Great Expectations: Washington, Beijing, and the North Korean Nuclear Crisis
Abstract Throughout the North Korean nuclear crisis, the Bush administration has believed that China is the most crucial player in the effort to find a solution. Washington has frequently expressed disappointment that Beijing is not willing to put more pressure on its misbehaving client. China faces a dilemma, however. Although most evidence indicates that Chinese leaders are not happy about Pyongyang's quest for nuclear weapons, keeping the Korean peninsula nonnuclear is not China's highest priority. Beijing is even more concerned about preserving North Korea as a geographic buffer between the U.S. sphere of influence in Northeast Asia and the Chinese homeland. China does have substantial economic leverage over North Korea, since it supplies a major portion of the country's food and energy supplies. The PRC is cautious, however, about using that leverage to coerce Pyongyang regarding the nuclear issue. Chinese leaders fear that putting too much pressure on Kim Jong Il's regime could cause the North Korea...
Understanding Northeast Asian regional dynamics: inventory checking and new discourses on power, interest, and identity
Northeast Asia has emerged as the center of gravity in contemporary international relations (IRs), partly owing to China’s rise, over the past two decades. In understanding regional dynamics in Northeast Asia, the (neo-) realist perspective has been dominant. Despite its rich analytical and empirical contribution, however, preoccupation with power and its distribution, blurred geographic focus, and built-in status quo bias have prevented the existing realist literature to capture the new reality of the region that can be characterized by trends toward liberal transition, the politics of national identity, and growing correlates of perception, domestic politics, and regional interactions. Against this backdrop, we attempt to undertake an inventory checking of new discourses on power, interest, and identity in accounting for regional
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1