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Table of Contents

Political Identity and Regional Cooperation in East Asia ……………………1 Dingping GUO Fudan University

Contending East Asian Regional Identity: Market-led, Institutions or Social Reconstruction …………………………15 Zhengyi WANG Peking University

Extended Producer Responsibility in East Asia: Approaches and lessons learnt from the management of waste electrical and electronic equipment ……… 41 Panate MANOMAIVIBOOL Mae Fah Luang University

From Shock Absorber to Engine: A Big Transformation Facing Sino–Japan Environmental Cooperation ………………………………………………… 67 Haibin ZHANG Peking University

Environmental Cooperation between China and Other Northeast Asian Countries: The Case of Northeast China …………………………………… 81 Junting LIU Liaoning University

“National Identity” Image and Human Insecurity of Migrants: The Case of Japan …………………………………………………………… 99 Kinhide MUSHAKOJI Osaka University of Economics and Law

The Twin Nationalisms and Koreans in Japan …………………………… 115 Namsun SONG Osaka University of Economics and Law

East Asian Review Vol.13 March (2010), 1-13.ISSN 1342-8047 © The Asian Research Institute, Osaka University of Economies and Law

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1. Introduction

Remarkable progress has been made in regional cooperation in East Asia during the past decade after East Asia experienced miraculous rapid growth in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s and launched a political transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the 1980s-1990s. Based on achievements in economic development, political transitions and regional cooperation, East Asia has expanded its international influence and raised its global status.

This paper analyzes the progress and problems in promoting regional co-operation in East Asia by comparing political identities between Europe and Asia, among East Asian countries and areas, using data from the past decade, including the 2000 Asia-Europe Survey, the Eurobarometer, and the AsiaBa-rometer. It will consist of the following four parts. In the first part, the different approaches to regional cooperation in East Asia will be reviewed, for example, the perspective of economic integration, political leadership, cultural exchange and confidence-building and I will provide a new approach from a perspective of political identity. In the second part, I will analyze the national identity in East Asia. The third part will be devoted to discussing regional identity and deepening cooperation in East Asia by introducing a number of survey results. Finally, the author will discuss the problem and prospect of regional coopera-tion in East Asia in light of the comparative analysis of political identity.

2. The new perspective of political identity

While East Asia has been making steady progress toward regional integra-

Political Identity and Regional Cooperation in East Asia

Dingping GUOFudan University (China)

2 Dingping GUO

tion and community-building, the study of regional cooperation in East Asia has attracted greater and closer attention from political leaders and academic circles. In the growing literature on regional cooperation in East Asia, there are brief descriptions of regional developments, basic interpretations of the dynamics and processes of regional cooperation, and heated discussions about the problems and prospects of community-building. A close examination of this research revealed that there were at least four different types of perspec-tives in the study of regional cooperation in East Asia.

First, the economic perspective tends to see regional cooperation in East Asia as a process of economic integration, a mechanism of overcoming eco-nomic and financial crisis, a device for expanding foreign trade and attracting foreign investments. During the early 1990s, economic cooperation was pro-posed by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir in order to promote economic integration in East Asia and balance the pressure from the grouping of devel-oped Western countries. After the East Asian financial crisis broke out in 1997, regional cooperation became top priority and was put into motion under the ASEAN+3 framework (China, Japan and Korea), with leaders initiating meet-ings from late 1997. Makoto Taniguchi, an economist and former high-level governmental official in charge of international economic relations, insisted that there are many insurmountable difficulties in the process of community-building, most of which are political. Therefore, a realistic approach to regional cooperation in East Asia is to promote economic integration and build an economic community (Taniguchi, 2005:76-77). He analyzed in detail the pos-sibility and advantages of building an economic community.

Second, some scholars emphasized the importance of political leadership and insisted that initiatives from political leaders are the key factors in pro-moting regional cooperation. A salient feature in the East Asian development model is the leading role of government. Regional cooperation is no exception. From the first ASEAN+3 leaders meeting in 1997 to the latest one in early 2008, the whole process of regional cooperation has been directed, planed and su-pervised by the political leaders from East Asian countries and areas. Based on discussions among the leaders and the proposals by senior scholars, regional cooperation has been intensified and expanded into economic, social, cultur-al, and security affairs. In discussing security cooperation in East Asia, Jusuf Wanandi, a leading Indonesian scholar on strategic and international affairs, especially pointed out, “Since leadership will be very important, a quadrangle leadership should be allowed to develop, namely among China, Japan, Korea and ASEAN. Depending on the issue, either one of the four should be upfront

3Political Identity and Regional Cooperation in East Asia

in taking the initiative and move the issue” (Wanandi, 2004:164-165).Third, the institutional perspective focused on the growth of institutions

and the process of institutionalization in promoting regional cooperation in East Asia. During the past decade, a multi-dimensional and multi-tiered mech-anism of regional cooperation has been established, such as the ASEAN+3 and ASEAN+1 framework, East Asian Summit, all different kinds of high-level governmental officials meeting on economic, trade, financial, environmental, educational, cultural, military affairs. Yunling Zhang analyzed the institution-al developments in the process of regional cooperation and maintained that they have created public good for the countries and areas in East Asia (Zhang, 2005:12). Yongming Fan explained the evolution of regional cooperation from the perspective of regional public good and argued that regional cooperation has obvious advantages in providing regional public good compared with uni-lateral hegemony providing international public good (Fan, 2008:7-12).

Fourth, the cultural perspective has tried to explore and explain the cul-tural origin and psychological foundation of regional cooperation in East Asia. Although there are various cultural traditions in languages, religions and life styles, some common characteristics such as family values can be found in East Asian societies. Therefore, regional cooperation is also a process of the forma-tion of common values and a collective identity. Applying social constructivism in international politics to the study of regional cooperation in East Asia, some scholars regarded East Asia as a cultural community and tried to analyze the collective identity as the mental foundation of community-building. Amitav Acharya presented an example when he published Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problems of Regional Order (Routledge, 2000). In his research, a crucial idea about a security community is that international relations is a process of social learning and identity for-mation through transactions, interaction and socialization (Acharya, 2004:2). Jong-Yil Ra, a Korean scholar and diplomat, has explored the cultural aspects of Northeast Asian community-building and insisted that identity is basic and fundamental (Ra, 2004:284).

Although many achievements have been made and some programs are under progress in promoting regional cooperation, considering the political and economic difficulties including the relation with the United States and FTA negotiations, some scholars have noticed that the pace of regional coop-eration in East Asia has slowed down and confidence in community-building has been weakening and passion diminishing. Therefore, the dynamics and foundations of regional cooperation in East Asia must be reexamined and re-

4 Dingping GUO

considered (Zhang, 2008:4-20). Based on the social constructivist studies of regional cooperation, political identity has been emphasized and should be an important and useful perspective. Alexander Wendt expatiated on the social theory of international politics and argued that the most important structures in which states are embedded are made of ideas, not material forces. Ideas determine the meaning and content of power, the strategies by which states pursue their interests, and interests themselves. In the social process, states learn to construct their identities and interests in interaction, and then cooper-ating states can form a collective identity based on interdependence, common fate, homogenization and self-restraint (Wendt, 1999:308-317). In this sense, regional cooperation is a process of collective identity formation.

The problems of political identity came into vogue in the late twentieth century as the process of globalization and regionalization had been intensi-fying and exerting a greater influence on people’s lives all around the world. Identity is multiplex. Otherness and sameness are both internal and external to any identity (individual or collective). Accordingly, diversity or multiplicity of overlapping identities and their corresponding allegiances is one characteristic of identity politics (Tully, 2003:518-519). In the light of the central role of na-tion-state in international politics, political identity can be simply divided into three types: subnational identity, national identity and supranational identity.

3. National identity and nationalist sentiments

Identity is a key concept in the AsiaBarometer survey, and some related questions were asked in 2003 and 2004. Question 15-1 in the 2003 and 2004 survey asked: “Do you think of yourself as being (nationality), or do you not think of yourself in this way?” Figure 1 displays the 2004 survey results, but the 2003 survey result is used for China.

As indicated in Figure 1, identification with a specific nationality is ex-tremely high across the board, and is close to 100 percent in the top four countries, namely, Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar. The AsiaBarometer survey results were exactly 100 percent in Thailand, Korea and India, 99 percent in Vietnam, and 96 percent in Myanmar. More than 90 percent of respondents in the other seven countries expressed identification with their respective nationality. The relatively low percentage for Singapore (79.5%) may be explained by its diversity of ethnic backgrounds such as Chinese, Indian, Malaysian and so on (Fukushima and Okabe, 2006:340).


An interesting finding is that national identity is not as strong as we would expect. Only 84.5 percent of respondents in China thought of themselves as Chinese. Historically, China regarded itself as the Central Kingdom (Zhong-guo) and could afford a sense of national pride for a long time. But when Western countries had developed enough strength from modern technology and industrialization to support their expansionist efforts, China was pushed around, plundered and carved up by one country after another, ever since Britain went to war in 1839. The People’s Republic of China was founded after the CCP came to power in 1949, which ended the semi-colonial history of modern China and declared the beginning of the new socialist China. Two years after Mao Zedong’s death, the second leadership with Deng Xiaoping at the core sought to open to the outside world as its initiative.

One result of the open-door policy is a sharply increased foreign pres-ence in China. There are more and more academic and cultural exchanges between China and other countries. The Chinese government has sent thou-sands of scholars and students abroad, particularly to Japan and the United States, thereby giving them exposure to foreign values and ideas. As a result, in contrast to its erstwhile self-conceit, a sense of humility spread over the whole country. Socialism and Marxism were doubted, and the CCP was believed to be responsible for backwardness of the state of the country. Even patriotism that is taken for granted almost all over the world was challenged. Some people criticized unfairly during the Anti-rightist Movements or the Cultural Revolu-

Figure 1: National Identity in East Asia (%)

[2004 AsiaBarometer Survey, Question 15-1] Do you think of yourself as being (nationality)? 2003 AsiaBarometer Survey result is used for China.

0 20 40 60 80 100�ailand

PhilippineCambodiaMyanmar

LaosVietnam

KoreaMalaysia

JapanIndonesia

BruneiChina

Singapore 79.584.591.491.692.992.995.296.397.699.199.199.399.6

6 Dingping GUO

tion asked why we must love the motherland since we were forsaken and were not loved by our motherland.1

To solve the belief crisis or identity crisis mentioned above, the CCP has taken a series of measures since the early 1980s. In the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on the student democracy movement, the CCP and Chinese government were faced with pressures from abroad and home. Re-cognizant of the incompetence of the Communist ideology, Chinese leaders consciously cultivated nationalism as a new glue to unite the country. Com-munism was discredited as a result of the Tiananmen Incident and the Soviet Union’s collapse. Therefore, Jiang Zemin and others used the education system and propaganda to nurture a national pride in response to foreign pressures. In August, 1994, the CCP promulgated “An Outline of Implementation of Patriotism Education”, in which the trinity of patriotism, collectivism and socialism was emphasized and patriotism education for youth was given over-riding priority. Meanwhile, some scholars suggested that Chinese leaders use nationalism to enhance and consolidate the political legitimacy. For example, defining nationalism as a precious, “natural” political resource that can be exploited to maintain and strengthen the unity and consensus of a political community, Gongqing Xiao advocated that it was time for Chinese leaders to make good use of nationalism to fortify a legitimate basis and restructure the moral values for the CCP regime (Xiao, 2004).

As a result of Chinese leaders using patriotism instead of communism to educate the people, nationalism has become much stronger since the early 1990s. Ying-shih Yu observed that in the early 1990s nationalistic sentiments suddenly resurged and reached monstrous proportions (Yu, 1997:262). In spite of those efforts, as Figure 2 shows, only 34.5% of the respondents in China felt that they were proud to be Chinese. This is a relatively low percentage in com-parison with other East Asian countries and areas as indicated in Figure 2.

Similarly, patriotism has been advocated and nationalism has been stirred up in Japan by many conservative scholars as well as political leaders. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party is not satisfied with the condition of Japanese patriotism and has tried to amend for the first time the Basic Law on Educa-tion, written under the American military occupation as part of the democratic reforms. The point of amendment is to include “love of country” in the public school curriculum, and to ask students to pledge allegiance to the national flag and sing the national song. While Japanese leaders try to nurture love

1 For example, this attitude was apparent in the film script “Unrequited Love” written by Bai Hua. Also see Tsou Tang (1986:228).


of country, some historic textbooks have been rewritten with some parts of war history being omitted or embellished. Consequentially, nationalism has become a very important topic and one of great concern during the late 1990s and the early 21st century. This is a very important factor relating to the origin of the Sino-Japanese controversy over historical issues.

According to the 2003 and 2004 AsiaBarometer survey results, there were only 24% in 2003 and 23% in 2004 of Chinese respondents who said Japan has a “good” and “rather good” influence on China. In Japan, there were merely 30% in 2003 and 21% in 2004 of respondents who said China has a “good” and “rather good” influence on Japan (Inoguchi, 2005:355-356; Inoguchi, 2006:482-483). Another famous survey was conducted in China, India, Japan, Pakistan, Russia and the United States by the Pew Global Attitudes Project from March 31-May 14, 2006. The findings from the survey showed that there was a good deal of dislike, if not outright hostility, in how the public major Asian countries view their neighbors. The deepest divides exist between traditional rivals, especially China and Japan. Roughly seven-in-ten Japanese express an unfavorable view of China and an equal number of Chinese dislike Japan.2 Although high-level meetings have been conducted and mutual trust among political leaders has been improving during the past two years, nationalist sentiments in both the Chinese and Japanese public remain strong and sometimes explosive.

Figure 2: National Pride in East Asia (%)

[2004 AsiaBarometer, Question 16] How proud are you of being (nationality)? Answer: VERY PROUD

0 20 40 60 80 100Laos

�ailandPhilippines

VietnamIndonesiaCambodia

BruneiMyanmarMalaysiaSingapore

ChinaJapanKorea 14.9

26.434.550.672.379.181.782.085.389.390.695.297.9

2 “Publics of Asian Powers Hold Negative Views of One Another”, 6-Nation Pew Global Attitudes Survey Report, see: www.pewglobal.org.

8 Dingping GUO

4. Asian identity and regional cooperation

National identity is certainly extremely important in a world where nation-states exist and interact as the main actors. However, identity is not limited to nation. Instead of having a sense of nationality, people may think of themselves as being part of some other sub- or supranational group.

In contrast with Figure 1, which showed the existence of a high level of national identity in almost all East Asian countries, Figure 3 reveals a wide variation between East Asian countries with respect to Asian identity. While as high as 99.3 percent of respondents in Cambodia identified themselves as “Asian”, there were only 26.9 percent in Japan who identified themselves in the same manner. If the 2003 AsiaBarometer survey results are included, China was the lowest in its self-identification as “Asian”. Contrary to the expectations that a strong identification with a specific nationality would then result in a low level of attachment to Asian identity, more than 90 percent of respondents in Cambodia and Vietnam, and more than 80 percent in the Philippines, Thai-land and Myanmar identify themselves as “Asian”. Referring to Figure 1 and Figure 3, we find that respondents from those countries also show a strong national identity, which seems to indicate that national identity and suprana-tional identity coexist and are not mutually exclusive (Fukushima and Okabe, 2006:341). More than 60 percent of respondents from Singapore, Brunei, Ma-laysia and Korea identify themselves as “Asian”. Except for three big countries

Figure 3: Asian Identity in 2004 (%)

[2004 AsiaBarometer, Question 17-1] Do you identify with any transnational group? (SA): Asian. 2003 AsiaBarometer Survey result is used for China.

0 20 40 60 80 100CambodiaVietnam

Philippine�ailandMyanmarSingapore

BruneiMalaysia

KoreaLaos

IndonesiaJapanChina 6.0

26.939.359.466.167.868.878.080.087.188.992.699.3


in terms of population, that is Indonesia, Japan and China, there are relatively strong Asian identities in most East Asian countries.

With regard to supranational identity, a similarly low level of Asian iden-tity in China was found from the 2000 Asia-Europe survey results. Chinese people did not show special features like South Korea and other Asian coun-tries. As indicated in Figure 4, 31.0% of respondents thought of themselves as being part of Asia. At the same time, 33.9% thought of themselves as Chinese (Huaren). There were as many as 29.2% who did not think of themselves in this way. Compared to other Asian countries and areas, Chinese people belong to groups that are not interested in supranational identity. In a sharp contrast with the high percentage of 88.6% in South Korea, the percentage of respondents who identified with Asia in China was very low although China is much bigger than Korea in terms of population and territory. Similarly, in a stark contrast with the high percentage of 67.1% in Taiwan, the percentage of respondents who identified with Chinese (Huaren) in mainland China was unbelievably low although there is a much larger Chinese population in the Mainland than in Taiwan.

Many reasons account for the weak supranational identity in China. For example, traditionally, Chinese people had thought of China as the center of the world and themselves as the most civilized people on the planet. So, in many Chinese people’s mind or eyes, the outside world was barbarian, corrupt, immoral and dirty. Communist propaganda reinforced these divisions between China and the outside world, especially the West during the period of the Cold War. Although China began to join in the process of modernization and was gradually integrated into the world market, in general, Chinese people’s knowl-edge of other countries and engagement in world affairs remain very low even

Figure 4: Asian identity in 2000 (%)

[2000 Asia-Europe Survey Q9] Do you think of yourself as being part of a larger group: Asian?

0 20 40 60 80 100JapanKoreaChina

SingaporeMalaysiaIndonesia�ailand

Philippines 75.181.99.95.819.731.088.626.4

10 Dingping GUO

today. The weak supranational identity perhaps only reflects the other side of the strong regional identity and local connections.

The extremely low level of supranational identity in China may be explained by the relatively strong local identity. As shown in Figure 5, an overwhelming majority (78.9%) of Chinese respondents thought of themselves as being part of one region. In China, the region means province (sheng) for the most part. There were also 44.7% of respondents who thought of themselves as part of ethic groups. In China, there are 55 minority ethnic groups besides the Han ethnic group. Neighborhood and religion play little role in Chinese identity. Historically, regionalism/localism had played an important role in Chinese traditional culture. The central-local relation had been one of the most serious problems during the past two thousand years. Two thousand years of Chinese history is filled with cycles of unity and disunity, each of which totals nearly one thousand years.3 This historical situation made it difficult for Chinese people to identify themselves with the central government or central kingdom (Zhongguo). They are accustomed to associate themselves with local units such as the province instead of national and supranational units.

Figure 5: Chinese identity with sub-national groups (%)

[2000 Asia-Europe Survey Q8] Instead of having a sense of nationality, is there any other community or group that you feel part of?

01020304050607080

No

answ

er

Don

’t t

hink

this

way

Relig

ion

Ethi

c gro

up

Regi

on

3 According to the estimate by Jianxiong Ge (1994:79), in the history of China from 221 B. C to 1911 A.C, the period of union covers 950 years (54%) by a relatively broad criteria.


5. Problems and Prospects

The national identity and Asian identity have been displayed and dis-cussed above by using the recent survey data. Although a simple cross-regional comparison is not relevant, European data may serve as a reference here. The dream of the European community’s founding fathers was ultimately, to see the emergence of a European identity. In Europe, the concept of European citizen-ship was first officially introduced by the Maastricht Treaty that states: “Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union (1992).” The 1997 Amsterdam Treaty clarified the link between European and national citizenship. It states clearly that “citizenship of the Union shall com-plement and not replace national citizenship (1997).” The 2000 Eurobarometer survey results shown in Figure 6 reveal that a truly European identity is not very strong, although the majority of respondents saw themselves as a Euro-pean citizen to some extent.

As indicated in Figure 6, a sense of European identity is not as strong as the founding fathers had expected. However, a sense of European identity has evolved from the spill-over effects of European integration. According to a famous analysis, this sense of identity is not linked, negatively or positively, with national pride. Rather, it seems to challenge only local feelings of belonging. The main feature of this sense of identity is its link with education, cognitive mobilization, and post-materialism (Duchesne and Frognier, 1995:193-223).

Comparing the evolution of European identity and Asian identity, we can draw some basic conclusions as follows:

First, the emergence of a collective identity is an important aspect of re-gional integration. Although not yet of great significance, an Asian identity is emerging and has provided strong support for regional cooperation in East Asia.

Second, national identity and supranational identity are not mutually ex-clusive. The formation of collective identity does not replace national identity. Both AsiaBarometer and Eurobarometer survey results indicated that citizens holding a strong national identity also identified themselves with a suprana-tional entity. On the contrary, citizens with a weak national identity tended not to identify themselves with a supranational entity.

Third, although there are strong Asian identities in most Asian countries, great disparities exist between different countries. In particular, the survey results surprisingly indicated the lowest level of collective identity in the three biggest East Asian countries, namely, China, Japan and Indonesia. The weak

12 Dingping GUO

supranational identity and strong nationalism in those countries constitute the major obstacles to community-building in East Asia.

Fourth, identity is not a matter of scientific fact nor theoretical reason. It is one’s practical identity, a mode of conduct, of being in the world with others. Therefore, negotiation and dialogue, exchange of reasons in dialogue over forms of recognition, are very fundamental. In this sense, the existing frameworks such as ASEAN+3, ASEAN+1, ARF, APEC, and the East Asian Summit have contributed substantially to the formation of a collective identity in East Asia. Such kinds of frameworks should be insisted upon and improved, and more similar dialogue mechanisms must be created at different levels and at various fields if we are to continue to promote community-building in East Asia.

References

Acharya, Amitav (2004) Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problems of Regional Order (Chinese edition), Shanghai People’s Publishing House.

Duchesne, Sophie and Andre-Paul Frognier (1995) Is There a European Identity?, In Oskar Niedermayer and Richard Sinnott (ed.) Public Opinion and Internationalized

Figure 6: European Identity in 2000

[Eurobarometer Spring 2000] Results = European only + European & Nationality + Nationality & European.

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80ItalySpainFrance

LuxembourgNetherlands

BelgiumPortugalDenmarkGermanyFinlandGreeceAustriaIrelandSweden

UK 334043454545515253586168697174


Governance, Oxford University Press, 193-223.Fan, Yongming (2008) Quyuxing Guoji Gonggong Chanpin (Regional International

Public Goods), World Economy and Politics No.1, 7-12.Fukushima, Akiko and Misa Okabe (2006) Finding a Path toward Regional Integration

in East Asia, In Takashi Inoguchi et al. (ed.) Human Beliefs and Values in Striding Asia, Tokyo: Akashi Shoten.

Ge, Jianxiong (1994) Tongyi Yu Fenglie (Union and Disunion), Beijing: Sanlian Shudian.

Inoguchi, Takashi et al. (ed.) (2005) Values and Life Styles in Urban Asia, Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo.

Inoguchi, Takashi et al. (ed.) (2006) Human Beliefs and Values in Striding Asia, Tokyo: Akashi Shoten.

Ra, Jong-Yil (2004) Dongbeiya Gongtongti De Wenhua Shijiao (Cultural Perspective of Northeast Asian Community), Yanbian University Press.

Tang, Tsou (1986) The Cultural Revolution and Post-Mao Reforms: A Historical Perspec-tive, The University of Chicago Press.

Taniguchi, Makoto (2005) Higashi Ajia Kyodotai (East Asian Community), Iwanami Syoten.

Tully, James (2003) Identity Politics, In Trence Ball and Richard Bellamy (ed.) The Cam-bridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, 518-519.

Xiao, Gongqin (2004) Minzu Zhuyi Yu ZhongGuo Zhuanxing Shiqi De Yishixingtai (Nationalism and Ideology during the Transitional Period in China), Zhanlue Yu Guanli (Strategy and Management) No.4.

Wanandi, Yusuf (2004) The Architecture of Security Cooperation for a Durable Regional Security in East Asia, In Yan Xuetong and Zhou Fangyin (ed.) Security Cooperation in East Asia, Peking University Press.

Wendt, Alexander (2005) Social Theory of International Politics, Peking University Press.

Yu, Ying-shih (1997) China’s New Wave of Nationalism, In Larry Diamond et al. (ed.) Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies: Regional Challenges, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Zhang, Yunling (2005) East Asian Regionalism, Beijing: World Affairs Press.Zhang, Yunling (2008) Dui Dongya Hezuo Fazhan De Zairenshi (Reconsidering the

Developments of Regional Cooperation in East Asia), Journal of Contemporary Asia-Pacific Studies No.1, 4-20.

Email: [email protected]


15

1. Introduction

There has been an obvious world-wide development of regionalism since the end of the Cold War with the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in North America, the implementation of a single European Currency (EURO) in Europe, the on-going formation process of the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the successful expansion of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the Asian Pacific. East Asian regional cooperation of the past two decades is the most attractive model: the emergence of such regional institutions covering Southeast Asia

Contending East Asian Regional Identity :Market-led, Institutions or Social Reconstruction1

1 Some of the ideas in this essay were developed under the auspices of the Program on “International Political Economy and Regionalism in the Asian Pacific” (1996-2000) under the leadership of Professor Miles Kahler of University of California at San Diego, Professor Sechirro Takagi of Institute of Denfence of Japan and Professor Wang Zhengyi, co-sponsored by Program for International Studies in Asia (U.S.) and supported by the Ford Foundation and Japan Asian Foundation. I am very grateful to Asian Fellow Program of the Ford Foundation under which I was selected as one of fellows in 2001, and Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand , and its remark-able director Professor Dr. Supang Chatavanich graciously hosted me and facilitated my research. I am also grateful to Sasakawa Peace Foundation-IDSS project on “Evolving Approaches to Security in the Asia Pacific Region”, under which I was appointed as a visiting fellow of Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. I am indebted to Professor and Deputy Director Amitav Archarya of IDSS whose outstanding work stimulates me rethinking earlier research work and Professor Ezra Vogel of Harvard University for criticism of an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Zhengyi WANGPeking University (China)

16 Zhengyi WANG

as the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) in 1992, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in 1995, the successful expansion of ASEAN itself in membership with Cambodia joining in 1999; the creation of a series of dialogue channels such as “ASEAN+3” (ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea) in 1998, the “Joint Statement on East Asia cooperation” in 1999 and the “ASEAN-China Free Trade Area” in 2001. Although it may be the most attractive model it is also the most controversial. Some scholars insist on comparing such regional cooperation with reference to the variables available within the EU and North America agreements (Yuan, 1994; Akrasanee and Stifel, 1994), while others try to explain Asian regional cooperation as being based on Asian culture and society2. In this paper I will examine three aspects: (1) What political and economic facets of European regionalism could be applicable to Asia? (2) What is meant by “ASEAN way” or “Asian way”? (3) What is happening and will probably happen in East Asia?

2. Approaches to regionalism according to different theoretical perspectives

From the 1980s on, under the umbrella of neo-realism, neo-liberalism and social constructivism in international relations studies respectively, four approaches to regionalism have been elaborated on in international relations literature, namely the international institutional approach from the liberalist perspective, the power relations approach and domestic politics approach from the realist perspective3, and the socialization approach from the constructivist perspective4. It is here, first of all, that I will examine each of them carefully.

2.1. Liberalism’s Perspective: International Institution Approach

The international institution approach has been the most popular and dominant one in international relations literature on the politics and eco-

2 In this aspect, Professor Amitav Acharya’s recent work (2001) is most provoking and thus breaking through; others including Richard Higgott (1999) and Peter Katzenstein (1999).

3 Of which the most important and summary work about realism and liberalism perspec-tives on regionalism is Mansfield and Milner (1997).

4 As for general elaboration about constructive perspective, see, for example, Katzenstein and Wendt (1996).

17Contending East Asian Regional Identity

nomics of regionalism. The international institution approach emphasizes economic cooperation among states and the fostering of regional institutions so that collective action can be controlled in a monitored manner. Based on this approach, regionalism or regional integration is treated as a confluence of re-gional economic activity. In this sense, the international institutional approach to regionalism derives from the liberalist traditions stressing interdependence not only in the area of politics but also in economic activity within a region or throughout the world. This approach was very influential in 1970s in dis-cussing the role of multinational corporations and foreign direct investment, and in the 1990s in evaluating the role of regional institutions such as the EU, APEC, NAFTA and ASEAN during the integration process of these regions.

In the 1970s, with the successful access of the multinational corporations of the U.S., Japan and Western Europe to raw materials, technologies, manage-rial know-how and human resources on the world economic market, a notable model named “sovereignty at bay”5 appeared. In this model the nation-state’s control over economic affairs is said to be relinquished to the multinational corporations, the Euro-dollar market, and international institutions that are not only more suited to coordinating the economic needs of mankind but also better in terms of world efficiency and domestic welfare. The commonly quoted statement concerning relations between nation-states and the world market is:

In an important sense, the fundamental problem of the future is the conflict between the political forces of nationalism and the economic forces pressing for economic world integration. This conflict currently…[is] between the national government and the international corporation, in which the balance of power at least superficially appears to lie on the side of the national government. But in the longer run economic forces are likely to predominate over political, and may indeed come to do so before the end of this decade. Ultimately, a world federal government will appear as the only rational method for coping with the world’s economic problems (Johnson, 1975:24).

In the 1990s, due to the success of the EU in Europe, the advent of NAFTA in North America and the on-going process of APEC in the Asian Pacific, the “Powerless State” model became popular. In his work, The End of the Nations

5 According to Robert Gilpin, the name of model derives from the title of book Sovereignty at Bay written by Raymond Vernon (1971) and reexamined in Robert Gilpin (1975:220-228).

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State: The Rise of Regional Economies, Kenichi Ohmae wrote:

Taken together, the mobility of these four I’s [investment, industry, information technology and individual consumers] makes it possible for viable economic units in any part of the world to pull in whatever is needed for development. They need not look for assistance only to pools of resources close to home. Nor need they rely on the formal efforts of governments to attract resources from elsewhere and funnel them to the ultimate users. This makes the traditional “middleman” function of nation states—and of their governments—largely unnecessary. Because the global markets for all the I’s work just fine on their own, nation states no longer have to play a market-making role. In fact, given their own troubles, which are considerable, they most often just get in the way. If allowed, global solutions will flow to where they are needed without the intervention of nation states. On current evidence, moreover, they flow better and more precisely if such intervention is absent (Ohmae, 1995:4).

At the same time, Europeans were expressing opinions against the na-tion-state and security at the nation-state level, while making an appeal for governance at the regional level:

[In Europe] the nation-state is too big to run everyday life , and too small to manage international affairs. Europeans are finding national interest hard to see, let alone define Regionalism, weather within or across national borders, is Europe’s current and future dynamics (Newhouse, 1997:67).Europeans for the most part have lost the habit of thinking about providing for their security at the level of the nation-state. Instead, they have an existential feeling of security from membership in both NATO and the EU (Newhouse, 1997:73).Foreign policy has to be concerned with crime, drug trafficking, and immigration. Local authorities feel that they, not the national government, are best suited to deal with such matters, even though they must compete with their capitals for adequate funding (Newhouse, 1997:68).

Both the “sovereignty at bay” model and the “powerless state” model are theoretically based on following three assumptions:

Firstly, economic forces are the most predominate ones in an interdepen-dent world economy, and multinational corporations and international or regional institutions such as the IMF, WTO and World Bank globally as well as the EU, APEC, NAFTA and ASEAN regionally assume major roles in the contemporary international system.

Secondly, national economies have become enmeshed in a web of econom-


ic interdependence from which they cannot easily escape, otherwise a high cost has to be paid in terms of the inefficiencies of national economy and social welfare or domestic well-being. Only through trade, monetary relations, and foreign direct investment is it possible for national economic growth or even development to be reached and attained.

Thirdly, regional arrangement or institutionalization is a parameter or a mechanism, by which the governments in a region can work more closely together to meet various functional needs. In other words, the expansion of economic activity creates incentives for states to further liberalize and standard-ize economic exchanges, which enhances the economic welfare of participants, and the states cannot play a central role in this process.

Under this kind of international institution approach to the world economy and regional integration, the EU model in which international institutions such as NATO and the (EEC) EU are said to play key roles in European regional in-tegration was and is still regarded as available for other regions outside Europe, especially for the on-going regional integration in the Asian Pacific. In regard to this, Miles Kahler commented:

European initiatives have stimulated the latest round of regional institution-building as well. After a decade of “Eurosclerosis” the single European Act of 1986 promised renewed energy in constructing a unified European market, the genuine common market espoused by the founder of the community. Fearful of the possibility that the world economy would become dominated by blocs, others outside Europe looked to their own regional futures (Kahler, 1996).Legalized institutions are characterized by high density of rules that are specific, formal and binding; secondary rules that govern the production, interpretation, and application of those rules; and dispute settlement delegated to a neutral third party. International institutions with those characteristics appear to be heavily concentrated in Western Europe and North America, a zone of long-standing liberal democracies and high levels of economic integration (Kahler, 1999).

2.2. Realism’s Perspective: Power Relation Approach and Domestic Politics Approach

There are two kinds of approaches to regional integration studies among realists, one being the power relation approach, and the other the domestic politics approach.

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(1) The power relation approach to regionalismThis approach is derived from realist and neo-realist traditions and em-

phasizes a disregard for international systems by viewing nation-states as the primary actors in the international system. Realism is based on four basic as-sumptions (Viotti and Kauppi, 1995:55). The first is that states are the principle actors, and the study of international relations should focus on these units. Non-state actors such as multinational corporations and other transnational organizations are decidedly less important. Secondly, the state is the unitary authority and has a voice. Thirdly, the states are rational actors. In other words, it is considered that the state could achieve its particular goals based on its ex-isting capabilities. Finally, national security ranks at the top for the state among the array of world issues. In other words, military security or strategic issues are referred to as high politics, and economic and social issues as low politics. The state, power, and disregard for international systems have been the core concepts for both classical realists and neo-realists.

When applying these kinds of core concepts that exist within the inter-national system at the global level to regional studies, regionalism is defined as a political and economic process related to power-relations or hegemony. Following this logic, it focuses on three main issues (Mansfield and Milner, 1997:10): the formation of a regional arrangement designed to promote eco-nomic exchange; political alliances to shape the patterns of international trade; and hegemony giving way to the rising of protectionist regional blocs. In a word, the key of the power relation approach to regionalism is that economic cooperation cannot exist without power cooperation.

(2) Domestic politics approach to regionalismApart from emphasizing the effects of international forces of regionalism,

there exists another popular approach to regionalism, which focuses on the effects of domestic political and economic structures on foreign economic policy. In fact this approach encompasses the beliefs of the contemporary statist theory6. A statist approach has the following two basic assumptions:

First, the state is an autonomous actor. According to Stephen Krasner:

A statist paradigm views the state as an autonomous actor. The objectives sought by the state cannot be reduced to some summation of private

6 The Statist approach to the study of foreign economic policy started in 1970s. Three scholars contributed to its evolution, namely, Robert Gilpin (1975), Peter Katzenstein (1976, 1977) and Stephen Krasner (1976, 1978).


desires. These objectives can appropriately be called the national interest (Krasner, 1978:5).

Second, the national interest is to promote the general well-being of the society over a long period of time.

In sum, an inductive statist approach asserts that the national interest consists of a set of transitively ordered state preferences concerned to promote the general well-being of the society that persists over a long period of time (Krasner, 1978:45).

If we apply the statist paradigm to regional integration studies, then re-gionalism is regarded as a process relevant to social welfare improvement and national interest. The domestic politics approach to regionalism highlights bu-reaucratic factors such as interest groups and the policy-making process.

2.3. Social Constructivism: An alternative way to regionalism?

Over the past decade, the constructivist perspective on international systems and states has appeared in international relations studies, which has attempted to go beyond the debate between realism and liberalism and the bridged anarchy of international systems and the state7.

Constructivism, according to Wendt, is mainly based on three assump-tions (Wendt, 1992:391-425):

First, states are the principal actors in the international system;Second, the key structure in the states system is inter-subjective rather

than material;Third, state identities and interests are in a large part shaped by those

structures, rather than being determined exogenously through a system or by human nature or domestic politics.

Thus far, few scholars have applied the constructivist perspective to re-gional studies except for Amitav Acharya’s studies on regional identity in Southeast Asia (Acharya, 2000), Richard Higgott’s attention to ‘region build-ing’ in East Asia (Higgot, 1999:91-106), Thomas Risse-Kappen’s studies on NATO (Risse and Kappen, 1995), Michael Barnett’s studies on Arab Politics (Barnett, 1998), and Peter Katzenstein’s focus on national security and Asian regionalism (Katzenstein and Wendt, 1996).

7 For summary of this kind of attempt, see, for example, Paul R. Viotti and Mark V.Kauppi (1999) and N.J. Rengger (2000).

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Constructivism differs from both the realists’ and liberalists’ approaches to regionalism. Regionalism from a constructivist perspective is regarded as a process of cultural recognition or socialization of a collective identity. In Kanishka Jayasuriya’ words,

Regionalism is set of cognitive practices shaped by language and political discourse, which through the creation of concepts, metaphors and analogies determines how the region is defined; these serve to define the actors who are included (and excluded) within region and thereby enable the emergence of a regional entity and identity (Jayasuriya, 1994:412).

The constructivism perspective on regionalism, according to Amitav Ar-charya, is said to offer three insights into the discourse of a collective identity (Acharya, 2001:3-4).

The first is the social construction of a security community. For construc-tivism, cooperation among states is to be understood as a social process that may redefine the interests of the actors in matters of war and peace.

Second, constructivism allows for a much deeper impact of norms in shaping international relations. “By focusing on the constitutive effects of norms, constructivism has thus restored some of the original insights of in-tegration theory regarding the impact of socialization in creating collective interests and identities.”

Third, constructivism allows us to look beyond the impact of material forces in shaping international politics. According to constructivism, while material forces remain important, inter-subjective factors, including ideas, culture and identities, play a determining, rather than secondary, role in foreign policy interactions.

The main concern that will be addressed here is whether these different approaches and different theoretical perspectives are applicable to East Asian regional cooperation or not, and which one is more acceptable to employ for the analysis of regionalism in East Asia?

3. Asian regional cooperation: four competing conceptions

With the economic success of Japan that started in the 1960s, then that of “the four little dragons” and NIEs in Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, and finally that of China and Vietnam from the 1980s onwards, East Asia as a region has been viewed as a key economic powerhouse in the world economy. At the same time, recognition that security and stability are prerequisites for


economic growth has stimulated the creation of forums to discuss issues of regional security and political issues as well as economic dimensions such as trade, finance and investment. It is still an open question as to whether the eco-nomic growth and dynamism of East Asia can be sustained well into the 21st century as well as if is it possible for East Asian countries to reach a regional identity, and if so, which path would be most appropriate.

Since the end of the Cold War, East Asia has entered into a new round of chaos about regional identity both politically and culturally, although eco-nomic growth and cooperation has seen unprecedented progress compared with that during the Cold War period. Accordingly there are a variety of con-troversial views on regional identity in this region, some of which are (1) the flying-geese paradigm; (2) Greater China and China’s threat theory; (3) the balance of power or concert of powers; and (4) the “ASEAN way”.

3.1. The flying-geese paradigm

The flying-geese paradigm under Japan’s leadership was originally put forward to explain the linkage between industrial growth and the changing trade patterns of developing economies in East Asia (Akamatsu, 1962), and later used to explain the growth and trade nexus of the Asia-Pacific econo-mies (Das, 1996:131-191). According to this paradigm, in the East Asia region, the leader-follower relationship has worked in the following manner: Japan is the undoubted leader, followed by the four NIEs (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore), the ASEAN-4 (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand) and finally China. By investment and trade, East Asia, like flying geese, becomes integrated into a compact whole.

It is estimated that intra-Asian trade is growing four times faster than did Asian exports to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s (Katzenstein and Shiraishi, 1997:4).

This made the image of the flying-geese paradigm influential even in the 1990s. For example, the Japanese Minister of Finance’s Committee on Asia Pacific Economic Research declared in 1990, “It is necessary that what Japan used to do should be done by the Asian NIEs, what the Asian NIEs used to do should be done by ASEAN countries” (Katzenstein and Shiraishi, 1997:53).

Obviously Japan, under this “flying geese” paradigm, has contributed much to economic growth in East Asia since the 1960s, and Japanese networking has also played a crucial role in the regional economic integration of East Asia (Katzenstein and Shiraishi, 1997:35-37). However, the political and security

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implications of the flying-geese paradigm under Japan’s leadership have been confusing to most East Asian countries.

Politically the flying-geese paradigm under Japanese leadership reminds Asians of Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” in the 1930s and the colonialist role it took in East Asia based on the following basic ideas:

Expansion against other Asian peoples was rationalized within Japan by the doctrines of Social Darwinism, by the notions of the superiority of Japan’s unique national polity, and by the idea of a Japanese national mission to bring progress and modernity to its backward neighbors (Fairbank et al, 1973:423-441).

As for the security implication, Japan’s persistent pursuit for military power since the end of the Cold war reminds Asians of its militaristic past. In fact, Japan has not only sought to rebuild U.S.-Japan security relations but also Japan’s military power in the world by “rebuilding the US-Japan security structure” and “A Mid-Term Defense Program (FY 2001-2005)”.

“Rebuilding the US-Japan security structure” was put forward seriously when Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa visited the U.S. on March 12,1996:

The context within which Japan-U.S. relations exists has changed greatly. The most important change in the context really is not the change regarding Russia, China, or the Korean peninsula; it is the change in the Japan-U.S. relationship itself. If one doesn’t think in this way, we will agree to go beyond the “confirmation” to a “redefinition” of our relationship as if an urgent response can quickly improve our security ties. In my view, the basic thrust in the Nye report on East Asian security that we can put Japan-U.S. security ties back on track with minor adjustment is misguided. In fact, if the recommendations are carried out, it is hard to believe that such policies recommended in the report could produce beneficial impacts on relations in the future (Hosokawa).8

A Mid-Term Defense Program (FY 2001-2005) was adopted by the Se-curity Council of Japan and The considerations resulting from the Japanese Cabinet on December 15, 2000 are proclaimed to be:

The end of the Cold War has relieved the world of the terrors of an all-out nuclear war between East and West. Relations among major countries have basically become stable, and the possibility of armed conflict occurring on a global scale has diminished. However, regional conflicts have increased,

8 Morihiro Hosokawa’s Keynote Address, Seattle, Washington, March 12,1996.


not decreased, and weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles have proliferated after the Cold War. The international situation remains unpredictable and uncertain, and causes of conflict are yet to be resolved, particularly in East Asia. In this sense, we need to build the capability to deal with a variety of situations…During the Cold War era, Japan was able to contribute to the stability of the world simply by defending the peace and independence of Japan. In the post-Cold War world where such a security environment has disappeared and major countries are endeavoring to cooperate to stabilize the international community, calls for contributions from Japan, the second-largest economy in the world, over and above economic assistance have become increasing vocal. In such circumstances, the defense posture of Japan had necessarily to change (Kondo, 2001:297-298).

Such proclamations are not positive attributes towards confidence-build-ing measures of an East Asian regional identity through the “flying-geese paradigm” under Japan’s leadership.

3.2. Greater China or China’s threat theory

With the successive events of China’s economic growth since the 1980s, the return of Hong Kong (1997) and Macau (1999), and the entrance of China into the WTO (2001), it seems reasonable to assert that China has become the most dynamic country in East Asia and is playing, and will play an important role in East Asian regional integration (Chen and Kwan, 1997). Historian Cohen put it clearly:

After reviewing approximately 4000 years of activity in East Asia, there are inevitably indications of continuities and discontinuities. There are lessons of the past that might be seen as guides for the future---and lessons some will draw that are likely to prove no more valuable than a record of last year’s performance is for judging a stock or bond’s prospects for next year. The most obvious continuity over these several millennia has been the importance of China (Cohen, 2000:477).

In relation to the rise of China, there are two main opposing views that exist. One is the “greater China” theory and the other is the “China threat” theory.

The “Greater China” theory also has two variations. One is mainly based on the “Sinocentric tributary system” of East Asia history. According to this version, the tributary system is centered on China in East Asia history and this

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laid the foundation economically and structurally for the later development of East Asia in its own way or on its own terms. In Takeshi Hamashita’s words:

The traditional historiographic categories of Western “impact” and Asian “responses” cannot adequately address the structural transformations in the East Asian hegemonic system. East Asian history in modern times must be examined in its own terms, with special attention to how its internal dynamism led to its transformation and how it accommodated the “impact” of the coming of European powers and the rise of a new international system (Katzenstein and Shiraishi, 1997:113).East Asia entered modern times not because of the coming of European powers but because of the dynamism inherent in the traditional, Sinocentric tributary system” (Katzenstein and Shiraishi, 1997:113).

Another version of “Greater China” is derived from so-called Confucian capitalism (Weiming,1984), which tries to explain the economic success of East Asia, especially that of Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. According to this version, although there were influences by Western colonial powers and different processes of modernization in this region, one common concept is that East Asia aligns to a “Greater Chinese culture sphere” characterized as Confucianism. The difference between East Asian capitalism and Western capitalism is that East Asian capitalism has been based on Confucianism. It is Confucianism that stimulates and promotes the development of capitalism in East Asia.

The opposing reaction to the rise of China is the “China threat” theory9, which has been popular since the 1980s. The “China threat” theory is based mainly on two factors, one is that China was a superpower in history.

China’s sheer size and inherent strength, its conception of itself as a center of global civilization, and its eagerness to redeem centuries of humiliating weakness are propelling it toward Asian hegemony. Its goal is to ensure that no country in the region—whether Japan seeking oil exploration rights in the East China Sea, Taiwan inviting the Dalai Lama for an official visit, or Thailand allowing American naval vessels to dock in its ports—will act without taking China’s interests into prime consideration (Bernstein and Munro, 1997:19).The emergence of China as a superpower—whether it be nuclear weapons testing, the expansion of its navy, or its territorial assertions in the South

9 As for summary and evaluation of “China’s Threat Theory”, see, for example, Wang & Wong (1998:339-358).


China Sea—reminds one in some ways of “imperial China” of the past. In fact, such a style of diplomacy may carry considerable strength in the “borderless economy” today (Hosokawa).10

The other factor is that the economic growth of China will threaten not only American interests but also the stability of East Asia because of a potential spillover of economic power into military capability.

China’s more modern economy and its greater economic influence are already giving it the power to enhance its authoritarianism at home, resist international dissatisfaction with its policies and practices, and expand its power and prestige abroad in ways hostile to American interests (Bernstein and Munro, 1997:22).China, as our huge neighbor in the Pacific, will undoubtedly develop the industrial base and armaments commensurate with its large size and huge population. Over the past 100 years, China has had a history of difficult trials and tribulations. It is a history in which nationalistic impulses have not been entirely fulfilled. Hence I think it’s necessary to pay sufficient attention to the latent desires of the Chinese state and the instability this introduces to Asia (Hosokawa).11

Such reactions to China’s history, economic growth and military power make it difficult to find a position for itself in East Asia. Additionally, it also creates complexity in forming an East Asian regional identity with consider-ation to the fact that China’s population makes up almost two thirds of the people residing in East Asia, it also has a huge territory and a broad business network in the region.

3.3. Balance of power or concert of powers

The conception of “balance of power” has been dominant in East Asia since the end of the Second World War. In the 1950s and 1960s, bipolarity characterized as a U.S.-Soviet Union balance created a polarized East Asia with Japan and ASEAN-5 (Indonesia, Malaysia, Phillipine, Thailand and Singapore) on the one hand, and Indochina (Vietnam, Burma, Laos and Cambodia) on the other; in the 1970s and 1980s, a Soviet Union-U.S.-China balance appeared in East Asia after the normalization of Sino-U.S. relations in 1972; in the 1990s, a new balance of the U.S.-Japan-China relationship has emerged due to the

10 Morihiro Hosokawa’s Keynote Address, Seattle, Washington, March 12,1996.11 Morihiro Hosokawa’s Keynote Address, Seattle, Washington, March 12,1996.

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collapse of the Soviet Union and the success of China’s economic reforms. For example, the importance of the U.S.-Japan security alliance was once again emphasized by Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa in 1996:

At the start of this century, Japan was inexorably compelled to form an alliance with England as it was in its signing of the security treaty with the United States as a means of countering the Northern threat embodied in Russia. In a similar vein, the other newly industrializing countries of Asia along with Japan would not feel comfortable being influenced heavily by China (Hosokawa).

From the 1990s on, another concept has evolved with the emergence of Asia-Pacific regional cooperation, namely the “concert of powers” (Shirk, 1996:27-30). A concert system, according to this concept, should have the fol-lowing three basic attributes. First, a regional crisis could be more satisfactorily resolved by relying on bilateral and multilateral consultations between the great powers; second, regional stability could be maintained by that agreement among concert members; third, great power conflicts could be moderated in a concert system based on equality (Khoo and Smith, 2001).

The great power game in East Asia has faced two kinds of challenges, one from the “in-between” great powers disputes, such as the Sino-American dispute on Taiwan issues, trade, human rights and nuclear proliferation, and the recent China-Japan rivalry as to which is and will be the dominant eco-nomic power in East Asia in the next decade (the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area vs Japan-Singapore Free Trade Accord). Another power game involves some of the small states in this region, for example the East Asia Economic Caucus (EAEC) excluding the US which was suggested by Malaysia because of Mahathir’s reservations about Japan’s proposal to build a broader free trade zone including ASEAN-10, Japan, the PRC, The ROK, Australia and New Zealand. In consideration of such tactical games, neither the great power rela-tion approach, nor the approaches offered by either of the “balance of power” or “concert of powers” seem to be a sensible means as a basis for regional integration in East Asia.

3.4. “ASEAN way”: “Mushawarah” and “Muafakat”

The fourth way to regional cooperation is the “ASEAN way”. It is also called the “Asian way” by some scholars to differentiate it from regionalism in Europe and North America.

The “ASEAN way” originated from regional cooperation in Southeast Asia


in the 1960s. Before regional cooperation in the 1960s, there was some regional co-operation but mainly with outsiders, namely the Southeast Asia Treaty Or-ganization (SEATO) in 1954 as the region’s first multilateral military alliance to cope with the Laos communists, which included only two indigenous states, Thailand and the Philippines, and was dominated by the U.S.

ASA in 1961 was the first regional co-operation effort in this region. In this effort, three governments shared a common consciousness about an external communist threat and communist insurgencies internally: the twelve-year an-titerrorist “Emergency” was only successfully conducted in Malaya; similarly, the Philippines suppressed the Huks; Thailand’s insurgents were still active and were more problematic because they had an easy sanctuary in Laos (Antolik, 1990:13), but it survived for only two years because of a territorial dispute over part of Northern Borneo between the Philippines and Malaya and then its con-stitutional successor (Leifer, 1989:3). The Maphilindo in 1963 was the second round of efforts towards developing regional co-operation but a little different from the first. It was mainly based on primordial affinities “among the peoples who are bound together by ties of race and culture”, but because of individual national interests behind the claims that “a grouping of the three nations of Malay origin working together in closest harmony” was more directed towards each wanting to influence its neighbors (Antolik, 1990:13-14), it also failed.

The turning point in regional co-operation and thus regional identity among countries in Southeast Asia is the establishment of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967. Although from outset the objective of ASEAN was to strengthen economic and social stability in this region as the Bangkok Declaration proclaimed, functionally ASEAN, from 1967 to 1992, was mainly treated as a political forum. As Adam Malik, Indonesia Foreign Minister, commented:

Although from the outset ASEAN was conceived as an organization for economic, social and cultural co-operation, and although considerations in these fields were no doubt central, one of the foremost concerns was that there was a convergence in the political outlook of the five prospective member nations in regard to national priority objectives as on the question of how best to secure these objectives in the emergent strategic configuration of East Asia which provided the main stimulus to join together in ASEAN (Leifer, 1989:21).

From 1992 on, ASEAN, as a regional organization, was reorganized not only in membership but also in cooperative content. Under the ASEAN um-brella, Vietnam (1995), Laos (1997), Myanmar (1997) and Cambodia (1999)

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were accepted to join the regional organization respectively and thus ASEAN became a regional organization for the first time in the history of Southeast Asia. Functionally, ASEAN took a transition from a “political forum” to settle disputes within the region in the early days to a comprehensive one with a series of institutions and dialogue channels created successively in the 1990s, from the ASEAN Free Trade Area in 1992, the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1995 to the Joint Statement on East Asia Cooperation in 1999 and the “ASEAN-China Free Trade Area” in 2001.

ASEAN is different from both NATO for collective security, the EEC for economic cooperation and EU in political and legislative affairs in Europe, and as a regional organization, has taken a very different direction, namely more flexibility and openness, which is mainly reflected in its decision-making process.

In the decision-making process of ASEAN, Mushawarah (consultation) and Muafakat (consensus) are the two basis principles. “Mushawarah” and “Muafakat” are traditionally ways of democratic decision-making in villages in Southeast Asian societies (at least Malay societies), in which everyone becomes committed to the results after consensus. Nowadays it is popularly and professionally referred to as the “ASEAN way”.

The “ASEAN way” is generally said to have the following three key charac-teristics (Quisumbing and Domingo, 1983):

Firstly, consensus among members. Consensus is the starting point for further discussion. There is no voting and no veto.

Secondly, the principle of flexibility. All the participants avoid the rigid forms of negotiation processes and formalities.

Thirdly, intergovernmental cooperation. All decisions of ASEAN are po-litical decisions at both the national level and the regional level.

It seems too early here for us to draw a conclusion in relation to the on-going attempts to shape an East Asia regional identity, but ASEAN, as a regional or-ganization, has made incredible progress in regional cooperation in Southeast Asia in the past two decades, and the ASEAN way, as a framework for regional cooperation, is very successful in the following sense: first, it allows regional identity among developing countries in Southeast Asia to be possible without any intervention from great powers outside; secondly, it achieved its initial ob-jective and has continuously progressed smoothly without any serious conflict between the members; thirdly, it has put forward many stimulating suggestions about regional cooperation in East Asia, and consensus, as a core principle of the ASEAN way, is welcomed by many countries.


4. “ASEAN way” to an “economic security community” in East Asia: rationale and limits

Why do East Asian countries prefer the “ASEAN way” to the other two ways—the market-driven flying geese paradigm under the liberalism umbrella and concert of powers based on realism? Why will it happen in East Asia, and what challenges will have to be faced in coming years.

In my view there are two factors, globalization and the Asian economic crisis that are contributing towards resetting the East Asia regional identity based on the “ASEAN way”.

4.1. Globalization and national interest in East Asia

Surrounding the definition of globalization itself there appears to be a heated debate,12 but there are some scholars who try to define East Asia from a globalization perspective to explain the rise of East Asia, of which the liberal economic theory is the most popular. The liberal economic theory views glo-balization as a confluence of economic phenomena, especially the liberalization and deregulation of markets, privatization of assets, retreat of state welfare functions, diffusion of technology, cross-national distribution of production and foreign direct investment and the integration of capital markets (Ruigort and Van Tudor, 1996), and then emphasizes the role of these global economic factors in the rise of East Asia (Lash and Urry, 1987:196-198).

Undoubtedly globalization has changed and is changing the global economy and thus the regional economy, and it is the global capitalism system that has promoted economic growth in East Asia and allowed East Asia to benefit much more than other regions such as Africa and Latin America in the past two decades. At the same time globalization also makes it harder for governments to control an economy as much as before, and this has resulted in most East Asian countries being swept into a “vicious cycle of globaliza-tion”: to completely adopt such an economic model means risking national sovereignty; to refuse and take a protectionist stance probably means risking

12 According to Richard Higgort, there are four broad stylistic ways to definition of globalization: namely, globalization as but a specific historical epoch; globalization as a confluence of economic phenomena; globalization as the hegemony of American values; and globalization as technological and social revolution (Richard Higgort 1998:6). For a recent survey of globalization, see, for example, John Beynon and David Dunkerley (2000).

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the loss of American and European markets. How to sustain economic growth without forfeiting national sovereignty becomes a priority on the agenda for most East Asian countries in the context of globalization. All of them prefer to be involved in international markets, but not the laissez-fair type; they also try to maximize their national interests, whilst trying not employ protectionist measures. They try to seek an alternative way to bridge the balance between globalization and national interests. The successful expansion of ASEAN, es-pecially with its flexibility and consensus styled settlement process possibly offers a solution. As Estrella Solidum summarized:

Styles of negotiation in ASEAN are underpinned by common cultural ways and the principles of the Declaration of 1967 and the Treaties of 1976. A certain openness exists during the process of decision-making, thereby, allowing anyone to know the nuances of the statements being made, especially when referring to national differences. National interests are viewed as being intertwined with regional interests, so, officials do their work together. They avoid injuring one another’s feelings by not pushing their interests too far (Quisumbing and Domingo, 1983:130).

4.2. Asian economic crisis and re-orientation of China’s political economy

As mentioned above, two “ASEAN way” institutions and dialogue channels were created after the Asian economic crisis, one being “ASEAN+3” in 1999, the other being “ASEAN-China Free Trade Area” in 2001. Why?

Firstly, ASEAN countries were eager to recover from the Asian econom-ic crisis. Trade is still the engine of economic growth for East Asia, because “all the East Asian countries, including China and Japan, continue to depend heavily on export expansion for their economic growth. The crisis countries have become even more dependent on exports as they struggle to recover” (Bergstein, 2000). Both the “ASEAN+3” and the “ASEAN-China Free Trade Area” put intra-regional trade as a priority on the agenda for regional identity. It is estimated that the ASEAN-China free trade arrangement will help ASEAN increase its total GDP by 1% and China’s by 0.3%, while the volume of bilateral trade between ASEAN and the PRC will grow by 50% (Huang, 2002).

Secondly, China started to re-orient its foreign economic policy towards regional cooperation in the mid-1990s. China had been reluctant to take part in multilateral security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region due to fear of international backlash of the Taiwan and the Spratley islands issues, Starting


in 1996, China gradually reoriented its political economic approach towards regional cooperation, namely a transition from national security inter-state relations mainly based on realist assumptions to attempt to reconstruct a “new” regional security incorporating consideration for transnational problems13: It has tried to pave the way for regional cooperation: it tried to obliterate the shadows of the “China treat” theory by maintaining the exchange rate of Ren-minbi during the Asian economic crisis in 1997-98 in order to alleviate the pain in Southeast Asia caused by the economic situation. It also promised to settle disputes with the relevant countries about the Spratley islands under a regional framework.

Thirdly, all East Asian countries hope to construct an “economic security community” in which economic growth and economic recovery could be sus-tained. Japan has been an economic hegemony in East Asia, but the “flying geese paradigm” did not work well in the past decade because of its long lasting economic depression and failure of the “Asia Fund” to cope with crisis which was rejected by the US-led IMF and consequently lead to East Asian countries reconstructing an “economic security community” in East Asia.

In consideration of the above, the “ASEAN way” as a culture became a priority towards regional identity, just as Richard Higgort observed:

In East Asia—notwithstanding the economic crises and arguments that the only way forward is to adopt Anglo-American models of corporate economic management—we cannot assume that a benign process of convergence in the economic behavior of regions will now take place. Indeed, we should just as easily expect difference and enhanced competition to emerge from the processes of political transformation in East Asia after the crises. In this regard, region building should also be understood as a cultural dimension of capitalism, as well as an economic one, in which social and cultural organization is as much in need of explanation as the rationalist economic elements of it. Far from some stable homogenous understanding of globalization being achieved, we should expect regions to continue to develop as sites of social-cultural contest (Higgort, 1998:15).

The social and cultural reconstruction of regional identity in East Asia is mainly based on following two basic premises.

Firstly, regionalism is a process in which national interests among member states could be realized by mutual cooperation. In other words, the models that

13 Seiichiro Takagi, “The Chinese Approach to Multilateral Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region”, a personal exchange paper.

34 Zhengyi WANG

evolved from the recognition of shared European social and cultural experi-ences cannot be transferred completely word by word into that of other regions outside of Europe and North America. “As a Euro-centric theory, the liberal-pluralist explanation of regional integration proved to be inapplicable in the Third World context” (Acharya, 2000:2). And “under Keohane’s intellectual leadership, neo-liberal institutionalism accepted the realist premise concern-ing anarchy as a given of the international system and that cooperation among states, while possible, would arise only in response to states pursuing their short-term self-interest” (Acharya, 2000:2-3).

Secondly, ideas shape the agenda and ideational factors in a regional setting. The successful expansion of ASEAN and the establishment of new institutions in this region shows “……a political economic approach to region building. It is, rightly so, the dominant explanatory approach, but it is insufficient. Ideas shape agendas and ideational factors must now be openly discussed to develop a more informed understanding of region-construction than in the past. This assertion finds support in the European regional experience. It is also finding support in the Asian Pacific area in recent years” (Higgort, 1999:96).

4.3. Limits of ASEAN way

Although the proclamation of the “Joint Statement on Cooperation in East Asia ” by the ASEAN+3 and the “ASEAN-China Free Trade Area” participants were positive steps towards developing a better association, a series of chal-lenges to this kind of “Asian way” for East Asian countries attempting to form a regional identity cannot be ignored in the coming years.

(1) Asia-Pacific or East Asia?The Joint statement on East Asian cooperation was signed by 13 countries

in East Asia excluding the U.S. The question remains, is it possible to work toward cooperation in East Asia without the U.S.?

For the US, according to the US East Asian Strategy Report 1998, East Asia is only put on its agenda of maintaining comprehensive engagement in the whole world based on the following strategic vision:

Underpinning [our security] vision is the essential requirement that America remain engaged in world affairs, to influence the actions of others—friends and foes—who can affect our national well-being. Today, there are some who would have us pull back from the world, forgetting the central lesson of this century: that when America neglects the problems


of the world, the world often brings its problems to America’s doorstep (Department of Defense, 1998:4).

Under this global strategy, the U.S. seems to prefer to treat the Asia-Pacific region as one entity rather than separate East Asia. In relation to this, the U.S. declared:

The U.S. views the cumulative effect of bilateral, minilateral and multilateral security frameworks as establishing a diverse and flexible framework for promoting common security in the Asia-Pacific region into the next century. The United States views the continued development of the ASEAN Regional Forum, for example, as an important vehicle for exchanging views on regional issues such as the South China Sea, enhancing mutual understanding and confidence, and potentially addressing preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution. The continuation and broadening of minilateral contacts will also remain a U.S. strategic priority and take its place alongside traditional mechanisms of dialogue in coming years (Department of Defense, 1998:66).

The problem with this concept is that some countries in East Asia hope to build an East Asian region that includes only East Asian countries. This concept underlies the proposal by Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the Malaysian Prime Minister, of an East Asian Economic Grouping (EAPG) in December 1990, later named the East Asia Economic Caucus (EAEC) including ASEAN states, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and China. Mahathir put his consideration clearly:

Certainly, at a strategic level, the EAEC is seen to offer a more independent Asian voice than is possible within APEC. As Malaysia’s finance minister, Anwar Ibrahim, put it: The East Asian Group should be able to sit with North America or Europe on an equal footing. This would not be possible if we relied on APEC because the U.S. and Canada also belong to the North America free trade area. We would say we have a platform to deal with one monster (the U.S.) and another monster (Japan). Small countries have to be smart in dealing with large nations (Higgort and Stubbs, 1995:523).

(2) Actors and levels: which one is prioritySince the end of Cold war, a series of competing concepts of regional-

ism have appeared in East Asia both in the economic domain and security domain.

In the economic domain, centered around economic cooperation, there is

36 Zhengyi WANG

APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum) based on Asian Pacific, or more Pacific in some sense versus EAEC (East Asian Economic Caucus) based on East Asia, or more Asian in some sense (Higgort and Stubbs, 1995:516-535); there is a growth triangle between Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia (Singapore, Johor and the Indonesian islands of Batan and Bintan) (Ohmae, 1993) based on a sub-regional level versus AFTA (ASEAN Free Trade Area) (Garnaut and Drysdale, 1994) on inter-regional level; There is also an on-going Japan-Singapore free trade area based on the state level versus an on-going ASEAN-China free trade area based on subregional-state level.

As for security cooperation, it is far more complicated since the end of the Cold war, and security frameworks include multilateral, bilateral and mini-lateral dialogues in this region. The most comprehensive official multilateral dialogue in Asia is the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), which was established in 1994 and has outlined an evolutionary course for itself from confidence building, to preventive diplomacy, to conflict resolution. Bilateral dialogues for security in this region are also popular, not only including a series of reaf-firmed bilateral dialogues with the US and countries in this region such as the US-Japan alliance, the US-ROK partnership, the US-Thailand alliance, the US-Philippines alliance, and its comprehensive engagement with China, enhancing nascent relations with Mongolia, broadening cooperation with Southeast Asia, expanding regional cooperation with Russia; but also including bilateral dialogues among nations within this region, for example, the China-Japan se-curity dialogue in 1998, the China-Russia dialogues about border disputes, the Russia-Japan dialogue about the resolution of the Northern Territories dispute, the Japan-ROK dialogue about historical tensions, etc.. Minilateral dialogues include the US, ROK, North Korea, China, Japan and Russia on Korean Pen-insula (Department of Defense, 1998:19-42).

5. Conclusion: Market-led, Institutions or Social Reconstruction?

In relation to an analysis for a framework for regional identity in East Asia, the situation becomes rather complex due to the number of actors such as structure, institutions, regimes, major powers, economic cooperation, security cooperation, social and cultural context, etc., and many of these exist at dif-ferent levels such as the regional level, the sub-regional level and the national level, etc.. Realists believe that state actions are determined by the pursuit of rational self-interest in a given anarchic world system; liberalists believe that


institutions can influence state behavior, and economic interaction also can contribute towards peace. Constructivists attempt to go beyond this kind of dichotomy and view agents in the international system such as institutions, regimes and structures not as given ones or status quo but as what the state itself makes of them.

The successful expansion of ASEAN in Southeast Asia, then the creation of a series of institutions based on this kind of “Asian way”, and finally the creation of the “Joint Statement on East Asia Cooperation” show that (1) in reality de-veloping countries themselves can also contribute politically to create regional cooperation regimes without major powers; and (2) it is possible, and thus necessary to go beyond models derived from European and North American regional experiences and theoretically reconstruct the experience outside of Europe and North America.

Regional identity in East Asia is only in the initial stages and the process will face a series of challenges in coming years, but East Asian countries rec-ognize the fundamental importance of such a regional community and are attempting to move forward both politically and culturally. The “ASEAN way” provides an option for them in reaching their goal on cooperation with each other, not only going beyond the traditional Sinocentric tribute system and the Japan-centric East Asia concept, but also wiping off any European colonial shadows that may still persist. Possibly it is the enchantment of the “ASEAN way”.

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41

1. Introduction

Decoupling is an often-discussed concept of sustainable development. It refers to the trends of decreasing the negative environmental impact while furthering economic prosperity. In resource management, this can even mean a double task– first, decoupling resource consumption from economic devel-opment and, then, decoupling negative environmental consequences from resource consumption. All these would require a shift from a one-way economy towards a circular one.

The circular economy model became popular among policy makers in industrialised countries in the 1990s. Pioneers were the 1993 Swedish Ecocycle Bill, and the 1994 German Closed Substance Cycle and Waste Management Act. In Asia, Japan promulgated the Fundamental Law for Establishing a Sound Material-Cycle Society in 2000. Recently, China announced that it had been drafting its Circular Economy Law (Sun, 2007). Similarly, a sister concept of 3Rs (Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle) has been promoted vigorously, especially by the Japanese government (MOEJ, 2008).

However, a mere concept of 3Rs does not prescribe any mechanisms to

Extended Producer Responsibility in East Asia: Approaches and lessons learnt from the management of waste electrical and electronic equipment1

Panate MANOMAIVIBOOLMae Fah Luang University (Thailand)

1 This research at IIIEE, Lund University, was made possible with a scholarship from the Royal Thai Government in collaboration with Mae Fah Luang University. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Naoko Tojo, Dr. Thomas Lindhqvist, and Dr. Chris van Rossem for their insightful guidance and input to the research. My gratitude is also extended to Dr. Masayoshi Nakawo and the session panel for their constructive com-ments and the Organizing Committee of the 5th International Conference on East Asian Studies.

42 Panate MANOMAIVIBOOL 43

drive such a shift. In addition, in many cases the incentive structure of existing institutions is indifferent or even dampens 3Rs. For example, municipalities could incur additional costs in implementing separate collection and recy-cling programmes while facing budgetary constraints; on the other hand, manufacturers of products which later become waste have a natural interest in increasing sales but not in the end-of-life management of their products. Against this backdrop emerged extended producer responsibility (EPR), for-mulated first as a policy strategy and later as a policy principle.

EPR comes with the ambition to drive a change in the products and the product systems by extending producers’ responsibilities beyond those con-ventionally defined, particularly towards the end-of-life management. It was first put into practice in the German Packaging Ordinance in 1991. Since then it has underlined end-of-life legislation and programmes for the management of other product groups such as vehicles, electrical and electronic equipment (EEE), batteries, tyres, etc. in many jurisdictions.

Policy makers in East Asia have also found EPR attractive. The case in point is the management of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE, also known as electronic waste or e-waste). The existing programmes in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are explicitly based on EPR2 (see MOEJ, 2003a; MOEK, 2006a; Lu et al., 2006). Though the programme has not been fully enacted yet, policy development in China is also claimed to follow the prin-ciple (e.g. He et al, 2006; Tong et al., 2004). However, it is less clear why these programmes in East Asia subscribe to the principle. The situation in the region differs from that in the European Union (EU) where producer responsibility is prescribed in the bloc’s WEEE (2002/96/EC) and RoHS (2002/95/EC) Direc-tives and member states are obliged to transpose them to national legislation. In other words, the development in East Asia is not a case of negotiated policy transfer (Evans, 2004).

Theoretically, there can be various competing and complimentary ex-planations to this policy convergence. Literature is divided between internal determinants and policy diffusion/transfer models (Berry and Berry, 2007). A good example of the former, which explain convergences with macro so-cio-economic factors and assumes a degree of automaticity, is the so-called environmental Kuznet’s curve. On the other hand, proponents of policy trans-fer look more at the intermediate level and into the details of voluntary policy learning processes as a form of rational policy making. In the age of globalisa-

2 In Taiwan, EPR can also refer to the term “Extensive Production Responsibility”; see http://www.epa.gov.tw/en/artshow.aspx?art=2007121117321278&path=9061&list=115

43Extended Producer Responsibility in East Asia

tion, the role of epistemic communities (Haas, 1992) in the lesson drawing processes can be salient in the development of those processes. Less inclined towards rationality are ‘policy bandwagoning’ (Ikenberry, 1990) and ‘isomor-phism’ (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) explanations.

Another important aspect is the different ways EPR have been (and will be) implemented. It is not uncommon that an EPR programme will consist of a mixture of policy instruments, which may also vary across programmes. In the area of WEEE management, the differences range from product scope (whether a programme covers only few EE products or a few hundreds) to financial ar-rangements (e.g. pay-as-you-go (PAYG), financial guarantees, end-user-pays; market-share or return-share models; industry-managed versus government-managed funds) to target setting (e.g. no target, with collection or/and recycling targets). Studies show that approaches in different jurisdictions in Europe and North America can vastly diverge and there is no exception in East Asia, as will be seen shortly. Intuitively, the design and configuration can have a major effect on the effectiveness of a programme. However, to my knowledge, there has not been a thorough investigation into these issues barring some pioneer work such as (Murakami-Suzuki, 2007; Murakami, 2006).

This study aims to provide a systematic comparison of the WEEE policies in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. It is based on an extensive review of previous studies and documentary research. It focuses on the drivers behind policy development in the four jurisdictions and the effectiveness of the pro-grammes. The latter is based on qualitative theory-based evaluation (TBE). The rest of the paper is presented in the following way. The next section ac-counts for EPR and TBE in more details. Then, the programmes in the four jurisdictions are described followed by an analysis and discussion. The paper ends with conclusions and suggestions for future research.

2. EPR and its Evaluation

EPR is an environmental policy principle.3 It is a derivative of the pollut-er-pays principle, a pollution prevention approach, and life-cycle concept. It redefines the end-of-life management of products not as a solid waste problem per se but that of product and product system design. Thus, its proponents

3 Other terms that can be used to describe EPR are “strategy” (Lindhqvist, 1992), “ap-proach” (OECD, 2001), and “policy paradigm” (Manomaivibool, 2008) although each gives a special nuance to the definition.


argue that having producers who in general have the most influence over the design responsible for the end-of-life management “could provide ongoing in-centives for the incorporation of environmental concerns into the design of products [and product systems]” (Lifset and Lindhqvist, 2008).

An archetypal EPR model consists of four types of responsibilities: physi-cal, financial/economic, informative responsibilities, and liability, as shown in Figure 1. As mentioned in my previous review of EPR literature (Manomaivi-bool et al., 2007), two important lessons from the previous implementation of EPR programmes are that (1) it is not necessary to place all the responsibility of every end-of-life activity on (individual) producers but (2) the more individual producers assume physical and financial responsibilities, the more likely he/she will make design improvements ceteris paribus. An ultimate form is when a producer retains the ownership over the products and shifting from simply selling products to providing functions, i.e. the product-service system (PSS) business model (Lindhqvist, 2000).

Figure 1 Model of Extended producer responsibility (Lindhqvist, 1992)

In practice, evaluating the effectiveness of EPR programmes is neither a trivial nor straightforward enterprise. The ultimate goal of EPR – “total life cycle environmental improvements of product systems” (Lindhqvist, 2000) – is of a long-term nature and is very difficult, if not impossible, to measure with precision. As Manomaivibool (2008) and Tojo (2004) have argued, this renders theory-based evaluation (TBE) preferable.

TBE circumvents this problem by employing a set of programme theories consisting of causal links between an intervention and its ultimate outcomes. It assumes that behind every intervention exist theories about how the in-tervention would bring about the desirable change and the main tasks of an evaluator are to make explicit these theories and to use them as a standard of comparison. If an intervention follows closely the causal steps prescribed in its


programme theories and intermediate outcomes are borne out well, then he/she can infer with a degree of confidence that the intervention is effective and likely to produce the desirable ultimate outcomes in a longer term. Thus, the strength of TBE is the attribution test, i.e. whether the change can be attributed to the intervention (Tojo, 2004). In addition, it has been claimed that TBE is adept in detecting theory and implementation failures and hence bears practi-cal value for programme design and implementation (Pawson, 2002).

The logics of TBE have been applied in previous evaluations of EPR programmes (see Manomaivibool, 2008; Gottberg et al., 2006; Tojo, 2004). However, often the two classes of programme theories, namely, intervention and implementation theories are not separated which, in turn, compromis-es the evaluation. An intervention theory is a set of propositions explaining mechanisms which an intervention releases to trigger anticipated outcomes. Theory failures mainly question the validity of intervention theories. An im-plementation theory is a set of propositions linking programme activities to anticipated outcomes. A mismatch between the intervention and implementa-tion theories can indicate implementation slippages, providing the intervention theory is valid; otherwise we have a case of double theory failure (Chen, 1990). Bamberg and Schimdt (1998) in their evaluation of transit policies provide a good example of TBE with a clear separation between the two classes of theories. Unfortunately, the discussion and evaluation of EPR in general and WEEE policies in particular has been mainly focused on the issues around the implementation aspect (e.g. Sanders et al., 2007). Exceptions are (Herold, 2007; Lindhqvist et al., 2008; Manomaivibool et al., 2007) which try to test the boundary of EPR intervention theories for the EEE sector and the sector in non-OECD contexts.

In this paper, TBE is carried out in two steps. First, key aspects of pro-gramme configuration are linked with an evaluation scheme proposed by (van Rossem and Lindhqvist, 2005) in an ex ante qualitative fashion. This procedure captures implementation theories assessing how well the actual programme is in line with the EPR intervention theory. The second step tests the valid-ity of the EPR intervention theory itself. It triangulates the results from this first step with the actual degree of upstream and downstream achievements. If the intervention theory is valid, the results of the two steps should be con-sistent, i.e. a programme bearing more causal EPR links should produce more desirable outcomes. It must be noted that evidence on the actual upstream improvements are scattered and, in some cases, commercially confidential; so, the results drawn from the second step in this area should only be considered


as indicative.

3. Case Description

3.1. Japan

Traditionally, municipal solid waste management in Japan was completely under the remit of municipalities according to the Waste Management and Public Cleansing Law inaugurated in 1970. The law was amended in a major way in the early 1990s to address its inadequacies and inter alia to promote waste separation and recycling (Tanaka, 1999). At about the same time, the Law for Promotion of Effective Utilization of Resources was enacted in 1991. Then, a few laws were developed and enacted in the second half of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s to regulate specific waste streams including the Specified Home Appliance Recycling Law (SHARL). Legislation was the product of the co-initiation between the then Ministry of International Trade and Industry (now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, METI), the then Environmental Agency (now the Ministry of the Environment, MOEJ), and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) (Tojo, 2000).

SHARL was the first piece of legislation in Japan that directly deals with WEEE. It was enacted in 1998 and came into force three years after. Tojo (2000) mentions “[s]carcity of the final disposal sites, increase of EEE in the waste stream, and inadequacy of existing treatment plants under local governments to handle EEE” as the main drivers for its enactment. SHARL is the second EPR legislation after the 1995 Law for the Promotion of Separate Collection and Re-cycling of Containers and Packaging (henceforth, Packaging Recycling Law). Its scope covers four home appliances that meet all four criteria4: refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners (only unit-type), and television sets (only CRT-type). One of the issues under an ongoing review is to expand the scope to include clothes dryers and LCD-display and plasma-display TV sets in the

4 The four selection criteria in Article 2.4 are: (1) a product that is difficult to be recycled under the existing facilities and technologies possessed by local governments; (2) a product that contains valuable resources that can be recycled and the cost for recycling is economically feasible; (3) a product whose design or selection of raw materials or components by the manufacturers exerts a great influence on the recyclability; and, (4) retailers deliver a substantial number of the products so that smooth take-back by retailers can be secured.


future (van Rossem and Tojo forthcoming).SHARL shifts legal responsibilities to manage these items from munici-

palities to businesses. Retailers are obliged to take back, i.e. collect, obsolete appliances from consumers and deliver them to regional aggregation facili-ties. Producers, i.e. manufacturers and importers, are then responsible for the environmentally sound management from the aggregation facilities onward including meeting the material recycling targets set between 50 and 60% by weight of products collected. The law allows retailers and producers to charge consumers for their extended “services”. In addition, the Association for Elec-tric Home Appliances (AEHA) acts as an umbrella organisation and also a designated legal body handling orphan products. In practice, the fees charged by retailers vary considerably depending on the size of retailers and whether a new product is purchased, i.e. a take back on a 1:1 basis (van Rossem and Tojo forthcoming) while the charges for recycling were uniformly set by the govern-ment (DTI 2005). Consumers pay by buying a recycling ticket and the money is forwarded to producers by retailers or post offices. The five-copy recycling voucher also serves as a manifest, enabling consumers to track the movement of the products they handed in electronically via AEHA’s web page (MOEJ, 2003b). Producers are divided into two groups, which DTI (2005) labels as Group A led by Matsushita and Toshiba and Group B led by Sony, Sharp, Sanyo, Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Fujisu. DTI (2005) reports that each group controls some 190 take-back centres and there are 30 recycling plants used by Group A while producers in Group B have jointly invested in 16 plants.

Personal computers weighing more than 1 kg are under a separate scheme. The product is classified as a Specified Resources-Reconverted Product accord-ing to the Enforcement Order of the Law for Promotion of Effective Utilization of Resources. Manufacturers and importers who sell 10 000 or more personal computers are required to provide voluntary take-back services. In practice, the costs are internalised in the prices of new products (marketed after October 2003) which bear a sticker, which in turn, enabling consumers to dispose them free-of-charge (DTI 2005). The end-user-pays rule is still applicable for those without the sticker.

Producers in Japan also have prescribed physical and informative respon-sibilities regarding the use of hazardous substances in their products. Target substances are the six substances regulated under the EU’s RoHS Directive: lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, polybrominated biphenyl, and polibrominated diphenyl ether. According to Japanese Industrial Standard for Marking the presence of the Specific Chemical Substances for electrical


and electronic equipment (JIS C 0950:2005 or "J-MOSS" Standard), standard values of these substances in seven products (4 HAs, PCs, cloth dryers, and microwave ovens) is set at 0.1 wt%, except cadmium which is 0.01 wt%. Prod-ucts with any of the content rates exceeding the values can still be put on the market, on the contrary to the EU’s RoHS Directive, but must be marked with a designated symbol. An optional label, called green mark, can be put on prod-ucts with content rates equal or under the standard value.

3.2. Taiwan

Taiwan underwent a major environmental reform in the second half of the 1980s. The Taiwanese government developed some 70 pieces of environmen-tal legislation by the end of the decade (Feeley, 1990). One of the legislative efforts was the amendment of the Waste Disposal Act in 1987. The amended Act stressed the importance of recycling and its Article 10.1 obliged the pro-ducers, i.e. manufacturers, importers, and retailers, of products with certain characteristics to be responsible for their end-of-life management. At first, nine product groups were under the provision but not any EEE. In practice, producers fulfilled their responsibilities by forming sector-specific manage-ment organisations (Lee et al., 1998). Producers paid fees to these collective bodies that, in turn, managed the contracts with existing waste management companies to ensure that the prescribed recycling targets were met. However, this industry-led regime ran into several problems including the transparency of the self-reporting procedure, the management of collected fees, improper targets, unfair competition and lack of coordination (Lee et al., 1998) and was discontinued with the amendment of Article 10.1 in 1997.

The 1997 amendment consolidated the management of recycling systems under the control of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration (TEPA) (Fan et al., 2005). TEPA established and managed the Resource Recy-cling Management Fund (RRMF). The existing 13 management organisations ceased operations and transferred their remaining funds to RRMF (Lee et al., 1998). A new product range was specified in the Official Announcement of the Responsibility of Manufacturers and Importers with Regards to the Re-cycling, Clearance, and Disposal of Articles and Containers, and the Scope of Responsibility of Enterprises with Regards to Recycling, Clearance, and Dis-posal. Four electric and electronic appliances, similar to that of SHARL, were included in the list of the regulated recyclable waste in July 1997 and later came IT products: personal computers, notebook computers, monitors, print-


ers, and computer components and subassemblies. Under the new system, also known as the 4-in-1 Recycling Program, fees from producers are the main source of RRMF’s revenues (Fan et al., 2005). Producers are obliged to pay recycling fees to RRMF. Funds raised are used to subsidise downstream activi-ties, collection, storage, transportation, recycling, and treatment and disposal. Consumers also get compensated for items they deliver to the system. The finances are arranged in a PAYG fashion. The Resource Recycling Fee Rate Review Committee sets the fee, buy-back, and subsidy rates.

The third-party auditing system has been developed extensively in Taiwan. This is understandable considering the salience of the transparency issue in the 1997 amendment. Recycling and waste disposal related businesses are not eligible to get subsidies from RRMF unless third-party auditors certify their work in accordance with the procedures and provisions in the Regulated Re-cyclable Waste Auditing and Certification Regulations. RRMF finances the auditing system.

Taiwan has not yet promulgated any product standards restricting the use of certain chemical substances in EEE. However, the Bureau of Standards, Me-trology and Inspection (BSMI), Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), issued regulations forcing exporters of EE products to the EU to conduct compliance tests with designated Taiwanese laboratories (Design News, 2006).

3.3. South Korea

The first break away from the management of mixed municipal solid waste in South Korea was the introduction of a “deposit-refund system” (DRS) in 1992 (MOEK, 2006b). DRS initially targeted packaging and containers before being expanded to cover CRT TV sets and washing machines, then, refrigera-tors, and, lastly, unit-type air conditioners in 1992, 1993 and 1997, respectively. In the system, deposits were levied on the products and packaging at a constant rate and refunds were paid back when they were recycled. Recycling was further strengthened in the 2nd Comprehensive National Waste Management Plan (2002-2011) promulgated in March 2002 with the goal to establish a sustain-able and resource circulating socio-economic foundation (MOEK, 2006b).

The EPR system replaced DRS in 2003 after the amendments of the Waste Management Act and the introduction of the Act on the Promotion of Saving and Recycling of Resources a year earlier (MOEK, 2006a). A few more EE items were included in the scope of the new system with the addition of per-sonal computers in 2003, audio equipment and mobile phones in 2005, and


printers, copiers and facsimiles in 2006 (Park, 2007). Producer responsibil-ity in South Korea was arranged in a way that each producer5 had a quota of WEEE that had to collected and recycled in a year. The assigned quota, called mandatory recycling rates, was calculated based on the producer’s sales in the previous year. If the targeted volume could not be met, the producer had to pay a recycling fee with a penalty of up to 30% of the fee to the government. In practice, most producers formed resource recycling associations to comply with the requirements. Regulated WEEE were collected through three main channels: municipalities (consumers must buy a sticker), retailers (for free on a 1:1 basis), and private collectors/recyclers who normally paid consumers for relatively new obsolete products (Yoon and Jang 2006). Unlike municipalities and retailers, private collectors/recyclers were not obliged by laws to deliver collected items to producers’ storage centres though they still had to comply with legal recycling procedures, methods and standards, at least in principle.

South Korea has built up its capacity to collect and recycle regulated WEEE under its EPR programme. Park (2007) reports that 98 companies operate more than 3,200 collection points in addition to 234 municipal drop-off centres. Manufacturers have also erected five automated recycling centres: Sudok-won Center (253,000 kg/day), Mid-area Center (267,000 kg/day), South-area Center (250,000 kg/day), Honam-area Center (150,000 kg/day), and Jeju-area Center (60,000 kg/day), on the top of the other 38 independent plants with a combined capacity of 140,000 tonnes per year (Park, 2007).

The EPR system for EEE (and vehicles, as it matters) underwent a signifi-cant change when the Act for Resource Recycling of Electrical and Electronic Equipment and Vehicles went into effect in January 2008. Park (2007) explains that the promulgation reflects a need for a system that is profoundly different from that designed for packaging waste. In the beginning, the product scope would be the same as that of the prior system (though LCD and Plasma TV sets were now included) but in the long run there is a plan to include all EEE in a similar manner as the EU’s WEEE Directive (MOEK, 2006a). The main additions to the new law lay in its upstream measures such as the restrictions and the assessment of the use of hazardous substances, and eco-design provi-sions. There are plans to establish an Eco-Assurance Review Committee and an Operation Management Information System to review the measures and to oversee enforcement and reporting, respectively (Park 2007). A manifest system will also be put in place to strengthen system monitoring.

5 Producers are defined as domestic manufacturers with a yearly output of 1 billion won or more, and importers with yearly imports of 300 million won or more.


3.4. China

Environmental activism turned the WEEE issue into a policy agenda in China in the early 2000s. The infamous report of the Basel Action Network (BAN) and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalitions (SVTC), Exporting Harm (Feb-ruary 2002), introduced the world to health and environmental hazards of the so-called backyard recycling that took place in Guiyu town, Guangdong Province. As an immediate reaction to the scandal, the Chinese government issued a blanket ban on any imports of used EEE, even for reuse as second-hand products, to mainland China in August 2002 though this prohibition did not apply to Hong Kong. It is worth noticing that the imports of certain WEEE for recycling were already prohibited under a Notice on the Import of Wastes of the Seventh Category under the Interim Provision on Waste Import and Environmental Protection issued by the State Environmental Protection Ad-ministration (SEPA) in 2000. Besides the import ban, a longer-term approach to set up a WEEE management system was also initiated.

The approach comprised of two main components: the development of legal frameworks and physical infrastructures. For the former, three legal doc-uments were promulgated. The first was an Ordinance on the Management of Waste Household Electrical and Electronic Products Recycling and Disposal (China WEEE) drafted by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). This ordinance would lay the foundation for the management of, at first, five products: TV sets, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, and personal computers. It would be based on the EPR principle with some modifications for the Chinese situation (He et al., 2006). The draft Ordinance proposed to establish a special fund and producers were expected to pay con-tributions and comply with eco-design provisions while municipalities were responsible for collection and treatment. The draft became public in 2004 but had yet been finalised. The second was the Measures for Administration of the Pollution Control of Electronic Information Products (China RoHS) prepared by the Ministry of Information and Industry (MOII). It was enacted in 2006 and became effective in March 2007. China RoHS requires all electronic infor-mation products manufactured and imported to be tested in Chinese certified laboratories and labelled if the content of the six hazardous substances exceeds the standard value. Lastly, SEPA developed a Technical Policy for the Preven-tion of Pollution from Waste Electrical and Electronic Products.

6 Recently, a number of scientific studies have confirmed grave health and environmental impacts from the uncontrolled recycling of WEEE; see a review in Wong et al. (2007).


To build the necessary physical infrastructure, WEEE management proj-ects have been piloted in a few locations. In 2003, NDRC selected Zhejiang Province, and Qingdao City to trial two models of WEEE management, an independent recycling plant model and an EE manufacturer-led model, re-spectively (Tong et al., 2004). He et al. (2006) reports other trials in Beijing City and Tianjin City. The results of these projects were less than satisfactory with collection processes presenting major problems to sustaining formal systems (Streicher-Porte and Yang, 2007). Besides the pilot projects, material recycling in general and recycling of specific electronic parts in particular attracted private investments. New plants and facilities were set up along the east coast of China (Liu et al., 2006). However, most for-profit plants focused more on imported pre-processed recyclables or domestic industrial wastes than post-consumer WEEE (Yang et al., 2007).

4. Analysis & Discussion

4.1. Is there a case of policy convergence?

There seems to be a convergence in policy discourse. All four jurisdictions claimed EPR was an underlying principle of their existing and future WEEE management programmes. In Japan and Taiwan, EPR was credited for the achievements in minimailizing waste (e.g. Yamaguchi, 2002; Lu et al., 2006). The Korean approach has become more “EPR” and more comprehensive with time and the Ministry of Environment Republic of Korea (MOEK) has been speaking out about it. A similar but slower trend can be noticed in Chinese policies.

This might be due to the influence of epistemic communities. In 1994, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) initiated projects on EPR which later it championed as an approach to operationalise the polluter-pays principle. It even published a guidance manual for governments “to provide information to national governments that may wish to establish EPR policies and programmes” (OECD, 2001). Japan and South Korea have already been members of OECD while China is one of possible candidates for membership. The Government of Japan in particular was instrumental as it funded (part of) the OECD EPR Programme, especially the 1999 workshop in Paris. Besides intergovernmental bodies, transnational movements including BAN and SVTC also promoted EPR to advance their cause, environmental


justice (Pellow, 2007). This was particularly relevant for China, which has been one of the main campaign targets.

On the other hand, the speed and system design were determined largely by internal factors. Setting up a WEEE recycling system is no trivial matter and local conditions must be taken into account. Two parameters, the stock of EEE and the capacity of existing waste management infrastructures, can con-stitute necessities for such a system. First, the magnitude of potential WEEE is a necessary condition for the establishment of a national WEEE system. The majority of households in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea enjoyed the use of major home appliances well before the 1990s; and, by the end of the decade almost all households owned the major four appliances, i.e. the markets were saturated. During the first half of the 2000s, the share of households with a personal computer(s) jumped from below 40% to almost 70% in these jurisdic-tions. China started with much lower rates in the 1990s but caught up rather quickly in the 2000s. Table 1 compares the ownership of selected items per 1,000 households in China and Japan.

Second, limited waste disposal capacity might be a more crucial factor for the promotion of recycling in general and WEEE recycling in particular. In this respect, the island jurisdictions face a greater challenge. In 1999, it was estimated that the remaining capacity of landfill sites in Japan would last for only another 12.3 years (MOEJ, 2000). Similarly, Chen et al. (2005) report that if all waste in Taiwan was landfilled, the capacity would last for only 8 years. This might explain why the two were frontrunners in implementing EPR programmes. In the beginning, their EPR programmes targeted packag-ing waste which account for a lion share of municipal solid waste by volume. Then, certain WEEE, namely large household appliances and televisions, came into the picture as they exhausted the capacity of municipalities. We can also see a similar trend in South Korea where these items were added to a recycling

Table 1 Ownership of selected items in Japan and China (units per 1 000 households)

RF WM AC CTV PC Mobile

Japan’94a 1249 1110 1665 2214 190 n.a.

Japan’99 a 1281 1098 2056 2318 485 1061

Japan’04 a 1274 1086 2347 2140 999 1823

China’95 b 662 890 81 898 n.a. n.a.

China’00 b 801 905 308 1166 97 195

China’05 b 907 955 807 1348 415 1370

Source: a Statistics Bureau, Government of Japan; b National Bureau of Statistics of China


system initially designed for packaging waste. China differed from the rest with its vast land areas. In addition, like other non-OECD countries, private/informal recycling businesses were prolific there. These businesses divert waste from final disposal and therefore reduce the pressures on the underdeveloped MSW infrastructures.

These differences are well reflected in the focus and the cautious approach in policy development in China. There, computer waste was at the centre of policy discussion, thanks to a few precious metals and a range of hazardous substances present in it. The former made it attractive to recyclers, formal and informal alike, to engage in the recycling of WEEE. The latter, however, implies grave health and environmental risks when uncontrolled and rudi-mentary methods in the informal sector are applied to this hi-tech waste. Not only does this put human health and the environment at risk, but it can also harm the viability of the formal businesses. Savings on safety and environmen-tal protection give the informal participants an unfair financial advantage over their counterparts in a regulated sector (Manomaivibool et al., 2007). On the other hand, any harsh measures on this shadowy sector could adversely affect socially disadvantaged groups employed there (not to mention that the actual enforcement would be prohibitive) and might not be popular particularly to local authorities (Lin et al., 2002). Although many reached a conclusion that it would be better for the informal sector to be integrated into a future recycling system (e.g. Streicher-Porte and Yang, 2007; Manomaivibool et al., 2007), such integration proved to be a challenging task. However, owing to less stress in terms of disposal capacity, the government could afford to take a trial-and-error approach on a pilot scale.

Areas where external drivers can be salient are those relating to interna-tional trade. The restriction of the use of hazardous substances (RoHS) is a good example. To harmonise (or, as some commentators argue, retaliate) with the EU’s RoHS Directive, similar standards were quickly adopted in most ju-risdictions in this study after the EU standards became effective in July 2006. Regardless of local conditions, the list of six regulated substances and thresh-old values in East Asian standards were identical to those of the EU’s RoHS Directive.

4.2. What are the effects of different programme design?

This section evaluates the effects of different programme design of the existing WEEE programmes in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. China is not


included here because it is too early to perform an evaluation at this stage of policy development. The Japanese system, on the other hand, is split into two programmes because the mechanisms behind the PC programme are qualita-tively different from those of SHARL. Table 2 summarises the four programmes in nine key areas.

Table 3 presents summary results of the first step of TBE. Space does not allow a full presentation of the complete linking of programme configura-tion and ex ante scorecards which involves a matrix of 6x9 for every single programme. The evaluation shows that the Japanese programme for personal computers contains the strongest set of incentives for upstream improvements thanks mainly to its new/historical split which makes it possible to implement the financial guarantee model for all new products. This interpretation applies only to new complete computers from identifiable producers, but not histor-ical or new computers from small assembling shops, a consequence of the programme’s narrow scope. Incentives in other programmes based on present costs are discounted due to relatively long life spans of EE products. In addi-tion, the market-share allocation further dilutes incentives for product and individual system improvements. The Taiwanese programme is particularly weak in this respect. Besides the financial models (aspects 3-5), its organisa-tional arrangements (aspects 8-9) requires the least involvement of producers which can, in turn, mean minimal informative feedback to the makers and limited learning in the design phase.

Regarding downstream improvements in the first TBE step, scope, finan-cial consequences to end users at the point of disposal, collection and recycling targets, and organisational control, are the key design aspects. The Japanese programmes are the least favourable in terms of collection due to their limited product scope, lack of collection targets, and an end-user-pays method, in the case of SHARL. But, once WEEE is incorporated into the system, the recycling potential of the two programmes are higher thanks to the existence of recy-cling targets. On the other hand, the strength of the Taiwanese and the Korean programmes lies in their collection potential. The former employs monetary incentives to encourage end users’ cooperation while the latter approaches the issue from the other end by setting collection targets on producers with finan-cial sanctions. Volume-based collection targets in South Korea also improve predictability of supplies crucial for investments in recycling infrastructures. Last but not least, quality treatment can be secured in all programmes albeit through different means. In Japan and South Korea, this comes from a close tie between downstream facilities with major producers or groups of producers,


Tabl

e 2

Key

aspe

cts o

f WEE

E pr

ogra

mm

es in

Japa

n, T

aiw

an, a

nd S

outh

Kor

ea

(1)

Scop

e(2

) N

ew/

hist

oric

al

split

(3)

Fina

ncia

l m

echa

nism

(4)

Fee

char

acte

rist

ics

(5)

Fina

ncia

l co

nseq

uenc

es a

t di

spos

al

(6)

Col

lect

ion

targ

et

(7)

Recy

clin

g ta

rget

(8)

Resp

onsi

bilit

y or

gani

satio

n

(9)

Ow

ners

hip

of

faci

litie

s

Japa

n –

SHA

RLSe

lect

ive

(4+1

)N

oPr

esen

t cos

ts,

retu

rn sh

are

Visi

ble,

no b

rand

di

ffere

ntia

tion

End

user

s pay

No

Yes,

se

ctor

al,

mat

eria

l-ba

sed

Two

cons

ortia

, co

mpe

titiv

eG

roup

A:

Som

e G

roup

B:

Yes

Japa

n –

PCYe

sH

istor

ical

: Pr

esen

t cos

ts,

retu

rn sh

are

New

: Fu

ture

cost

s,

all i

tem

s

Hist

oric

al:

Visi

ble,

no b

rand

di

ffere

ntia

tion

New

: In

tern

alisa

tion

Hist

oric

al:

End

user

s pay

New

: Fre

e

No

Yes,

sect

oral

, m

ater

ial-

base

d

Indi

vidu

alSo

me

Taiw

anSe

lect

ive

(7+)

No

Pres

ent c

osts

, m

arke

t sha

reV

isibl

e, no

bra

nd

diffe

rent

iatio

n“R

efun

ds” t

o en

d us

ers

No

No

Gov

ernm

enta

l fu

ndN

o

Sout

h K

orea

Sele

ctiv

e (1

0)N

oPr

esen

t cos

ts,

mar

ket s

hare

Invi

sible

, no

bran

d di

ffere

ntia

tion

End

user

s pay

(m

unic

ipal

ity)

Free

(r

etai

lers

)

Yes,

in

divi

dual

, vo

lum

e-ba

sed

Yes

Mul

tiple

(d

omin

ated

by

few

maj

or

acto

rs)

Yes,

for m

ajor

pl

ayer

s


Tabl

e 3

Sum

mat

ive

qual

itativ

e re

sults

from

the

first

eva

luat

ion

step

SCO

REC

ARD

SJa

pan

– SH

ARL

Japa

n –

PCTa

iwan

Sout

h K

orea

Ups

trea

m

impr

ovem

ents

Prod

uct

Lim

ited,

disc

ount

ed a

nd e

xter

-na

lised

ince

ntiv

e; re

cycl

abili

ty

as a

des

ign

para

met

er; m

ore

likel

y in

Gro

up B

Cle

ar in

cent

ive;

recy

clab

ility

as

a de

sign

para

met

erN

o in

cent

ive;

no

end-

of-li

fe

desig

n pa

ram

eter

No

clea

r inc

entiv

e; b

ut m

ore

likel

y am

ong

maj

or p

laye

rs;

recy

clab

ility

as a

des

ign

para

met

er

Indi

vidu

al

syst

emLi

mite

d, d

iscou

nted

and

ex

tern

alise

d in

cent

ive

Can

be

an in

cent

ive

(pro

vidi

ng

no u

nder

estim

atio

n of

futu

re

cost

)

Disc

oura

ged

Som

e w

eak

ince

ntiv

e (d

epen

d-in

g on

the

leve

l of c

olle

ctio

n ta

rget

)

Col

lect

ive

syst

emC

lear

but

som

ewha

t wea

kene

d in

cent

ive;

mor

e lik

ely

in

Gro

up B

Unc

lear

ince

ntiv

eVe

ry w

eak

ince

ntiv

e (if

at a

ll)So

me

limite

d in

cent

ive

(dep

endi

ng o

n th

e le

vel o

f fee

s an

d pe

nalti

es)

Dow

nstr

eam

im

prov

emen

tsC

olle

ctio

nPr

oble

m o

f ille

gal d

ispos

al; b

ut

good

cost

reco

very

for c

ol-

lect

ed it

ems

Lim

ited

prob

lem

of i

llega

l di

spos

al; p

oten

tial u

nder

esti-

mat

ion

of fu

ture

cost

; but

goo

d co

st re

cove

ry fo

r col

lect

ed a

nd

new

item

s

Col

lect

ion

pote

ntia

l (de

pend

-in

g on

the

leve

l of “

refu

nds”

); go

od co

st re

cove

ry fo

r col

-le

cted

item

s

Col

lect

ion

pote

ntia

l and

can

be

impr

oved

(dep

endi

ng o

n th

e le

vel o

f col

lect

ion

targ

et a

nd

fees

); go

od co

st re

cove

ry u

p to

th

e ov

eral

l tar

get

Trea

tmen

tEn

sure

soun

d tr

eatm

ent w

ith

self-

(Gro

up B

) or c

ontr

act-

mon

itorin

g (G

roup

A)

Pote

ntia

l und

eres

timat

ion

of

futu

re co

st; b

ut e

nsur

e so

und

trea

tmen

t with

self-

or c

ontr

act

mon

itorin

g

Impr

oved

qua

lity

with

the

audi

ting

syst

emEn

sure

soun

d tr

eatm

ent w

ith

self-

or c

ontr

act m

onito

ring

Reus

e &

Re

cycl

ing

Prom

ote

mat

eria

l rec

over

y;

good

cost

reco

very

for c

ol-

lect

ed it

ems;

can

be b

ette

r in

Gro

up B

Prom

ote

mat

eria

l rec

over

y;

pote

ntia

l und

eres

timat

ion

of

futu

re co

st

Onl

y ba

selin

e re

cove

ry; b

ut

good

cost

reco

very

for c

ol-

lect

ed it

ems

Onl

y ba

selin

e re

cove

ry; b

ut

good

cost

reco

very

and

supp

ly

cert

aint

y up

to th

e ov

eral

l ta

rget


i.e. the system ownership. In Taiwan, independent downstream participants undergo intensive audits to ensure the quality of their work in exchange for government subsidies.

The second step reviews the actual upstream and downstream achieve-ments of the programmes and triangulates them with the results from the first step. Overall, downstream improvements are more visible and measurable in the three programmes than the upstream improvements. Infrastructure such as collection points and recycling facilities mushroomed, as described above, and the amounts of WEEE collected and recycled increased continuously in all the three cases. However, there are limitations and external factors that influenced the success in these areas. Particularly, the actual collection rates seem to deviate from the prediction of the first step. The evidence of design improvements, on the other hand, are in tandem with the prediction. The rest of this section presents details of the findings.

Most studies have reported a collection rate of around 50% or below of estimated WEEE figures (see, for example, Oguchi et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2007), with the exception of (Lin, 2008) which uses a different methodology. The explanation behind this considerable hidden flow, i.e. the amount of obso-lete products not accounted for in any WEEE formal management systems, is mainly economic. A fraction of used products considered “obsolete” with some kinds of average lifetime methods are still functional and command high market value. It is unlikely that the existing WEEE programmes designed to collect WEEE for recycling would be able to compete with the second-hand market. This explains why the hidden flow of products such as notebook com-puters and mobile phones are particularly large. For example, in Taiwan only 9,233 units of notebook computers were collected and verified in 2006, equal to 2.7% of the estimated obsolescence of 342,977 (compared to 49.3% in the case of desktop computers in the same year); Lu et al. (2006) report that the average price offered for reusable notebook computers in Taiwan was higher than the refund by a factor of 44. When the international trade of used EEE is taken into account, the picture becomes even more drastic. There, the demand from the less developed countries is not only limited to reusable products, but also for valuable materials from the recycling of WEEE. With cheaper labour costs, Kondo et al. (2007) demonstrates that similar recycling processes could be more profitable in China than in Japan. Streicher-Porte and Yang (2007) and Manomaivibool et al. (2007) even go further to argue that the processes were not the same and savings from the lax enforcement of environmental regulations and standards in less developed countries would only make the


economics of the informal sector all the more attractive, financially speaking. However, because the exports/imports of WEEE for recycling have been re-stricted, trade is done in a secretive manner and, hence, its flow hidden in the official trade statistics (Terazono, 2007).

Despite the existence of large hidden flows and associated economic drivers, the collection of regulated WEEE into the programmes was continuously im-proved in the three jurisdictions. Table 4 shows the calculated collected units of four major home appliances per 1,000 persons. Here, only items directly under the remit of the programmes, i.e. those handled by producers in Japan and South Korea, and those verified by third-party auditors in Taiwan, are included in the figures. It was estimated that these figures accounted for around 60% and 70% of the unhidden flow in Japan in 2006 and in South Korea in 2004, respectively (van Rossem and Tojo forthcoming; Yoon and Jang, 2006); and it is not possible to estimate collected items not verified in Taiwan. The results here showing that Japan tops the league seem to contradict the evaluation in the first step. However, one possible explanation is the target setting and the level of refunds in South Korea and Taiwan, respectively. Although the figures of South Korea in Table 4 were the lowest, they exceeded the mandatory recy-cling rates by large margins of over 50% (Lee et al, 2007). A continuous increase can also be interpreted as a result of an incremental but frequent adjustment of the collection targets. Thus, the outcomes might reflect the lower levels of the parameter than the inherent potential of the policy instruments. In Taiwan, the performance leapfrogged in 1999 after the introduction of refunds. The trend later fluctuated within a narrow range (apart from the outliner in 2001), which might reflect the full potential of the levels of existing refunds and the fact that the levels were not frequently reviewed in practice.

Table 4 Collection rates of four home appliances per 1000 populations

Year Japana Taiwanb South Koreac

1998 18

1999 50

2000 43 13

2001 83 80 14

2002 96 57 17

2003 98 56 21

2004 104 56 33

2005 107 64

2006 107 64

Source: a AEHA, pop ~ 127 millions; b TEPA, pop ~ 23 millions; c AEE, pop ~ 49 millions


Actual recycling rates in Japan exceeded the targets from the first year and continuously increased. In 2005, the actual rates in the programme were 84%, 77%, 66%, and 75% for air conditioners, televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines compared to the targets of 60%, 55%, 50% and 50%, respectively (Ogushi and Kandlikar, 2007). The recycling targets in South Korea were also met and the targets were increased in 2006, e.g., from 55 to 65% for televisions and computers, from 60 to 70% for mobile phones, audio, refrigerators, and from 70 to 80% for washing machines and air conditioners (Lee et al., 2007).

The patterns of upstream improvements conform well to the ex ante evalu-ation. The improvements can be categorised into product design (e.g. design for disassembly, design for recycling, designing out toxics, etc.), downstream technological innovation (e.g. disassembly methods, separation techniques, reapplication of recovered materials, etc.), and changes in product systems (e.g. PSS). Evidence of innovation by individual producers in terms of product design and technological innovation in Japan after the programmes were implemented are well documented in (Aizawa et al., 2008; Ogushi and Kand-likar, 2007; DTI, 2005; Tojo, 2004). Downstream technologies and innovation in South Korea are presented in Lee et al (2007) and Park (2007) provides some evidence of product design but in a more general way. To my knowl-edge, there has been no evidence in upstream improvements in Taiwan that was attributable to the implementation of the WEEE programme, except one Taiwan-based electronic multinational corporation whose designer teams paid a visit to recycling plants.

Compared to the WEEE programmes in Europe, the scope of East Asian programmes is much less comprehensive. Only a few major products are regu-lated. This is understandable if landfill diversion is a prime driver of the policy development. For example, Oguchi et al. (2008) find that the regulated items in Japan accounted for almost 70% by weight of the total 94 EE products. However, the merit of a selective scope can be questioned from a different perspective. It can be argued that in certain areas such as RoHS in new products a more com-prehensive scope could provide stronger drivers for technological changes and innovations. Smaller and less valuable items are also less likely to be collected and recycled and consumers often discard them by mixing them with other waste (Darby and Obara, 2005). Therefore, in the not-so-distant future, waste from these products could be a source of lost resources and contamination at disposal sites, unless they are gradually incorporated into the system.


5. Conclusions

The management of post-consumer waste has seen a shift in policy para-digms in the last two decades. Government embraced the EPR principle as a way to create a circular economy and promote 3Rs. In this light, WEEE was singled out as a priority waste stream as it contained both valuable materials that should be recovered and hazardous substances that should be reduced and handled properly. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have had WEEE pro-grammes up and running for some years while China is in the process of starting its national programme. In this study, I argue that, although the pro-liferation of EPR in the policy discourse owed much to the work of epistemic communities, whether and how (and how fast) it would be translated into action depends largely on local conditions. The so-called bandwagoning effect was evident only in the case of product standards (i.e. RoHS). Looking at the impacts, the analysis shows that the existing programmes succeeded in building up and improving downstream capacity though the problem of hidden flows was still prominent. There is also evidence of design improvements such as design for disassembly, design for recycling, and design to eliminate toxics, and technological innovations, especially in the programmes where producers are not only financially responsible but also involved in physical management of WEEE both collectively and individually. TBE shows that the EPR intervention theory can explain the behaviour of economic participants such as produc-ers, collectors and recyclers rather well, providing that the implementation theory is first evaluated. It also highlights the importance of the fine-tuning of policy instruments such as targets and fees. However, the intervention theory alone cannot explain consumers’ replacement and disposal decisions in their entirety.

Based on this study, there are many areas worth further investigation. First, the EPR intervention theory should be developed and specified based on new findings on the effects of policy instruments and the role of contextual condi-tions. In addition, a more sophisticated model of consumers might need to be developed. Of particular interest is the incorporation of knowledge from the field of psychology. For example, the waste collection fees in Japan, although inflicting the worst financial consequence on the end users, might have edu-cational effects by making the consumers more aware of the system and the costs of handling WEEE and, hence, encourage people with pro-environmental values to cooperate. Second, the issue of hidden flows does not only call upon future studies but also policy actions to address the problem. Third, policy


effectiveness is the only evaluation criterion concerned in this study. Future re-search should pay more attention to other criteria such as relevancy, economic efficiency, cost-effectiveness, distributional effects, social acceptability, and political feasibility. This can provide a more comprehensive and critical un-derstanding, for example, to target setting. Last but not least, policy processes should be studied in more detail. As more information and the experiences from existing programmes become available and more and more jurisdictions are in the process of policy development, the process of voluntary policy trans-fer is particularly interesting. Hopefully such an understanding can strengthen a link between science and policy.

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67

China and Japan are two global environmental powers (Worldwatch Institute, 1997). Therefore, their environmental cooperation is of critical im-portance to the global environment. It has been over 30 years since Sino-Japan environmental cooperation started in 1977. The last 30 years saw remarkable progress in Sino-Japan environmental cooperation. There has been abundant literature on this progress and assessment of Sino-Japan environmental coop-eration. However, research on the interplay between Sino-Japan environmental cooperation and the Sino-Japan relationship is scarce. By looking at Sino-Japan environmental cooperation from the angle of international politics, this paper aims to explore what role Sino-Japan environmental cooperation has played in the past and is going to play in the future in the Sino-Japan relationship. The main argument is that Sino-Japan environmental cooperation is shifting from shock absorber to engine for the Sino-Japan relationship. The paper consists of three parts. Part one gives a brief introduction of the evolution of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation. Part two analyzes the role of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation in the Sino-Japan relationship in the last 30 years. Part three argues that now is the time for both sides to shift Sino-Japan en-vironmental cooperation from shock absorber to engine for the Sino-Japan relationship and explains why.

1. Evolution of Sino-Japan Environmental Cooperation

The first Japanese environmental delegation paid a visit to China in 1977, marking the beginning of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation. The 30 years

From Shock Absorber to Engine :　　　 A Big Transformation Facing Sino–Japan Environmental Cooperation

Haibin ZHANGPeking University (China)

68 Haibin ZHANG

of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation can be divided into two phases. The first phase lasted from the late 1970s until the end of the 1980s, and is charac-terized as a period of limited environmental cooperation. The second phase was between the 1990s and 2006. China and Japan conducted full and compre-hensive environmental cooperation during this period.

1.1. First phase (late 1970s until end of 1980s)

The first phase was a period of limited environmental cooperation between the two countries. The first phase witnessed major progress in Sino-Japan en-vironmental cooperation as follows:

(1) Communication and dialogue between the two countries’ environ-mental agencies increased gradually. For example, a Chinese environmental delegation led by Qu Geping, then Administrator of the State Environment Protection Agency paid a fruitful visit to Japan in May 1989. During his visit, the two sides exchanged views on how to promote bilateral environmental cooperation.

(2) Japan began to provide environmental assistance to China. This assis-tance took many forms, including grants, loans and environmental technology cooperation. See Tables 1 and 2.

(3) The two sides reached an agreement on the establishment of the China-Japan Friendship Center for Environmental Protection. Obviously, this is the largest form of progress made in Sino-Japan environmental cooperation in the 1980s. Japanese Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru visited China in 1988 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the singing of the China-Japan Friendship Peace Treaty. As a result, the two sides decided to establish the China-Japan Friendship Center for Environmental Protection with Japan offering a grant of 10.5 billion Yen and China investing RMB 66 million Yuan. The construction of the center started in 1992 and was completed for use in 1996. The center, with a space of 34 thousand square meters and over 3000 sets of science research equipment, has been the biggest single environmental project between China and Japan since then. It plays a key role in facilitating China’s environmental policy research, environmental technology development, personnel training and pollution monitoring.

Obviously, in the 1980s Sino-Japan environmental cooperation focused on how to improve China’s urban living facilities and how to address China’s ecological problems, such as protection of endangered animals, tree planting and fighting against desertification. In addition, some global environmental

69From Shock Absorber to Engine

problems like ozone depletion and transboundary movement of waste were touched upon in dialogue between China and Japan. In general, Sino-Japan environmental cooperation was quite limited in the first phase in terms of scale and level of cooperation. Bilateral environmental cooperation was a marginal issue in the China-Japan relationship.

1.2. Second phase (early 1990s until 2006)

Big changes have taken place in Sino-Japan environmental cooperation since the 1990s. Firstly, the two countries have shown much stronger political will for environmental cooperation than ever before. Quite a few important bilateral environmental agreements were signed in the 1990s. The China and Japan Agreement on Environmental Protection was signed in 1994, which clearly demonstrated the strong political will of the two countries. According to the agreement, the two sides agreed to cooperate in the following areas: air pollution and acid rain control, water pollution control, disposal of hazard-ous waste, environmental pollution’s impact on human health, improvement of the urban environment, protection of the ozone layer, prevention of global

Table 1 Japan’s Environmental Grants to China (Unit: Million Yen)

Project Name Year of Approval Amount

Equipment for the protection of pandas for the Ministry of Forestry 1984 50

Meteorology observation equipment for South China College of Tropic Botany 1984 43

Management of clean water factories in Changchun (First phase) 1986 1465

Management of clean water factories in Changchun (Second phase) 1987 564

Daxinanlin forestry rejuvenation plan after forest fire 1987 1314

Source: Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1995). Japanese Environment Agency, Environmental White Paper (1994) and (1998).

Table 2 Japanese Environmental Loan to China (Unit: Million Yen)

Project Name Year of Approval Amount

Urban Water Supply Project 1988 8050

Beijing Sewage Treatment Plant Construction Project 1988 2640

Urban Water Supply Project (II) 1989 4530

Beijing Water Supply Project (II) 1989 4866

Three Cities Water Supply Project (Tianjin, Hefei, Anshan) 1990 8866

Source: http://www.jbic.go.jp/english/oec/project/yen_loan_list.php

70 Haibin ZHANG

warming, protection of the ecological environment and ecological diversity. Cooperation was carried out as follows: exchange of activities, policies, laws, regulations and technology related to environmental protection, communi-cation between the two countries’ scientists and technicians, joint seminars for scientists and technicians, implementation of joint projects agreed upon, and other types of cooperation mutually agreed upon. Another example is the China and Japan Joint Communiqué on Environmental Cooperation in the 21st Century, which was reached in 1998 when Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited Japan. In the communiqué the two countries promised to step up efforts to promote bilateral environmental cooperation and make the 21st century a better one.

Secondly, a comprehensive and systematic bilateral environmental coop-eration mechanism has been established. At the official level, the China and Japan Joint Committee on Environmental Cooperation was established in 1994. The committee is designed to implement bilateral environmental coop-eration agreements, review and plan joint projects, exchange environmental problems facing the two countries and environmental policy concerning both countries. As of 2006, six meetings had been convened. The committee played a very important role in the promotion of Sino-Japan environmental coopera-tion, the setting of issues to be prioritized in cooperation, and exploration of cooperation channels. At the semi-official level, the China and Japan Compre-hensive Forum on Environmental Cooperation was established in 1996. The participants of the forum are representatives of central governments and local governments, ODA implementation agencies, research institutes, and NGOs from China and Japan. This forum is unique in that it offers a golden opportu-nity for people of every walk of life in the two countries to promote all-round China-Japan environmental cooperation. At the non-governmental level, many Japanese environmental NGOs are actively engaged in China’s environmental protection. One of them is the Sino-Japan Non-governmental Committee on Forestation Cooperation, which was established in 1999 and funded by the Keizo Obuchi Fund. Another example is the project entitled “Environmental Protection Model Base toward 21st Century in Chinese Capital Circle”, co-sponsored by the Toyota Company, the Chinese Academy of Natural Sciences and the Japanese Center for Green Planet. The project kicked off in 2001, with the major purpose of planting trees and improving the economic structure in Fengning County, Hebei Province, a major place of origin of sand storms hitting Beijing. In the first term (2001-2004) and second term (2004-2007) of the project the forestation area reached 2497.8 hectares, with the Toyota


Company investing RMB 22million Yuan. The third term project (2007-2010) is in operation now. It aims to create a forestation area of 500 hectares with funding of RMB 1100 Yuan from Toyota (Li, 2007).

Thirdly, the effective operation of the China-Japan Friendship Center for Environmental Protection greatly enhanced China’s capacity to build in the field of environment. The center is a major base where China and Japan conduct environmental science and technology cooperation. From 1992 to 2008, Japan dispatched 35 long-term experts, and over 100 short-term experts to China. More than 100 Chinese technicians were sent to Japan for training programs. The center received environmental equipment worth nearly 400 million Yen from Japan.1 With its rapid development in terms of environmental equipment and its research level, the center has become an important base for regional environmental cooperation in Asia.

Fourthly, environmental cooperation has become a top priority in Japanese ODA to China. Japanese ODA to China, which started in the late 1970s, takes two forms, one being grants, the other being the providing of long-term low interest Japanese Yen loans to China. In terms of grants, two projects should be mentioned here. In 1997 the Japanese government provided a grant of 2.7 billion Yen to China, helping China establish a national urban construction environmental information network. The network covers 100 Chinese cities. In addition, part of the grant went to the establishment of three model envi-ronmental cites, namely, Dalian, Shenyang, and Guiyang. These projects have been completed and are thus far operating well. In 2006 Japan offered a grant of 790 million Yen to establish China’s network of monitoring acid rain and sand storms. The project plans to build 50 monitor stations in 25 Chinese provinces and autonomous regions.2

In terms of Yen loans to China, the percentage of environmental loans in the total amount of Yen loans to China rose dramatically after 1996, accounting for nearly 50 percent between 1996 and 2000, and over 60 percent after 2000. See figure 1.

Sino-Japan environmental cooperation gained huge momentum in the second phase mainly for two reasons. First, the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s made it possible for the international community to pay more attention to non-traditional security issues like environmental problems by minimizing

1 See website of China-Japan Friendship Center for Environmental Protection: http://www.china-epc.cn/zrhjhz/zfj/jshzxm/200801/t20080125_117046.htm.

2 “Japan provides China’s Environmental Projects with a Grant of 7.2 Million US Dollars”, http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2006-12-20/150211842855.shtml.

72 Haibin ZHANG

the probability of nuclear world war. Environmental challenges were brought to prominence in the international arena. Strengthening international envi-ronmental cooperation was a major theme on the global agenda. This was the international background of full Sino-Japan environmental cooperation. Second, China and Japan share common interests in environmental coopera-tion. Diplomatically, the two sides wanted to improve their international image as a responsible member of the international community. Strengthening bilat-eral environmental cooperation serves this purpose. Economically, China and Japan are strongly complementary to each other in terms of environmental co-operation. With its rapid economic development, China encountered serious environmental problems. However, as a developing country, China cannot afford to address environmental challenges alone and desperately needs in-ternational environmental cooperation. Japan is the second largest developed country with abundant financial and technological resources. China, boasting a huge potential market of environmental industry, is attractive to Japanese enterprises. For example, China’s environmental investment reached 80 billion Yuan, accounting for 1% of its total GDP in 1998. The number was 233.8 billion Yuan, accounting for 1.31% of its GDP in 2005.3 It goes without saying that Japan will have more access to China’s huge environmental industry market by

Figure 1 Percentage of Environmental Loan in Japanese Yen Loans to China

Source: University of Koyto, Assesment and Review of the Preformance of Japanese Environmental Loans to China, http://www.jbic.go.jp/japanese/base/network/pdf/peking_data05_04.pdf.

Unit: 100M

il Yen

Yen Loans to ChinaEnvironmental Loans

1st Term (1978~1984)

2nd Term (1984~1989)

3rd Term (1990~1995)

4th Term (1996~2000)

a�er 2001

3 “Kosa no nagare, nichu tyosa”, Asahi Shimbun, April 19,2001.


cooperating with China in environmental fields. Environmentally, China and Japan are neighbors. The concern over China’s negative environmental impact on Japan increased considerably in the Japanese public after the mid 1990s.4 For many Japanese, helping China address environmental challenges is helping Japan itself to some extent.

2. Past Sino-Japan Environmental Cooperation: Shock Absorber of the Sino-Japan Relationship

If we look at Sino-Japan environmental cooperation from the perspective of the environment, no one can deny its big contribution to China’s environ-mental protection. The most prominent features of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation are as follows:

First, Sino-Japan environmental cooperation is one of the most fruitful examples of bilateral environmental cooperation in the world. Few cases of bilateral environmental cooperation in the world are better than Sino-Japan environmental cooperation in terms of depth and breadth of environmental cooperation.

Second, Sino-Japan environmental cooperation is the most important of China’s bilateral environmental cooperation efforts. Just as well-known Chinese environmental scholar Guang Xia said, “Sino-Japan environmental cooperation is the best in China’s international environmental cooperations in terms of scale and performance of cooperation” (Xia, 2002).

Third, Sino-Japan environmental cooperation creates a win-win situation for both countries. Japan provides China with key financial and environ-mental technology resources and China provides Japanese businesses with a large environmental industry market. Both China and Japan benefit from this cooperation. Therefore, the two governments spoke highly of the bilateral en-vironmental cooperation.5

Unfortunately, if we look at Sino-Japan environmental cooperation from the perspective of the Sino-Japan relationship, the picture is quite different. Its role has not been so significant. Although the Sino-Japan relationship is broadening, Sino-Japan environmental cooperation is low on the agenda of the

4 China.com, “China’ Environmental Investment reaches RMB 2388 Yuan, Accounting for 1.31% of GDP”, http://www.china.com.cn/chinese/kuaixun/1230040.htm

5 “Both Officials of China and Japan See Huge Potential for Bilateral Environmental Cooperation”, People’s Daily, fourth edition, October 9, 2002.

74 Haibin ZHANG

Sino-Japan relationship. Environmental cooperation is still in the periphery compared with other core issues like political, security and economic issues. Few signs have shown that full Sino-Japan environmental cooperation has spilled over to the areas of “high politics” in the Sino-Japan relationship.

The role of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation can be characterized as a shock absorber in the Sino-Japan relationship. By shock absorber, here we mean two things.

One is that Sino-Japan environmental cooperation could reduce the shock caused by deterioration of the Sino-Japan relationship (the political relation-ship in particular) by helping to prevent the Sino-Japan relationship from going completely out of control when the Sino-Japan relationship worsened. The linkages are (1) The deterioration of the Sino-Japan relationship was confined to certain areas by close Sino-Japan environmental cooperation, and all-round retreat of the bilateral relationship was avoided. (2) Sino-Japan environmental cooperation was the most convenient tool for the two sides to use to get the bilateral relationship under control because environmental cooperation is one of the least sensitive issues. (3) Close Sino-Japan environmental cooperation helped to maintain communication and dialogue between the governments and public of the two countries, enabling the people of the two countries to deeply feel the existence of common interests and increase their confidence over future development of the Sino-Japan relationship.

The evolution of the Sino-Japan relationship since the 1990s best illus-trates the role of the shock absorber of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation. Unlike the steadily rising trend of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation, the Sino-Japan relationship had been full of undulations since 1972. China and Japan normalized their relationship by signing the China-Japan Joint Statement in 1972, turning over a new leaf in the history of their bilateral relationship. Characterized by friendship and cooperation, the 1970s and 1980s were a hon-eymoon period for the Sino-Japan relationship. However, with the end of the Cold War, rise of China, and change of domestic politics in the two countries in the 1990s, the honeymoon came to an end. The Sino-Japan relationship has been fluctuating greatly with a lot of tension and conflict between the two sides. The history issue, textbook issue, Taiwan issue, Diaoyudao issue, competition for energy and demarcation debate of the sea east of China kept disturbing the bilateral relationship in rapid succession. “Cold politics and warm economy” was the most frequently used phrase to describe the character of Sino-Japan relations. The year 2005 witnessed a freezing point in the Sino-Japan relationship after Junichiro Koizumi’s forth consecutive visit to Yasukuni


Shrine, China’s anti-Japan demonstration and unprecedented diplomatic game between China and Japan over Japan’s quest to gain permanent membership to the U.N. Security Council. The Sino-Japan relationship went through a most difficult period.

Interestingly enough, the Sino-Japan relationship, on the one hand, saw a consistent downward trend, while on the other hand, Sino-Japan envi-ronmental cooperation steadily saw positive momentum. This amazing gap precisely indicates that the deterioration of the Sino-Japan relationship was controllable. Clearly, close Sino-Japan environmental cooperation was helpful in improving the controllability of relations. Japan’s ODA to China focused on environmental protection after the mid-1990s partly because the Japanese government came under minimal domestic pressure in doing so. In China, there have been some calls to boycott Japanese goods, but few Chinese opposed Sino-Japan environmental cooperation. Chinese President Jiang Zemin paid a visit to Japan in 1998. The two sides were unable to break a political deadlock due to lack of consensus on the history issue. The China-Japan relationship was facing a difficult time. However, to avoid doing irreversible damage to the Sino-Japan relationship, the two sides decided to promote bilateral environ-mental cooperation by signing an agreement. In doing so, the leadership of both countries sent a strong signal to the outside that China and Japan shared some common interests although the two countries were seeing hard times in their relationship.

The other is that Sino-Japan environmental cooperation played a supple-mentary role in the Sino-Japan relationship, which means it mainly adapted to rather than shaped the Sino-Japan relationship. Political, economic and security issues prevailed over environmental issues. In China, it was environ-mentalists who were concerned about Sino-Japan environmental cooperation. The public knew little about it. Even in some organs in charge of Japanese affairs from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, environmental coopera-tion was not a priority issue.6

3. Shift From Shock Absorber to Engine: Is It Possible?

After a 30 year journey, Sino-Japan environmental cooperation is encoun-tering a golden opportunity, shifting from shock absorber to engine for the

6 Based on an interview with a diplomat from Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs on June 8, 2007.

76 Haibin ZHANG

Sino-Japan relationship. By engine, we mean: First, environmental cooperation is elevated to the strategic level in the Sino-Japan relationship and becomes the core issue of the bilateral relationship. Second, the autonomy of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation increases considerably. By producing more of a spillover effect, Sino-Japan environmental cooperation has more power to shape rather than just react to the future of the Sino-Japan relationship. What is the golden opportunity?

First of all, the current international situation is changing in favor of the shift. The fact that environmental challenges are posing the biggest threat to the world requires nation states including China and Japan to put environmen-tal diplomacy into the mainstream of their foreign policy. This will definitely facilitate the shift of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation. Looking back on the evolution of environmental issues in international relations, one can see that the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 placed the en-vironmental issue on the global agenda for the first time in history. The U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 accelerated the process of environmental issues moving from the periphery of the global agenda to the core. Now the most recent development of the international relationship has firmly placed the environmental issue high on the global agenda. In the four short years from 2004 to 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was twice awarded to environmentalists and once to an environmental agency (IPCC). This clear evidence demonstrated that the international community is attaching great importance to environmental issues. Another important example is climate change. In the 2007 World Economic Forum, climate change was listed as the biggest challenge for the world. Climate change has now become a major theme of major bilateral, regional and global conferences, such as the Sino-Great Britain Summit Meeting in 2008 and the G8+5 in 2008.

Confronting the unprecedented threat to international peace and security posed by environmental challenges, China and Japan, two global environmen-tal powers, come under increasing international pressure to shoulder more responsibility for global environmental security. The new situation requires China and Japan to put more emphasis on international environmental coop-eration, including Sino-Japan environmental cooperation.

Second, the adjustment of China and Japan’s environmental diplomacy is favorable to the shift because both China and Japan now approach Sino-Japan environmental cooperation with a strategic view.

Environmental diplomacy is of special importance to Japan. Japan started to pursue a goal of becoming a political power in the 1980s. However, Japan’s


Peace Constitution constrains the areas where Japan can bring its role into full play. International environmental cooperation provides Japan with a unique chance which enables Japan to play a corresponding role as a mature and re-sponsible member of the international community (Kawashima, 1997:95-126; Grubb, 1999:33). Japan has placed environmental diplomacy into the main-stream of its foreign policy since the 1990s by taking three major steps. One step is to reiterate the significance of international environmental cooperation in important Japanese legal and policy documents. For example, the Japanese Diet passed Japan’s Fundamental Law of Environment in 1993, which is the most important legal document guiding current Japanese environmental pro-tection. The law lists the promotion of international environmental cooperation as one of three objectives in Japan’s environmental strategy (OECD, 1994:17). The Japanese cabinet approved the Japanese Environment-Oriented National Strategy in the 21st Century in 2007. The major purpose of the document is to create a “Japanese model” for a graceful “Environmental Nation” so that Japan can contribute to the development and prosperity of the world and dispatch the idea throughout Asia, and to the world.7 Another step is to strengthen the Japanese mechanism of environmental diplomacy. In order to carry out its en-vironmental diplomacy more effectively, the Japanese government took a lot of reorganization measures. The Central Environmental Council was established in 1993. The Japanese Bank of International Cooperation was established in 1999. The Japanese Environmental Agency was elevated to the Ministry of Environment in 2001. In 2004 the Japan International Cooperation Agency became independent from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With all these reform measures in place, Japan has established a comprehensive and streamlined system of environmental diplomacy where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Transportation and Industry play a central role, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and Japanese Bank of International Cooperation are central supporting organs, and other ministries and agencies are ready to help. The third step is to increase envi-ronmental ODA to developing countries. The percentage of environmental ODA in Japanese ODA rose from 9.8% in 1989 to 30.5% in 1999 and to 35.2% in 2002. See figure 2.

In general, it is fair to say that Japan and Germany are the two countries which attach greatest importance to environmental diplomacy in the world.

7 See Japanese Ministry of the Environment, “Becoming a Leading Environmental Nation Strategy in the 21st Century: Japan’s strategy for a Sustainable Society,” http://www.env.go.jp/en/focus/070606.html.

78 Haibin ZHANG

The history of China’s environmental diplomacy can be traced back to 1972, when China sent its delegation to the UN Conference on Human Envi-ronment. China’s rapid industrialization exerted unprecedented pressure on its environment in the post Cold War era. To address environmental chal-lenges, the Chinese government attached greater importance to environmental diplomacy. The 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2007 was the watershed event in the development of China’s environmental diplomacy. In the report passed by the congress the biggest challenge facing China today was that China paid too much in terms of resources and envi-ronmental damage for economic growth. To address this challenge, the report strongly advocated greater efforts on two fronts. Domestically, China should do its utmost to achieve an ecological civilization. Internationally, China is committed to building a harmonious world by promoting international envi-ronmental cooperation. This was the first time that the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese government listed promotion of international environ-mental cooperation as one of the major elements of Chinese foreign policy. It clearly demonstrated the Chinese government’s strong determination to place environmental diplomacy into the mainstream of its foreign policy. Obviously, promotion of international environmental cooperation now is of strategic im-portance to China. China’s recent policy toward climate change is the best example. As one part of its efforts to promote international cooperation on climate change, China released China’s National Program on Addressing Climate Change, which is the first of its kind in developing countries. At the same time, the Chinese government established the Chinese National Leading Group on Climate Change which is led by Premier Wen Jiabao and includes leaders from nearly 30 ministries and agencies of the Chinese government. What is equally important is that a group study for the Political Bureau of the

Figure2 Percentage of Environmental Loan in Yen Loan to China

Source: Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ODA Annual Report (’89, ’93, ’96, ’01, ’03)


CPC Central Committee was held on June 27, 2008. The study focused on global climate change and the country’s ability to tackle the issue, and was the first of its kind in China. Chinese President Hu Jintao, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, is urging the country to contribute further to the global fight against climate change. He said, “How we cope with climate change is related to the country’s economic development and people’s practical benefits. It’s in line with the country’s basic interests.”8

The above-mentioned adjustment the two countries have made in their international environmental policy shows that China is increasingly integrat-ing with Japan in terms of international environmental cooperation. No doubt, this will facilitate the shift of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation.

Last but not least, a large amount of experience has been accumulated in the past 30 years of bilateral environmental cooperation, which sets a good foundation for the shift.

To conclude, the current international situation and China and Japan’ s domestic politics are favorable to the shift of China-Japan environmental co-operation from shock absorber to engine in the Sino-Japan relationship. If the two sides can grasp this golden chance to make the shift successful, the future will see a more stable and better Sino-Japan relationship. Just as the common enemy Soviet Union created a honeymoon period for the Sino-Japan relation-ship in the 1970s and 1980s, the shift of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation has big potential to act as a new strategic foundation in the Sino-Japan relation-ship. What merits notice is that the most recent development of Sino-Japan environmental cooperation signaled to the outside that the shift is taking place. China and Japan have reached bilateral environmental agreements one after another in the past two years. See table 3.

In particular, in one important agreement entitled the Sino-Japanese Joint Statement on All-round Promotion of Their Strategic and Mutually Beneficial Relations which was signed in 2008, the two sides agree that bilateral energy and environmental cooperation should be a fundamental element of Sino-Japan Strategic and Mutually Beneficial Relations. Sino-Japan environmental cooperation is at a crossroads. What we need most now are a stronger sense of urgency, more confidence and more action.

8 Xinhua news agency, “Chinese president urges enhanced efforts to cope with climate change”, Beijing, June 28, 2008.

80 Haibin ZHANG

References

Grubb, Michael et al. (1999) The Kyoto Protocol: A Guide and Assessment, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs and Earthscan Publications.

Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1995) Current Status of Japan-China Economic Cooperation in the Field of Environment, In Liu Dachun et al. (ed.) Environmental Problems: From the Perspective of Comparison of China and Japan and Sino-Japan cooperation, China Renming University Publishing House, 192-194.

Kawashima,Yasuko (1997) A comparative Analysis of the Decision-making Process of Developed Countries toward CO2 Emissions Reduction Targets, International En-vironmental Affairs 9 (Spring), 95-126.

Li Dejin (2007) China and Japan Join Hand in Hand in Pushing Environmental Protec-tion, People’s Daily (Overseas Edition) seventh edition, June 5, 2007.

Worldwatch Institute (1997) State of the World 1997: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society, January 11, 1997. http://www.worldwatch.org/press/news/1997/01/11/.

Xia Guang (2002) The Impact of Japanese Economic Situation on China-Japan Environ-mental Coperation, China Environment Daily, 3rd edition, February 8, 2002.

OECD（編），日本環境庁地球環境部企画課外務省経済局国際機関第二課（監訳）(1994)『OECDレポート日本の環境政策成果と課程』，中央法規出版社.

Table 3 China-Japan Environment Related Agreements Signed After 2007

Title of Agreement Level of Signature

Sino-Japanese Joint Statement on All-round Promotion of Their Strategic and Mutually Beneficial Relations (2008) head of state

Sino-Japan Joint Statement on Climate Change (2008) ministerial level

Sino-Japan Joint Statement for Furthering Cooperation of Science and Technology on Climate Change (2007) ministerial level

Sino-Japan Joint Statement for furthering Cooperation on Environmental Protection (2007) ministerial level

Sino-Japan Joint Statement for furthering Cooperation on Energy and Environment (2007) ministerial level

Sino-Japan joint press communiqué on boosting bilateral exchanges and cooperation (2008) ministerial level

Sino-Japan memorandum of Furthering Cooperation on Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection (2008) ministerial level


81

1. Introduction

Northeast Asian countries have experienced impressive economic growth in the past decades. However, these countries have also experienced serious environmental pollution problems, among them acid-rain, sandstorms, and water pollution. Since these environmental problems are transnational and indivisible, it is impossible to realize the goal of protecting the regional en-vironment if only depending on the effort of single country. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the cooperation of all of the Northeast Asian countries to cope with environmental pollution.

Northeast China which adjoins the Korean Peninsula, eastern Russia and Mongolia, and faces Japan across the sea, lies in the core of Northeast Asia, which means that Northeast China shares environmental resources with its neighboring countries. With the development of the Chinese economy and society, China has come to be visualized as a country that must play a respon-sible and constructive role within the international society as well as playing an important role in environmental cooperation in the Northeast Asian region.

The Chinese central government announced the “Plan for Revitalizing Northeast China” in 2003, one aim of which is to transform the old industrial structure of excess resource consumption and extensive economic growth into a new industrial structure of resource-saving and intensive economic growth, and realize sustainable development of the economy and society of the region. This strategic aim provides a valuable and historical opportunity for Northeast Asian countries to cooperate on environmental issues as well as for promoting the development of Northeast China.

Environmental Cooperation between China and Other Northeast Asian Countries

:The Case of Northeast China

Junting LIULiaoning University (China)

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This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly reviews the histori-cal development of environmental cooperation between China and Northeast Asian countries. Section 3 investigates the status quo and tendencies of environ-mental cooperation between Northeast China and Northeast Asian countries. Section 4 analyzes the problems for achieving environmental cooperation between Northeast China and the neighboring Northeast Asian countries. Section 5 provides some advice on strengthening environmental cooperation between China and Northeast Asian countries.

2. Historical review on environmental cooperation between China and Northeast Asian countries

China participates in environmental cooperation with Northeast Asian countries through both bilateral cooperation and multilateral cooperation.

2.1. Present bilateral cooperation between China and Northeast Asian countries

Environmental cooperation between China and Northeast Asian countries began in the 1990s, and deepened and widened from the mid-1990s. During this period, the Chinese government signed bilateral environmental coopera-tion agreements with Japan, Russia, Mongolia, the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the aim of which was to develop environmental cooperation in terms of combating air pollution, utilizing water resources, and conducting environmental impact assessments, in addition to other environmental issues.

Environmental cooperation between China and Japan is most effective and prominent because Japanese Official Development Assistant (ODA) has played a very important role. From 1996 to 2000, the cumulative agreed amount of the environmental protection program was approximately 360 billion Japa-nese yen (Yu Weihai, 2006). It was reported in Fuji Sankei Business on July 12, 2007 that the agreed amount of Japanese ODA loans to China had reached about 1000 billion Japanese yen on environmental protection since 1979. This amount comprises about 30% of the whole amount of ODA loans to China. In addition, China and Japan signed the “Joint Statement by Japan and the People’s Republic of China on the Further Enhancement of Cooperation for Environmental Protection” in 2007, and both sides confirmed that they would

83Environmental Cooperation between China and Other Northeast Asian Countries

focus their cooperation on areas such as prevention of water pollution in vital waters including the Bohai Sea and Huanghai Sea regions, developing recy-cling in their respective societies, air pollution prevention, measures to combat climate change, prevention of drifting marine litter, and measures for tackling acid rain, sandstorms, and other weather-related issues.

China and the Republic of Korea (ROK) focus on combating acid rain, air and water pollution, and dealing with waste and trans-boundary pollution of the Huang Hai Region. In addition, cooperation with the environmental pro-tection industry has also been strengthened. China and the ROK signed the Agreement on Mutual Recognition of Environmental Labeling in 2005, which is the second mutual environmental labeling agreement that China has signed with another country.

China and Russia focus on fields including combating pollution, estab-lishing an emergency mechanism for environmental disasters, establishing a trans-boundary natural reserve, protecting biological diversity and monitoring the quality of trans-boundary bodies of water. China and Russia established the Sub-Committee of Environmental Protection in 2006, which is a signifi-cant innovation in the model of international environmental protection and marks a new stage of environmental protection between China and Russia.

China and Mongolia focus on combating sandstorms, vegetation recovery, utilization of pastures, and so on. China and the DPRK focus on the protection of the water quality of the Yalu and Tumen rivers, and biological diversity.

2.2. Present multilateral cooperation between China and Northeast Asian countries

Generally speaking, there are three types of multilateral cooperation agreements between China and Northeast Asian countries: (1) Cooperation involving two or more Northeast Asian countries; (2) Cooperation involv-ing all of the Northeast Asian countries; (3) Cooperation involving Northeast Asian countries and Non-Northeast Asian countries.

The Tripartite Environment Ministers Meeting (TEMM), the Tripar-tite Nature Reserve (TNR), and Northwest Pacific Action Plan (NOWPAP) oversee the first type of cooperation. TEMM has been held by the environment ministers of China, Japan and the ROK on an annual basis since 1999. The ninth TEMM was held in 2007, and the environment ministers of the three countries shared their views on the recent progress in each country regarding environmental management. NOWPAP was adopted in 1994 by China, Japan,

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Russia and the ROK as a part of the Regional Seas Programme of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The North East Asia Sub-regional Program for Environment Coopera-tion (NEASPEC) and Tumen River Economic Development Area (TREDA) oversee the second type of cooperation. NEASPEC is an inter-governmen-tal forum on regional environmental issues held by China, Japan, Mongolia, Russia, the ROK and the DPRK, with the 13th Senior Official Meeting (SOM) of NEASPEC being held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in 2008. The Tumen River Area Development Program is a joint project of five of the member coun-tries: China, the DPRK, Mongolia, the ROK and Russia. It was supported by the United Nations Development Program in 1992, one aim of which is to strengthen environmental cooperation in fields such as forest ecological pro-tection, wetland ecology and marine protection.

Acid Deposit Monitoring Network in East Asia (EANET) is the third type of cooperation. EANET was established as an important initiative for regional cooperation, aiming to create a common understanding on the state of acid de-position problems, to provide useful insight to policy makers at various levels and to contribute to cooperation on issues related to acid deposition among East Asian countries. At present, 13 countries in East Asia have participated in EANET.

3. Status Quo and the development of environmental cooperation between Northeast China and Northeast Asian countries

Northeast China, consisting of the Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang prov-inces, adjoins Northeast Asian countries, and is becoming the forefront to develop environmental cooperation with Northeast Asian countries. Northeast China is the old industrial base of China and it is composed mainly of raw ma-terials and heavy-chemical industries that feature high resource consumption, large traffic volume and severe pollution. In 2000, the waste water emissions of Northeast China accounted for 10.5% of the total waste water emissions of China, and the water quality monitoring section which is between the orders of I~III only accounts for 30.5%. Solid waste emission per unit of industrial value-added is 30% higher than the average level in China (Chen and Song, 2004). Therefore, the task of industrial pollution control in Northeast China is arduous. Nevertheless, international cooperation provides an important way for environmental pollution treatment in Northeast China.


Among the Northeast Asian countries, it is Japan who cooperates most closely with China in terms of environmental protection. This cooperation comes in the form of Japanese government gratis assistance (grant aid), tech-nological cooperation and Japanese yen loans. These cooperative efforts play an important role in solving the problem of environmental pollution in North-east China.

3.1. Environmental cooperation between Liaoning Province and North-east Asian countries

Liaoning Province began environmental cooperation with Japan in 1985. From the mid-1990s, environmental cooperation further deepened through cooperation with local Japanese governments such as those in Sapporo, Kita-kyushu and Toyama. As of this writing, Liaoning has accepted 13 grants for environmental grassroots projects1 amounting to 97.12 million yen, 11 loan aid projects amounting to 103.7 billion yen and 10 technological cooperation projects.

In addition, Liaoning, in cooperation with Toyama, began a joint investi-gation on upstream and downstream water pollution of the Liao, Daliao and Daling rivers. The program has lasted for 10 years and is now entering the third stage of cooperation, which is an investigation of the water quality in the inshore waters east of Liaoning. An interim report co-edited by China and Japan provided technical support for the establishment of a water pollution treatment plant on the Liao River.

Dalian, the coastal city in the south of Liaoning, has developed a good relationship with Kitakyushu in environmental cooperation. In a business ex-change conference on the environment held in 2008, representatives from 20 enterprises in Kitakyushu provided a number of technological advancements and products related to environmental protection, which indicates that the field of environmental cooperation between Dalian and Kitakyushu has ex-tended from inter-government to inter-enterprise.

Besides cooperation with Japan, Liaoning has also strengthened its en-vironmental cooperation with Russia, the ROK, the DPRK and Mongolia through holding conferences such as the Northeast Asian High-tech Products Exposition and Technology Cooperation Conference by utilizing opportuni-

1. Grassroots Project is the small scale gratis assistance project held by Japanese Government, whose aim is to promote the development of economy and society of Less Developed Countries.

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ties such as Year of Russian and the R. Korean Week.

3.2. Environmental cooperation between Jilin Province and Northeast Asian countries

Jilin Province has developed cooperative efforts with the local Japanese governments in such places as Tottori, Shimane and Miyagi. Jilin established a good relationship with Tottori in 1987 and subsequently developed exchange and cooperation in the area of environmental protection. To this day, Jilin has accepted 14 Japanese grant aid projects consisting of 4 financial gratis as-sistance projects amounting to 3.89 billion yen and 10 assistance grants for environmental grassroots projects amounting to 100 million yen. In addition, Jilin also accepted one loan aid amounting to 12.8 billion yen and developed 3 environmental technology cooperation projects.

Pollution treatment in cities along the Song-Liao River Basin is the project where Jilin utilizes the fourth batch of Japanese Overseas Economic Coopera-tion Fund loans amounting to 12.8 billion yen. This environmental treatment project consists of 8 sub-projects including 5 wastewater treatment projects, 2 industrial pollution projects and 1 project for Songhua River pollution control. The project implementation improves the cities’ environmental quality, and all of the pollutant indexes are decreased. For example, the 5 waste-water treat-ment projects alone can treat 900 thousand tons of sewage every day.

In addition, Jilin Province has developed cooperative efforts towards the purification of rivers and environmental improvement around the Japan Sea. Tottori and Shimane prefectures have invested funds totaling 6.22 million yen and 4.28 million yen respectively to cooperate with Jilin Province on water purification of rivers since 1999. As to the cooperation of environmental improvement around Japan Sea, it consists of two projects: one is the estab-lishment of an environmental information exchange system, and the other is an investigation on the wildlife of Northeast Asia.

As for environmental cooperation with other Northeast Asian countries, Jilin Province established the Planning Group of the Tumen River Project to develop cooperation with the ROK, the DPRK, Russia and Mongolia, finish-ing the project in 2001. In 2008, the Jilin Bureau of Environmental Protection began environmental information exchange and executive training with the environmental Bureau of Gyeonggi-do in the ROK.


3.3. Environmental cooperation between Heilongjiang Province and Northeast Asian countries

Up till now, Heilongjiang Province has accepted 1 grant aid for environ-mental protection amounting to 8.20 million yen, loan aid projects amounting to 25.3 billion yen and 2 technical cooperation projects from the Japanese gov-ernment. In 2006, a project on the capacity of pesticide analysis of the water quality of the Songhua River jointly applied for by Heilongjiang Province and Yamagata County was approved by the Japanese government, and is proceed-ing successfully.

In 2005, an explosion at Jilin Petrochemicals caused serious pollution of the Songhua River, and the Russian Far East was also affected. Therefore, en-vironmental cooperation between Heilongjiang and Russia was strengthened. Heilongjiang Province and Russia developed joint monitoring of the water quality of trans-boundary bodies of water in 2006, which provided technical support and a basis for the decision for the joint protection of the Heilong River, Wusuli River, and Xingkai Lake. As for environmental cooperation with the ROK, Haerbin, the provincial capital of Heilongjiang, held the Sino-Korea environmental protection industry forum to provide a cooperation oppor-tunity for environmental protection enterprises of both sides. In 2007, the climate and environmental research center of Northeast Asia was established in Haerbin to strengthen the climate of environmental cooperation in North-east Asia.

3.4. Development tendency of environmental cooperation between Northeast China and Northeast Asian countries

With the economic and social development of Northeast China, environ-mental cooperation between Northeast China and Northeast Asian countries will develop even further. In 2004, the Chinese central government adopted the “Revitalization of the Old Industrial Base of the Northeast” as its nation-al policy, which provides an historic opportunity for economic cooperation between Northeast China and Northeast Asian countries as well as the devel-opment of Northeast China. One strategic aim of “Revitalization of the Old Industrial Base of the Northeast” is to adopt the advanced technology necessary to restructure traditional industries, and eliminate industries of high-pollution and high-energy consumption, in order to realize the aim of the sustainable development of Northeast China as well as “energy-savings and emissions re-duction” of the heavy and chemical industries.

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Local governments of Northeast China pay more attention to environ-mental problems as the economy develops. For example, the government of Liaoning Province has promulgated the Determination on the Implementation of a Scientific Development Perspective and the Strengthening of Environ-mental Protection. In this document, the government of Liaoning Province proposed the resolution of putting environmental protection and economic growth in the same strategic position to realize a synchronous coordinated development of the economy and society. In the period of the 10th five-year construction (2000~2005), the total amount of environmental protection input of Liaoning Province has increased to RMB 69 billion yuan. The proportion of environmental protection input to GDP increased from 1.5% (1995-2000) to 2.2%, and in the period of the 11th five-year construction (2006-2011), this proportion will continue to rise.

The large potential demand for environmental protection products in Northeast China will attract enterprises in Northeast Asian countries, and en-vironmental cooperation will also promote the realization of the revitalization of Northeast China. Environmental cooperation will help the enterprises of the Northeast to increase competitiveness, strengthen the development of the environmental protection industry, introduce advanced production ideas and management experience, and then promote the sustainable development of the economy and society of Northeast China.

4. Existing problems in environmental cooperation between North-east China and Northeast Asian countries

Although environmental cooperation between Northeast China and Northeast Asian countries has attained comparatively significant achieve-ment, it is necessary to investigate and solve some existing problems in this cooperation.

4.1. Lack of effective institutional cooperation mechanism

Arrangements by international institutions can effectively promote in-ternational cooperation through reducing transaction costs, improving the status of information exchange, strengthening trust, and helping to form stable expectations. Since environmental cooperation is a kind of public good, but at the same time will result in transaction costs being incurred, it is neces-


sary to arrange some credible institutions to promote cooperation. However, one primary problem existing in Northeast Asian cooperation is the lack of a powerful and regional environmental mechanism that aims to promote the sustainable development of Northeast Asia.

At present, environmental cooperation in Northeast Asia is mainly being developed according to “soft” constraint mechanisms such as action plans, declarations, resolutions and memorandums of understanding. All of these documents only establish some frame and principle of cooperation, and lack practicality and maneuverability, and are thus are not strong as a binding force. As for the building of institutions, each country mainly relies on ministerial conferences to develop cooperation, and still has not established a standing body to coordinate and regulate environmental policy. Although some insti-tutions such as working groups or committees have been established as part of cooperation programs, these institutions mainly took charge of research, information exchange, coordination and some special tasks such as environ-mental monitoring. Moreover, although there are quite a few organizations and conferences that discuss environmental conferences in Northeast Asia, overlapping of institutional responsibilities and low efficiency still exist. For example, many of the same institutions with similar agendas exist in both TEMM and NEASPEC. Therefore, when compared to the EU, Northeast Asia lacks a stable organization that aims for the fulfillment of collective interests and plans in the long-term, which in turn restricts the futher development of environmental cooperation in Northeast Asia. Northeast Asian countries do not implement comprehensive cooperation according to their own compara-tive advantage, which causes a narrow field of cooperation, low cooperation levels, and simple forms of cooperation. Thus many important environmental problems cannot be solved effectively.

4.2. Lack of emergency response mechanism aiming at trans-boundary environmental crisis events

At present, many declarations and action plans on environmental coop-eration in Northeast Asia mainly focus on long-term cooperation programs. However, one problem with this type of cooperation is that it obviously lacks the emergency preparedness and ability to mobilize multilateral strength to act jointly in a short time. For example, in dealing with the trans-boundary water pollution of the Songhua River in 2005, China and Russia conducted joint monitoring on the Mulan and Tongjiang sections of the Songhua River.

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However, Russia and Mongolia, the two countries that were directly affected by this event, did not take further substantial joint action with China under the mechanism of NEASPEC (Lin Xuechun, 2007). At the same time, there are difficulties for Japan and the ROK to intervene in such an event under the mechanism of TEMM. Pollution of the Songhua River, therefore, was dealt with solely on the effort of each country’s domestic emergency response mech-anism, which will affect how the Songhua River is to be treated.

4.3. Lack of funds support for the environmental cooperation

Among the Northeast Asian countries, it is Japan with whom Northeast China gets the most significant effects in terms of environmental cooperation. One of the important reasons is that Japan has provided a great number of loans for environmental protection to China in the past decades. However, it will be difficult for Japan to further widen the scale of cooperation in the coming period because of its own domestic economic problems. Particularly in 2008, Japan stopped providing loans to China completely, which affected environmental cooperation between China and Japan. In addition, since the level of economic development of Northeast China is relatively low and treat-ment of environmental pollution needs a great deal of human and material resources, the effective settlement of funds for environmental cooperation is another question to which attention needs to be paid.

4.4. Lack of communication of Enterprises

Northeast China offers a large potential market development opportunity for the environmental protection industry, which would be attractive to en-terprises of other Northeast Asian countries who have advanced technology. Although these enterprises entered the market of Northeast China very early, they have not made much progress in developing the market. Therefore, such enterprises are eager to strengthen cooperation with Northeast China and jointly develop the environmental protection market. The current problem is that the enterprises of both sides lack direct and effective communication, and they cannot establish a mature cooperation model (Dong liyan, 2007). The enterprises of Northeast Asian countries do not know what type of technology the enterprises of Northeast China need, and they cannot find appropriate Chinese companies or partners to form cooperative agreements. Both sides need to strengthen the exchange of policies and regulations about the environ-


mental protection industry, and establish formal, lasting and effective channels to improve the communication and cooperation of enterprises.

4.5. Lack of participation of public

Environmental protection can only have good and lasting effects when the whole society pays wide attention and the public is attentive to the situa-tion. However, the public consciousness concerning environmental protection is not very strong and needs to be increased, especially in Northeast China. For example, a research project investigated the residents in 5 cities of heavy chemicals and heavy industry in Liaoning Province in 2004, and found that 62.9% of the people thought that the reason for environmental problems was the lack of a public consciousness, which stood in first place among the reasons for environmental problems (Li Peijun, 2006).

5. Countermeasures on strengthening environmental cooperation between China and Northeast Asian countries

5.1. To strengthen the institutionalized construction

Strength is the element most necessary to keep institutional cooperation running effectively, and the strengthening of institutions should include the following measures:

(i) Establishing a regional institution for environmental managementAlthough it is impossible to establish a supranational authority with

compelling force in a short time, it is necessary to establish an institution for environmental management in Northeast Asia which is not only favorable in terms of strengthening environmental cooperation among Northeast Asian Countries, but also in providing incentives for the construction of domestic environmental institutions. The standing body of environmental management should be composed of the officials from the environment ministries of the Northeast Asian countries. The responsibilities of the standing body would be as follows: to implement the decisions of conferences of environmental coop-eration in Northeast Asia; to help to coordinate each country’s environmental policies; to develop procedures for the settlement of environmental issues among countries; to promote the transfer of technology for environmental

92 Junting LIU 93

protection; to raise funds for environmental protection; to develop environ-mental protection projects; to develop education and conduct consultations about environmental protection, and promote the exchange of information.

(ii) Establishing groups that assume temporary responsibility in emergenciesThe standing body of environmental management of Northeast Asia can

establish an emergency management group that responds in the event of a trans-boundary environmental crisis. The members of this group should consist of the representatives of officials from the environmental ministries of each country, scientific and technical experts, and the representatives of environmental non-government organizations. Among them, officials of the environmental ministries should be responsible for the management of re-sources, while the experts should provide the scientific and technical support for schemes. The representatives of non-government organizations would be responsible for the monitoring of events, as the spokespersons of public events, and garnering public support. The operation of the group should be flexible, which means it is operates temporarily when an environmental crisis takes place and returns to a dormant mode when the crisis is solved.

(iii) Merging the two institutions of TEMM and NEASPECIt is wasteful to have two parallel institutions focused on the same aspects

of environmental cooperation as it requires the duplication of a great deal of resources. Moreover, it has seriously hindered the coordination mechanism of environmental cooperation in Northeast Asia. Therefore, we can consider having the two bodies merged. The merging of TEMM and NEASPEC will be beneficial in unifying and coordinating decisions on environmental protec-tion, implementing environmental polices, and maximizing the integration of resources. In addition, the establishment of unified environmental coop-eration mechanisms in Northeast Asia will provide an objective diplomatic platform different from the traditional category of political and military affairs, thus benefitting regional stability.

5.2. To actively seek the model of market operation for environmental cooperation

With the rising economic power of China, aid for China will be more dif-ficult to come by, which will require China to produce an innovative model of


international environmental cooperation, and establish equal, win-win part-nerships. Therefore, Northeast Asian countries and Northeast China should actively develop a multi-level, multi-channel and multi-field market operation model.

(i) Multilateral model of environmental cooperationUnder a multilateral framework, the Clean Development Mechanism

(CDM) is an important model for the environmental cooperation of Northeast Asian countries.2 The CDM model is an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol allowing developed countries with a greenhouse gas reduction commitment to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alter-native to more expensive emission reductions in their own countries. Since developed countries such as Japan have taken extensive measures to reduce emissions and incurred very high costs to reduce the amount of emissions, it is difficult for developed countries to complete the task of the reductions stipulated in the Kyoto Protocol only domestically. Comparatively, it would be more economical for developed countries to reduce emissions in developing countries such as China first, and then account this part of emission reduction as a proportion reduction goal.3

CDM model offers the best potential for development of environmental cooperation in Northeast Asia. Developed countries such as Japan with ad-vanced technology cannot only obtain a substantial return through providing technological innovations for developing countries such as China, Mongolia, and the DPRK, but also develop new products and markets through extending appropriate technologies in developing countries.

(ii) Bilateral model of environmental cooperationBilateral cooperation of Northeast Asian countries should also be on the

basis of market operation. The means of Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) should

2. Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a method that is stipulated in Kyoto Protocol signed in the third conference of contracting parties of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as supplement measure (Tokyo Mechanism) to minify greenhouse gases.

3. It is calculated that costs equated as coal will dropped down to $103.7 per ton at the price of economic growth rate’s decreasing 1.1%, and unemployment rate’s increasing 1.3% if Japan completes the goal of emission reduction without CDM, while costs will dropped down to $4.1 per ton while keeping the current situation of economic growth rate and unemployment rate with CDM (Zhao Xumei, 2007).

94 Junting LIU 95

underpin the market operation of the environmental protection industry. For example, Japanese enterprises can establish joint plants with Chinese enter-prises by providing funds or advanced technology and equipment, and transfer the ownership and management rights to Chinese enterprises after they have received enough return on the investment. The BOT model is mainly applied to the capital intensive projects of the environmental protection industry such as the treatment of waste water, atmospheric pollutants, and solid wastes. The BOT model is a win-win model for the cooperation of environmental pro-tection between China and Japan, and will not only alleviate the problem of insufficient funds, but also promote the adjustment and optimization of indus-try structures, and assist to meet the demands. In addition, the entry of foreign capital will indicative of the willingness of countries to develop cooperation and will also provide funds for the environmental protection in China.

5.3. To strengthen the coordination of government policies

Government behavior is one of the key elements for the development of an environmental protection industry. Concerning government policies for envi-ronmental cooperation, China and other Northeast Asian countries can take the following measures: (i) promote trade liberalization of environmental pro-tection industry; (ii) encourage Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) aimed at green product production; (iii) encourage enterprises to take measures to produce environmental protection products according to the taxation policies.

Trade liberalization and FDI can alter environments via scale, structural and technological effects. The scale effect refers to the increase in environ-mental pollutant emissions as the production of non-environmentally friendly production increases. The structural effect refers to the weight of non-envi-ronmentally friendly production as a percentage of gross production increases which results in the price of non-environmentally friendly products rising when the production scale remains unchanged, which in turn will aggravate pollution. The technological effect measures the effect of technology on the concentration of pollutants that will decrease with the use of clean technology. The mechanism of the environmental effect of trade liberalization and FDI is as follows:

Since trade liberalization will increase the volume of international trade, then if traded goods are non-environmentally friendly products and an in-crease of trade volume causes rises in price, the scale effect and structure effect will aggravate environmental pollution. In such a case, both importing and


exporting countries could levy a tax on non-friendly ecological products to encourage firms to adopt clean technology and decrease the concentration of pollutants through the technological effect. Similarly, an increase of FDI to polluting industries will deteriorate the environment, while the inflow of FDI into green environmentally sound industries will improve the environment. The technological effect has the most significant on the environment. Trans-national cooperation usually provides advanced clean technology to the host country and decreases the concentration of pollutants.

Environmental effects of Trade and FDI mean that, China and other Northeast Asian countries should coordinate their economic and foreign trade policies and combine environmental protection with the development of trade and FDI in order to improve the investment conditions for environmental sound industries.

References

Barrett, Scott (2005) The theory of international environmental agreements, In K.G. Mäler and J.R. Vincent (ed.) Handbook of Environmental Economics 3, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1457-1516 .

Bulletin of government of Liaoning Province (2006) Determination on Implementation of scientific development view and Strengthening of Environmental Protection. (in Chinese)

Chen Quanyuan and Song Yuxiang (2004) Study and Assessment of the Sustainable Development of Northeast China (in Chinese), China Population Resources and En-vironment 1, 78-83.

Chen Yingzi (2006) Regional Environmental Cooperation in Northeast Asia and Revital-ization of Northeast China (in Chinese), Northeast Asia Forum 15 (1), 68-72.

Courtois, Pierre and Guillaume Haeringer (2005) The Making of International Environ-mental Agreements, UFAE and IAE Working Papers from Unitat de Fonaments de l’Anàlisi Econòmica (UAB) and Institut d’Anàlisi Econòmica (CSIC)

Dong Liyan and Li Na (2007) Current Situation of Chinese and Japanese Environmental Cooperation and Sustainable Economic Development Strategy of Jilin Province (in Chinese), Japanese Studies Forum 2, 77-82.

Gaines, Stanford and Richard Westin (1991) Taxation for Environmental Protection: A Multinational Study, Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

Hayes, Peter and Lyuba Zarsky (1993) Regional Cooperation and Environmental Issues in Northeast Asia, Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, IGCC Policy Papers, Paper PP05. http://repositories.cdlib.org/igcc/PP/PP05.

Henriques and Sadorsky (1996) The Determinants of an Environmentally Responsive Firm: An Empirical Approach, Journal of Environmental Economics and Manage-ment 30, 381-395.

Li Peijun, Wang Zhijiang, Gong Zongqiang, et al. (2006) Investigation and Assessment

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of Public Environmental Awareness in Heavy Chemo-Industrial Areas of Liaoning (in Chinese), Chinese Journal of Ecology 25(1), 64-69.

Lin Xuechun (2007) Regional Environmental Cooperation Mechanism of Northeast Asia Urgent to Be Strengthened (in Chinese), Social Observation 1, 42-43.

Muller-Furstenberger, G. and G. Stephan (1997) Environmental policy and cooperation beyond the nation state: an introduction and overview, Structural Change and Eco-nomic Dynamics 8(1), 99-114.

Nakamura, M., T. Takahashi, and I. Vertinsky (2001) Why Japanese Firms Choose to Certify: A Study of the Managerial Response to Environmental Issues, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 42(1), 23-52.

Neumayer, Eric (2001) How Regime Theory and the Economic Theory of International Environmental Cooperation Can Learn from Each Other, Global Environmental Politics 1(1), 122-147.

Schreurs, Miranda A. (1998) Environmental cooperation in Northeast Asia, Global Eco-nomic Review 27(1), 88-101.

Yu Weihai (2006) A Review of Environmental Cooperation between China and Japan (in Chinese), Japan Studies 3, 45-48.

Zarsky, Lyuba (1995) The Domain of Environmental Cooperation in Northeast Asia, presented at the Sixth Annual International Conference: Korea and the Future of Northeast Asia.

Zhao Xumei (2007) Patterns of Sino-Japan Industrial Cooperation in Environmental and Protection (in Chinese), Northeast Asia Forum 16(6), 107-112.


AppendixTable 1: Japanese Loan Aid to Northeast China for Environment Protection

Province NO. Projects Year Agreement Value (100 million JPY)

Liaoning

1 Guanyin Ge multi-functional Reservoir 1988-1990 182.25

2 Water supply for Tianjin, Hefei and Anshan 1990 88.66

3 White Stone Reservoir 1996 80.00

4 Treatment of environment of Shenyang 1996, 2000 111.96

5 Treatment of environment pollution of Benxi 1997-1999 85.07

6 Water supply of Dalian 1997 55.00

7 Demonstration city (Dalian) 1999-2000 85.17

8 Drainage of Dalian 2000 33.09

9 Water supply of Yingkou 2000 25.04

10 Environmental comprehensive control of Anshan 2001 145.25

11 Environmental comprehensive control of Anshan 2001 145.25

Jilin 1 Treatment of environment pollution of Liao River Basin 1998 128.00

Heilong-jiang

1 Treatment of environment pollution of Songhua River Basin 1998 105.41

2 Water environment serving of Haerbin 2005 74.00

3 Water environment serving of Haerbin 2005 74.00

Source: Consulate-General of Japan in Shenyang, http://www.shenyang.cn.emb-japan.go.jp.

Table 2: Technology Cooperation between Liaoning Province and Japan in Environment

Type No Projects Start year End year

Special technology cooperation

1 Education Center of Energy Saving of Dalian 1992 1999

2 Waste gas treatment Technology 1996 2001

Development and investigation

1 Investigation of energy saving of plant 1985 1986

2 Investigation of building plan of environmental demonstration of Dalian 1996 2000

Other cooperation 1 Training of executive on energy saving and environmental protection 1999 2003

Basic-level friendly technology

cooperation

1 Environment monitoring System of Dalian 2000 2000

2 Analysis on Water Pollution of Liao River 2000 2001

3 Training of executive on clean production 2001 2004

4 Study of micro-analysis technology of Environmental Hormone 2002 2004

5 Investigation on water quality of Liao River Estuary, Liaodong Bay and Bohai Bay 2002 2007


98 Junting LIU

Table 3: Japanese grant assistance for environmental grassroots project to Northeast China

Provinces No. Projects Year Value (JPY)

Liaoning

1 Drinking water improvement of Jianping County 1996 6,379,787

2 Building of sand defence forest of Jianping County 1999 9,741,720

3 Assistance on drought in Wawo town 2000 8,882,055

4 Refit of sand defence forest of Jianping County 2001 8,258,153

5 Waterway improvement of Yi County 2003 7,414,428

6 Waterway improvement of Beipiao City 2003 8,823,284

7 Water improvement of Lingyuan City 2004 8,099,410

8 Project of tap water of Xiuyan Autonomous County 2004 7,157,150

9 Drinking water improvement of Qiding Mountain 2004 8,030,220

10 Refit of sand defence forest of Zhangwu County 2005 7,487,325

11 Drinking water improvement of Gaosheng Town 2005 7,746,158

12 Drinking water improvement of Huangqi zhai Village 2005 4,000,088

13 Drinking water improvement of Heigou Village 2006 5,105,223

Jilin

1 Drinking water improvement of Badao Hezi Town 1997 9,395,777

2 Drinking water improvement of Zhenlai County 1998 9,602,958

3 Waterway improvement of Huichun City 1999 9,878,880

4 Refit of equipment of irrigation of Baicheng City 2000 8,424,150

5 Waterway improvement of Baicao Gou Town 2002 9,995,094

6 Waterway improvement of NanpingTown 2003 9,561,628

7 Project of Tap Water of Dunhua City 2004 8,423,580

8 Soil improvement of grassland of Baicheng City 2005 8,297,422

9 Drinking water improvement of Huinan County 2006 9,042,282

10 Drinking water improvement of Quanhe Village 2006 9,862,905

Heilong-jiang 1 Project of Tap Water of Keshan County 2004 8,206,000




99

1. The National Identity Image of Japan and Its Problem

The present paper will discuss the national identity image of modern Japan, which causes human insecurity of migrants and requires urgent reconsideration. “National identity image” is defined here as an ideology widely accepted by the society, legally, economically, and culturally reproduced by the State agencies. In the case of Japan it is the belief that Japan is a homogeneous nation composed of people sharing a common national identity, a common language and a common culture. It is generally believed in Japan that this belief has historically supported the development of Japan as a modern state since the Meiji era. It not only supported the national mobilization of expansionist Japan, but also enabled, after its defeat of 1945, to rebuild its national economy during and after the American occupation. It was because Japan was a homogeneous nation that it succeeded in becoming the first non-Western country to join the club of the big powers now called the G8.1

The production system worldly known as Toyotism is based on the “tacit knowledge” shared by the management and the workers by the fact that they all believe in the same Japanese cultural values of harmony and cooperation

“National Identity” Image and Human Insecurity of Migrants: The Case of Japan

Kinhide MUSHAKOJIOsaka University of Economics and Law (Japan)

1. The comment of Premier Nakasone about why the United States is not as successful as Japan, referred to the homogeneity of the Japanese nation which is at the basis of its economic growth whereas the United States citizens were not only Anglo-Saxon but included African Americans, Latinos, etc., and therefore could not compete with the Japanese was justly criticized as a racist statement. It was not only racist in its description of the United States but praised the xenophobic rejection of foreigners as a virtue of the homogeneous Japanese people.

100 Kinhide MUSHAKOJI

often referred to as “wa”. This “tacit knowledge” (anmoku-chi) combined with technical knowledge is supposed to allow the workers in the sub-contracting chain of factories to understand, before being told, the intention of their bosses. This tacit knowledge is said to facilitate communication and hence coopera-tion between the different levels of its sub-contracting production network, allowing them to cooperate in the improvement of productivity. In this way the productivity of Toyotism is made possible by the cultural homogeneity of the workers with the management, so that Toyotism is based on the Japa-nese image of cultural homogeneity where a shared tacit knowledge enables communication and cooperation and increases the productivity of the total production system.

2. The Crisis of the Japanese Immigration Policy

This ideology is presently challenged by waves of incoming migrants, which have accompanied the globalization of the Japanese economy since the 1980s when the Japanese “bubble” economy provided a strong incentive to enter Japan even undocumented. This included sex-workers trafficked into Japan, which became in late 1990s an international issue following the anti-trafficking campaign launched by the United States which labeled Japan as a state which was not taking necessary measures to control the activities of the traffickers in spite of the international agreement to control transnational organized crime.

The globalization of the Japanese economy supported by an increased number of migrant workers makes it impossible for Japan to continue relying on its national homogeneity ideology. To keep rejecting the migrant workers who want to work in Japan, even by using illegal means of entry, is no longer possible for two reasons. Firstly, in terms of production, the maintenance of a productive labour force is essential for the Japanese economy to remain sus-tainable. It is no more possible to limit incoming migrants to those useful to Japanese economic growth, since the ones unwanted by the state find ways to enter Japan through “illegal” means, and provide the cheap work-force of the bottom heap of the Japanese manufacturing and service industries. The present efforts of the Japanese government to mobilize the public in finding and repatriating “illegal stayers” is in a sense contradictory to the interests of the small firms who loose their cheap labor supply. Additionally, this situation cannot continue for so long under heightened criticism by the international

101“National Identity” Image and Human Insecurity of Migrants: The Case of Japan

community of the xenophobic treatment received by foreign migrants, espe-cially those who are undocumented.

The hope to keep Japan a homogeneous nation is also challenged, in the long run, in terms of demographic reproduction. The population of the Japa-nese nation cannot be sustained only thru reproduction by Japanese families. As in the case of other post-industrial societies, Japan is experiencing a de-crease in child births. The demographic trends of a reduced reproduction of the Japanese population, makes it impossible, in the long run, for Japan to continue avoiding the multi-culturalization of the population inhabiting the Japanese archipelago. This paper presents a few aspects of how Japan can shift its immigration policy, developing multi-culturalism in the predominantly mono-cultural society of the country.

The above circumstances are causing a serious crisis for the immigration policy of Japan. With or without its ideology of homogeneity, Japan has to satisfy two contradictory requirements on two levels. The first contradiction Japan faces, is common to all the industrial regions in this global age. This con-tradiction shared by Japan with the other trilateral industrial regions, Europe and North America, is caused by the necessity for the “democratic industrial societies” to guarantee the basic rights of all citizens including the foreign mi-grants while building a barrier to stop the mounting tide of undocumented migrants from the developing regions. Japan, a latecomer industrial nation seems to have invented an approach to face the tide of migrants, different from the other two industrial regions. The United States builds a fence on its border with Mexico, and the EU builds a network of repatriation centres spread not only in Europe but also in its neighboring countries from where migrants enter into the EU, from Algeria to Turkey. Without building walls or repartriation networks, Japan is developing a society collectively dedicated to fighting against the invasion of “illegal” foreigners. This is why the Japanese police have launched a campaign alerting the public about the danger caused by “illegal” foreigners, establishing specialized centres to receive denunciation about foreign criminal activities.

This measure, denounced by human rights movements and in the human rights mechanisms of the United Nations, has been developed due to the sense of homogeneity and fear of potentially bad foreigners causing insecurity within the Japanese society. This xenophobic tendency of the “homogeneous” Japa-nese society is legitimized now by the global fear of “terrorism” under the media pressure activated by the “War on Terror”. This fear is combined with the fear of an increasing tide of “criminal” foreign migrants. This is a fear provoked


mainly by the Japanese media, which reports all sorts of crimes committed by foreign migrants with special interest.

Japan cannot remain a closed country in this global age. It now has to open its market to qualified foreign technicians and workers in order to strengthen its competitive power in the neoliberal global market. It wants, nevertheless to keep its national homogeneity. To introduce non-Japanese to strengthen Japan while maintaining its homogeneity has led Premier Mori to insist on educating the young generation about the divine nature of Japan, which is a mythical expression of the Japanese image of its homogeneous national iden-tity. This statement was complementary to the invitation he extended to Indian IT experts, since inviting them should not lead to bringing into the Japanese nation non-Japanese elements watering down the homogeneity of Japan.

Besides the Indian IT experts, Japanese industries have been profit-ing from foreign workers who enter Japan “illegally,” such as trafficked sex workers. They work in the unprotected sectors of the Japanese sex industries in districts only partially under the control of the police. These “illegal” workers were serving the interests of the Japanese economy, by providing cheap unpro-tected labour in the informal sectors at the bottom of society. Their presence has been tolerated only in the periphery of the homogeneous Japanese society, and did not affect the homogeneity of the nation until their number increased and the influence of the foreign mafia began to challenge the traditional, infor-mal power structure of Japanese society which had guaranteed law and order in traditional Japan.2 The necessity to control the trafficking of foreign sex-workers is now an priority task for police, in spite of the fact that it reduces the income of this prosperous service industry. This is a situation where the control of “illegal” migration is strengthened in spite of the loss incurred by this prosperous industry, the income of which contributes considerably to the GDP of Japan.

In face of these dilemmas, there are currently on the international level and in Japan itself, a few attempts being made to overcome the immigration crisis of contemporary Japan.

2. We will not enter here into theorization about the role of clientelism in Japanese poli-tics, which connects the under-world with the political elite. This cooperation between formal and informal politics was possible only when both spheres shared a homoge-neous belief and value system. The foreign mafia broke this traditional informal “order”. The xenophobic reaction to this new situation generalizes into a general fear of bad foreigners.


3. The Racist Treatment of Foreign Migrants in Contemporary Japan

Foreign migrants in Japan face a number of problems, making their every-day lives insecure and unsustainable. The problems reported to and discussed by the international community indicate the seriousness of these issues, all caused by the Japanese homogeneous identity ideology that allows for the development of a generalized xenophobia towards all foreign migrants and particularly discriminatory treatment of specific migrant communities.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination Xenopho-bia and Related Intolerance, Dr. Doudou Diene made an official visit to Japan in July 2005. His report identifies three categories of people who are the targets of racism and the objects of xenophobia. They are, a) national minorities, in-cluding the Buraku People, the Ainu and the Okinawa people, b) migrants from the former colonies, and c) the new migrants from different, less devel-oped regions. This paper is concerned specifically with the latter two categories of people, referred to in Japan as “old-comer” and “new-comer migrants.” The former are composed of Koreans and Chinese (from Taiwan) citizens who were treated as Japanese nationals until the defeat of 1945. The latter category includes an increasing number of nationalities, such as South-East Asians, West Asian, Latin American, East European, and especially Latin Americans of Japanese-decent.

The Diene Report singles out the discrimination experienced by the old-comer Korean community. The examples given by the rapporteur covers the insecure livelihood of the Utoro Korean community whose settlement lacks basic facilities and from where they have been expelled by authorities who want to redevelop the area. More generally, the report raises questions regard-ing unpaid pensions and discrimination against Korean schools, including the harassment received by Korean school children (identified through their uniform, Korean gowns). The rapporteur also stresses the fact that the “comfort women” issue constitutes a serious case of most shameful discrimination af-fecting also the Korean diaspora in Japan.

Concerning the new-comer migrants, the report mentions the existence in Japan of racial discrimination both on the official and on the private level. Examples of official discrimination include the police press conference stating that the recent rise in crime is caused by the increase of foreigners, confirming right wing propaganda treating foreigners as potential thieves. Japanese immi-gration is also mentioned in connection with its website inviting anonymous denunciation of “foreigners who are likely to be illegal stayers”, in a way insti-


gating a xenophobic attitude making all foreigners potential criminals. The report further refers to the problem of the impunity of public servants making racial statements, such as Governor Ishihara of Tokyo.

On the private level, the report mentions the refusal to allow foreigners entry into private and semi-public institutions such as public baths and golf clubs. Another set of issues raised by the Special Rapporteur relate to the job insecurity of foreigners, especially those undocumented, deprived of social security.

In this way, Dr. Diene presents a systematic picture of racial discrimina-tion, stressing its multi-dimentionality combining socio-economic factors and politically determined biases. The Special Rapporteur insists on the crucial role played by historical and cultural factors which must be confronted in any attempt to overcome racism and xenophobia in contemporary Japan. The 24 recommendations based on the above observations include, not only legal, institutional, and policy-related improvements, but also long-term recom-mendations to transform the racist nature of the Japanese state and society.

Such cultural and historical recommendations include: a) Revision of manuals on history (Para. 82). b) Development of programs promoting minority cutures (Para. 84). c) Media programs about minorities reflecting the cultural diversity of

Japanese society ( Para. 93). d) Fighting discrimination of foreigners through cultural activities to

eliminate prejudices about the cultures of “others” (Para.95). e) Develop mutual support among the minorities in order to build a multi-

cultural society (Para. 97).

The above recommendations constitute a roadmap project towards the creation of an alternative image of Japan, which replaces homogeneity with multi-ethnic and multi-cultural symbiosis. Such a project must stop the social reproduction of the homogeneity myth accompanying the historical develop-ment of the developmentalist state of modern Japan, hence, the revision of the manuals of history. The promotion of different minority cultures, including the cultures of colonized minorities as well as of new-comer foreign migrant communities has to replace the mono-cultural formal education and informal processes of socialization. This would turn Japan into a society where com-munities of varying identities could develop a mutually beneficial system of common security and common prosperity. On this basis, the myth of a homo-geneous Japan must be transformed by the media, shifting their propaganda activities from praising the uniqueness of Japan as an ethnically, culturally and


politically unified nation into pluralistic information about the diversity of the communities living together in the Japanese archipelago. It is only after having opened the eyes of Japanese citizens about the plurality of their identities that a systematic effort to learn to accept difference with “others” rejecting all kinds of prejudices becomes possible, with the support of all the minorities who have so far been treated as “others” by Japanese society. Their cooperative efforts of self-expression will play a special role in the road towards overcoming the Japanese self-image of a homogenous society.

4. Two Plans to Reform the Japanese Migrant Policy

In contrast with the migrant rights approach supported internationally by the United Nations and within Japan by minorities, the Liberal Democratic Party has produced two policy proposals, which share with each other the realization that the present migrant policy based on the exclusion of foreign migrants from the homogeneous Japanese nation is unsustainable yet attempt to keep the uniformity of Japanese society in which the majority is Japanese. One proposal would accede to only short-term contract migrant workers. The other proposes to integrate well-trained migrants who are permitted to settle-down in the periphery of Japanese society.

The first policy paper is entitled the “Short-term employment system of migrant workers” (Jiminto Gaikoku Roudousha PT Teigen), while the other is a proposal to develop a “Japan-Style Migrant Policy” (Sakanaka, 2007). The former proposal is clearly contrary to the best interests, rights, and security of the migrants who are forced to return home even when they wish to settle in Japan. The proposal includes measures to correct the exploitative nature of the present trainee system, but does not cope with the exploitative brokers who often force the migrant workers into a state similar to indentured labor-ers by forcing them to repay their “debts”. The present trend in which migrants not accepted for short-term employment choose to enter Japan through illegal channels provided by some brokers will increase as short-term employment contracts are selectively given to only a few of the migrant candidates.

The latter proposal emphasizes the need to actively develop a migration regime based on inviting well-trained migrants and allowing them to settle in Japan. The paper proposes to invite 10 million migrants to compensate for the decreasing working population in Japan. This proposal is clearly more interest-ing from the point of view of potential migrants. They receive training, both


in terms of language and of the skill required to work satisfactorily in their work-place. The paper recommends a welcome revision of Japanese laws on nationality, on immigration, etc., and the enactment of basic laws for migrant rights. The proposal also refers to training the Japanese public to live peacefully together with migrants, who will no longer be treated as unwelcome foreign-ers, but integrated into Japanese society. This integrative process is considered indispensable in maintaining a sustainable reproduction of workers. Without immigration the Japanese population will decrease to about 90 million in 2050 so the proposal is to add people from abroad into the population so that they compose 10% of the total population.

This plan is nevertheless not well prepared enough to guarantee the full rights and security of migrants. It is unclear whether the proposed integration is not simply assimilation. On top of this basic obscurity, eventual reactions by the Japanese society are not well studied. There is no guarantee that some Japa-nese citizens will not develop a xenophobic reaction to foreigners who come as competitors into a shrinking job market. As long as the present income gaps between the Japanese and the foreign migrants are corrected, the new Japanese citizens will not fully share the same equality with the old Japanese.

The American policy of the “salad bowl” seems to be adopted when the proposal refers to the education of Japanese citizens. Yet, the basic idea under-lying the proposal is that the old Japanese citizens will always constitute the majority dominating the newly integrated citizens. They will not be mixed with the foreigners in the same salad bowl but rather be kept on top of them. This would constitute a reverse Salad “domburi” (rice bowl with topping), where the salad is underneath the rice (a symbol of the homogeneous Japanese identity). Such a dish would prove to be insipid for many.

Besides the assumption that foreign migrants can be selectively invited to Japan and be socialized to integrate into Japanese society is not realistic. The example of overseas Koreans among whom some acquire a Japanese identity but a great number of them insist on keeping their Korean identity while ac-quiring Japanese nationality, indicates the difficulty of an integration policy which does not accept the idea of having the Japanese mixing with other na-tionalities, creating a “salad bowl” as in the United States.

The problem of integration and that of selecting and training candidates for migration implies that many of those eliminated would continue to try to enter Japan. In this way, the same problem, as in the case of short-term contract migrants, of exploitative brokers supporting “illegal” migration will accom-pany any regime where the migrants are selected, even when they receive


adequate training. It is interesting to notice the fact that the above two recommendations are

based on different principles, one forbidding migrants to settle-down in Japan and the latter trying to accept the settling-down of foreign migrants. Neverthe-less, the two proposals are both trying to maintain the national identity and homogeneity of Japan either by exclusion or by integration.

The true meaning of this immigration policy debate becomes clear when compared with the Diene Report recommendations mentioned in the previous section of this paper.

1. Whereas the Diene Report treats migrants as individuals with equal rights to the Japanese, and recommends the transformation of Japan into a nation where migrants can fully develop their human capacities, the two LDP proposals treat migrants only as a work-force useful to the Japanese economy.

2. The Diene Report does not focus on those migrants admitted legally, but treats all migrants equally, stressing the insecurity and discrimination experienced by undocumented migrants treated as criminal “illegal” migrants. Conversely, the two LDP proposals both work on the assumption that Japan, eventually in agreement with the sending countries’ governments, should exercise its right to select those migrants meeting certain requirements established for the benefit of the Japanese economy and society.

3. The Diene Report seeks the improvement of worker livelihood, and this is where the xenophobic nature of the Japanese identity image is treated as a major cause of the insecurity of migrants. The short-term contract proposition ignores completely the problems arising from the Japanese society’s suspicion of foreigners. The Japan-Style Migration Policy Proposal touches upon the question of xenophobia and recommends the development of multiculturalism. However this recommendation is combined with an insistence on having migrants well trained and educated to be integrated into Japanese society, and does not permit them to keep their own identity. Thus, the term “multi-culturalism” is used only under the condition that migrants behave like Japanese. It is unclear how different this approach is from a policy of assimilation.

The comparison of the UN Report and the two LDT papers leads us to


look more closely at the question of the Japanese homogeneous identity, since the LDP proposals for migration policy reform do not give any good answers concerning how to cope with the difficult task of building a multi-cultural Japan reeducating the Japanese society to overcome the homogeneous identity image presently given credence. They both just assume that the State of Japan can freely dispose of migrants as human resources for production and repro-duction of the Japanese economy and nation.

5. The Social Reproduction of the Japanese Homogeneous Identity

Japan, as a non-Western developmentalist state, generated development ethics of its own, adjusting its traditional ethics to the requirements of national development within the Hegel-Fichte tradition of the Prussian state, replacing the universalist dialectics of the former by historically based patriarchal ethics particular to the Japanese state, turning the latter’s emphasis on national iden-tity into a state religion.

This developmentalist ethics was summarized in the Imperial Edict on Education (Kyoiku Chokugo). It is based on concepts of Confucian ethics, in-cluding filial piety, faithfulness of wives to their husbands, and dedication to serve the Emperor as subjects. It stresses the familial ties uniting the nation with the Emperor at its head, and proclaims that it is the ethical duty of all Japanese subjects to be prepared for eventual mobilization in time of national peril. The Meiji state developmentalist ethics skillfully combined the introduc-tion of Western legal institutions with Japanese ethics.

This developmentalist ethics of the Meiji modern imperial state chose the metaphor, “Japanese spirit with Western skill” (wakon-yousai) to build the Japanese nation. This concept used the family as a core unit for the social reproduction of the Japanese nation. Such communitarian ethics defined the Japanese state in an entirely different way from the Western Enlightenment in that it did not pose as the ultimate unit the individual whose rights are univer-sal. It was a developmentalist state ethics par excellence in the sense that it had as its focus the reproduction of a homogeneous nation dedicated to the defense and the prosperous development of the state. The ethics of social reproduction of the imperial state, attempted to recreate a homogeneous people sharing a common familial tradition under the Emperor, the pater familias of the Japa-nese nation (Eisenstadt, 1995: 8-12).

The Meiji state educational system was reformed and “democratized” after


the defeat of 1945 under the new Basic Law on Education during the Ameri-can occupation. The defeat of the Meiji developmentalist state of Japan was followed by an effort by the U.S. Occupation authorities to democratize Japan, and this objective could not be reached without building an educational system which was not geared to the reproduction of faithful subjects but of individuals conscious of their rights. Consequently, the Japanese government enacted in 1947 a Basic Law on Education (Sakata, 2007), which stated the basic prin-ciples indispensable for the democratization of Japanese education. This law stipulates, for example, as the objectives of education such virtues as “love of truth and justice”, “respect of individual values”, “work and responsibility”, and “autonomous mind”, all individual qualities following the Enlightenment tradition.

This law has now been abrogated into a law emphasizing again the social reproduction of the Japanese nation. This abrogation was the ideological reaction of the Japanese Government and of the Japanese elite in face of global-ization that was perceived to threaten the homogeneity of the Japanese nation. It is interesting to notice that the new Basic Law of Education enacted in 2007 stresses now ”life and environment”, “appreciation of tradition and culture”, and “love of our nation and homeland” which nurtured them, while respect-ing foreign nations and contributing to the “peace and development of the international society”. This emphasis on national traditions and culture, and on patriotism indicates a shift of the revised development ethics of global Japan turning from a Hegelian appreciation of the state to a stress on national identity typical of Fichte, as indicated in his “Rede an die Deutche Nation”.

This new turn in Japanese developmentalist state ethics is not quite a return to the Confucian patriarchal Meiji state ethics. It tries to reproduce a nation, which accepts Enlightenment values and is open to the globalizing neo-liberal international society, and still maintains a national pride about Japanese tradi-tions and culture, as well as a patriotic collective awareness.3

It is important, here, to take note of the fact that the Meiji Imperial Edict on Education and the two Basic Laws on Education of 1947 and 2006 all have in common the basic principle that the state is responsible for the education of Japanese nationals. Alien children are excluded from the three documents that

3. It is interesting to note here that the revised Law on Education stresses the importance of international awareness. The Japanese children should be educated to actively partici-pate in global economic competition. Education of universal norms like human rights is not excluded from education, it is just legitimized by the need to participate in the global market, not on any universal ethical values.


define education as a means of the social reproduction of the Japanese nation. This is where the Japanese educational system is basically different from the ideal of education defined in international law, for example in the Law of the Child which defines the right to education as a right which does not permit the distinction between national and alien children. Its ethical base is not universal human rights but a developmentalist state interest in its social reproduction. This is why we consider the Japanese example as one representing the develop-ment ethics of the developmentalist states, which compete now in achieving global modernity be it in the developing or in the post-socialist states.

As we saw above, the massive influx of migrants, accompanied by the rapid growth of diaspora communities has been met in Japan by a xenophobic reaction denying the rights and security of foreign migrants including their rights to education and to their identity reproduction and development. The xenophobic nature of Japanese state-based ethics is, in a sense, a typical case re-sembling many of the developmentalist authoritarian states. Racism within the context of development tends to discriminate and exploit non-nationals and minorities. This is justified by the national objective to unite and develop the nation. The effort to establish development ethics which accept the social re-production of parallel identities is now indispensable in such situations where the collective rights to development are proclaimed to overrule any individual rights antagonizing national development. In contemporary Japan where this anti-human-rights trend appears to get stronger day-by-day, there is neverthe-less are healthy ongoing counter-current developments in the communities where the Japanese citizens are forced to live together with diaspora communi-ties. In such multi-ethnic and multi-cultural communities quite a number of Japanese citizens try their best to satisfy the identity needs of the non-Japanese migrants, especially reducing the insecurities caused by the lack of educational facilities for their children.

The developmental ethics manifested in the abrogated text of the Basic Law on Education is based on the affirmation of the right to reproduction and development of the Japanese nation. Such ethics are particularistic in that they do not recognize the same rights for foreign diaspora communities in Japan. This is why the abrogated law and its ethical position have been strongly criti-cized by many Japanese intellectuals who believe in human rights and reject xenophobia.

Their critique rejects as collectivistic and nationalistic any ethical position affirming the right to social reproduction of nationalities and ethnic commu-nities, and tries to keep the individualistic principles of the original Basic Law


on Education. There exists among Japanese intellectuals a tendency to con-sider any emphasis on national or other identities as contrary to the universal values of human rights and of individual freedom. This would imply that we should reject the idea of a homogeneous identity and replace it with an indi-vidualistic image of the Japanese society. However, the fact has already pointed out in another paper that many of the foreign diaspora in Japan, beginning with the old-comer Koreans, consider it essential to reproduce their cultural, national or ethnic identity. This is why, rather than to reject any kind of iden-tity reproduction, it is preferable, from the point of view of both the Japanese society and of the different diaspora communities, to accept the co-existence of a variety of cultural, national and ethnic identities, having the state guaran-teeing equal opportunity for the social reproduction of any of these identities. The image of homogeneity of a single Japanese nation should be replaced by a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural co-existence of the different communities within the Japanese nation.

The problem of the abrogation of the Basic Law of Education lies in the fact that it is exclusionary and recognizes the right to social reproduction of national identity only to the Japanese people, treating foreigners as alien “others”(Kristeva, 1988). According to the Japan-style Migration Policy pro-posal, the future new Japanese composing 10% of the Japanese population must be integrated into Japanese society and be socialized to think and act as other Japanese, loosing their own specific identities. This is where the Diene Report road map towards a multi-cultural Japan indicates a much more radical way to go beyond the present homogeneous identity image. It tells us to accept the settling and reproduction of different diaspora communities.

To recognize the right of identity reproduction of migrant communities may imply the influx of too large a migrant flow which would be uncontrollable by the states. Japan, in particular, fears the inflow of migrants, due to its ho-mogeneity image. However, a multi-cultural co-existence of migrant diaspora communities with the society is much more stable than a society where a great number of the migrants enter “illegally” and constitute an informal sector on the fringe of the society.

The present globalization of migration does not follow plans decided by states, and if states select those migrants they permit legal entry, a great number of those migrants who have been rejected try to enter the country through any available means including trafficking and smuggling. The LDP proposal to admit 10 million migrants does not mean that there will be only this number of migrants entering in Japan. There will be additional millions entering illegally


depending on the exclusionary effects of the planned training process.This is why it is essential to develop a global system guaranteeing the right

to live in peace and to reproduce identities in both the developing countries of origin and the industrial countries of destination, so as to reduce the size of the natural migration caused by the rich/poor gap. A self-organizing mechanism limiting the size of the migration flow should be developed on the basis of a global regime of co-existence among identity communities in the North and in the South.

This is however an issue beyond the scope of this paper, it is suffice to mention only the need for the state of Japan to renounce to its claim to re-produce alone its idea of a “homogeneous” identity, forbidding migrant communities to reproduce their own diverse identities. If Japan accepts the reproduction of different national, ethnic, and cultural identities, then it could combine the LDP plans to welcome 10 million migrants, with the building of a truly pluralistic society respecting the human rights of all minorities, foreign or national as recommended by Dr. Diene.

In summary, what is important now in Japan is to guarantee the right to identity reproduction of the diaspora communities along with those same rights of Japanese national minorities, Buraku, Ainu, and Okinawan. A corol-lary would be that for all of them, their right to development should also be recognized, permitting them vertical mobility climbing the social ladder from the informal level upward. This would become possible only when the barrier between the legal migrants of the formal sector and the “illegal” migrants in the informal sector is eliminated. This would make the LDP Japan-style Migrant Policy compatible with the universal norms of international human rights, and complete the road map proposed by Dr. Diene, towards building a multi-cultural society in Japan. This could become an alternative Japan-style migrant policy compatible with the human rights of migrants guaranteeing their human security.

References

Abdel-Malek, Anouar (1972) La dialectique sociale, Seuil.Eisenstadt, S.N. (1995) Japanese Civilization: A comparative view, University of Chicago

Press.Harada, Tatsuo (2005) Objectives and Methods for the Study on the Cities of the Chubu

Region: A Preliminary Rough Sketch, Journal of Human Security 1, 36-50.Inaba, Nanako (2006) Trafficking in Japan: Racism Hindering Victims’/Survivors’

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Kristeva, Julia (1988) Étrangers à nous-mêmes, Gallimard.Mushakoji, Kinhide (1992) Development and Racism in Asia and the Pacific, IMADR

Yearbook 4, 15-30.Mushakoji, Kinhide (1993) Post-Modern Cultural Development in East Asia: Beyond the

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Mushakoji, Kinhide (1998) Global Issues and Interparadigmatic Dialogue: Essays on mul-tipolar politics, Albert Meynier.

Mushakoji, Kinhide (2001) Engendering the Japanese “Double Standard” Patriarchal Democrcy: The Case of the “Comfort Women” and Military Sexual Slavery, In Rita Mae Kelly et al. (ed.) Gender, Globalization, and Democratization, Rowan and Little Field, 205-222.

Mushakoji, Kinhide (2003) Ningen-Anzennhoshou-Ron Josetsu (Introduction to Human Security), Kokusai Shoin.

Mushakoji, Kinhide (2004) Beyond Diasporas: Peace and Human Rights in the Asia Pacific (Report of the Inaugural Symposium of Centre for Asia Pacific Partnership), Centre for Asia Pacific Partnership, Osaka University of Economics and Law.

Mushakoji, Kinhide (2007) ‘Wa’ no Sai-kochiku to jinken no Saiki-teki Naihatsu-ka (The Reconstruction of ‘Wa’ and the Reflexive Endogenization of Human Rights), In Kuniko Miyanaga (ed.) Global-Ka to Paradox (Glonalization and Paradox), Sekai-Shiso-Sha, 107-147.

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Sakata, Takashi (ed.) (2007) Shin Kyouiku-Kihon-Ho: zenbunto kaisetsu (The New Basic Law on Education: Full text and commentary), Kyoiku Kaihatsu Kenkyujo.


115

1. Introduction

The Koreans residing in their former suzerain state have constantly been subject to the direct influence of the power politics in the Korean peninsula, in Japan, and between them. These geopolitical conditions gave Koreans living in Japan certain inherent characteristics. The primary purpose of this paper is to provide an illustration of these characteristics and account for them through an observation of the process of making of the Korean community in Japan and their language use as well as the language education for them.

The primary purpose of this paper is to assess the inherent characteristics and account for them through an observation of the development of both the Korean community in Japan and their language as well as the language educa-tion models they adopted.

For ethnic minorities obtaining the nationality or citizenship of their host country is generally regarded to be desirable because it guarantees a full set of citizenship rights. The majority of resident Koreans in Japan continued living in Japan as resident aliens by their own resolve or simply because there was no other choice. This peculiarity is accounted for in terms of tacit collaboration between the nationalism in Japan and that of Korean communities in Japan.

Koreans in Japan have been devoted towards the promotion of Korean ethnic education and maintaining Korean language even whilst facing the suppressive policies in the postwar period and the following discriminative ignorance towards them as a social group. It is observed that the suppressive and discriminative nature of the Japanese government’s policies for the ethnic education for and by resident Koreans and the perception of Korean language shared by the majority of Korean residents can be characterized by the linguis-

The Twin Nationalisms and Koreans in Japan

Namsun SONGOsaka University of Economics and Law (Japan)

116 Namsun SONG

tic nationalism of Japan and that of Korea which have the same historical and theoretical roots

2. Making of Korean Communities in Japan

2.1. Composition of Koreans in Japan

There is a community of the people who are referred to as zainichi ‘being in Japan’, or zainichi chousenjin/kankokujin ‘Koreans in Japan’. Its population is estimated at 600,000 to 650,000. Yamawaki (2005: 43) writes that by 2004 the number of Koreans in Japan was approximately 610,000 including 460,000 Koreans with the “special permanent resident status” which is the legal status granted by the Japanese government only to those who are from the former colonies and their descendents. The number of Koreans living in Japan was 31% in 2006 of the total number of registered foreigner residents in Japan. The term zainichi, in its narrow sense, is used to denote those who reside in Japan with either chousen (Korean) nationality or the nationality of Republic of Korea. Those who obtained Japanese nationality are regarded simply as Japa-nese. It is estimated that more than 250,000 Koreans have acquired Japanese nationality. They are usually no longer categorized as zainichi and have been automatically excluded from the Korean community. This is what differenti-ates zainichi from the Korean diaspora communities in other countries where one’s obtaining the nationality of the host country is not contradictory to his or her membership of a minority group and those with the nationality of the host country play an important or even a leading role in the minority commu-nity. In this sense, the notion of zainichi does not carry the same entitlements as ethnic minority groups living in Western countries and being incorporated into the mainstream over an extended time period.

Korean residents in Japan consist mainly of two groups, i.e. the old comers and new comers. The old comers are those who immigrated or forcibly brought to Japan before 1945 or immediately after and their descendents. They make up the majority of Korea residents in Japan and their number is approximately 450,000. The majority of the old comers are from the southern areas of Korean peninsula. In 1988 the restrictions on traveling abroad for South Koreans were relaxed. It resulted in a rapid increase in the number of so-called new comers. Many of them work in family businesses run by resident Koreans or marry resident Koreans or Japanese. The number of new comers is estimated around

117The Twin Nationalisms and Koreans in Japan

at 150,000 plus presumably 50,000 illegal stayers.The number of Koreans naturalizing as Japanese has increased. In the

1950’s, less than 2,500 a year became naturalized. The number increased to 3,600 per year in the year 1960 to 1966. The number stabilized at around 5,000 a year through 1970’s and 1980’s. In 1990’s the number increased to approxi-mately 10,000 per year. The decrease in the number of Korean residents in Japan due to naturalization is constantly being replenished by increasing new immigrants.

2.2. Colonial period

In 1905 Japan deprived Korea of its diplomatic authority making Korea its protectorate. After laying the groundwork for colonization in the following years, Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910, enforcing Koreans to become Japanese imperial subjects.

Although a small number of Korean students and seasonal workers were found in Japan even before annexation (Fujii, 2005:179), labor migration in-creased after 1910. As the First World War broke out, the demand for industrial labor in Japan increased dramatically, and Japanese industry started recruiting Koreans aggressively (Inokuchi, 2000:142). The national census of 1920 re-corded approximately 40,000 Koreans in Japan, the number increasing in 1930 to 420,000 and in 1940, 1,240,000 approximately (Morita, 1968:66).

Japan faced an even more severe labor shortage with the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. From 1939 to December 1944, a total of 634,093 male Koreans were brought to Japan to supplement the labor force in various sectors: 320,148 worked in coal mining, 61,409 in metal mining, 129,664 in construction and civil engineering, and 122,872 in manufacturing and ma-chining industries (Ryang, 2000:3). In spite of the slogan naisenittai meaning that Korea and Japan must form one body sharing “blood and flesh”, Korean workers were subjected to slave labor. The colonial experience Koreans had in Japan inevitably made them extremely anti-Japanese and nationalist.

By 1945 when the Japanese Empire collapsed, the population of Koreans in Japan had swelled to approximately 2,100,000 (Fujii, 2005:179). Many of them returned to their homeland right after the war ended.

About 600,000 remained in Japan. Owing to Soviet and the U.S. occupa-tion many of them hesitated to go home being uncertain about the prospect of having an independent home country. Also a prolonged stay in Japan meant that many of them had no means of living in their homeland.

118 Namsun SONG

2.3. Post-war period

The status of Koreans in Japan immediately after Japan’s defeat resulted from a combination of the policies of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and the policies taken by the Japanese government. The attitude of SCAP toward Koreans in Japan was ambiguous. They treated Koreans in Japan as “liberated people” who should be protected. At the same time, in terms of maintaining social security they identified Koreans as nationals of the enemy state, i.e. Japanese nationals or “disturbing elements” that had to be segregated.

The Japanese government took advantage of the ambiguous status of Koreans. They continued to treat Koreans as Japanese nationals to facilitate the social control of them, while they restricted Koreans’ citizenship rights. The policies of SCAP in combination with the policies of the Japanese government left Koreans in Japan being technically Japanese but practically stateless.

The Alien Registration Law of 1947 saw that Koreans in Japan were re-garded as aliens. The revised Nationality Law of 1950 took the principle of patrilineal jus sanguinis stipulating that aliens’ descendents born in Japan would be aliens. This enabled Japan to keep Koreans, generation after genera-tion, under the immigration control without giving them an option to take advantage of having any benefit from the Japanese nationality they were once forced to accept.

The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1952 guaranteed Korean independence from Japan. The Japanese government stipulated the uniform loss of Japa-nese nationality by Koreans and Taiwanese as a result of the treaty. The loss of Japanese citizenship drove Koreans living in Japan into an extremely inse-cure stateless status due to the lack of diplomatic relations between North and South Koreas and Japan. It also meant that Koreans lost all the socio-political rights they had as the colonial subjects. National health insurance was one of the rights Koreans lost in 1952. The national pension scheme, for instance, was only extended to Koreans in Japan in 1982 that is 30 years after the Peace Treaty, when Japan ratified International Covenants on Human Rights and the UN Refugee Convention. Before the liberation Koreans were discriminated against and put under surveillance while they were defined as the subjects of the empire. The Peace Treaty brought a conclusion to this contradictory dual definition of Koreans. The Japanese government continued putting Koreans under surveillance, i.e. under strict immigration control laws that allowed the Japanese to simply treat them as aliens.

Immediately after liberation Koreans in Japan formed Caeil cosenin


yenmeng (the League of Koreans in Japan, hereafter the league). The major purpose of the organization was the repatriation of all Koreans in Japan. The leadership of the league was controlled by communists and leftists and formed a close tie with the Japanese Communist Party. Anti-communists organized the Association of Koreans in Japan, or Mindan in abbreviation. The league brought together the overwhelming majority of Koreans in Japan. Ōnuma (1980: 241 n87) points out that the league received support from between 60 and 90 % of Koreans in Japan.

As the peak of repatriation passed, the main concern of the league shifted to the improvement of the life of Koreans remaining in Japan and their educa-tion. The league integrated Korean schools which had been built by individual efforts and constructed new schools throughout Japan. By October 1947, 541 elementary schools, seven junior schools, and eight high schools as well as twenty-two adolescent schools, came into existence (Inokuchi, 2000:149). The educational orientation of the league was nationalist rather than commu-nist. The primary purpose of these schools was to restore Korean culture and history and improve Korean language skills which were all suppressed under the imperial rule.

SCAP was against the establishment of Korean schools regarding the ex-istence of a minority ethnic group as a source of social conflict (Inokuchi, 2000:149). They claimed that Korean children must be included in Japanese compulsory education. They defined Koreans schools as the “hostile educa-tional institutions” run by a communist organization (Shin, 2005:275). At first, the Japanese government was to approve the establishment of Korean schools as “miscellaneous schools” (Lee, 2006:220-221) that is a category for schools whose educational credentials would not constitute fulfilling the requirements for entry into higher educational institutes. The Japanese government, however, changed its policy in accordance to the policies of Allied occupational forces and issued the order on 24th January 1948 that all Korean children must attend the schools accredited by the Japanese government.

In September 1949, the Japanese government, backed by SCAP, applied the order to regulate the activities of “anti-democratic” and “terrorist” organiza-tions to the league and in the process the league was dissolved. Korean schools were simultaneously ordered to close.

It should be noted that the majority of Korean schools built and supported by Mindan were closed by the same order. This indicates that what annoyed the Japanese government and the occupation authorities was not only the threat of communism but the very existence of undesirable ethnic minority groups.

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2.4. Conflicts

Entering the 1950’s, the cold war tensions rose only to culminate in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. The division of the homeland and the conflict between the two regimes was reflected in Korean communities in Japan. By the time the war ended in 1953, the division between the leftists and rightists were irreconcilable.

Following the league’s dissolution, left-wing Koreans formed the Demo-cratic Unified Front of Koreans in Japan or Minzun in abbreviation in 1951 and eventually organized the General Association of Koreans in Japan or Chon-gryun in abbreviation in 1955. Whereas the league was not a North Korean organization since North Korean state did not exist yet when it was formed, Chongryun unequivocally upheld safeguarding the honor of North Korea defining Koreans in Japan as its overseas nationals. Mindan strengthened its tie with South Korea as much as the leftists declined to North Korea. Chon-gryun enjoyed broad support from Koreans in Japan despite that more than ninety percent of Koreans in Japan were originally from South Korea. To the eyes of the majority of Koreans in Japan who were enthusiastic supporters of postcolonial nationalism, the North Korean regime looked more legitimate than American-backed South Korean regime. Police authorities estimated in 1955 that about 90% of Koreans in Japan supported North Korea (See Ryang, 2000:35).

Chongryun rebuilt Korean schools receiving unanimous support from resident Koreans. By 1988 it built one university, 12 high schools, 56 junior high schools, and 83 elementary schools. Chongryun Korean schools have been consistently supported by North Korea. Ryang (2000:24) writes that the cumulative total of North Korean educational aid amounted to about 42 billion yen as of 1st January 1995.

The 1965 restoration of the diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan brought a significant change in the power relations between the two rep-resentative organizations of Koreans in Japan. The Korea-Japan Treaty enabled Koreans in Japan to obtain the right of permanent residence on condition that they apply for South Korean nationality. Application for South Korean nation-ality involved a bundle of civil rights as well as a passport that enabled them to travel abroad. The applicants included many Chongryun supporters. The treaty and the permanent resident status gave a birth to zainichi as resident aliens.

In the 1980’s and the 1990’s, Korean communities in Japan underwent profound changes. Koreans in Japan enjoyed partial benefits from the long-


term economic growth that occurred in Japan in the latter half of twentieth century. The economic development and democratization of South Korea in combination with the increasing availability of the first-hand information of economic disasters and the deplorable situations concerning human rights in North Korea gradually made Chongryun-affiliated Koreans a minority group among Koreans in Japan. Ratification of International Covenants on Human Rights in 1979 and the United Nations Refugee Convention in 1981 compelled the Japanese government to improve the level of protection of Koreans in Japan and extend the range of their citizenship rights. In 1981, the Japanese govern-ment created a new permanent resident status to cover the chousen (Korean) nationality holders. In 1991, all permanent resident statuses for the former colonial subjects and their descendants were unified under the category of “special permanent residence.” These changes mark the transition of Koreans in Japan from sojourners to permanent settlers.

By the 1990’s more than ninety percent of resident Koreans were Japan-born. The majority do not speak Korean. They are fully assimilated to Japanese life-styles and the values. More than 90% of Korean children go to Japanese schools and around seventy percent of the marriages are with Japanese. They have little interest in joining either North or South Korean political or social interest groups. The homeland-oriented politics by Korean-born immigrants has lost its appeal. The politics among resident Koreans can no more be cap-tured adequately in terms of Chongryun vs. Mindan.

3. Tacit collaboration

When the first alien registration was implemented in Japan in 1947, Koreans numbered 598,507 out of the total 639,368 resident aliens, i.e. Koreans accounted for 94% of the total aliens registered in Japan (Yamawaki, 2005:41). Koreans remained the majority of aliens living in Japan until the 1970’s. It means that the Japanese policies for resident aliens were practically equivalent to the policies for resident Koreans. The policies for resident aliens of a state usually consist of immigration control and the social integration. In terms of social order and security, the presence of a large group of foreign residents always concerns a host state. Their movement of the country has to be properly controlled. At the same time decisions have to be made whether to encourage them to return to the home countries, as the Japanese government did by en-couraging resident Koreans to repatriate to North Korea, or seek some way to

122 Namsun SONG

incorporate them into society through the extension of citizenship rights so that their marginalization may not pose a problem. Yamawaki (2005:45) suggests that the postwar Japanese policies for resident Koreans were synonymous to immigration controls lacking the notion of social incorporation. The Japanese did not develop or regulate their policies in regard to the concept of Koreans’ permanent settlement and their integration into the Japanese society.

In the colonial period, Japan attempted to incorporate Koreans into society by defining them as the emperor’s subjects and therefore acknowledging the multiethnic composition of the empire’s population to some extent. Kashi-wazaki (2000:27) says that after Japan’s defeat in war, in contrast, academics and popular writers portrayed Japan as an island-nation inhabited by homo-geneous people. The fact that the Japanese postwar economic growth was achieved in dependence not on foreign labor but on the massive population flow from rural communities to urban areas reinforced the postwar discourse of Japan as a single-ethnic homogeneous nation-state (Nishinarita, 1997:349). The prevailing postwar conception of homogeneous Japan that is shared by the Japanese government “attached symbolic cultural and ethnic meanings to nationality” (Kashiwazaki, 2000:27), i.e. nationality is national essence.

Harajiri (1998:77) claims plausibly that the Japan’s postwar policies for Koreans in Japan are best illustrated in terms of exclusion and assimilation. Koreans have been excluded from Japanese society by being kept under strict immigration control or repatriated to North Korea. The channel for naturaliza-tion was tightly maintained in a restricted manner. The political orientations of the individual applicants for naturalization were thoroughly inspected. They were expected to adjust to Japanese culture and convention to a considerable extent. They were also expected to adopt a name that sounds Japanese. Natu-ralization was allowed only to those who were assimilated enough so as not to undermine the existing homogeneity of Japanese society.

In the Western contexts, it is now taken for granted that nationhood does not presuppose ethnicity in its racial or cultural implications. However, in East Asia there is a strong illusion that nationhood and its membership is not something that is defined and delimited by law but lies in ethnic substance. In these societies, nationality tends to have a close association with authenticity. Hayao (2007) portrayed how the notion of authenticity is employed for the control of the colonized by the colonizers. Colonized nationals are required to make every effort to become authentic nationals. However, since authen-ticity is considered to be a set of attributes that can be acquired with only by authentic nationals, it is impossible for the colonized to gain it by imitation.


Consequently, they are subject to an endless assimilation process.Whilst Korea was under occupation, Koreans were expected to endeavor

to be full-fledged subjects of the emperor because they were granted Japanese nationality, the token of authenticity they must respect so as not bring shame on the state. After the war they are required to undergo the same process to obtain the token.

The aforementioned uniqueness of Koreans in Japan is that they have re-mained in the status of resident aliens for more than half a century ever since the end of the Second World War. However, this cannot be attributed only to the exclusive and naïve nature of the policies taken by the Japanese authori-ties for Koreans in Japan. Kashiwazaki (2000:13-31) shows how the equation between nationality and national essence held by the Japanese authorities was rather ironically shared by the majority of resident Koreans. She points out that both rightist and leftist organizations had common grounds: they were adamantly anti-Japanese and anti-colonial, nationalists and “repatriationists.” Neither of them, therefore, had any agenda covering the eventual settlement of Koreans in Japan. They both believed or at least advocated that Korea would be reunified before long and Koreans in Japan would all go back home.

When the uniform loss of Japanese nationality was stipulated by the Japa-nese authorities in 1952, Koreans were both willing to accept it and rejected the idea of retaining Japanese nationality. It took several decades for Koreans in Japan to realize what they really lost. The two Korean organizations instead were deeply involved in the “loyalty competition” persuading Koreans to take the nationality of the state that they believed was legitimate. Neither made active commitments to extend citizenship rights for their fellow people. They made little demand for dual nationality and were consistently opposed to the activities demanding facilitation of naturalization procedures insisting that it would lead to further assimilation. Chongryun, from its own self-definition of an organization for North Korean overseas nationals, did not involve itself in Japanese politics but strived to raise the consciousness of its members and af-filiates to devote themselves to North Korea. It has consistently been opposed to the Koreans demand for suffrage in Japan. It was also indifferent to the Koreans movements to refuse fingerprints on alien registration certificates in the 1980’s.

The activists of the two organizations regarded Korean language and their nationalities as the major representations of the national essence or Korean-ness. As monolingualization of Koreans in Japan furthered, both organizations became more dependent on the symbolic value of the nationality. All ethnic

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communities will have norms for evaluating who is and is not a member (Fought, 2006:7). One can be denied membership in the community because of the actions that signal a lack of loyalty or some other lack of adherence to the norms considered appropriate to group. In Korean communities, ob-taining Japanese nationality has been taken as an action to infringe the norm that led to a sanction, i.e. exclusion from the community. The majority of naturalized Koreans remain silent about their ethnic heritage. Therefore, the number of those naturalized was automatically subtracted from the population of Koreans in Japan both by Korean communities and the Japanese authori-ties. The considerably low rate of naturalization of Koreans in Japan, thus, is a consequence of the interaction between two parties who share the same nationalistic discourse.

4. Twin linguistic nationalisms

It would be worth shedding light on the Japanese linguistic nationalism in the prewar and the postwar periods and its relations to the counterpart in Korea to address the issues of Korean language education and Korean language use in Japan in proper historical and sociological contexts.

It is often a case that what is believed to have been passed down from the remote past is actually a product of modernity acceding to certain political or economical requests. The notion of a nation, nationhood, nationality, and a national language are among them. The power those notions have lies in that they betray their birth by looking primordial.

There is a prevailing discourse in postwar Japan that Japan is a homogeneous single-ethnic nation-state. Japan has highly congruent speech community with less than 2% comprising the minority population. The Japanese identify their ethnicity with their language. “There is a strong general interest in the lan-guage, which is often portrayed as incorporating the true spirit of the Japanese people. Such ideas are of modern origin and can be traced to European linguis-tic nationalism.” (Coulmas, 1999:404)

After the 1868 restoration of imperial order, modern nation-building became the agenda of Japan. The notion of the national language was con-sidered to be one of the apparatuses urgently needed to integrate the people in Japan to a congruent political and national unit, i.e. the Japanese nationals. The notion of the national language of Japan was outlined and formulated by one prominent linguist Ueda Kazutoshi (1986-1937) who played a crucial role


in the making of linguistic policy by the Japanese Ministry of Education in the imperial period (see Yasuda, 2000:66-82). After his education in Germany, he called for the want of the unified language of Japan. He called the Japanese language the spiritual blood of the nation whereby the Japanese could have a sense of oneness. He advocated that the national spirit could be fostered only through the diffusion of a standardized national language. It is apparent that his theory is based on German romanticism in which two common concepts of blood and Volksgeist (the “spirit” inherent in a people) are supposed to be the basis of nationality. These two are related to language in the belief that a common national consciousness and a common way of looking at reality can be shared by people who share hereditary bloodlines and language (Safran, 1999:79). His theory formed the basic tones of the modern Japanese linguistic policies. The defeat in the war did not weaken the nationalistic tone. On the contrary, the experience of failed colonial expansion reinforced the idea that Japanese is the proper language of only the Japanese. Little room was left for fostering alternative visions of an ethnically and linguistically diverse society.

Japanese attempts at modern-nation building coincided with its em-pire-building. Thus the notion of the national language forged by Ueda was simultaneously applied to its colonies. It was claimed that the colonial subjects could become authentic subjects of the emperor through education and accul-turation in terms of the national language. As Chen (2005:43-44) points out, the Japanese colonizers came up with a self-contradicting norm for equality by insisting that the colonized would be granted equal status when they became as civilized as the colonizers. However, since the term of civilization in their use was synonymous to assimilation in terms of the Japanese language, fulfill-ment of the promise of equality would be postponed indefinitely. A colonial subject, however good at the Japanese language he or she might be, could not reach the genuine mastery of the language which was preserved for possession by the authentic Japanese nationals. This is the brutality and naivety of the as-similation policy taken by the imperial Japan that was based on the belief that a nation should share one sole national language.

Miura (2000:19-20) illustrates the introduction of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s thoughts of the language to Korea and its impacts. Fichte gave well-known patriotic lectures “Reden an die deutsche Nation” (1807-1808) on fourteen oc-casions in Berlin, whilst occupied by Napoleon’s force to inspire the German people with fighting spirit. He stated that the language and the nation are in an inseparable relation and the language is the very essence of the national spirit. He emphasized the oldness and the purity of the German nation and

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attributed them to the purity of German language. German people who main-tained their own primordial language were held to be superior to the French who had a Latinized language. The German language is referred to as “the primordial spring of life” of the people. The views of the language and the nation clarified by Fichte were not his own but the ones shared by German romanticists who defined the language as “what generates” rather than “what is generated” as seen in Humboldt (1910:152). Fichte’s ideas of the language and the nation along with the basic tones of the German romanticist theories of the language contributed to forming German nationalism and later laid the theoretical grounds for Nazi’s Fascism.

It was “an irony of the history” (Miura, 2000:20) that the Fichte’s thought, as soon as it was translated and introduced to Korea in 1932, attracted the Korean intellectuals involved in the movements for Korea’s independence and were overwhelmingly accepted by them to produce a strong counter discourse against the Japanese linguistic assimilation policy formulated by Ueda. The German philosophy which provided German Fascists and Japanese imperial-ists with their theoretical bases was employed by the colonized intellectuals to forge the counter discourse against the colonial rule. Korean nationalists in-cluding Coe Hyen Pae attempted to mold a national identity for Korean people through the diffusion of standardized Korean regarding the two things as being indispensably related to each other. The linguistic nationalism of Japan and that of Korea share the same root.

Kumatani (1997:192) holds that the linguistic nationalism in South Korea is still in a classic paradigm in which the love of the national language is equal-ized with the love of the nation and the state on the basis of the firm belief of Korea as a homogeneous single-ethnic nation-state.

He claims that it is an undeniable historical fact of modern Korean, its lexicon in particular, was formed modeling the Japanese language whether one likes it or not. He says that the Korean language had incorporated Japa-nese vocabulary in bulk in Kaewhaki (Enlightenment period 1876-1910). The extensive adoption of Japanese words was made in an attempt to modernize Korea following the modeling of Japan. Kumatani picked up the examples from Tonglip Sinmwun (The Independent Newspaper) that started being printed in 1896. The Korean words cited below are only a few examples originating from the Japan-made Chinese character words that were also adopted into the Chinese language. These words were borrowed and allocated a corresponding Korean sounds.


Kyengjaehak (economics), kongdong (cooperation), kwankey (relation), kwuelli (a right), Kwukcang (a theater), kihoy (a chance), taephyo (a representative), mokcyek (a purpose), mwullihak (physics), miswul (fine art), pwutongsan (real estate), pwunsek (analysis), sangep (commerce), swuhak (mathematics), sinyong (credence), yensel (a speech), uyhoy (parliament), cenpo (a telegram), cengtang (a political party), cengpwu (a government), cyongkyo (religion), cyunki (steam), chelhak (philosophy), chwulphan (publication), chioypepkwen (extraterritoriality), twuphyo (vote), hakki (a school term), hangi (protest), haepang (liberation), hyengpep (criminal law)

The Japanese language has words written in Chinese characters with native Japanese sounds such as teate (a special allowance), kozutsumi (a parcel), yougasa (an umbrella), amagasa (an umbrella), kaiki (a buying sentiment). These Japanese words also came into use in Korean with the corresponding Korean sounds for the Chinese characters resulting in swutang, sopo, yangsan, wusan, maeki, respectively.

Kumatani states that the basic framework for the lexicon of modern Korean had come to its completion adopting masses of Japanese vocabulary before Korea was colonized by Japan. The incorporation was so extensive that “linguistic life would become impossible instantly if the use of these words should be banned”.

Under the Japanese colonial rule most Koreans were forced to become more or less bilingual in their use of Korean and Japanese as aforementioned. Many intellectuals were better at Japanese writing than Korean writing. This furthered the borrowing from the Japanese language including the direct loan words with Japanese sounds such as kanjyo (counting), tettai (assistance) , banto (a head clerk), tabi (split-toe socks), momohiki (underpants), aimai (ambiguous), jimi (plain), wakamama (selfish), saki (fraud), humikiri (a rail-road crossing). Korean loan words from Japanese included those that had been borrowed from the Western languages for use in Japanese such as penkki (house paint), seymeyntu (cement), pokeytto (a pocket), syatu (a shirt), koppu (a glasss) .

The borrowing from Japanese was so extensive as to include the colloca-tions and syntactic structures which took hold in Japanese through translation of the Western languages such as ~ul uymihada (mean that ~), ~hajyamajya (as soon as ~), ~ey thulimi epta (must be ~, there is no doubt that ~), etc.

The Korean Language Purification Movement which had been under suppression by the imperial rulers was boosted immediately after Korea’s lib-eration from Japan. The movement aimed to thoroughly remove the Japanese

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elements penetrating the Korean language. They were regarded as the dregs of the linguistic assimilation policy. The naivety of the movement led by Korean linguists represented by Coe Hyen Pae, as asserted by Kumatani (1997:183), was that it confined the target mainly to the direct loan words with Japanese sounds because they were conspicuous owing to their exotic sounds making them an easy target for the movement to launch a campaign appealing to the general public. The leaders of the movement did not face up to the reality that the Japanese elements adapted to their national language were too wide-spread and ubiquitous to tell and had already become too deeply rooted to remove.

The shallowness and the chauvinistic coloring of the movement was an inevitable outcome of Korean linguistic nationalism holding an axiom that the national spirit or Koreanness is generated and underpinned by Korean language. The national language, which could never be purified, entailed that Koreans would never be free from yamato tamasii (the soul of Japan), which was totally unacceptable for Korean nationalists.

North Korean linguistic policies presuppose that Korean nationhood is inseparably associated with descent and the language. The equation of the na-tionhood and the language can be seen in the remarks referring to Korean language made by Kim Il Sung whose teachings entail absolute obedience in North Korea. In his remarks on January 3rd 1964 Kim Il Sung defined the language as one of the most important commonalities to characterize a nation. He stated that even those who share the descent and the territory could not be regarded as being of the same nation if they speak different languages. It was also emphasized that Koreans ought to be proud of having one single language that is beautiful and superior.

The ideology that the language equates to the nation was inherited by Kim Jong Il, Kim Il Sung’s successor. Referring to the aforementioned instruction by his predecessor in 1964, he stated that Korean is a language that is unparalleled in the world in its “purity” and “homogeneity” (Kim Jong Il, 1994). He also remarked that the reason why Koreans in Japan belong to the Korean nation even if they live in Japan is because they share the descent and the language with Koreans on the peninsula. An overall consideration of the views of the language and nationhood shared by the two leaders and the language policies of North Korea springing from the former, shows that they are underpinned by strong adherence to the presupposition of Korea as a homogeneous single-ethnic nation-state and the linguistic nationalism that equates nationhood or national essence with the language.


5. Linguistic nationalism and Koreans in Japan

In recent Western contexts the assertion that nationhood is based on descent and language does not enjoy broad support as typically seen in Kohn (1945:13): “nationalism comes into existence only when objective bonds delimit a social group. A nationality generally has several potentially unify-ing elements; very few have all of them. The most usual of them are common descent, language, territory, political entity, customs and tradition, (but) none of them is essential to the existence of nationality.” If only language were to be considered as the sufficient ingredient of nationalism (defined as a politically mobilizing and state-seeking ideology), there would be several thousand sov-ereign states, rather than the existing two hundred (Safran, 1999:78). It is not the consciousness of having a common language that makes for nationalism but the growth of nationalist sentiment that endows language with political importance. Alfred Cobban (1970:121-122) says that the common conscious-ness of being a nation was derived far more from living in common and sharing common ideals than from any racial, linguistic, or cultural inheritance.

It should be noted that Korean language education in Japan has been con-ducted under pressure from the three parties; Japan, South Korea and North Korea where language, descent, and nationhood are still equated. The three parties, more or less, dealt with the Korean community in Japan with a black-white dichotomy promoting the idea that you are “one of us” or you are “one of them”. Nationality (of North Korea, South Korea or Japan) and language have been seen as key indicators of an individual’s positioning with respect to the dichotomy. The identities of human beings in modern societies are complex. People live their lives constantly changing their roles and expectations, con-structing complex identities in which ethnicity is but one component, not even the dominant one. However, the black-white dichotomy imposed by the surrounding powers have pushed to the side the variations and options that should have been available to Korean residents in Japan.

Japanese authorities and leaders, who have faith in the discourse of Japan as a homogeneous single nation-state where one’s mother tongue is automati-cally one’s national language, have not been imaginative enough to realize that they have a considerable number of people in their territory whose mother tongue and the language of the homeland are not compatible. Their attitudes toward Korean ethnic education have been either suppressive or indifferent. They suppressed Korean ethnic schools closing them by force in the late 1940’s. They have treated Korean schools run by Chongryun as if they did not exist in

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their country. The Japanese government has not funded Chongryun schools which are run by tax payers of Japan. The situation has recently changed slight-ly, as some local governments have decided to give certain limited kinds of aid to Korean schools. In Kanagawa prefecture, for instance, the allowances from the local government for the Chongryun school students are only one quarter of those for Japanese private school students (Ryang, 1997:24). Hitherto not a single yen has come from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s central funds.

The ethnic identity of “self ” is constructed in contrast with an ethnic one of “others”. Many Japan-born Koreans visit South Korea to be educated in their homeland learning Korean language. They have the common experience of feeling more alienated in their homeland than in Japan while in Japan they feel they have Korean ethnic identity. Japan-born Koreans are viewed and il-lustrated in South Korea either as deplorable people who lost their language and identity or the laudable ones who strive to restore their identity. In either case, resident Koreans are portrayed in terms of being victims. The following remarks cited from Chung Daekyun (2001:127) by a Japan-born traditional dance performer give a good picture:

Taking a taxi and exchanging a few words with the driver, he is often asked, “Have you been abroad for long?” or “Are you from Japan?” The taxi drivers carrying various customers instantly tell correctly where their customer is from and how old he/she is. I reply, “I am caeil kyopho (Korean Japanese).” Then he says “You are good at our language.” However, in this country (Korea) “you are good at our language” instantly may switch to “Aren’t you Korean? How can you be so bad at Korean?”. It is a well-worn phrase for picking on Korean Japanese. They don’t hesitate even to say “Go back to Japan.”

Congruency of the speech community South Koreans live in and their faith in the discourse that their nationhood lies in their language hinder them from understanding the cost and the time Japan-born Koreans spend to learn Korean as a second language.

As aforementioned, Chongryun established a nationwide organizational network. It built more than 150 Korean schools including nursery schools, elementary, junior high, high schools and one university. All subjects except for English and Japanese are taught in Korean. Students are encouraged and required to use Korean not only in class but in during breaks, lunch time, and whilst involved in extra-curricular activities. Chungryun has provided Japan-born Koreans with highly effective bilingual education. Except for the


commitments of Chongryun the maintenance of Korean language among resi-dent Koreans would not have been possible.

Chongryun and the resident Koreans affiliated to it have formed a rather closed community in Japan. Korean is Chongryun’s “official” language that is used at all meetings, conferences, seminars, art performances and events. As Kim, I (1994:187) points out, Korean language education in Chongryun’s schools is, therefore, indispensable for continuity of the community organiza-tion of Chongryun.

Korean language education by Chongryun has been conducted under the heavy influence of the linguistic nationalism in North Korea. It has been carried out in accordance with the teachings of the North Korean leaders that the language is exactly the nation.

Strong glamorization of the language of their motherland is seen in Chon-gryun’s Korean community. Korean language is always described as something they were deprived of and they must reclaim or restore at any cost, while Japa-nese is something that was imposed on them and they must overcome. Thus the use of Korean and Japanese has been described in terms of victimization and shame. In these contexts the mastery of Japanese language by Korean children as their first language, which is an inevitable result, is taken to be abnormal. Prior to the editing of new textbooks in 1983, Korean language education had been carried out with the principle that Korean is their mother tongue and Japanese is their second language.

The equation of nationhood and the language entails that the majority of resident Koreans who are Japanese monolingual are not true Koreans. It is advocated that they can ‘become’ Koreans only through endeavors to learn Korean language. In a word, Korean language learning in Chongryun schools is considered as a sacred ordeal whereby one can restore the deprived ethnic identity to become a genuine Korean.

This shows the process in which nationalism in the host country and the home country is copied by a minority group to produce pressure within the community. A well-known Japan-born Korean writer Yang Suk Il remarks that patriotic ethnic consciousness of Koreans in Japan is measured by his/her com-petence in the language of motherland.

It is generally acknowledged that the pressure to use the heritage language may be strong where the language tied to an ethnic identity is perceived as threatened. In such a case, not knowing the language can be a source of shame, embarrassment, or criticism. Maeda Tatsurou (2005) interviewed a group of Ja-pan-born Koreans who managed to acquire considerable command of Korean

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language without going to Korean schools in Japan. Some went to South Korea for language learning and some learned Korean at language schools, etc. His analysis shows that they had strong ethnic consciousness that they could not be a genuine Korean but for the good command of the language. The ideology to equalize nationhood with language acquisition was their main motivation for learning Korean. It is suggestive that his interviewing those who do not have any knowledge of Korean shows that they share the belief that ethnic identity is represented by language and many of them feel ashamed of not being able to speak Korean. The discourse that nationhood is language prevails among Korean residents in Japan regardless of their competence of Korean language. It has been a strong motivation for learning Korean and at the same time gener-ated a constant pressure on them as well as a sentiment of shame.

6. Recent Trends

In the 1990’s and the early 2000’s the concept of South Korea among the Japanese underwent significant changes. Seoul Olympics in 1988 removed the image of South Korea as a state of military dictatorship. Joint sponsorship of 2002 Soccer World Cup generated a sense of solidarity between the younger generations of Korean and Japanese. Korean pop culture caught on throughout Japan. They all together changed the contexts in which Korea is viewed. It is now mentioned along with the name of a famous footballer, different styles of soccer, new fashion trends and foods in the Kagnam area of Seoul, a spot where the main character couple met in a TV drama while it used to be in terms of a civil war, military conflicts and demonstrations.

The new trends inspired many Japanese as well as resident Koreans to learn the Korean language. About 1,800 took Korean Language Proficiency Test in spring 1998. It increased to 2,800 in spring 2001 and to 9,000 in spring 2004. The number of Japanese high schools giving Korean language lessons were 42 in 1993, became 159 in 1999, and increased to 219 in 2003. By 2003, 335 uni-versities out of a total of 702 Japanese universities resumed Korean language courses.

Korean communities also went through important changes. The third and fourth generation Koreans are less interested in the power politics in their homelands, with their homelands and within their communities. They focus on improving their status in Japan attempting to extend their citizenship rights. More Koreans including Chonryun’s affiliates take their ethnic identity only as


one of the identities they have. They do not delimit their communities in terms of the language any more. They seem to be interested in how to integrate their complex identities including their ethnic one rather than deciding where they belong. They are more interested in their “ego identity” rather than their “self identity” in Erikson’s (1968) terms.

Korean residents in Japan have been subject to strong nationalism that exists in Japan, South Korea and North Korea for more than half a century. They have been constantly pressed by each country’s nationalism for a decision in relation to their affiliation and membership. They have been tested as to the ascription of their loyalty to a state by means of nationality. They have also been tested as to their entitlement to membership of a community by means of language. This paradigm still remains unchanged. However, Koreans in Japan seem to be changing themselves with more flexibility and universality. They are coping with the black-white dichotomy posed by the surrounding national-isms with more reservation.

As aforementioned, Korean language has functioned mainly as a type community language, a tool to express solidarity, to confirm one’s identity and belonging, and demonstrate one’s adherence to the community and the homeland. Koreans learned Korean language for their ethnic identity. In 1993, Chogryun made an extensive reform of its school curriculum. Chongryun seems to be trying to reformulate its Korean language education from the education for the reproduction of its closed community to teaching Korean for communications with broader Korean-spoken communities including the people on Korean peninsula.

As newcomers increase, resident Koreans have more contact with native Koreans. They are exposed to more South Korean mass culture. This is chang-ing the functions of Korean language used by resident Koreans. More resident Koreans are learning Korean language for jobs, for better education, and for sufficing their cultural interest, which all go beyond Korean language as a community language. It would be desirable if these new trends should come together to make Korean language a language for the future of Koreans in Japan.

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