East Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Challenges Facing The Reunification Of Korea, Patricia Cazeau

Helm's School of Government Conference - American Revival: Citizenship & Virtue

After the Second World War, the once-unified northern and southern halves of the nation of Korea had been under immense external pressure from the American-Soviet Cold War. As a result, the northern side had sided with the Russian communists, while the southern side had leaned into the United States’ style of democracy over time. Despite multiple proposed ideas for unification, the increasing tensions between Russia and the United States discouraged reunification, despite the Cold War’s eventual end. Thus, various social, religious, economic, and military crises multiplied within each country’s borders. This paper will assess the challenges surrounding the reunification of …

North Korea: How Fear Is Used To Control A Nation, Ashley Clisby

Capstone Showcase

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, more commonly known as North Korea, is most commonly known for its possession and testing of nuclear weapons and threatening to use these weapons of mass destruction. Less commonly talked about are the human rights violations that are being experienced by the citizens of North Korea. Most, if not all, of the information regarding North Korean human rights that have been reported on comes from individuals who have escaped the Kim regime. There is very limited information traveling in and out of North Korea that is not heavily monitored by the government. These individuals …

Text Mining In Chinese Ancient Attires, Lu Wang

Western Research Forum

Starting from the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE) when writing system appeared in China, clothing was recorded as symbols to denote social statuses. The hierarchical signification of clothing remained in the following dynasties until the end of imperial China in 1911. The imperial period produced twenty-five official dynastic histories with rich corpuses on the subject of attire, documenting regulations and prohibitions of detailed dress code, a subject being scarcely studied and treated with assumptions today. This research will use text mining tools to identify descriptive words of clothing that reflect Chinese hierarchal ideology from the twenty-five histories. The method is to …

Maneuvering Modernity: Family Law As A Battle Field In Colonial Taiwan (1895-1945), Yun-Ru Chen

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Twenty five years after launching its own legal modernization in response to Western imperialism, Japan imposed a modern legal system upon its first colony, Taiwan. In accordance with the “respecting old custom” colonial policy, the Japanese created a system called Taiwanese customary law, a mixture of imperial Chinese laws, local customs and European legal concepts, and gradually implemented its newly adopted European-style Meiji Civil Code (1898). However, even since the late 1910s when the colonial policy changed into “full-flag assimilation,” family law remained an exception to the transplantation of Japanese laws. That did not, however, mean that family law was …

Searching In The Dark - Han Learning And The Controversy Of 1799 Metropolitan Exam, Shiu On Chu

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper investigates the introduction of Han Learning (hanxue 漢學) in Qing civil examinations from an institutional perspective. Focusing on the controversy over the 1799 metropolitan examination, I argue that hanxue was resisted not only by the intellectual orthodoxy Cheng-Zhu learning, but also a concept of “proper advancement” (zhengtu 正途) from examination.

The 1799 metropolitan examination was often seen as a triumph of Han Learning because the chief examiners Zhu Gui (朱珪1731-1806) and Ruan Yuan (阮元1764-1849), who were famous patrons of Han scholarship, awarded degrees to a number of established Han scholars. Contemporaries attributed this high rate of …

The Emergence Of Singlehood In The 20th And Early 21st Century: Hong Kong, Japan, And Taiwan, Joanna Kang

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

In East Asia, Confucian philosophy is the dominant value system, especially its prominent doctrine of filial piety. Filial piety is a requirement of life, and being filial is an essential approach to acquire public recognition as an individual with integrity. The most unfilial and unforgivable behavior is being unmarried or sonless.[1] However, there are more and more Asian women who are immersed in this social milieu yet are choosing to embrace their singlehood. The liberation of Asian women is one of the momentous outcomes of Western modernization. This is also a trans-cultural trend that spans nations, societies, and ideologies. What …

The Human Flesh Search Engine: Democracy, Censorship, And Political Participation In Twenty-First Century China, Vincent Capone

Graduate History Conference, UMass Boston

The Human Flesh Search Engine is a recent, unique phenomenon on the Chinese internet. Comprising of thousands of forum, micro-blog, and entertainment websites and mobilizing the overwhelming number of Chinese internet users, or netizens, the search engine is able to quickly find obscure information and identify seemingly anonymous internet personalities. These websites allow netizens to have their voices heard in an otherwise restrictive government, however these websites also become a hotbed for dissent, with web users highlighting stories and figures which they deem harmful to society. Through clever investigative work, netizens hunt down an individual's identity with the goal of …