CIAO DATE: 03/05/07

Pacific Affairs:
An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

 

Spring 2006 (Vol. 79 No. 1)

Articles

• Killing Five Birds with One Stone: Inward Foreign Direct Investment in Post-Crisis Korea
  Judith Cherry

  This paper analyzes Korean attitudes towards inward foreign direct investment (IFDI) before and after the 1997 financial crisis, within the context of the debate on the costs and benefits of IFDI and intensifying global competition to attract inward investment. The Korean experience sheds light on the forces driving the liberalization and deregulation of inward investment by countries that had previously restricted and controlled IFDI and on the problems inherent in implementing these policy changes. For more than three decades, the South Korean government maintained a negative or passive attitude towards inward investment, which, despite its potential economic benefits, was seen as a less desirable option than using foreign loans to finance economic development. However, the 1997 crisis brought about a fundamental change in the Korean government's attitude, and led to sweeping policy changes that resulted in an investment boom in the immediate post-crisis period. After this initial success, the subsequent decline in FDI inflows prompted further measures to attract high-quality foreign investment. As the Korean government has discovered, while legal frameworks, promotional systems and structures can be reformed with relative ease, the issue of changing investors' perceptions of Korea and the Koreans' views of the role and value of inward investment is more problematic. Failure to resolve these problems and to develop strong locational advantages will put Korea at risk of losing crucial investments to regional competitors and will undermine efforts to enhance the global competitiveness of Korean firms and to promote sustainable economic growth and development in the years ahead.

• The Political Economy of Japanese Foreign Aid: The Role of Yen Loans in China's Economic Growth and Openness
  Tsukasa Takamine

  Over the past quarter of a century, China's economic growth, its transition from a socialist to a market-based economy and the integration of the Chinese economy into the global economic system have all progressed significantly. On the other hand, during the same period Japan has been the single largest source of foreign aid to China of all donor nations and international aid organizations, by providing more than half of China's total bilateral aid receipt. This article looks at the role of Japanese foreign aid in China's economic growth and increasing openness, and explains Japan's grand strategy in implementing its aid policy to China. My analysis suggests that there is a positive, albeit indirect, link between Japanese development fund, which is widely known as yen loans, and the growth and increasing openness of the Chinese economy. The evidence also indicates that the link between Japan's provision of yen loans to China and Japan's immediate corporate gains is surprisingly weak. Indeed, Japan has benefited indirectly because yen loans have contributed to the economic growth and openness of China, which in turn make it a better economic partner and more responsible regional neighbour for Japan. In the end, China's economic development, the incorporation of the Chinese economy into the global economic framework and China's transition to a market economy are in Japan's national economic as well as political interests.

• Health Care Regime Change in Urban China
  Edward Gu and Jianjun Zhang

  In urban China, health care is no longer free. The workplace-based free health care system has been replaced by a compulsory health insurance system. The new system, however, has not achieved universal coverage of all employees, leaving nearly half of the urban population without health insurance. Although they are mostly public organizations, health care providers have been rapidly commercialized and health care costs have soared. The marketization of the health care sector has become a target of public criticism. The Chinese government has responded with an attempt to launch a new round of health reforms, but there is no consensus on how the reforms should be carried out.

• Responses to Rapid Social Change:Populist Religion in the Philippines
  Christl Kessler and Jürgen Rüland

  Within the last few decades in the Philippines, there has been outstanding growth among Catholic Charismatic and Pentecostal groups and churches, part of a worldwide proliferation of these strands of Christianity. The article is based on qualitative interviews and nationwide survey data gathered in a research project on religious change in the Philippines, and explores the scope and the character of Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity in the Philippines. It explains the success of this strand of Christianity by its ability to transfer core concepts and techniques of political populism into the religious sphere. The paper identifies the populist themes within the cognitive framework of Charismatic and Pentecostal religion in the Philippines, as well as the populist techniques applied to mobilize followers. The analysis of Charismatic and Pentecostal religion in the Philippines as populist religion, however, does not imply that such groups and churches can be characterized as populist actors in the political sphere. After outlining the core topics and techniques of populist religion, the paper concludes with a discussion of the political impact of these groups in the still crisis-ridden democracy of the Philippines. These potentials are depicted as potentially ambivalent, due to the ambivalent character of populism itself.

Books Reviewed In This Issue

Asia General

• Civil Society and Political Change In Asia: Expanding and Contracting Democratic Space. Edited by Muthiah Alagappa.
  Reviewed by Yoichiro Sato

• Beyond Metropolis: The Planning and Governance of Asia's Mega-Urban Regions. By Aprodicio A. Laquian.
  Reviewed by Tim Bunnell

China and Inner Asia

• House, Home, Family: Living and Being Chinese. Edited by Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-Yin Lo.
  Reviewed by Daniel B. Abramson

• Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. By Pun Ngai.
  Reviewed by Vera Leigh Fennell

• Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics. By Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler.
  Reviewed by Malcolm Thompson

• The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China. By Zvi Ben-Dor Benite.
  Reviewed by R. Kent Guy

• Party Politics in Taiwan: Party Change and the Democratic Evolution of Taiwan, 1991-2004. By Dafydd Fell.
  Reviewed by Murray A. Rubinstein

• When Valleys Turned Blood Red: The Ta-pa-ni Incident in Colonial Taiwan. By Paul R. Katz.
  Reviewed by Lung-chih Chang

• Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. By Faye Yuan Kleeman.
  Reviewed by Andrew Horvat

Northeast Asia

• The United States in Japan's Foreign and Security Policymaking, 1945-1992: National Security, Party Politics, and International Status. By Liang Pan.
  Reviewed by Toshiro Ozawa

• Japan's Subnational Governments in International Affairs. By Purnendra Jain.
  Reviewed by Apichai W. Shipper

• Toward a Peaceable Future: Redefining Peace, Security, and Kyosei from a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Edited by Yoichiro Murakami, Noriko Kawamura and Shin Chiba.
  Reviewed by Tomoyuki Saito

• The 'Big Bang' in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change. Edited by J.S. Eades, Roger Goodman and Yumiko Hada.
  Reviewed by Bruce Stronach

• Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Japan: Politics, Organizations, and High Technology Firms. By Kathryn Ibata-Arens.
  Reviewed by Edward J. Lincoln

• Tsugaru: Regional Identity on Japan's Northern Periphery. By Nanyan Guo, Seiichi Hasagawa, Henry Johnson, Hidemichi Kawanishi, Kanako Kitahara and Anthony Rausch.
  Reviewed by Debra J. Occhi

• Japan's Financial Crisis: Institutional Rigidity and Reluctant Change. By Jennifer A. Amyx.
  Reviewed by Myung-koo Kang

• A Companion to the Anthropology Of Japan. Edited by Jennifer Robertson.
  Reviewed by Karen Nakamura

• The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda. By Barak Kushner.
  Reviewed by James L. Huffman

• Japanese Temple Buddhism: Worldliness in a Religion of Renunciation. By Stephen G. Covell.
  Reviewed by Nancy Stalker

• Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village: The Making and Becoming of Person and Place. By D.P. Martinez.
  Reviewed by Robin O'Day

• Kannani and Document of Flames: Two Japanese Colonial Novels. By Yuasa Katsuei, translated with an introduction and critical foreword by Mark Driscoll.
  Reviewed by Ted Goossen

• Politics, Memory, and Public Opinion: The History Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society. By Sven Saaler.
  Reviewed by Robert A. Fish

• Korea after Kim Jong-il. By Marcus Noland.
  Reviewed by Avram Agov

Southeast Asia

• Violence in Between: Conflict and Security in Archipelagic Southeast Asia. Edited by Damien Kingsbury.
  Reviewed by Robert W. Hefner

• After the Crisis: Hegemony, Technocracy and Governance in Southeast Asia. Edited by Shiraishi Takashi and Patricio N. Abinales.
  Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Winters

• Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space. By Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben and Henk Schulte Nordholt.
  Reviewed by Patricio N. Abinales

• The Thaksinization of Thailand. By Duncan McCargo and Ukrist Pathmanand.
  Reviewed by Pitch Pongsawat

• Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand. By Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker.
  Reviewed by Pitch Pongsawat

• Thailand's Secret War: OSS, SOE and the Free Thai Underground During World War II. By E. Bruce Reynolds.
  Reviewed by David Chandler

• Burma at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Edited by Monique Skidmore.
  Reviewed by Josef Silverstein

• Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights. By Amity A. Doolittle.
  Reviewed by Sulochana Nair

• Jemaah Islamiyah: Radical Islam in Indonesia. By Greg Barton.
  Reviewed by Andrew T.H. Tan

• Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia. By Jacques Bertrand.
  Reviewed by Edward Aspinall

• The Indonesian Military after the New Order. By Sukardi Rinakit.
  Reviewed by Steven Drakeley

• State Terrorism and Political Identity In Indonesia: Fatally Belonging. By Ariel Heryanto.
  Reviewed by John Roosa

• The Indonesian Revolution and the Singapore Connection, 1945-1949. By Yong Mun Cheong.
  Reviewed by Robin Ramcharan

• And the Sun Pursued the Moon: Symbolic Knowledge and Traditional Authority Among the Makassar. By Thomas Gibson.
  Reviewed by Kathryn Robinson

• Power Plays: Wayang Golek Puppet Theatre of West Java. By Andrew N. Weintraub.
  Reviewed by Michael H. Bodden

• A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor. By Joseph Nevins.
  Reviewed by David Webster

Australasia and the Pacific Region

• New Zealand in a Globalising World. Edited by Ralph Pettman.
  Reviewed by Katie Pickles

• A Concise History of Australia: Second Edition. By Stuart Macintyre.
  Reviewed by Charlie Fox

• A Trial Separation: Australia and the Decolonisation of Papua New Guinea. By Donald Denoon.
  Reviewed by Steffen Dalsgaard

• As Mothers of the Land: The Birth of the Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom. Edited by Josephine Tankunani Sirivi and Marilyn Taleo Havini.
  Reviewed by Nancy Sullivan

• Paint Me Black: Memories of Croker Island and Other Journeys. By Claire Henty-Gebert.
  Reviewed by Clare Archer-Lean