EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No. 3

Abstract

South Korea needs a new strategy for managing triangular ties with China and Japan. It. must address the deteriorating state of Sino-Japanese relations as well as U.S. scepticism about China’s push for regionalism and the South’s autonomous inclinations through a patient role as a facilitator, not a balancer. In 2005 it overreached in a desperate response to a difficult environment. Tracing the dilemma the South faces, this paper focuses first on the U.S. factor and the frustrating impact on Roh Moo-hyun’s plans to engage North Korea. Then it evaluates ties with Japan, delineating causes and effects of the sharp slide in bilateral cooperation with restoration difficult. Next it assesses relations with China and how hard it is to synchronize them to other ties. The conclusion stresses the value to South Korea of a balance of power. As a middle power between assertive competitors, it must tread cautiously with special attention to shaping the triangle with China and Japan.

Author
Gilbert Rozman is Musgrave Professor of Sociology, specializes on comparisons and relations in Northeast Asia, including China, Japan, and Russia. In the year 2000-2001, he began to add Korea to this mix. He compares the historical development of these countries, their recent-day societies, their search for national identities, and their strategies for international relations.  His recent published works include ed., Japan and Russia: The Tortuous Path to Normalization 1949-1999, "Sino-Russian Cross-Border Relations: Turning Fortresses into Free Trade Zones," "Flawed Regionalism: Reconceptualizing Northeast Asia in the 1990s," "Backdoor Japan: The Search for a Way Out via Regionalism and Decentralization."

This paper was submitted to "EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia" supported by the Henry Luce Foundation based in New York. All papers are available only through the online database.

South Korea is buffeted by four countries whose foreign policy does not measure up to the standards needed for our times. All have reacted to recent international events by accentuating worrisome trends seen in earlier policies and show no inclination of changing direction. George W. Bush has steered the US not only away from Clinton’s engagement policy toward China but also toward an inconsistent regional strategy in which Richard Armitage’s Japan first approach coupled with Robert Zoellick’s follow-up to encourage China to become a “stakeholder” has been interspersed with Dick Cheney’s neo-conservative quasi-containment of China combined with an ideological rejection of diplomacy with North Korea.1 Koizumi Junichiro has let his obsession with visiting the Yasukuni Shrine overwhelm traditional diplomatic professionalism, making no effort to staunch an upsurge of ultra-nationalist claims in Japan or to try to contain the damage across the region. Hu Jintao has been less flagrant about his transgressions of cautious diplomacy, but some would argue that he has betrayed early expectations that China was ready to find common language to reassure the US and Japan by exploring shared values with increasing transparency. Finally, Vladimir Putin has resuscitated the image of an authoritarian leader in Moscow narrowly concerned with supporting dictators in order to expand his state’s influence regardless of the impact on regional stability and human rights. In the shadow of the powerful US influence and a marginal Russian one, South Korea faces the challenge of managing the deepening rivalry between China and Japan.

Among three choices for South Korean diplomacy in the coming years, only one is bound to serve the national interest best. Yet, given the policy choices favored in the four competing powers and North Korea’s inclination to seek advantage from hyperbolic rhetoric and purposeful threats, the path forward is not easy. One choice is to accept the vision of US neoconservatives and Japanese ultranationalists and draw a taut line against North Korea in the Six-Party Talks while recognizing that a three-way alliance must stand firm against China’s drive for regionalism. Taking this approach would be an admission that the Sunshine Policy was wrong and that the cold war continues in Asia, reviving the logic of the 1950s to 1980s. A second choice is to accede to the rise of China as the center of regionalism, essentially reverting to the sinocentric order during the millennium before the end of the nineteenth century. Given the rapid economic integration of South Korea and China and the preeminent influence of China in dealing with North Korea, this might seem to be a realistic adjustment to ongoing trends if it were not obvious that it would be a betrayal of aspirations for autonomy and leverage in foreign policy that have escaped Koreans since the seventh century and only from 1990 became a serious possibility. Finally, South Korea could strive for a region in equilibrium where the weight of China would be balanced by the weight of nearby Japan coupled with that of distant US, and its own flexibility would be maximized. This is a worthy goal not contradictory to certain views advocated by US and Japanese diplomats as well as experts in China, but the way Sino-Japanese relations are evolving may now be the foremost barrier to its realization.

Why is the deterioration in Sino-Japanese and Japanese-South Korean relations of 2005 different from other setbacks in the region over the past decades? First, contrary to what is asserted in most coverage, it is about fundamental matters of security and identity. Second, it should be understood not only as another instance of “economics hot, politics cold,” but, as explained by former Japanese ambassador Tanino Sakutaro, also as “people cold.”2 Even Japanese-South Korean mutual trust, which had been rising since 1998 and benefited from the “World Cup,” the “Korean wave,” and a surge in cross-tourism, has fallen with 89 percent of the Koreans saying that they cannot trust Japan, including a doubling from 2002 to 38 percent who cannot trust it at all.3 Third, it exposes the difficulty of South Korea in steering a middle road in the region. Northeast Asia is at a crossroads, and how Seoul manages ties to its two closest great power neighbors is one factor that may tip the balance. Cognizant of forces that complicated Seoul’s choices in 2005, we still should draw lessons on what is needed to improve the situation. The intensified rivalry between China and Japan posed new challenges in 2005 for many countries. The US faced unprecedented concern that this rivalry was spoiling the atmosphere for strategic cooperation in East Asia, leading officials to debate quiet intervention to find a way to ameliorate damage from Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine while still giving priority to boosting Japan versus China. ASEAN states struggled with the impact of the rivalry on plans for regionalism, agreeing with Japan’s request to expand the new East Asian Summit with three additional members that had the effect of diluting China’s potential dominance but followed with an approach welcomed by China to confine discussion on forging an East Asian Community to the more compact ASEAN + 3 setting. Russia and India debated counteroffers by these two other claimants to Asian great power status, without making abrupt changes. Yet, the most important battleground for China and Japan once again became the Korean peninsula; South Koreans confronted the most urgent decisions on how to manage this rivalry along with a fraying US alliance...(Continued)