Panel A: Security in East Asia - Carolina Asia Center

Panel A: Security in East Asia

Location: Rm. 1005

Yangsun Choi, “The Effect of the Dual Naming of the Sea on the ROK-US Alliance”

Visiting Scholar, Carolina Asia Center, UNC-Chapel Hill

Keywords: ROK-US Alliance, ROK-US-Japan trilateral relationship

The sea, located between the Korean peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago, is at the center of acute controversies surrounding its international official name between Korea and Japan. Internationally, it is recommended that the geographical name of the topographical feature shared with two or more countries should be decided according to the agreement of the involved parties. If not, names used in each country should be marked side by side according to UNCSGN resolution III/20(1977) and IHO technical resolution A.4.2.6(1974).

The Korean government has kept trying to recover the sea name of the East Sea after joining the United Nations in 1991 which Japan took away from Korea during the colonial period.

Koreans want dual naming instead of sole naming such as East Sea or Sea of Japan. But Japan did not want to restore it. This issue was created throughout the history of Korea, U.S. and Japan in North East Asia. This issue should be solved preventing deterioration of the trilateral relationship. U.S. should do some constructive role for the future ROK-US-Japan trilateral relationship.

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Ting Wang, “Who is like Whom: A Qualitative Research on the Convergence of the Gender Gap in Offending in China”

Assistant Professor of Sociology, UNC-Greensboro

Keywords: mainland China, gender gap in crime

This paper focuses on the gender gap in crime within China, addressing two primary questions: which gender contributes most to the narrowing of this gap, and what factors are responsible for its convergence? Employing qualitative analysis methods, this study is based on fifteen interviews conducted in 2017 with professionals in the Chinese criminal justice system. The findings lend support to both the behavioral change hypothesis and the net-widening hypothesis, highlighting a diminishing gender gap attributed to the rise in female criminality among the one-child policy generation. Notably, this increase in female offending is interpreted less as a sign of gender emancipation but more as a retaliatory reaction rooted in the entrenched patriarchal structures against the progressive shift in gender ideologies.

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Steven Rosefielde, “China: Limits of Western Shock and Awe Economic Sanctions”

Professor of Economics, UNC-Chapel Hill

Keywords: China, deterrence

The United States and NATO are striving to deter aggression in the Asia Pacific with a mix of hard and soft power, while discretely promoting color revolutions in China and North Korea. This essay refrains from speculating about prospects for success, focusing instead narrowly on the potential potency of Western economic sanctions as a tool for vouchsafing peace (Rosefielde, 2023; Rosefielde and Mills, 2022). It examines the theoretical potential of economic sanctions from a competitive neoclassical perspective supported by lessons drawn from the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War in an era of declining American naval power. The evidence suggests that stern economic sanctions will not deter Xi Jinping in the South China Sea or Kim Jung-un on the Korean Peninsula.

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