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In South Korea and Taiwan, capital punishment has been highly open to change during the development and democratization processes, and its importance in those societies has been deeply political and symbolic. But the death penalty in these two jurisdictions can hardly be called a minor institution with “minuscule impact,” for democratic transitions in both places have pivoted on the imperative of distancing the present from a past in which capital punishment was a familiar feature of law and politics. This chapter and the next focus on two central questions. First, what explains the rapid decline of capital punishment in South Korea and Taiwan during the last decade and the purposeful pursuit of abolition in both places? And second, to what extent will South Korea and Taiwan become an Asian vanguard, leading other jurisdictions in the region on the road to life without the death penalty?

The greater the gap between democratic ideals and reality, the greater the resulting tension. This chapter presents a model of tension in a new democracy and applies it to the Republic of Korea (South Korea), drawing on survey data from the 1997 New Korea Barometer. South Korea is particularly suitable for intensive analysis, since the level of mass education is high and commitment to democratic ideals is also high, yet the introduction of free elections in 1987 has produced a succession of presidents whose actions in government have fallen well short of the democratic ideal, leading to convictions on corruption charges. The political fallout of the abuse of power for personal gain was exacerbated in 1997 when the government faced the national humiliation of relying on the biggest International Monetary Fund loan in history to avoid financial collapse and the chapter concludes by considering demand‐driven pressure for reform.

Initially, Eisenhower's emergence as the Republican nominee for president also helped to sustain a basic consensus behind the war, for Ike was a moderate who was prepared to defend Truman's decision to intervene in Korea. As the campaign progressed, Eisenhower's comments became more critical. But even his decisive promise to voters to “go to Korea” was ambiguous. It was intended to signal that something new had to be done to end the fighting, while leaving Ike free to decide precisely what—and, crucially, while also ensuring that he kept his distance from MacArthur and the Republican right. On becoming president, Eisenhower therefore retained a good deal of freedom. But in terms of public relations, he swiftly made many of the same mistakes that had plagued Truman's early efforts. And only Stalin's death, which in turn led to a thawing of the communist position, revived the armistice negotiations and resulted in an end to this long and costly war.

The Asian Tigers South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are the subject of this chapter, which describes their introduction to computing and how that technology became a central export and economic development strategy for these nations. In the process the economies boomed, grew faster than other national economies, and became some of the most intensive users of IT in the world. How those developments occurred are explained and experiences compared from one state to the other since each one had a unique national path to adoption. North Korea’s minimal experience with computers is also analyzed and placed within the context of Asian computing and economic development.

This chapter examines how problems and politics in the nascent alliances and alignments in both the communist and anticommunist camps affected security relations between the two camps in the first years of the Cold War. It shows how the uncertain and poorly defined nature of U.S. commitment to its partners in East Asia undercut the credibility of the nation's near-term threats and long-term assurances in coercive diplomacy. It argues that North Korea's invasion of South Korea that started the Korean War was rooted in a combination of communist elites' underestimation of the resolve and power of the United States to counter such an aggression in the near term and an inflated view of Japan's likely future role in the security politics of the region after its full economic and military recovery from World War II.

To what extent South Korea adopted neoliberal reforms and thus conformed to the pressures of globalization is explored in this chapter. After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, South Korea was compelled to adopt IMF-style liberalization policies and, by implication, to abandon economic nationalism. However, this chapter argues otherwise. The evolution of Korea’s economic trajectory since World War II shows that no real shift has taken place in Korea’s economic nationalist trajectory despite the adoption of Segyehwa (iglobalization policies) in the early 1990s incorporated under outward foreign direct investments by Korean business followed by inward foreign investment. Despite deep international economic integration, the capacity of the Korean state has not diminished nor has the traditional nationalist development trajectory reversed. The Korean state remains developmental, neo-mercantilist, and economically nationalist.

Includes all relevant information on national elections and referendums held in South Korea since independence in 1948. Part I gives a comprehensive overview of South Korea's political history, outlines the evolution of electoral provisions, and presents the current electoral legislation in a standardized manner (suffrage, elected institutions, nomination of candidates, electoral system, organizational context of elections). Part II includes exhaustive electoral statistics in systematic tables (numbers of registered voters, votes cast, the votes for candidates and/or parties in parliamentary and presidential elections and referendums at both the national and regional level, the electoral participation of political parties, the national and regional distribution of parliamentary seats, etc.).

This chapter investigates the role of security assurances in four phases of U.S.–Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance interaction: the Park Chung-hee period, a period of revitalized alliance cooperation under Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, the impact of diverging U.S.-ROK priorities and South Korean domestic change, and, finally, Lee Myung-bak's efforts to “restore” the alliance. It deals with the conditions under which assurances have been effective. It then describes how changes in the alliance might shape the nature and impact of assurances going forward. U.S. security assurances to the ROK have been and remain important, but have also required periodic efforts to infuse them with credibility. Over the history of the U.S.–ROK alliance, South Korean relations with the United States changed from a wholly dependent relationship to one in which South Korea has a distinct capacity, role, and set of interests.

This chapter discusses the long-standing problem of identifying Confucians in China (and East Asia in general) through social science research methods—a problem deeply rooted in the nineteenth-century conceptualization of Confucianism and the overall classification of Chinese religions. It investigates different types of empirical data—national censuses and surveys—from Mainland China, as well as from Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, in order to answer two questions. First is about whether “Confucianism” is a category in religious classifications in these East Asian countries and regions; the second asks about how many people are counted as “Confucians” in China.

This chapter discusses three Asian states: South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia. The “good” case, South Korea, has been remarkably successful in consolidating democracy and carving out a proper place in the new institutional architecture for its armed forces. The “bad” case is Thailand where, after a promising though difficult fifteen-year democratization process, the military overthrew the elected government in 2006. Finally, the “interesting” case is Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority state, where, against the expectations of most experts, the armed forces' political presence and influence have gradually diminished since 1998. The chapter explains why Korean officers have become the servants of the state, why their Indonesian colleagues have more or less given up their intention to run their country, and why members of the Royal Thai Armed Forces (RTAF) have been far more reluctant to relinquish their political role.

This chapter deals with the Japanese fandom of Bae Yong-Joon (BYJ) and explores the ways in which South Korean masculinity is reconstructed through the ambivalent desires of middle-aged Japanese female fans. Bae Yong-Joon has gained remarkable recognition in Japan after the South Korean television drama Winter Sonata was first screened on Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) in April 2003. It is argued that the construction of BYJ's soft masculinity is reinforced by the postcolonial desires of Japanese female fans that engender “retrospective” and “nostalgic” sentiment. The chapter specifically describes how the Japanese embrace is underpinned by “counter-coevality” and “cultural proximity,” based on the disjunctive spatiotemporal contexts of South Korea and Japan. It starts by presenting the Yonsama syndrome. Moreover, the chapter reviews the three key aspects of BYJ's bodily performance that reinforce his soft masculinity through examining the characteristics of Joon-Sang in Winter Sonata. They are “tender charisma,” purity, and politeness. The chapter then highlights the ways in which the transcultural flows between Japan and South Korea operate in constructing South Korean soft masculinity as represented by BYJ.

This chapter looks at South Korea's response to the rise of China. It establishes South Korea's growing dependence on the Chinese economy and its growing cooperation with China to manage North Korean belligerence. The rise of China creates strategic pressure on South Korea both to accommodate Chinese interests and to maintain defense cooperation with the United States, and that this policy challenge is exacerbated by politically significant anti-Japanese nationalism in South Korea. The result has been significant South Korean policy instability. The policy swings in South Korea's maneuvering between the United States and China from the government of Roh Moo-hyun to that of Lee Myung-bak and then to Park Geun-hye reveal the difficulty that great power competition during a power transition imposes on a small country.

Chapter 2 examines the prolonged and vehement competition between North and South Korea over the allegiance of colonial-era Korean migrants who remained in Japan in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. The divergent transborder nation-building strategies that the two postcolonial states employed to make their own docile citizens out of this opaque and recalcitrant population are identified. North Korea launched a successful repatriation campaign and heavily invested in Korean enclaves, presenting itself as a safe haven in which marginalized Koreans could find an escape. South Korea instead fashioned itself as a broker that could facilitate their integration into the Japanese mainstream, and a gatekeeper that could control their engagement with families and home communities in South Korea. The control of the bureaucratic persona of Koreans in Japan, buttressed by the consensual practices of other states, was critical for South Korea’s eventual ascendancy in this competition.

This chapter describes how South Korea's remarkable economic and political development over the past two decades has shaped public opinion and national identity. Conversations with leading South Korean foreign policy analysts reveal widespread pride in the country's recent political and economic development and a resulting confidence derived from its accomplishments. However, South Koreans also harbor a sense of vulnerability stemming from the country's history and its inability to control its destiny with regard to major foreign policies and objectives. Despite the nation being a leading economy, many older Koreans continue to think of themselves as a small country surrounded by larger powers and subject to geopolitical constraints. In contrast, younger Koreans hold a much more ambitious view of Korea's position in the international order and what it should be expected to accomplish.

This chapter examines how late industrialization in South Korea was at first retarded by a state too weak to intervene and stimulate capital expenditures. It also takes the position that when industrialization began to accelerate, it did so in response to government initiatives and not to the forces of the free market. The Korean state was able to consolidate its power in the 1960s because of the weakness of the social classes: workers were a small percentage of the population, capitalists were dependent on state largesse, the aristocracy was dissolved by land reform, and the peasantry was atomized into smallholders. The behavior of the Korean state became influenced by two forces outside the class structure: the student movement and the American occupation forces. The student movement kept the new government relatively honest, and the American occupation forces drove the Korean military toward developmentalism, the only realistic course to reduce dependence on American support.