Visualized Narratives: Signs, Symbols, Political Mythology in East Asia, Europe and the US

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Nele Noesselt
Keyword(s):  
The Us ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Sidney Xu Lu

Abstract This article explains how the US westward expansion influenced and stimulated Japanese migration to Brazil. Emerging in the nineteenth century as expanding powers in East Asia and Latin America, respectively, both Meiji Japan and post-independence Brazil looked to the US westward expansion as a central reference for their own processes of settler colonialism. The convergence of Japan and Brazil in their imitation of US settler colonialism eventually brought the two sides together at the turn of the twentieth century to negotiate for the start of Japanese migration to Brazil. This article challenges the current understanding of Japanese migration to Brazil, conventionally regarded as a topic of Latin American ethnic studies, by placing it in the context of settler colonialism in both Japanese and Brazilian histories. The study also explores the shared experiences of East Asia and Latin America as they felt the global impact of the American westward expansion.


Author(s):  
Paul J. Heer

This book chronicles and assesses the little-known involvement of US diplomat George F. Kennan—renowned as an expert on the Soviet Union—in US policy toward East Asia, primarily in the early Cold War years. Kennan, with vital assistance from his deputy John Paton Davies, played pivotal roles in effecting the US withdrawal from the Chinese civil war and the redirection of American occupation policy in Japan, and in developing the “defensive perimeter” concept in the western Pacific. His influence, however, faded soon thereafter: he was less successful in warning against US security commitments in Korea and Indochina, and the impact of the Korean War ultimately eclipsed his strategic vision for US policy in East Asia. This was due in large part to Kennan’s inability to reconcile his judgment that the mainland of East Asia was strategically expendable to the United States with his belief that US prestige should not be compromised there. The book examines the subsequent evolution of Kennan’s thinking about East Asian issues—including his role as a prominent critic of US involvement in the Vietnam War—and the legacies of his engagement with the region.


Author(s):  
SEBASTIAN BERSICK

This chapter returns to issues raised by other authors in this section: the contrast between European, Chinese, and US perceptions of hard and soft power in the contexts of regional and global governance. Taking the ASEM process as a case, it shows how Europeans and Asians have approached the interaction from different institutional perspectives. Despite this, it sees ASEM as a process that reflects, and promotes, the advance of regional institutionalism in East Asia, adding an important dimension to the Europe–China relationship. This is then contrasted with the US strategy of dual divergence: a divergent internal strategy that rejects institutionalism for managing regional security; and an external divergent strategy that rejects the building of shared and reciprocal institutions between the USA and Asia. The chapter concludes that Europe's ‘balancing by convergence’ strategy has advantages over the USA's ‘balancing by divergence’ strategy.


Author(s):  
Jude Woodward

This chapter reviews US-China-Russia relations in the post-war period, and considers how recent developments affect prospects for the US ‘pivot’. It explains why those driving US foreign policy towards China see the confrontation with Russia in Ukraine as a dangerous and diversionary adventure, leading to Sino-Russian convergence, distracting US attention from East Asia and undermining confidence among the US’s Asian allies of its commitment to the region. It is argued that if the US is to maintain primacy in the 21st century, it must subordinate other foreign policy goals to the paramount objective of containing China’s rise. The US’s failure to do this, instead pitting itself against both Putin in the West and China in the East, means it has driven Russia and China together, quite possibly sacrificing its vital need to contain China for a lesser goal of uncertain outcome in Ukraine.


Author(s):  
Andrew Yeo

Chapter 4 describes the rising phenomena of East Asian regionalism in the wake of the Asian financial crisis and demonstrates how debates between inclusive and exclusive variations of Asian regionalism played out in the development of the regional architecture. The chapter traces the establishment of the ASEAN Plus Three, the East Asia Summit, and the Six-Party Talks. Taken together, these three institutions signified greater political will behind regional multilateralism but also revealed the contentious nature of institution building. The discussion of multilateral developments is juxtaposed to an analysis of the US–South Korea and US-Thailand alliances, and their resilience in an era of greater multilateralism and expanding regionalism.


2003 ◽  
Vol 176 ◽  
pp. 1097-1098
Author(s):  
Reinhard Drifte

This monumental work is in many ways the essence of Professor Kindermann's 50 years' research on East Asia, theoretically based on the Munich school of neo-realism (of which he is the pre-eminent representative) and inspired by his many personal encounters with those Asian leaders who shaped the region's rise in world politics. It also introduces interesting research by other German scholars, which is often excluded from the English-language literature that dominates the Asian studies field. The focus of the analysis is on the foreign policy of the states in the West Pacific region (including Myanmar and Indochina), their interactions and their place in world politics. It is impossible to summarize the 34 chapters within this review. The books offer a superb chronological and contextual overview of a crucial period in East Asia that is highly readable and illustrated with relevant photos. The most space is devoted to China, documenting its rise from imperial victim to major economic power. The coverage of China's interaction with foreign powers and the domestic background is very detailed, especially concerning the Kuomintang before and after 1949, and the Taiwan issue. The account of the era after the Pacific War focuses mostly on the People's Republic of China. Several pages are devoted to the Quemoy crisis of 1954–55, which revealed the complexities of the US–PRC–Taiwan triangle. Kindermann demonstrates how this crisis was the first application of Washington's “calculated ambiguity” towards the PRC concerning Taiwan. A whole chapter is devoted to the second Taiwan crisis of 1958 and its aftermath in 1962. Kindermann's interviews in Taiwan show how the US actively prevented Chiang Kai-shek's plan of occupying two mainland Chinese cities to start the “liberation” of the PRC. There are four chapters on how the Communist Party established and maintained its rule over China, but the majority deal with China's foreign interactions. On Tibet, Kindermann argues that the 17-item agreement of 1951 between Tibetan leaders and the Communist government may have served as a tolerable solution to the Tibet issue and thus have prevented a lot of hardship for the Tibetan people, even though the Tibetan representatives had been coerced into signing it.


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