The main foreign contacts officially sanctioned by the Choson Dynasty were diplomatic missions to China three or four times a year and a small outpost of Japanese merchants in the southeastern part of Korea near the present-day city of Pusan.
Few Koreans left the peninsula during the late Choson Dynasty, and even fewer foreigners entered. Japanese Colonial Period During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Korea became the object of competing imperial interests as the Chinese empire declined and Western powers began to vie for ascendancy in East Asia. It took Japan, itself only recently opened to Western-style international relations by the United States, to impose a diplomatic treaty on Korea for the first time in Japan, China, and Russia were the main rivals for influence on Korea in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and after defeating China and Russia in war between and , Japan became the predominant power on the Korean peninsula.
In Japan annexed Korea outright as a colony, and for the next 35 years Japan ruled Korea in a manner that was strict and often brutal. However, Japan also brought the beginnings of industrial development to Korea.
Modern industries such as steel, cement, and chemical plants were set up in Korea during the s and s, especially in the northern part of the peninsula where coal and hydroelectric power resources were abundant.
By the time Japanese colonial rule ended in August , Korea was the second most industrialized country in Asia after Japan itself. In the final days of the war, the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to jointly accept the Japanese surrender in Korea, with the U.
However, by , the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, combined with political differences between Koreans of the two occupation zones and the policies of the occupation forces on the ground, led to a breakdown in negotiations over a unified government of Korea. On August 15, , a pro-U. Both governments claimed to legitimately represent the entire Korean people, creating a situation of extreme tension across the 38th parallel. On June 25, , North Korea, backed by the U.
Under the flag of the United Nations, a U. In July , after millions of deaths and enormous physical destruction, the war ended approximately were it began, with North and South Korea divided into roughly equal territories by the cease-fire line, a Demilitarized Zone DMZ that still forms the boundary between North and South Korea today.
Since , North and South Korea have evolved from a common cultural and historical base into two very different societies with radically dissimilar political and economic systems. The differences between North and South Korea today have little to do with pre regional differences between northern and southern Korea. North Korea developed into perhaps the most isolated and controlled of all communist states, and even 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, showed little sign of political and economic liberalization despite severe economic hardship.
South Korea, on the other hand, has been greatly influenced by the United States and, in a more subtle way, by Japan. The U. While South Korea has often been less democratic than Americans would like or the Korean leaders claimed it to be, since the fall of its military dictatorship in the late s democracy appears to have become increasingly consolidated in the R.
South Korea recovered rapidly from the Asian financial crisis of and is currently the third-largest economy in Eastern Asia, after Japan and China. As in many other countries, American popular culture is an important presence in South Korea. To a lesser extent, Japanese popular culture is influential as well. However, South Korea has developed its own distinctly Korean forms of popular culture, while traditional Korean culture has undergone something of a revival in recent decades.
By the late s and early s, South Korean pop music, film, and television dramas were becoming quite popular in other parts of Asia too, especially China and Vietnam. Despite the general cultural homogeneity of Korea, regional sentiment has become an important factor in South Korean politics and in other areas of contemporary life. This means that the economies of East Asia are increasingly integrated around a Chinese core.
All of these countries look to China as their principal growing export market. China is orders of magnitude more open.
It means that these economies sink or swim together. If the Chinese economy catches a cold, the others in the region sneeze. It means that sanctions, either of the sort that isolated China before or , or those imposed on the USSR throughout its existence, are unthinkable today. They would be fiercely resisted by all of the countries in the region, and the damage to the world economy would be substantial.
China began to build institutions in the region to buttress these newly developing trade relationships. Since then, it has negotiated bilateral free trade pacts with a number of ASEAN members, and it has set as a goal free trade with the entire ASEAN region phased in by for the advanced economies.
The heads of state of the 13 have been meeting regularly since What is noteworthy about this group is that it would exclude the U. Thirteen years ago, PM Mahathir tried to build a similar bloc, but it broke down in the face of fierce opposition from the U. This time, do not expect any dissent within Asia at the behest of the U. China also has pursued important political and security initiatives in the last few years with its Asian neighbors.
Earlier this year, it definitively settled its centuries-old border dispute with Russia. PM Wen Jiabao visited New Delhi earlier this year and set up a mechanism for negotiations with India over their border dispute.
China also has become much more active diplomatically and multilaterally. It is the host and convenor of the six-party talks designed to bring an end to the North Korean nuclear program. One cannot conceive of China playing this role a few years back. But it also is not a coincidence that China has a strong interest in building relations with all of these countries because they are rich in oil and natural gas. While China looks to East and Southeast Asia as major trading partners and sources of investment, it looks to its north and the west for oil and gas to feed its massive appetite for energy.
It has increased massively its import of Saudi oil, but that is not enough. This is highly questionable in my mind, and not just because China denies it.
Most Chinese leaders and thinkers understand that the U. Chinese may not like the degree of U. The great exception is Japan. The other exception, of course, is Taiwan.
I believe the chance of conflict in the Taiwan Strait in the next few years is low and has gotten lower, with the visits of opposition leaders Lien Chan and James Soong to the PRC. But the chance of a conflict between Taiwan and the PRC is not a trivial one. Chinese scholars had devised a kind of printing system using carved wooden blocks. Koreans took this invention one step further and created the first world's first metal moveable type in the 12th century.
Adaptation of foreign things for their own use is a historical characteristic of Korean culture, even today. One good example of how foreign things and ideas become "Koreanized" is pottery making.
About a thousand years ago Korean potters learned how to make a special kind of fine, blue-green glazed pottery called celadon. Korean artisans adopted the technique and it became one of Korea's great cultural emblems.
Even Chinese visitors remarked on how beautiful Korean celadon was. For years a village near Seoul called Ich'on, has been home of Korea's greatest potters and it is here that the great celadon techniques have been revived. Today, it is still prized and sold all over the world. Celadon happens to be one of the many forms of art and culture that Korea passed on to Japan.
Another is writing. The Japanese writing system derives from China, as does paper making, block printing, art styles and much more.
Yet Japan has not always been friendly to its cousin to the west. By the 20th Century Japan had become an industrial power. Early in the century they conquered Korea and imposed Japanese culture and language upon it.
Koreans struggled to maintain their language and cultural identity. By that time many Koreans had become "westernized," and looked forward to industrialization, but yet another conflict intervened. Korea and Japan:. North Korea soon became a Communist state under the influence of the Soviet Union.
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