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Why Northeast Asian States have not seen the
Emergence of Cross-border Cooperation:
Reflections from the 1980s to Today

Kick-off Symposium of National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU) Area Studies Project for
Northeast Asia “Rediscovery of Northeast Asia” held on January 23-24, 2016 at the National
Museum of Ethnology in Osaka

Forward
The National Institute for Humanities (NIHU) established an Area Studies Project for
Northeast Asia in 2015. The Slavic-Eurasian Research Center of Hokkaido University
has joined the project as the core institution responsible for examining international andregional relations. Reviewing the entirety of the post-Cold War period, initially theNortheast Asian area experienced a surge of optimism regarding the possibilities forcohabitation and interdependence in the region, which ran from the late 1980s to the1990s. This vision of functioning cooperative relations between Japan, the Koreas,
China, Taiwan, the Russian Far East, Mongolia and the United States extending acrossnational borders was striking, captured under the notion of a “Common

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House of Northeast Asia” that shaped much of political and social discourse at the time.
More than 20 years has passed, and today few people still refer to Northeast Asia.
Efforts to create a regional community, including the six-party talks, have vanished.
Little attention is now given to the prospects of regional integration and cooperation
while political and economic rivalry and competition has characterized relations
between the US-Japan alliance, China and Russia. North Korea remains a pariah in theregion, although a nuclear-armed one.
These challenges force us to re-examine past efforts at building a Northeast Asian
community and to develop a new blueprint for the emergence of such an organization
under current conditions. The Slavic-Eurasian Research Center’s role within the
Northeast Asian project is to shed light on the potential for community-building acrossscales: at the sub-national, sub–regional and supra-regional levels.
The first issue of the on-line report Northeast Asia Today offers both a history ofcommunity-building in Northeast Asia and reflections on its future. It incorporates thecontributions of scholars from Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the US, all of whom
have extensive experience of the Northeast Asian region.
The discussion begins by examining what Northeast Asia is and why it failed tosuccessfully develop a framework for regional cooperation in the 1990s. Reflecting onthese past experiences,it then offers some thoughts for the future.

I hope that readers are inspired to join the discussion with us.
Akihiro Iwashita
Professor, Slavic-Eurasian Research Center
Hokkaido University / Center for Asia-PacificFuture Studies, Kyushu University2

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Moderator:
Akihiro Iwashita (Hokkaido University / Kyushu University)
Speakers:
Ha Yongchool (University of Washington, US)
Sergey Sevastyanov (Far Eastern Federal University, Russia)
Yang Cheng (East China Normal University, China)
Mitsuhiro Mimura (Economic Research Institute for Northeast Asia, Japan)
David Wolff (Hokkaido University)
Akihiro Iwashita
Good morning ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Akihiro Iwashita, and I work at the

Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, at Hokkaido University.

But now I am alsoaffiliated with the Kyushu University’s new center for Asian Pacific Future Studies.
Today, I will chair this first session.
First of all, when I was invited to this project one year ago, I was shocked to hear thename “Northeast Asian Project,” because from my point of view, the term “Northeast
Asia” is a bit old-fashioned. If we go back to the 1980s, we had exhaustively discussed
the term “Northeast Asia.” Seeking to create a “common house of Northeast Asia”, theregion was made up of South and North Koreas, Russia, Mongolia, China, Japan, andthe surrounding neighborhood.

But the realities are very severe, and we should facethese realities before creating a more beautiful plan.

This is my starting point.

In the 1980s and 90s, we had discussed the Northeast Asian communities in the context
of international relations at the state-to-state level, and also, we had big dreams forNortheast Asian regional cooperation and integration.

For example, Niigata, Toyama,in Japan, Primorye and Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, Jilin and Heilongjiang in
China, and the Eastern coastal provinces of South Korea and North Korea.
Unfortunately some criticized this area, and this plan for uniting poor regions to get
resources.

Except for a couple of capitals of the states, the Northeast Asian countries

did not pay attention to this regional plan.
This is the first point why now we again discuss Northeast Asia.

And this is the first3

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task of our first session.

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Secondly, what is Northeast Asia? Some mention it in avery, very ambitious perspective, but 20 years ago, 30 years ago, we also had discussed
what Northeast Asia was.
We never reached an agreement.

Probably, this kind of discussion will continue forlong, but our main concern here is international relations and politics. So, I hope that wecan provoke further discussion.
different way.

We decided to manage this session in a slightly

I do not want you to sit, to be patient for a long, long time; therefore,

we decided that speakers will have at least 3-5 minutes each, a kind of roundtable. So,
let me start the roundtable’s first half of the discussion.
First of all, dear panelists, I will give you 3- 5 minutes, so please introduce yourself:
who you are, why you were invited, what you think, and your contributions to Northeast
Asian research.

So Professor Ha Yongchool first, 3-5 minutes please.

Ha YongchoolFirst of all, I don’t know why I was invited here, but anyhow.

Actually, personally, I

have been trying to be a regional man for the last 10 years or so, but then I found it wasvery difficult to be a regional man in this region.
regional studies more than anything else.

That’s why I am interested in

I used to teach at Seoul National University

and then I moved to the University of Washington several years ago.
the region more or less from afar.

I came to look at

Basically, what I see in the region is the gap

between international relations approaches and regional studies.
To me, particularly reflecting on the Western international theories, somehow I see
what English historians long time ago said, that is what I call poverty of theory in theregion.

In other words, as much as we were felt to be regionally oriented, we haven’t

developed any kind of conceptual theoretical framework to understand the distinctive,
unique aspects of the region, largely because of the historical legacy of the region thathas long been what I call externalized by outside forces.
My first point to make is that we should realize—as much as I think we are in a hurry4V o l. 1

A u gu st 8, 2 016—the theoretical conception frameworks are not developed to support our sense ofurgency.
Akihiro Iwashita
The reason I invited Professor Ha is that he has endeavored to make the Northeast AsianCommittee. Every time he told me that we lacked an institution of Northeast Asia andthat we should create one.

He tried to do so before the APEC Summit in Vladivostok

of 2012. He organized a workshop to create the institution, invited governmental
people; we met in Beijing and in Moscow, but unfortunately, he failed and I failed.
Therefore, it’s a very big chance for Professor Ha to resume this work.

This is thereason why I invited him. Next, Sergey.
Sergey Sevastyanov
Chairman, so to start with the first question why I am invited, I think because I havebeen a friend of Professor Iwashita for a long while, and maybe because, again it’s kindof recognition that Russia is a part of Northeast Asia, also this is a good point I guess.
Maybe the third point is that I represent Far Eastern Federal University, which many ofyou may know. It is a really big university now, focused on Russian efforts to go ahead
with more studies and research on Northeast Asia and many other areas.
As for me, I have kind of two positions.

I am Director of Research Laboratory ofMulti-Lateral Cooperation Studies in Security and Economics, and my research focus is
East Asia, Northeast Asia.

Also, I am a professor at the Department of International

Relations.
In my research laboratory, we do a lot of studies, solve these issues, and during the last
several years we have published several monographs on East Asian Regionalism and onother issues, so we cooperate with many research schools in Japan, the United States,
China, and South Korea especially.
Maybe my last point is that, yes, it’s a long story.

I have represented Russia for many

years in such multilateral cooperation forums like Northeast Asian Economic Forum,
which many of you may know it’s about security and run by Lee-Jay Cho and also5V o l. 1

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Northeast Asian Cooperation Dialog run by Susan Shirk from California.
Again, both of these groups have been working for more than 20 years maybe and there
are always questions: if they are efficient, do they help or do they really make sense?
The answer is that yes, they actually do.

For example, the Northeast Asia Economic

Forum, for many years, they have discussed all those multilateral projects to start
constructing oil pipelines, to connect railroads, and finally, this happened and we cansee it.

It took some time, and then the governments accepted these ideas proposed byscholars and said that was their own ideas.

Maybe this is how it should work.

Anyway, I think that our project is important, and I would like to contribute to it asmuch as I can.

Thank you.

Akihiro Iwashita
Professor Sergey Sevastyanov has been a leading researcher in the Russian Far East’s
Vladivostok. Particularly during the Cold War period and after the 1980s, it wasdifficult to find a good researcher who could speak English in the Russian Far East.
He was an exception.
always.

Even now, he is a bit older than me, but he is still progressive as

In the Russian context, Moscow has ignored the Russian Far East,

Vladivostok for a long time, but Sergey now is very, very appreciated in Moscow.
Therefore, I am very happy inviting so influential a researcher in Russia, particularly in
the Russian Far East.
Yang Cheng, he is the youngest, but already a shining star researcher from China.
Cheng Yang
Thank you Mr. Chairman, and thank you for inviting me to join this mega project.

I’mvery happy. I think you invited me because of my research institution, Research Center
for Russian Studies at the East China Normal University, which has a status of anational key research base for social science and humanities.

Among all of theChinese universities, this is the only one which has such kind of status.
The second is because I joined the East Asian Academic Community on Russian
Eurasian Studies or Slavic Eurasian Studies.

We have helped Hokkaido University’s

Slavic-Eurasian Research Center from 2009 and had six East Asian Conference, but

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actually, I think it’s better to call it as Northeast Asian Conference because the majorityof the participants at this conference came from these six countries, which have been
mentioned a lot this morning.

And the seventh conference on the Slavic-EurasianStudies will be held this September in Shanghai, which we will host.
The third I think is because we also have some similar kind of multi-institutional or
multidisciplinary collaboration projects like yours.

For example, in our school, we

have a Center for so-called – it’s quite difficult to translate actually into English, thatmeans not only Russia and Central Asian states, but includes Japan, South Korea, North
Korea and so on, so a little bit similar to Northeast Asia, but it also includes Southeast
Asia.
The last I think is maybe because I have written some papers that criticized Chinesestudies on Russian and Eurasian studies.
different from traditional area studies.

I think that we need new area studies,

Actually, I think that China’s Russian andEurasian Studies after the collapse of the Soviet Union actually have entered into a new
period of crisis.

We would like to have more collaboration with the outside world,with the leading experts from all around the world.
points.

I think this is also one of theThank you.

Akihiro Iwashita
As you know, Northeast Asia has faced tense situations, particularly involving
China-Japan relations.

The reason why I invited Yang Cheng is because he is a

non-typical Chinese researcher.

Usually, in public, China delegates hesitate to speak

their own voices, and only repeat the official line or semi-official line.
Cheng never does that.

But Yang

As far as I know, until today, I don’t know about now, but I

believe that he will show his honest frank talk, as usually he does.
Next, Mimura-san.
Mitsuhiro Mimura
Thank you Chairman.

I am working for the Economic Research Institute of Northeast

Asia, which is located in Niigata, and I think the reason why I was invited here is7V o l. 1

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because our institute is a principal part of the notion of Northeast Asian Economic
Cooperation starting in the 1990s.

Actually, I am not a native of Niigata. I am justan immigrant worker, and this area (Osaka) is originally where I was from.

My highschool and university are in a 5-kilometer radius of this MINPAKU, and I am very
happy to come back to my hometown, and also be in an environment where I can speak
Osaka-ben.
Anyway, I am a researcher on North Korean economic law and also the North Korean
economy, and in my institute I conduct research on the Northeast Asian Economic
Cooperation.

I like travelling so I travel everywhere in Northeast Asian countries, andthe place where I first met Professor Iwashita was the transit room of Vladivostok
airport.

When I came back from Pyongyang via Vladivostok to Niigata, I saw him at

the airport, and he also saw someone sitting, maybe looking like a Japanese in a transit
room in the Vladivostok airport, and he thought that was a little bit strange and started
to talk.
Our institute has done a lot of work for the Northeast Asian Economic Cooperation, butthere are no official relations between Japan and North Korea yet, and there are so manydifficulties that we have to face, so yes, I want to do something to make the Northeast
Asian Cooperation Framework start working again in the 21st Century.

Thank youvery much.
Akihiro Iwashita
The reason why I invited him is because in the 90s, he invited me to a big conference on
Northeast Asian Studies and community in Northeast Asia.

But of course, as I told

you, it didn’t work. This last symposium, I remember he organized, on Northeast Asia,
therefore, he should have a responsibility for the work.

I asked him not to forget

Northeast Asia. So anyway, I am happy he will be back.
One more thing, it’s hard for us to invite researchers from North Korea, but he reallyknows North Korea and he often goes there.

We have so many researchers on South

Korea, but not so many on North Korea. I believe he is the number 1 North Korean
researcher in Japan because his accent of Korean is in North Korean way.

Have a chat8

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with him in Korean.

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So, David.

David Wolff
Good morning.

My name is David Wolff, and I am probably here because I am fromthe University of Hokkaido, and I am probably here because my office is across the hallfrom Professor Iwashita’s, which is very convenient.

Also, I am a historian, andtherefore, in possession of historical imagination for approaching imaginary geographic
areas such as Northeast Asia.

And I am also an American citizen.

Even though

Northeast Asia may be imaginary, nonetheless, imaginary things do have the ability toinspire fear.

When we talk about Northeast Asia, and we talk about Northeast Asia

that includes all of the countries we’ve just discussed, and we don’t talk about including
the United States, then the United States would always like to remind us that there areother imaginary regions that we could be thinking about, such as the North Pacific,
which would include the United States.
If we’re going to include a piece of Russia in Northeast Asia, because we are kind of
excluding the part that’s bordering on Germany, and if we’re going to exclude large
portions of China from Northeast Asia because otherwise we’re going to have pieces ofNortheast Asia that are bordering on India, which is kind of far from what we imagine
Northeast Asia to be most of the time, then why don’t we imagine a Northeast Asia that
includes a piece of Alaska and maybe even Seattle and the University of Washington soProfessor Ha can also live inside our region.
In any case, as an American, I present this view saying that we can talk about Northeast
Asia, but it doesn’t have to be in an exclusionary way as we search for ways to develop
further cross-border activity and cooperation.

As a historian, I can look back and tell

you that this region has been imagined differently in the past.

There was a very large

Japan in the last century, and there was a vision of a greater China, and the Soviet
Union, which doesn’t exist anymore, had bigger pieces of what we would think of as
Northeast Asia, with Mongolia almost as a semi-colony.
greater Korea.

And we can also imagine a

Koreans often think about a large version of Korea that includes all of

the Koreans in the Diaspora as well.
be are very rich for a historian.

So all of these visions of what Northeast Asia canOn the other hand, they involve overlapping claims

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and therefore, it makes it exceptionally difficult to come up with cooperation across theborders.

And that’s where historians can come in to help us understand where thoseoverlapping claims come in and possibly to help us to diffuse those claims in thepresent and to think of ways of compensating people for giving up on parts of theirimportant imaginary of where their nation should be.
moment.

So maybe I’ll stop there for theThank you.

Akihiro Iwashita
David is a historian of Northeast Asia, and he is talented in languages.
Russian, Chinese, and Japanese.
history-based sessions.
United States voice.

He speaks

Probably, he will contribute a comment to other

But today, I want David to be the commentator from the

Because how we treat the United States in Northeast Asian issues

is very important and, particularly for Japan, a country allied with the United States.
We can’t do well without the United States, for better or worse.

Anyway, I will ask

David to comment on and listen to the Northeast Asian voices-- Korea, China, theRussian Far East, and Japan-- and he will wrap up our session and elicit questions.

Sobasically, the roundtable, the four panelists from Professor Ha up to Mimura-san, we
continue.
The first topic is history and the background of Northeast Asia.
What historical events were more important in Northeast Asia? What should a country
have responsibility for? Responsibility means not just war and conflictual causes.

In

conventional wisdom, Japan seems to be the number one cause of World War II, andNorth Korea seems to be the number one cause for post-World War II tensions.
However, we have not forgotten the reconciliation period between Korea and Japan,
China and Japan, and North Korea and its neighbors. We also know about the tensions(past and potentially future) between South Korea and China, China and Russia again,
and so on.

Please tell us about your constructivist or about the time-changing complex

historical factors beyond the simple understanding of direct “responsibility.”
So Professor Ha, please.
Ha YongchoolThank you.

Actually, I was interrupted earlier, so I forgot to express my sincere

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thanks to the organizers for their excellent job here.
of this distinguished group.

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Also, I am very happy to be a part

Actually, Professor Iwashita sent us eight questions.

Ithought I was going through another round of qualifying examinations at the end of my
Ph.D. work, and so it was very tough.

Each question could be a book project.

Having said that, in the interest of time, just let me briefly read whatever I thought
about the questions which Professor Iwashita sent to me.

To me, the most relevant toEast Asia and especially Northeast Asia is the fact that modernization of the majorcountries in the region was not motivated by endogenous factors, but pressured byexogenous forces.

Each country trod a different route for change, but what they havein common is that the changes started with a strong sense of inferiority over the West,and in one form or another, the members of the region experienced the sense of
humiliation through the interaction with the West.

Intra-regional dialog or interactions

were minimal, if not non-existent. China took the most radical form of modernization
as a way of catching up with the West.

Korean history was interrupted by colonialism,

and Japan modernized in the most defensive way. The concept of Northeast Asia andEast Asia was poorly developed among the members of the region. In short, the region
had long been defined by non-regional members and forces.

The originality of theideas for the region as a whole has not been seriously sought.

The region has long

been externalized, as I had said earlier.
This is the basic background for the poor development of the consciousness of theregion.

Out of this historical background, two distinct phenomena have developed:

One is the apparent Asian paradox where the members of the region have shown
opportunistic and short-term pursuits of economic interests through increasing trade andinvestment while slowly progressing in political and security relations.

The other is ahigh level of frustration out of the lack of serious regional integration, which comesfrom the weak sense of history.

These two factors gave rise to the weak endogenous

intellectual foundation within the region.

Little effort has been made to build

intellectual infrastructure to understand and to present the historical trajectories of theregion.
Asia and Northeast Asia in particular should reflect upon this common historicalbackground before it is too self-critical of the lack of progress in regional cooperation.

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The Asianization of Asia, thus, has a long way to go.

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Thank you.

Akihiro Iwashita
Thank you Professor Ha.

I’ll just recap.

So he emphasized the outside factors for the

Northeast Asia, and the lack of original ideas.

So we should reflect more uponourselves.

So what do you think about thisSergey, you are probably an outsider.

discussion?
Sergey Sevastyanov
Thank you Chairman.
a fact.

Yes, of course, Russia is a late comer to Northeast Asia, this is

Sometimes we think that with our coming to the Northeast Asia’s region, we

kind of became formally organized.

It actually got the recent form as it is now.

We

speak about it differently, but anyway, Russia now considers itself as a part of this area,
and we are really interested in developing the Russian Far East and distant Siberia incooperation with our neighbors in the Asia Pacific, and especially with Northeast Asian
countries.
According to the Russian point of view, of course, all these countries are a part ofNortheast Asia.

It’s Northeast China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, North Korea,

Mongolia, and the Russian Far East, but plus also Eastern Siberia.

This is importantand it’s natural to look at Eastern Siberia as a region connecting European Russia with
its Eastern territories in a geographical and political sense.

These days, it’s really

important in global projects to speak about this Eurasian Initiative and other projects.
The Russian Government, while proposing perspective plans to develop eastern
territories, never separates the Russian Far East and Eastern Siberia.
As far as all historic experience in formation of Northeast Asia community, there werelots of discussions over the last 25-30 years highlighting complementarities between
economies of countries in Northeast Asia.

Based on that, many proposals had been

made and initiatives had been launched with The Tumen River Project being the mostimportant among them.

But unfortunately, most of those plans of forming a regional

community failed to materialize due to such fundamental opposing factors as: negative
historic memory, nationalism and territorial disputes, differences in state and12V o l. 1

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socio-economic systems, culture and civilization background et cetera.
But coming back to current situation, as our relationship with neighbors, Moscow hasvery good relationship these days with China, with the Republic of Korea, with
Mongolia, and we are also making gradual steps to solve the territorial dispute withJapan.

In fact, Russia does not consider it as a main obstacle on the way toreconciliation and improving bilateral ties with Japan.

We are asking Japanesebusiness for more cooperation with Russia, and I will touch this subject later during our
discussions.
My kind of final but preliminary final points, what is Russia’s possible input? How can
we see it? Energy and transportation have been chosen as Russia’s strategic assets tobecome more economically integrated to Northeast Asia, and to become Russia’scontribution to future Northeast Asia Community.
Another big point, as I say it now, as far as long-term historic animosities are concerned,
making substantial improvements in bilateral ties between China and Japan is a ‘must’on the way to forming the Northeast Asia community.

Thank you.

Akihiro Iwashita
Thank you Sergey.

As a researcher of Russian foreign policy, I am always thinking of

the meaning of the Russian presence in the Northeast Asian community.

As Sergey

mentioned, Russia is a late comer, so it means that it is relatively free from the long,
long history of Northeast Asia.

I mean that the presence of Russia sometimes provides

space for cooperation that is free from historical issues.

As he rightly said, probably

Russia is the most tolerant country to Japan in history, more than others.

So in thissense, Japan probably will be targeted every time by Koreans, Chinese, and others. So, I
skip Yang-san. Yang-san, after listening to Mimura-san’s comment, I would like toknow how China will respond.

So, Mimura-san first.

Mitsuhiro Mimura
Okay.

Well, as a researcher of Korean matters, I often visit South Korea, North Korea,

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and China.

What I remember is, my first day in South Korea in 1985 was also started

with history.

An old man sitting next to me started to talk about history on a train

from Busan to Seoul, and I was very surprised because our conversation started withhistory.

I mean Japanese colonization, and I didn’t know how to say anything but

sorry. But anyway, after that, I had many, many research projects with South Korean,
North Korean, Chinese counterparts, and now what I understand is that history,
especially the anti-Japanese war in China, or the struggle of Koreans on the Korean
Peninsula, constitutes a kind of legitimacy of these countries. So dealing with
anti-Japanese sentiments in South Korea, North Korea, and China is very important inorder to make a Northeast Asian cooperation mechanism.
One thing, very simply speaking, is the history problem with China, Mongolia, andRussia is not so complicated because we were defeated World War II.
Mongolia won, and the Soviet Union won.
Peninsula.

China won,But the problem is with the Korean

Korea, as a colony of Imperial Japan was defeated in World War II withJapan, and later, they gained independence.

But anyway, they have a trauma of being

defeated with Japan in the World War II, and they had the Government of the Republicof Korea in Shanghai, but the government was not ratified either by Allied forces or by
the Axis powers, so that constitutes a kind of a trauma. I suppose these are thesentiments of the Korean people.
History is always very complicated and troublesome when we discuss Korea.

The day

before yesterday I was in Seoul as a part of a strategic dialog between Japan and South
Korea, and what we talked about all day was how we could reach an agreement between
Japanese and the ROK government over the comfort women matters.
history.

So history is not

History is a contemporary matter, and we are easily creating history thismoment too.

Thank you very much.

Akihiro Iwashita
Thank you for the constructive explanation on the issue.

How will Yang Cheng

respond?

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Yang Cheng
I think history is history.

History in fact plays a significant role in the current situation.

For me, I think before the modernity entered into Northeast Asia, before the Western
powers entered into the region to break the traditional East Asian system, I think wehave had – as a part of the country in Northeast Asia of today has been a part of theintegrated system, economic system, culture system.

But when the Western countries

entered, the nation states started to replace the traditional empires in Northeast Asia, andthe result of this kind of states and nation building was the state-centrism behavioral
patterns of the decision-makers in this region.
I think to a large extent, nation building and state building as a political process partially
blocked the economic process in Northeast Asia as a common economic space, from theperspective of the long-term concepts of the French Annales School.
I think the historical memory, like the Qing-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, and
the War of Resistance against Japan consolidated the national consciousness of elites
and ordinary people in the countries located in the Northeast Asia over and over again.
The end of the Cold War did not bring an end to history, an end to geography, and an
end to the nation states, but strengthened the geographical and psychological boundaries
of nation-states instead. It also led to a competition among different models of regional
cooperation, regional integration, which is a leading cause of the failure to develop
regionalism and the regionalization process similar to the EU in Northeast Asia.
Akihiro Iwashita
Thank you.

We have a couple of different aspects to discuss, so if we haven’t fully

discussed these historical backgrounds, we will revisit them because this is just akickoff session in a kickoff symposium.
The second issue I raised is economy.

Divisional cooperation on the economic issues

in the region, for example, labor force for China and South Korea, resources for Russia,
technology and investment for Japan and Korea were typical discussion points on the
future of the Northeast Asian community in the 80s, early 90s.

Why hasn’t this15

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blueprint worked well? We should go back to discuss the starting point.
Please provide economic reasons here rather than political ones that can answer theabove question.

Additionally, the role of divisional function in the region seems to bechanging now.

China is now able to invest and lead the regional economy.

should we evaluate the current situation?

How

TPP, AIIB, and other new plans for

economic order making go beyond the Northeast Asian framework.

It means that we

do not need Northeast Asian framework in the economic terms, I think.

Can we, then,foresee a new opportunity to make a community in this new context of an economicorder? We also change the order, as an economist, Mimura-san will have the first say.
Mitsuhiro Mimura
Thank you Chairman.

Well, in Niigata, when we started talking about the Northeast

Asian Economic Cooperation in the mid-1980s, those who started the conversation were
the older generation, senior generation, that had a memory of the boats coming into theport of Niigata full of goods in between 1943 and 1944.

After the control of the sea

lane in the Pacific Ocean was taken by the US Allied Forces, and Japan had only the
Sea of Japan to get materials from Manchuria, Niigata was in the midst of an economic
boom at that time.

One of the reasons why we started to think about Northeast Asian

economic cooperation was the geographical proximity.
some cooperation.

We already had cooperation.

It’s near.

So we can makeIn the 1920s, we had a boat linefrom Niigata to Vladivostok, in the 1930s once every 2 days to Chongjin, Rajin, andfrom the Tsuruga, Fukui prefecture, Rajin, and Sŏnbong, and Vladivostok.

That kindof – there is a memory that had something to do with the Northeast Asian Economic
Cooperation thinking.

But at the same time, in order to make economic cooperation,

the conformity of systems and also the quality of market economy and those kind ofthings were very, very important. But at that time, in the 1980s we mainly talked
about proximity, and in the 1990s about Russia in the middle of shock therapy, and that
this financial system wasn’t working very well, and is a kind of – is a legal system andalso is a governmental organization.

So it was not working very well.

So someJapanese companies invested in the Russian Far East in the 1990s, and they failed.
Since then, they were continuously saying that, “Russia is stable, Russia is stable”.
But Russia, in 2015, is much different from Russia in 1992 or ‘93, so in that sense, we

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have to rethink how we failed at economic cooperation in Northeast Asia and then how
we can make better ways of economic cooperation.

Thank you.

Akihiro Iwashita
Sergey, you are targeted probably, so you are the next.
Sergey Sevastyanov
Considering the Russian Far East territories, and yeah, maybe Eastern Siberia too, but
mostly the Russian Far East, the critical challenge for Russia and for Moscow is how todiminish the outflow of Russian citizens from the Russian Far East to the mostprosperous parts of the country.

Actually, just during the last several years, thisprocess has slowed a little. People are still leaving, but not so many as it was before.
Heavily relying on natural resources of these territories, Moscow decided to introduce
long-term plans to develop the Russian Far East, and lately has been substantially
increasing public allocations to improve regional energy and transportation
infrastructure in these parts of the country.

The main idea of those concepts is tostimulate local and export business activities that will reproduce itself with being of
permanent character, and create high paying jobs, bring more taxes to local budgets, andfinally, stop outflow of local Russian population.

This is kind of a big plan.

But in fact, the APEC Summit that happened in Vladivostok 3 years ago, demonstrated
that well, it gave Russia a chance to articulate some of these ideas, some of its
preferences and to develop into the Russian Far East.

But the most important point

which I always emphasize in my papers, and with which not all Russian scholars agree
is that this summit demonstrated first of all, that the investment climate in the Russian
Far East is very bad, both for Russian business and foreign business.

As you may

know, as students of economics, in the Russian Far East, only huge government
companies are successful, like Rosneft, Gazprom, which are subsidized, but others are
actually not coming to the Russian Far East at all.

As a result, several important

administrative decisions have been made in the Kremlin, and a whole series ofadministrative measures and economic measures had been started.

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In the administrative sphere, as you may know, the Ministry of Development of theRussian Far East came into existence, and they were given the task of developing
several new projects to develop the Russian Far East, and very quickly, they introduced
the so-called Priority Development Areas Program as a key tool for the development of
the region.

In December last year, President Putin signed a law “On priority

socio-economic development areas in the Russian Federation,” trying to attract moreinvestments from Russian and foreign private investors.

According to this law,business people wishing to obtain resident status on these territories should sign anagreement with the authorities.

It’s a kind of interesting point.

After that, they are

subjects of a special, very good tax regime and simplified business rules.

In terms of

the Japan Sea Rim Economic Integration, as a core of the imagined Northeast Asia
community, I can emphasize just this perspective, the Priority Development Areas thathave been proposed recently for the Primorsky region where I come from, Southern
Primorye.

Just to give you an idea how diversified this area is, there are a lot of

options for Russian and foreign business. In the Primorsky region, for example, there
are projects, three or four of them already, that have been approved, and three more areunder discussion -a Rosneft petrochemical cluster in Southern Primorye, ashipbuilding cluster at Bolshoi Kamen, the sea port Zarubino, the Russian island where
our university is, this is research and development plus tourism cluster, theMikhailovsky agricultural park, and Nadezhdinsky industrial and logistics park.
possible areas are there.

All

These plans correspond well with the most recent initiative by

the Russian Government to introduce from January this year a special regime of a freeport in the southern part of Primorsky region for Russian and foreign investors.

Forbusiness, it means a lot, but it’s a very complicated and long story. Just for all of you
as scholars, I just let you know, now you can come to Vladivostok visa-free, any of you,any country, any citizen of any country for up to 8 days.

So now you are morewelcome because Russian visa is very tough to get, but now you can come visa-free.
As for the perspectives, some preferences are given to China, for example, now Russia
gives more space for Chinese participation in southern Primorye ports, and recently,
Japanese investors were given a proposal to invest in energy projects.

My final pointis that Russia also is still interested in trilateral cooperation projects on the Korean
Peninsula.

Of course, it is not easy to start because of the DPRK issue, but we still18

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think that it’s very important because otherwise, economic integration in Northeast Asia
will not go anywhere.

Thank you.

Akihiro Iwashita
Very, very good plans, like in the 1980s.

Could you tell me in 1 minute – 30 seconds

what’s the difference between the 1980s and now? Thirty seconds.
Sergey Sevastyanov
The point is that in previous years, it was only politics and the idea to show that wewere kind of ready to cooperate.

But now, we finally brought some economic impetus.

And it’s really, if you are an economist and you look at it, the conditions are excellent,just extremely good.

So we’ll see what will be in practice.

And the new team, we

have a new minister and a new representative of the President, they are both absolutely
focused on developing this new type of relationship.
Akihiro Iwashita
I hope it works well.

We invite the Chinese realist view on the economy.

Yang Cheng
I think actually, yes, successful economic cooperation, you have some pre-conditions
for it, but for example, it’s better to have a whole chain of economic exchanges,
especially to have a stable market.
Northeast Asia countries.

It’s better to have good governance in the

So I partially agree with Professor Mimura’s statements.

But I think it’s not enough to have this kind of stable market or good governance inthese countries because we have witnessed some different cases, fully successful orpartially successful regionalism in the world where also there is a lack of very
developed market economies.

I think this is not the only precondition.

I would liketo say that there is no cooperation or little cooperation in Northeast Asia, economic
cooperation can never be just economic, I fear, but has an active political nature.
Many political factors like historical memory, security regime, and political relations
constitute a complex cooperation background for the Northeast Asian economic
cooperation.

Let’s take the European integration as an example.

Even European

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integration was a political and legal process in the economic cooperation agenda fromthe beginning.

So I think ideas of politicians played a leading role in this process.

Therefore, in Northeast Asian countries, when we design the integration path, if we justlook from the perspective of economic functionalism, I think it will look scientific. But
actually, it’s unscientific.

It seems rational, but it’s actually irrational.

For example,

think in the context of the Ukraine crisis. Many Western observers emphasized that theagreements between China and Russia will play a significant role in the power
configuration in Northeast Asia.
signed by China and Russia.

But actually, let’s look at all of the agreements

Maybe a lot of agreements have been signed, but if welook at the real situation, I think a lot of agreements have not been realized until today.
Even the agreement of cooperation between Northeast China and the Russian Far Eastand Eastern Siberia in 1999, which I joined in the designing of, and joined almost all of
the negotiations between the Chinese and Russian governments.
think no more than 40% has been realized.

But until today, I

But this program is aimed at until 2018from 2009, which means more than half of the process has passed, but the ruralsituation is not good enough.

But the difference is that the Chinese Government andthe Russian Government tend to use a lot of new mechanisms – to express new
mechanism issues that we have a very successful agenda.

I think it’s a typical issue.

For example, labor forces in the Far East, the developing Far East needs a labor force
from the outside world, but a think-tank of top researchers from Russia, from Moscow,
who have always worked for the Kremlin told me and told all of the Chineseparticipants in Shanghai that it is too sensitive for Moscow to accept a Chinese labor
force in the Far East.
but not Chinese.

They would like to use North Korean or Central Asian neighbors,

So I think there are a lot of political factors which played an activerole in this whole process.
Akihiro Iwashita
We identified the challenges and the perspectives, so Professor Ha, could you wrap
things up in a more theoretical way?
Ha Yongchool
I don’t know a lot about it, but let me try.

Before I get into the economic area, with20

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which I am not so much familiar, I will just raise a general question, very
commonsensical question about how much actually, while working intellectually on thisregionalization or committee building issue, do we really feel regional? I don’t thinkthat’s the case.

In most cases, we are intellectually regional, but actually

psychologically sentiment-wise still its non-regional.
all of this.

That’s my honest feeling about

Having said that, Professor Iwashita, my dear colleague, mentioned thefailure story of the Northeastern Committee Building Consortium that I organized withhim several years ago.

I noticed that the main causes of the failure were exactly thelack of leadership and vision in the region.

In fact, whether it was Russian leadershipor any other national leadership in the region, I don’t think they were really interested inthis long-term vision thing.

I mean I thought at least intellectually or theoretically –conceptually the Russian Far East is a good target to build some sort of a – it could
provide some venues to improve the sense of community at least.
neighboring countries are interested in Russian resources.
has all the resources that we can possibly think of.
final touch to speak on the issue.

Why, because all

Then, the Russian Far East

But simply, there is no sort of a

So to me, that from a political science point of view,

there is a total lack of long-term vision and leadership.
Then, secondly, I would like to point out, I think having said that, however, somehow
the nature of the political economy development in the region, actually has a strong
sense of state or nationalism embedded in its development.

In other words, there is no

separation between the economy and policy in each country’s mode of development.
To me, it’s embedded as a sort of impediment or barrier to the further development of aregional vision.
But then also, having said that, somehow we have a sense of urgency.
hurry.

We are in a

To me, that kind of sense of urgency comes from the modes of our own

development. That is, rapid late comers overcoming their own domestic economic
problems.
I would like to throw in a general question here, somehow are we in a stage offrustration or are we hopeful about the future? To me, now it’s kind of a borderline
area—there is some hope and there is some frustration.

At this juncture, my

21V o l. 1

proposition is that we should not be so much frustrated.

A u gu st 8, 2 016

To me, the sources, as I’ll

develop later perhaps, the source of frustration in the region comes from the fact that weare comparing ourselves with Western Europe.

To me, that kind of impetus

assumption needs to be critically reviewed among ourselves.

So that’s my third point.

My final point is slightly separate from this political issue. There is an intrinsic sort ofconfrontational conflict between what I call physical economy and the financial
economy.

Somehow, whether you look at Japan, Korea, or China, they have very

weakly developed financial markets.

So I remember I was invited to Tokyo University

in 1997 right after the South Korean economic crisis, and then my first comment inJapan was about the famous model of Flying Geese with Japan leading and then the restof the geese follow.
goose ahead.

I said that all the geese flew away, leaving only one JapaneseWhy?

The Japanese production model of capitalism should have prepared for the possible
reaction of finance capitalism from the West upon the East Asian model.
we are not ready for it.

Somehow,

As long as the financial market is so weakly developed in theregion, the sense of vulnerability will remain high all the time and then this kind of
intrinsic sense of vulnerability will inhibit the further integration process.
Akihiro Iwashita
Thank you.

I think another team will continue the economic mission, so we can leavethis and go to the main topics - international relations, security, and geopolitics.
The end of Cold War gave us a good opportunity to reshape the community.
Particularly, the Six-Party Talks on the Korean Peninsula were expected to become an
institution in regional cooperation. The reality is that it did not work even for nuclear
issues, and has almost disappeared.

Why did we fail to capitalize on the opportunity?

Now, as China’s presence and challenge are reshaping the Northeast Asia regional order,
the US-Japan alliance has gained new momentum to react to that.

How should we see

the current situation? Could it be a new opportunity for community building or just acontinuation of a messy rivalry?

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What do you think were the geopolitical factors behind the failure of Northeast Asian
Community making in the past? The China-Soviet conflict and the Korean War were
examples of continental competition, but now the main battlefield is moving towards
the maritime area.

To what extent are the Southeast and East China Sea, the Sea ofJapan, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Arctic relevant to regional order transformation?
So as a specialist of international relations, Professor Ha, you are first.
Ha Yongchool
All right, I didn’t expect it.

I think that as for security, I will mainly focus on the

Six-Party Talks since you highlighted my current background.
Six-Party Talks has long been over.

To me, the era of

I have been advocating that the Six-Party formula

is not going to work for a variety of reasons.

The most important factor would be US

intentions. The US intention was not to meet with North Korea, they used the Six Party
formula as a way of avoiding North Korea.

To me, that’s a fundamental limit, thelimitation in the Six-Party Talks. Secondly, it’s too clumsy.

I mean, what kind of

meeting is this when it takes more than a year for one meeting.

For the past 10 years

or so, actually, the Six-Party Talks basically has functioned as a kind of final stampingof the job rather than seriously talking about anything.
Thirdly, it brought about too heavy reliance on China.

Now China became a target,

sort of, for their lack of control of North Korea or influence in North Korea.
that’s a totally irresponsible act on the part of the United States.

To me,For example, thecurrent US Government, President Obama, I like him in many ways, but what I don’t
like about his North Korean Policy is that this non-policy calls for strategic patience.
used to call it no strategy, only patience.

To me, that’s not going to work.

solely or merely relying on China is not going to work.

I

To me,

But most critically, what

happened to North Korea, I think the Six-Party Talks worsened what I call the nuclear
dilemma in North Korea.

Why?

In the case of North Korea, Kim Jong-Un’s base strategy was to prepare kind of a
project in the international environment before maybe he was thinking about any kindof domestic change.

But then, the nuclear talks dragged on and on.

In the meantime,23

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they only developed nuclear facilities while leaving North Korea economic agenda
totally lost along the way.

So the gap between the domestic agenda and the nuclear

weapon program development continued to grow.
Six-Party Talks, there are two trends.

For all these reasons, within the

One is Japan and South Korea, sometimes South

Korea situation and position fluctuate, but still Japan, the US, and South Korea on the
one hand, Russia, China, North Korea on the other hand.

So the North Korean

position was a good position to manipulate contending strategies in the Six-Party Talks.
For all these reasons, to me, the Six-Party Talks are not going to work.
going to say that we shouldn’t abandon the Six-Party Talks.

However, I am

But the general problem

they highlight is that the US has failed – they objectively failed in Asia, in Asian Policy
since the end of the Cold War, that’s my main criticism about US-led policy.
Then, in the meantime, within the region, each government actually also has notdeveloped better initiatives compared to the other governments.

Anyway, my final

point is that particularly, many people talking about economic security is a kind of
dilemma in Asia.

Once again, this basic frustration comes from an underlying

comparison between Europe and Asia.

As for me, we should start thinking about whatkind of different historical trajectories this region will go through rather than simply
comparing Europe with Asia.
Akihiro Iwashita
Thank you.

Targeting North Korea, so Mimura-san, you first.

Mitsuhiro Mimura
Well, security is one of the hardest areas for me, but I agree with Professor Ha, theSix-Party Talks for the United States was too rationalized and accomplished nothing
substantial on North Korean nuclear issues.

During the Obama administration, North

Korea has had a free-hand to develop nuclear weapons, not only plutonium but also theuranium type of nuclear weapon.

In that sense, yes, we have to do something against

that.
Speaking of the economy, economists basically think that the countries areinterdependent, and I think political scientists see international relations as some kind of24

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mutual distrust or something like that, so they need some nuclear weapons to save theircountries.

But economists think that a nuclear weapon is a very expensive thing, andit’s not good for the economy.
are very interdependent.

We are inter-dependent, so China and Japan also yes,

But sometimes, something happens, and then the statesmen

start to break the interdependence of the economies.

But it’s almost too late as the

economies of Japan, China and South Korea are already interdependent.

But one of

the reasons why we failed to form the Northeast Asian Economic Cooperation
mechanism is that we forgot other people’s thinking – that is, the way of other people’s
minds – I mean, there are other people who think that the people on the other side of thesea, I mean, the Sea of Japan (or the East Sea in Korea), we thought that the Far East,
China, South Korea and North Korea would be economic partners.

But at the sametime, in Tokyo too, I don’t know in Niigata, but in Tokyo too, there were more people
who think that China or Russia will be possible enemies at that same time.
In essence, security is one of the most important areas of research to make Northeast
Asian cooperation possible, I think.

Thank you.

Akihiro Iwashita
So China?
Yang Cheng
Okay, I would also like to start with the Six-Party Talks because when I worked at the
Chinese Embassy in Moscow, the first paper I wrote for the Ambassador was about theNorth Korean nuclear issue.

At that time, I pointed out that it was not a tactic but astrategy for North Korea to have nuclear power.

We recommend that it’s better tohave a more equal platform for every party to join.
We have imagined that maybe it can be resolved if the US could regard North Korea asan equal partner.

But it failed.

I think the failure of the Six Party Talks shows that

actually the end of the Cold War is partial and incomplete, to some extent, although theglobal Cold War has come to an end on the physical level.

But nowadays, even on the

Korean Peninsula, there is always the specter of the Cold War.

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In a sense of the national, North Korea and several regional countries are not at peace.
Also, there are territorial issues derived from the Second World War and strengthenedby the Cold War between Japan and Russia.

Also, the American ally systems based on

searching for an enemy during the Cold War did not weaken but strengthened after thecollapse of the Soviet Union.

More crucial, I think that the mentality of the Cold War

still influences decisions of Northeast Asian countries, including the United States as an“invisible Northeast Asian country”.
I don’t totally agree with the statements made by the Chairman that China has become anew impact factor, so that if we use John Fairbank's analytical framework, the“impact-response model”, then the other parties, including the United States and Japan,
are the “response” parties.

I don’t think so because I think in Northeast Asia,

especially during the period of power reconfiguration, every country, including the great
powers, mid powers, and small powers, use almost the same tactic, the same strategy—I
call it hedging.

Hedging means every country has a tool box.

They’ll have many

instruments from cooperation to containment and a lot of different other instruments.
So every country uses a different instruments strategy and has different opportunities ina real concrete situation.

So that means that China can play the role of a new impact

factor, and the AIIB case is a good example of this.

If China would have liked tomaintain its monopoly on this new international financial system, we wouldn’t haveinvited Japan, the US and other European countries to join.
refused.

We invited, but Japan

It’s quite strange for me to understand actually.

Akihiro Iwashita
How Russia should show its own presence or what Russia should contribute toNortheast Asian security…
Sergey Sevastyanov
Yes, thank you. The issue of how Russia should really contribute is a difficult issue.
Yeah, I agree with previous scholars who argued that the Cold War is still not over in
our area, in Northeast Asia, and it’s all about territorial disputes, historical memory, as
we already heard.

And just I also want to say a couple of thoughts about that.

As we

all know, the security system in Northeast Asia is still mostly based on American26

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bilateral alliances, and we have no any real multilateral mechanism to discuss theseissues.

The ASEAN Regional Forum is just a small one.

and more focused on Southeast Asia.

It’s really not very effective

So, really we have nothing.

As for a multilateral security system, China and Russia are consistent in supporting thecreation in Asia of a new security architecture that would serve the goal of building an
integrated space, and this can only be based on the concept of indivisible security.
This system of equal security in Asia should be based on a balance of bilateralmechanisms and multilateral diplomacy that excludes any closed or restricted systems
and blocks.

This is important.

We are sure that only if Asian states achieve real

progress in forming a new more comprehensive security system sometime in the future,
Asia may play a role of a global world leader.
But my own participation in annual conferences on Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialog
during the past several years recently revealed that in terms of regional security systemmodels, Northeast Asia powers are clearly divided into two groups.

The USA, Japan,

and the Republic of Korea prefer a security system based on bilateral military allianceswith the United States.

While three other countries, China, Russia, and the DPRK

want to form quite the opposite security system, and any hint of a compromise is notforeseeable on this issue.

The same line divides to some extent, Northeast Asian stateson the issue of the possible resumption of Six-Party Talks.

China, Russia, and the

DPRK are ready to start without any preconditions, while the USA, Japan and theRepublic of Korea have different demands of the DPRK.
reasonable, but anyway.

Of course, they are

So this is the reality.

We have a huge structural problem here, and it’s not clear how to solve it.
don’t know how it can be solved.

At least I

But we should try to do something, and in thiscontext, if coming back to the Six-Party Talks, I think it’s – yeah, maybe at this point,
the only option is to convert it to Five-Party Talks.

Yeah, there is such a group that is

actually headed by Russia, and maybe we can start to discuss Northeast Asian security
issues in this format of five-party talks.
Besides, I want to mention that Moscow is ready to support the Northeast Asia Peace27

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and Cooperation Initiative, NAPCI, which was proposed by Korean President Park
Geun-hye.

As you know, this is a process seeking to gradually build up trust among

Northeast Asian countries by proposing to start cooperation in solving soft security
issues first, including energy security, environment, disaster management, and so on.
Akihiro Iwashita
David, I apologize for the long silence for you, so probably the United States feels
uneasy about being excluded from the discussion, so I give you a chance for 5- 7
minutes as a commentator to show our allied spirits.
David Wolff
I’m put in a somewhat difficult position because you asked me not to speak historicallyas a historian, and then we had a section on history during which we identified issues ofpost-colonialism. I don’t think the word was used, but I think that was largely what
people had in mind as being a basic mentality in the region and modernity as having
come out of a colonial, imperial, and then post-colonial, post-imperial – that sounds likea very historically-based interpretation of the present.

I don’t see how I can addressthat without speaking to history.
Then, we had an economic section where we talked about the failures of numerous
bright ideas in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, which I also participated in, being
among the first, together with some of my colleagues here at the table to get to
Vladivostok when it was finally opened, also opening a new vision of Northeast Asia.
That’s also history already.
will be history.

In fact, when we have tomorrow’s session, today’s session

All of this is grist for the historian, just one day at a time.

Then we

had a security discussion where one of the salient points was that the Cold War is notreally over, that sounds pretty historical to me, you know we are already back to saying
okay, so what was the Cold War and what changed and what didn’t change when theSoviet Union collapsed in 1991 and various other things that went along with that.
I’m left with wearing my historian’s hat with these three big points that are so
historically-based.

Let me go back now while I still have 5 minutes, if I take the full 7,

and speak to a couple of these points as best I can.

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I think that all of us at the table aspire to – at least up here at the front of the room-aspire to Professor Ha’s position of trying to be a regional man.

It’s not that easy

because there is that deep tension between our professorial role as thinking beings andas members of the epistemic community of Northeast Asia, that’s a term I heard for the
first time in Vladivostok sometime in the late 80s I think, very late 80s.

A communityof knowledge that is attempting to create out of our cross-border knowledge the visionthat we hope we can inspire politicians with in order to produce a more secure place inwhich to live.
But there is this deep tension between the thinking of that process and the feelingbecause all of us have, in our own way and in our own time and in our own place, beenbrainwashed by the states in which we live, and even the multiple states in which welive have had their effect on our brains, and we all respond to those nationalist cues,
although some of us become consciously uncomfortable with them and try to step awayfrom those gut-reaction feelings that we have.

A good Marxist, a good Leninist,

wouldidentify this as a form of bourgeois ‘false consciousness,’ but they would also know
how to manipulate it against their enemies by getting their enemies to feel those kindsof irrational feelings that prevent them from thinking clearly.
To come back to the post-colonial issue, clearly this is at work here even if the countries
see themselves as being on different sides of post-colonialism.

For example, Japanand Korea, one was the colonizer and the other was the colonized.

On the other hand,

Japan also has its sense of having been somewhat colonized after World War II, andhaving been attacked by the Soviet Union so that there is that sense of victimhood andpost-colonialism here as well.

This could be seen as something which the region

shares if they were willing to accept their shared position as post-colonial.

Possibly

that’s a way forward towards some kind of vision, possibly, but we’ve gone on and on
about these sorts of the history questions with only occasional breakthroughs, such as
the Comfort Women Agreement that we had at the very end of this past year.

Thevery fact that they actually spoke about it and reached an agreement suggests an attempt
to deal with it rather than the irresponsible position of not dealing with it.

Let me justsay that about our post-colonial issue.

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Russia is arriving late in Northeast Asia.

A u gu st 8, 2 016

It arrives late, but when it does arrive. Alaska

is part of Northeast Asia, so there we have that vision of the United States, and Alaska
went all the way down to California in those days, yes, right.
Ha into Northeast Asia.

We finally got Professor

I know that Professor Ha also has a vision about the sharedpolitical economy in the vision of Northeast Asia as well and that maybe is also somekind of grounds for a historical sharing, in the sense of Northeast Asia having
developed its modernity and Russia as well through command economies or controlled
economies, a much heavier hand at the state in economic development and in manyother places in Europe I am thinking of here.
Professor Yang has talked about the traditional shared civilization of Northeast Asia,
and I think we’ll come back to that in the second round.

But I think he didn’t mention

it, but of course, the traditional civilization of Northeast Asia is the Chinese Tribute
System, so that’s a China-centered vision of shared civilization.
I was a little surprised in the discussion of economics, if I can move on from the history
to the economics, to not see a discussion refuting the question, the view that’s often
spoken about the division of labor. People talk about how there is a natural division oflabor in the region.

Russia has the resources, China has the manpower, and there islots of capital now from several different sources.
That’s something to be kept in mind.

Yes, there is a certain sense of irrationality; youknow, economists all think that they are very, very rational because they can do it withnumbers.

On the other hand, often the numbers that they come up with on different

sides of the border are quite different, so much for rationalities meeting all the time.

I

agree with the comments that were made about how seemingly rational things are
sometimes not quite as rational as all that.
What else seems to be of particular interest? Of course, APEC.

APEC 2012 had the

additional benefit in Vladivostok of producing a brand new campus for the Far EasternState University (DVGU), Federal (DFGU) now, Far Eastern Federal University.
also a preacher of the past.

I am

Yes, they changed their name as well when they got the

new campus.

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With regard to security, no one I think really spoke to the issue that was raised byProfessor Iwashita, the Chairman, about how friction in the region is shifting fromcontinental problems to maritime problems.
yet, so maybe we will come back to that.

I don’t think that one’s been addressed

I would just say on that score that if we wereon the Korean Peninsula, we often think of Korea as being on the continent, but it’s
actually a peninsula, which means it’s surrounded by water on three sides.

So from ageopolitical point of view, this is not really fully a continental issue, and of course theconflict on an island in the middle of a river is not quite so continental either even if theriver was frozen over at that moment.

But I think that your point is really important

here about people thinking in very traditional geopolitical terms about security that
includes thinking about the importance of the sea, and China in particular having
devoted an awful lot of attention to the development of its maritime forces.

And

finally, well, one unmentioned thing with regard to the incompleteness of the Cold
War’s ending, it was mentioned that the Korean Peninsula is still split and the US
alliance system is still there, and there are still territorial disputes.

But we didn’t

mention that we still have the largest and most powerful country in Asia still controlled
by a Leninist Party, which is also something we think of as kind of having come to an
end and that Leninist Party is much more experienced than it was before and much moresecure.

We have almost a hundred million party members in China, we don’t think

about it too often, and we have a new middle class of approximately 150 to 200 million
people, and although there is no statistics on this, I would bet just about anything thatamong the 150 million are the 100 million party members, almost all the party members
I met during my recent year in China all owned a car, which is almost a definition of
being in the new middle class.
responsible.

The state has done well by its people.

They will be

I don’t see the Leninist state going away any time soon.

If we thoughtof the Cold War as a conflict between Leninist visions and capitalist visions, wellmaybe we still have a little bit of that going on.

Thank you very much.

Akihiro Iwashita
Thank you David.

Frankly speaking, I provided a couple of more questions about thedomestic impact on international relations, the cultural impact on communities incomparison with other institutions, such as SAARC, ASEAN or the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization. But the Northeast Asian community should be transparent31

V o l. 1

and more open to the outside.

Therefore, I decided to pose questions and elicit

comments first and then we’ll return to the speakers.
say anything.
back.

A u gu st 8, 2 016

The speakers have the right to

How many questions, comments, please hands? Okay, the lady in the

So please limit 1, 2 minutes per question and comment.

Chisako Masuo
Thank you Chairman.

I am Chisako Masuo from Kyushu University.

well, I am just going to ask one question.

First of all,

I would like to ask a question to theprerequisite of this session, why have the Northeast Asian states not seen the emergenceof cross-border cooperation? I think this way of thinking is kind of a negative thinking
because we have listed all the negative factors, why we have not achieved theemergence of cross-border cooperation.

However, there is another way to make it as apositive calculation, and I think it is very necessary to review how much we haveachieved so far and how there is the possibility of achieving this cross-bordercooperation or community making.

Well, based on this session’s title, it sounds like

Northeastern Asian states have not made this cross-border cooperation, but as a studentof Chinese foreign policy, I think maybe we can compare this case to Southeast AsianRegional Cooperation.

And if we do this, we will realize that Asian states haveachieved so much in terms of cross-border cooperation, and it is true that they haveestablished a good framework for that.

Then they were very successful to invite China,

Japan, and the ROK and some other states to join the framework of their regional
cooperation.

However, if we think of the contents of their cross-border cooperation, I

think we have seen quite similar factors in this region already.

When they talk aboutcross-border cooperation, first of all, what is the most important is economic integration,and then politics. They have made great efforts to enhance connectivity and that usuallymeans infrastructure connectivity, transportation network or the mobility of people andgoods.

But at least, maybe not so much in North Korea and Russian Siberia, but if welook at Japan, South Korea, China, at least within those three countries we have seen a
lot of these already.

So it looks like we have fulfilled the precondition for the – wehave achieved quite a lot of cross-border cooperation.
Akihiro Iwashita
Thank you.

A good point, and thank you for correcting my negative campaign.

Any

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questions? Lady, you.
Naomi Chi
Sorry, I am not very good with the machines, that’s why I am a social scientist, not anatural scientist.

Good morning everyone.

Hokkaido University.

My name is Naomi Chi, I am fromThank you Chairman.

I just wanted to reiterate

Masao-sensei’s comment on the negativity, why so much negativity.
pose a question to the panelists.

I just wanted to

Of course we need to work on sort of traditional

security issues, but along with that, in parallel, we need to work on human security
issues. I think in Northeast Asia, just to give you some numbers, the birth rate in Japan
is 1.4, in Korea it is 1.2, and Russia, 1.4, China, 1.5, Taiwan 1.2, Mongolia, just over 2.
I mean we are not having enough babies in Northeast Asia.

We’re not going to havepeople living in this region if we don’t do something about this very important issue.

I

am just wondering if there is a possibility of building cooperation and trust in terms ofhuman security issues.

Thank you.

Akira Ishii
My name is Akira Ishii, University of Tokyo.

I have a question to Professor Ha

Yongchool. Professor Ha clearly pointed out that the age of Six Party Talks was over,and that the United States’ efforts at avoiding dialog with North Korea have not ended
in success.

I remember that in 1992, China and South Korea’s diplomatic relations

were restored.

After that, already over 20 years have passed, but there is no possibilityof the United States and North Korea developing relations.

Furthermore, North Korea

still shouts loudly that the signing of the Peace Treaty of the Korean War is urgently
needed, but there is no possibility.

My question is why has the United States so far

avoided direct dialog with North Korea? Thank you.
Akihiro Iwashita
Last question.
Edward Boyle
Good morning.

Edward Boyle from Kyushu University.

This sort of follows on

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A u gu st 8, 2 016

from Professor Masao’s question as well, but it’s to do with what we are expecting theNortheast Regional Cooperation to achieve.
implicit comparisons with Europe.

Professor Ha was talking about the

But if we would look at Europe today, it seems tobe there are a lot of divisions within the EU; the first time Europe hits a crisis, what waspreviously seen as a very tightly, regionally integrated collection of countries seems to
be disintegrating under migration and economic crises.

It’s just looking at what we are

expecting regional integration within the Northeast Asian Framework to look like.

I

mean, would the EU be the only model that is being aimed at here? More a comment
than a question.
Akihiro Iwashita
Thank you.

So back to the panelists.

I think that Professor Ha should respond;

therefore, I give you time to think, so you are the last.
talk so think seriously.

I guess you will have a longFirstly, Mimura-san.

Mitsuhiro Mimura
Well, the reason why Professor Iwashita has a negative thinking and well, I am mostly
for Professor Iwashita, because we visit Northeast Asian countries every year, and weknow that there have been many things achieved.

But in order to make the Northeast

Asian Cooperation Network or some frameworks, we know that there are so manythings to be done.

In daily activities what we feel is that there are so many things to bedone rather than what we already have made.
kind of explanation.

That’s why Professor Iwashita made thisAlso, yes, among Japan, China, ROK, we have a lot of things wehave been accomplished and also, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau as a Greater
China region, yes, we have a very integrated economic cooperation.

But if something

happens, then there will be a keen problem among these countries, especially with thehistorical issue and also the maritime issue around China and so on.
As for the questions of Professor Chi, yes, we have a lot of human security issues, butwhen I think about the North Korean issues, conventional security is kind of the number
1 priority; I mean the nuclear issue, and also, human rights there.
lot of human security issues.

Also, yes, there are a

I am doing some projects on that, but it’s very difficult

for us to cooperate with North Korea if the conventional security problems are not34V o l. 1

A u gu st 8, 2 016

resolved. In order to achieve something in the human security issues area, conventional
security issues should be solved accordingly.

That’s why I think conventional security

is now more important—it has a very important meaning in this region.

Thank you.

Why it is important to discuss about the failure of Northeast Asian regionalism isbecause without the knowledge of why we have failed, we cannot design a roadmap forthe next maybe successful cooperation agenda in Northeast Asia.

Also, I don’t thinkthat the successful, partially successful maybe, cooperation between China, South Korea,
and Japan can be regarded as a success for Northeast Asia as a whole because Northeast
Asia is more than these three countries.
so on.

There is Russia, there is East Mongolia, andI think if we could create a new multilateral mechanism which would provide

successful cooperation among all parties, including all of these six countries located in
Northeast Asia, then we may call it successful, not a negative phenomenon in Northeast
Asia.

This is the first point.

The second point is about human security.

To me, human security is a special term

according to the United Nations. That means there are approaches Western, Eastern,maybe Canadian, and a Japanese one.

The Western approach is focused on politicalrights for ordinary people, so that means political participation, freedom of speech, andso on, which are very important.

But for the Eastern approach, they are more focusedon the development of society.

For example, food safety is a crucial element to thiskind of human security.

It’s better to call them non-traditional security issues in the

Northeast Asia region.

I have mentioned in my statements that actually it is better toorganize some non-traditional security cooperation agenda for the Northeast Asian
countries so that we can develop trust and accumulate trust, and it will be paid backwhen regional security structures are stabilized in the future. These non-traditional
security fields include environmental safety, nuclear safety, and so on.
The last point is that, I think China is not a Leninist state.
important to understand its stance.

Domestic politics are quite

But I think, even according to studies in the West,

China is regarded more as a capitalist country than a socialist country.
been a Leninist state like the Soviet Union.

It has neverBut domestic factors have an impact on

the agenda-setting of Northeast Asian cooperation.

I mean, not only for China, but for35V o l. 1

all of these countries located in Northeast Asia.
nowadays.

A u gu st 8, 2 016

For example, nationalism is rising

But we also are told that, for example, even in China, nationalism is not

the mainstream ideology.

Actually, we have a lot of different diversified values,

including, for example, more pro-Western liberal ideas, especially in developed regions
like Shanghai in the eastern part of China.

Also, we should pay attention to the issueof regime security for the authorities of these countries, especially for North Korea, for
Russia, and for China. Thank you.
Sergey Sevastyanov
Okay, I shall be brief because several issues have already been mentioned.

In thesequestions from the audience, there were a couple about the models of integration andwhy they failed.

I think we have already discussed it; that mostly because theconsequences of World War II are still not resolved, we should go ahead and dosomething otherwise we will stay in the same position.

As far as we really haveeffective models, of course, the European model has been considered very effective forthe time and recent developments are not directly connected to its ineffectiveness, I
guess.

It’s kind of something brought from somewhere else, and I don’t think that theEuropean model is bad. It’s still good, but it’s kind of in trouble for some unexpected
reasons.
Speaking about it, I think what we can see actually, in the EU as well as the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, is that we should have shared leadership. It would be very
good if we could share leadership, like France and Germany or Russia and China in ahigh-cooperation organization. But in Northeast Asia, we have a division of leadership,
and until the relationship between China and Japan is on a good course, we can get
nowhere.

That is important.

But of course, I don’t think we will use this EU modelin terms of having subnational governance.

I don’t think that is good for Asia and that

it will ever be achieved.
As for human security issues, I think it’s very important, and I have mentioned about it,that this is one of the ideas behind the Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative.
Russia supports such areas like energy security, environment, disaster management, andwe are happy to contribute, but so far not much has been achieved, but I think it’s a very36

V o l. 1

A u gu st 8, 2 016

important area.
And a good point was made by Professor Chi that we don’t have enough population,and it will show in time. In the Russian Far East, we sometimes have joint families witha husband from China and a wife from Russia, not too many, but there are some, it’skind of a joke.

But in reality, we have some programs which are aimed to increase thepopulation in the area.

Quite recently, I have read in the Russian newspapers, there

will be 1 hectare of free land given to every family coming to the Russian Far East.

So

far, it’s for Russians, but I don’t know maybe even for foreigners in the future.
Ha Yongchool
I heard many, many questions and good comments, but then, speaking of humansecurity, since I have only one son, I am responsible for this decreasing population.
But I think, generally speaking, it’s more a trend issue, because in many Asian countries,
we are going through a kind of generation change from families with a large number ofchildren to lower numbers of children.– probably, you may come back to a more
optimal level.

I don’t worry too much about this so we will see, but that’s my very

unprofessional comment on this. But more seriously, going back to the first question
about Southeast Asia or whether my colleague has been too negative about the current
situation– I don’t think he was negative.

He was more realistic.

Always there issome kind of very delicate balance between realism and pessimism.

But having said

that, however, I agree with you that we should not underestimate the potential of theregion.
As I said, my position on this is that we should not be in a hurry.

We should be very

patient about this process. But as I said earlier, there are sources of urgency.
external –the European issue to which I’ll come back in a moment.
I think, is domestic sources.

One is

The second issue,

That is, if you look at China, Korea, Japan, somehow

their domestic success pushes them to be in a hurry, even in external affairs.

To me,

these kinds of self-generated success stories, I think, at the international level, probably
become an impediment to gradual preparation for regional integration.

Particularly,

however, I will say that we should not compare Southeast Asian success to Northeast
Asian failure.

In fact, I would say the Northeast Asian countries have been37

V o l. 1

A u gu st 8, 2 016

outsourcing too much of their own problems to Southeast Asia.
To me, there is some ironic kind of inverse relationship, the more success in Southeast
Asia, the less success in Northeast Asia.

I would say, we should realize this kind of

inverse relationship between the two regions.
Then, having said that, however, I want to make some general points; that is, ininternational theories or even comparative studies, we don’t yet have IR theories for latecoming nations.

We don’t yet have the social changing, institutional changing patternsof late industrialization.

We only have the political economy for late development.

To me, that’s a serious limitation, there are many, many good studies on Japan, but forthe other cases, very few studies on the changing institutional and social patterns of lateindustrialization.

We have a long way to go, that’s why I said at the outset that there isa long way to go for Asianization.

Asianization doesn’t mean to exclude the West, but

is more about the region itself, to develop a sort of distinct conceptual ideologicalframework.

So far, to me the Asian problem is its intellectual dependency on theWest.
My other point is about comparing, going back to the gentleman’s question aboutcomparison with Europe, yes, that’s exactly my point.

That is, if you look at theMaastricht Treaty in 1992, to me, the European Union was too politically motivated.
That’s why now it is suffering from these kinds of problems.

As a region of latecoming, I want to use the term of a regional theory of late comers, so as a region of latecomers, we should learn something from Europe.

Rather than quickly catching up

with Europe, I think we should learn some lessons from Europe to avoid getting
frustrated with ourselves.
All in all, to me, we need to have some sort of historical, long-term perspective.

If youlook at history, this region has gone through so many different phases: Imperialism,
Communism, and the Cold War, and now we don’t know where we are going.

But

then, in the meantime, we have to ask ourselves, have we ever created any universally
applicable values and systems other than to ourselves.

This means we should take amore long-term civilizational kind of position on this question. Once again, we should38V o l. 1

not be so frustrated.

A u gu st 8, 2 016

I don’t mean we have to achieve too much, but also I don’t mean

to degrade the possibility of potential, as long as we take a more kind of relaxed
position on this.

Not being too critical.

Going back to the professor from the University of Tokyo, the professor had a question
about why the United States has been reluctant to talk to North Korea.

I mean, we allknow there are many, many theories or a sort of hypothesis or guesses, but my own
thing is that somehow the United States does not recognize any intrinsic interest in
North Korea.

To me, that’s the primary cause for the lack of engagement – but thenwhat they have with North Korea is simply an international issue of denuclearization.
But now, I guarantee you that, even within the Washington circle, the so-called belt area,
they now gradually accept that the North Korean issue is not so much about
denuclearization, and is more about non-proliferation.

But then the policymakers are

actually very reluctant to talk about this because this is kind of a self-contradictory
about their own set goals, about complete irreversible denuclearization.

Then what to

do with North Korea? To me, the way they deal with North Korea is that they don’tknow what to do.

I mean simply they don’t know what to do about it themselves.

Why? If you look at Soviet history, I remember I met Gorbachev in 2009 in Italy, andI asked him the following question, How much did he know about his own country?
Actually, he made a mistake of not knowing the citizens or minority issues.

In otherwords, we should not assume that North Korean leaders know about their society
completely.

But why? There are no guidelines, reform plans which give them any

advice on political risks.
open up.

But how?

Every sector, every group, every country has pushed them toVery little about how.

And then, there are still possible

political consequences.
My suggestion is that we need to decide whether or not we’ll recognize regime stabilityor regime persistence in North Korea.
issue.

We haven’t agreed on this critical, fundamental

Then secondly, on the part of the United States, in fact, this is mainly the policy

failure of the Bush administration, we all know this.

Now it’s time for Asian countries

to talk for themselves and then to propose an Asian alternative to the United Statesrather than solely relying upon the United States perspective.

That’s my position.

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A u gu st 8, 2 016

Akihiro Iwashita
David, do you have a 1 minute comment? Two minutes, okay.
David Wolff
I guess I’ll speak briefly to a couple of the questions that came from the room.

I had

the honor in the early 2000s to serve on a working group that specifically examined thequestion, Should the United States recognize North Korea?

Every single nuclear

expert and every single Korea expert on the panel spoke in favor of speaking directlywith North Korea about these issues.

On the other hand, all of the representatives fromthe National Security Council and the State Department and the Defense Department
were very hopeful that North Korea would collapse all by itself and why should we talk
if they are going to collapse.

That has proved to be wishful thinking.

We said all

those things at the table, and it’s been over a decade, and anybody who’s waiting forthem to collapse, they might as well wait for China also to collapse with a 100-million
strong party in full control of the economy, the second richest country in the world, they
are not going to collapse any time soon, and I don’t think the Korean leadership is either.
That’s an answer for Professor Ishii.

Professor Chi, I agree with you.

We need tofocus more on some of the soft security issues if we can’t handle the hard security ones,
but it’s tricky, you know, for example, energy security.
can have all the energy security we want.
environmental security by using it.
contradiction with each other.

We have the cheap oil.

We

But we’re going to destroy our

These are two pieces of soft security in

I agree with Professor Ha that on the global level, we’restill facing overpopulation not under population, so maybe this isn’t such a terrible thingalthough it looks like a tricky economic problem in terms of imbalance in the age
cohorts.
My final point, I wanted to speak to Professor Masao’s question of why we were being
so negative, and I think the reason we’re being so negative is I think that on security
issues, things are genuinely getting worse, both the nuclear bombs in North Korea andthe tensions in the East China and the South China Sea and the new political stance inJapan in reaction to some of those things is leading us into the security dilemma where
we’re going to see a whole next generation of armament, and everybody in this room isgoing to pay for it.

The Americans have just launched their newest destroyer, and I’m40V o l. 1

sure the Japanese will want to buy it shortly.
previous one.

A u gu st 8, 2 016

It costs about triple the amount of the

They just get more and more expensive.

Of course, there is a grave

chance of there being a real conflict and real friction in the region, especially whenthings are out to sea where you can’t see them so quickly and so immediately unless
you’ve got a satellite right on top at that moment.
so visible all the time.

What happens out at sea is just not

Thinking about the well-known crises, you know all kinds ofterrible international conflicts have been triggered by incidents at sea.
Finally, I would say that we’re actually not negative.
negative.

We’re worried, but we’re notEvery single one of the people up here has been doing Northeast Asia for acouple of decades.

We had a lot less grey hair when we started.

But we’re still doingit, and we’re signing on and we want to thank the National Institute for the Humanities
and MINPAKU for heading this initiative, and we all want to see Northeast Asia
become a safer place.

But in order to do that, we really need to think about what we

can do to move the agenda for a safer place forward when conditions are good, andwhat do we do to minimize the downside when conditions are bad, because history goesin currents like that, and we’re bound to see both good and bad moments in the near
future.

Thank you very much.

Akihiro Iwashita
This session is also the startup session for our Hokkaido University Team, andfollowing Mimura-san’s terms, the best is to start with saying apologies, because now
today, we apologize for our failure to make the Community of Northeast Asia.
after that, we will be more relaxed and we will see the bright future.

Then

Therefore, this iskind of a ceremony. So, the negative campaigns, particularly today, we pay attention to
big issues and the high politics, and economy.

But we agree that even in community

making, we need big relations, state-to-state relations, big economy discussions.

Wealso fully understand we should pay more attention to social life based on bottom-up
processes of community making, for example, cross-border cooperation—a kind ofsocial civic relations.

Of course we will continue the discussion in this direction.

Today is just the beginning, and I think that you have many questions, but we will havediscussion time tomorrow at the end.

Thank you again for joining us.

We have already planned next year’s schedule.

We have a seminar in Hamada at the41

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A u gu st 8, 2 016

University of Shimane next May, and also, our team is organizing an international
symposium in December.

If you are interested in our Team’s discussions, then pleasejoin us in the next year events. We will focus more on local social life processes andmaking the Northeast Asian Community.

Thank you for joining us.

A big hand forthe panelists.

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Northeast Asia Today
北東アジア の現在
Vol.1, August 8, 2016

EDITORS
Mihoko Kato (Hokkaido University)
Seth Cervantes (Alliant International University)
Edward Boyle (Kyushu University)

NIHU Area Studies Project for Northeast Asia
Hokkaido University Group
Leader: Akihiro Iwashita
Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University
Kita-9, Nishi-7, Kita-ku, Sapporo, 060-0809 Japan
Tel: +81-11-706-2388

Fax: +81-11-706-4952

http://src-hokudai-ac.jp/northeast/index.html©2016 by the Slavic-Eurasian Research CenterAll rights reserved

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