosures, every country is heading towards more self-reliance and more nationalistic
or authoritarian approaches. These countries are likely to show solidarity and this
could connect the Middle East and then Europe, leading to an acceleration of
conflicts between the US and China and a new geopolitical East-West Cold War may
be witnessed in East Asia, leading to the Thucydides trap. The pandemic is likely toincrease the power struggle between the US and China, but it is the countries in the
middle who may be able to prevent both sides from going into conflict and minimise
tension by playing the role of mediator.
After the talks, panel discussions among all 4 speakers were held withquestions from the moderator and the audience.

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