• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.27-49
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• 2018

Public Diplomacy (PD) is the third pillar of South Korean foreign policy. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PD aims to attract foreign audiences by means of art, knowledge transmission, media, language and foreign aid. When it comes to the Korean language, its global profile has seen an especially marked increase in recent years (Kim, 2009). Thus, this paper's objective is to explain the relevance of the Korean language in the generation of South Korea's soft power. I draw from $C{\acute{e}}sar$ Villanueva's reflections in order to problematize how language promotion can be translated into soft power at five different levels: the empathetic, the sympathetic, the geopolitical, the diplomatic and the utilitarian. I observe that in the case of the Korean language in Mexico City, soft power has the potential to be generated on three levels: it helps to increase knowledge of Korean culture (empathetic); it exercises symbolic persuasion (geopolitical), since the products of cultural industries are mostly in Korean; and it is used as a tool for economic transactions in Mexico City (utilitarian).

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.152-167
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• 2018

Until recently, Japanese cuisine was known only for sushi and was still considered exotic outside the archipelago. However, today the number of specialized restaurants which serve other traditional foods is constantly increasing all over the world, making Japanese gastronomy one of the most influential. Japanese government has supported the promotion of national cuisine worldwide in different ways, making washoku (Japanese traditional cuisine) one of the main elements of Japan's soft power and cultural diplomacy. In this paper, I will analyse the connection between Japan's gastrodiplomacy, defined as the use of typical food and dishes as an instrument of soft power, and Japan's food security strategy. I will argue that the strategy of promotion of washoku worldwide is not a mere act of popularization of Japanese food but it is strictly related to the issue of the low self-sufficiency rate of the country, as the main objective of the government is the raise of food export, in order to foster agricultural production and improve self-sufficiency.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.145-161
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• 2016

Using the Sunflower movement as a case study, this article seeks to articulate a theoretical framework to evaluate online "free spaces" as tools for political mobilization. To this end, this article conducts a thematic and content analysis of 151 posts on the official Facebook page of the Sunflower movement. Key results uncover four thematic functions among posts - expressive, informative, informative-support, and promotional - that overlap, in which the expressive theme prevails, and two thematic topics discussed by posts - damages by protesters and their ideology of freedom. I conclude that: (1) combining the logistic and thematic dimensions of posts enables a specific understanding of an online free space's political viability and anticipates the campaigns it will connect itself to; (2) the networked nature of the Sunflower movement page prompts the reconceptualization of (i) online free spaces as nodes through which various political campaigns and struggles are thematically connected by a political ideology; (ii) inactivity as a strategy where protest capital and followers accumulate to prepare and empower future mobilizations.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.217-234
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• 2019

This study examined effects of the social-psychological motivations to use Instagram (i.e., identity seeking, social interaction) and narcissistic personality on personal attachment to Instagram and intention to post photos on Instagram. Identity seeking, social interaction and narcissistic personality (i.e., grandiose/exhibition) had significant positive effects on personal attachment to Instagram. Identity seeking and social interaction had significant positive effects on intention to post photos on Instagram. However, narcissistic personality had no effect on the intention to post photos on Instagram. The study results support the theory of the extended-self in the digital context. This study also provides useful information to help organizations understand why people use Instagram as well as how to take advantage of Instagram to enhance their services and consumer experiences.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.148-168
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• 2020

In April, 2020, amid widespread fear of a second wave of infections of the novel coronavirus in China, local authorities in Guangzhou cracked down on the city's black population, resulting in mass evictions of Africans. The incident raises several questions about racism in China. How should we interpret this heavy-handed treatment of black people? Was this an isolated incident? What motivated such operations? In this article, I explain social control of Guangzhou's African communities as a problem of municipal politics. What underlies the government's heavy handed approach, I argue, are those communities' ties to rurality, which constitute a roadblock in the city's urban upgrade. Using Dengfeng Village, one of the best known African communities in China, as a case study, I show that efforts to upgrade the area by the local state and the real estate industry were frustrated by the community's status as an urban village. Africans, whom Chinese have historically associated with rurality, are seen as contributing to a space that has long been stigmatized as a spatial manifestation of rural people's lack of self-discipline. To better reveal the interconnection between social control and urban politics, I place official action in context of the history of the community's formation and the lived experience. This analysis of Dengfeng applies to various extents to other major African communities in Guangzhou.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.30-48
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• 2019

China has initiated a series of "economic sanctions" against South Korea, affecting Korean pop stars visiting China and Korean investments in China. Sanctions were imposed on South Korea in response to the decision of South Korea to deploy Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in 2016. Furthermore, the Global Daily assembled local population to boycott Korean products and investments in China. However, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has never positively confirmed these activities as economic sanctions to South Korea related to the THAAD installation. In other words, the Chinese government singled a relatively weak message via these sanctions to South Korea. As a result, the THADD implementation continued in South Korea. In the paper, I interpret China's rationale to impost puzzling economic sanctions, which have a weak resolution, to South Korea and Taiwan. As signaling theory argues, economic sanctions with insufficient resolution, which are more likely to fail, is a more provocative foreign policy. By reviewing China's sanctions usage to South Korea and Taiwan, I propose arguments of bureaucratic competition to answer why China launched such sanctions to other countries: those are caused by domestic institutions who are seeking reward from the Communist Party of China. By comparing shifts of leadership between domestic agencies, the paper provides evidence to support the proposed argument. I also include two alternative explanations to strengthen the proposed argument, albeit connecting the paper with other two larger streams of research, which address analyses of China's aggressive foreign policies as well as the domestic politics of economic sanctions.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.1174-1182
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• 2017

The research and development on Web of Data to realize the opening and sharing of diverse, heterogonous data on the Web has been actively accomplished. As a standard data model for this effort, LOD (Linked Open Data) based on ontology has been proposed. A specialized instance generation system is vital to the development of LOD-based system effectively. This paper implements i-Manager as an appropriate environment for the development of LOD instances, considering the requirements of LOD systems and the practical development environment of the diverse application domains. i-Manager separates the instance layer from the ontology layer by way of LOD Interface Sheet (LIS) and implements the specialized functions requested in LOD instance development, such as instance edit/store, visualization and SPARQL query processing. This paper proposes a new approach for LOD instance development, and i-Manager can be applied for the practical LOD development environment in the diverse application areas.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.111-144
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• 2016

Alternate members of the Chinese Communist Central Committee are often overlooked regarding elite formation or even when assessing Chinese elites in general. This article focuses on the case of alternate members of the Central Committee from 1992 to 2007 in order to understand why some individuals will eventually be promoted and why some will never be. Through extensive quantitative testing, I argue that these non-promoted individuals differ from their counterparts in many ways, most of which can possibly be traced back to the type of formation they received early on. As such, the article concludes that Party School attendance and the age factor, through threshold analysis, are a significant factor helping us understand the difference between promoted and non-promoted houbu.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.23-41
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• 2010

In political science there is broad interest in whether a newly established democracy succeeds in overcoming the perils of democratisation and matures into a consolidated democracy or regresses to authoritarianism. Taiwan was under martial law for almost four decades. Democratic consolidation, therefore, is primarily a question of how to overcome the legacies of the former authoritarian regime. Nationalism and dysfunctional political institutions are some of the legacies that limit Taiwan's democratic development. The study of these destructive elements is important in the attempt to interpret Taiwan's most recent political history and to formulate effective democracy-building policies. In the following, I would like to address the aforementioned legacies and their implications for Taiwan's current and future democratic development.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.259-277
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• 2021

This article investigates the geopolitics of the energy transition era, concentrating on China's solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. Authors have noted that the rise of renewables is changing the geopolitical landscape of world energy systems, but these new energy sources carry their own technical characteristics and geopolitical implications. Bearing this in mind, this research answers the questions: What are the structural factors that facilitate China's use of renewable energy to achieve political goals, and what are their implications? In order to analyze the data, I devise an analytical framework based on the energy statecraft literature and contrast rival explanations, particularly the "prosumer theory" and the premise of less geopolitical interdependence in a renewable-centered world. I show that asymmetric interdependence in the solar PV sector is already a reality. China's solar PV industry is a case that suffices all conditions (centrality in industrial capacity, market share, and companies' compliance, but to a lesser extent in critical materials and technological endowments) in the solar PV sector to devise effective strategies aimed at reaping benefits out of its asymmetric interdependence with the rest of the world.