Author: Kyoung-Hee Moon, Changwon National University

With the number of foreign residents in South Korea exceeding one million as of May 2009, many scholars, journalists, and bureaucrats claim that Korea has become a multiethnic or multicultural society. This idea needs to be put in proper perspective. The total number of foreign residents in Korea, the majority of whom are temporarily visiting migrants or students, accounts for only 2.2 per cent of the country’s total population. In addition, Chinese residents represent, at 57 per cent, the highest share of these foreign residents, and about half of these Chinese residents have Korean ancestry. Korean society is still largely ethnically homogeneous and racially distinctive, and the term ‘multiethnic Korea’ remains an unconvincing descriptor.

In addition, many Koreans are yet to accept that Korea is in the midst of a demographic shift. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Ran Tao, Renmin University

‘Hukou reform’ is now becoming a catchphrase in the Chinese media and in China’s policy making circles. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, in an exclusive interview with the Xinhua News Agency on December 27, 2009, said that China will steadily advance the reform of its decades-long household registration system in order to ensure migrant workers have the same rights as city dwellers.

The importance attached to hukou reform is also reflected in the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘No. 1 Central Committee Document’, promulgated at the end of January 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Sherry Tao Kong, ANU

In December 2009 China’s Central Economic Work Conference announced policy initiatives of hukou (household registration) reform and the absorption of migrant workers into small-medium cities. Although the renewed national strategy can certainly be seen as a welcome sign to address this fundamental issue, the majority of migrants are clustered in metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The local governments in these cities will need to devise their own coping strategies to deal with the pressure and tension over limited infrastructure and resources.

Beginning last year, Shanghai and a number of other cities have started a ‘point system’ to grant ‘well-qualified’ migrant workers permanent residency. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Yuan Cai, ANU

One of the hottest television dramas currently on air in China is called ‘Woju’, translated as snail home, alluding to the tremendous burden of carrying the dream of home ownership in China. The series has sparked a nationwide debate on the housing affordability issue. Newspaper editorials, online discussion forums and gossip around the dinner table are all about skyrocketing house prices and their impact on social stability, especially regarding the younger generations.

In a recent Green Book on housing development in China, published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), many commentators argue that the housing affordability issue has reached a breaking point. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Pradumna B. Rana, National University of Singapore

Much has been written on the economic rise of China and India and the deepening of integration between these two Asian giants and the rest of Asia more generally. Asia’s emergence and integration is, no doubt, of contemporary interest. However, Asian integration is not without historical precedent and it would be more appropriate to refer to Asia’s ‘re-emergence’ and ‘re-integration’.

During the first eighteen centuries after the birth of Christ, Asia (mainly China and India) accounted for the largest share of world output. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Raghbendra Jha, ANU

Many agencies including national governments and the World Bank have cited public works programs as a crucial tool for poverty alleviation, particularly in the rural sector. When properly designed and implemented, rural public works (RPW) have the dual advantage of providing employment to the unemployed (hence reducing poverty) and building much needed rural infrastructure.

Besides, as RPW are designed to peak in seasonally slack periods, they help stabilise incomes. By stabilising and stimulating rural incomes and, therefore demand, RPW have the potential of stimulating the rural economy and, therefore, act as a counterfoil to contracting demand during recessions. RPW have been used in many countries, including India.

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Author: Kazumasa Iwata, ESRI, Tokyo

In 2005, former Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan noticed the insensitivity of long-term interest rates to changes in short-term interest rates, and called it the ‘conundrum of the long-term interest rate’. His successor Ben Bernanke shed light on this puzzle by pointing out that the balance between saving and investment shifted towards a tendency to excess saving after the Asian Currency Crisis in 1997-98, despite the boom in the world economy after the IT bubble burst. High growth combined with low real long-term interest rates created the macro-economic circumstances that were conducive to the emergence of economic bubbles.

This gave rise to a controversy between the US and Chinese governments on the cause of sequential bubbles. The then Treasury Secretary Paulson pointed out that to the extent that the capital inflow from China contributed to lowering the nominal long-term interest rate in the US, China had joined the process of generating bubbles. The Chinese government blamed the US for its irresponsibility in allocating the flow of funds available to US investors. Chairman Bernanke admitted in April that the US should have used capital flow from abroad in a more productive way. If we look at the movement of the US long-term real interest rates (the interest rate on ten-year government bonds minus the rate of change in consumer prices, we see that it peaked out in the mid-1980s, and then declined gradually until 2008.

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Author: Rajiv Kumar

With the new government due to take office (hopefully soon), it is now open season for offering ideas, advice and suggestions for policy reforms.

And we are all very good at giving advice and don’t really bother if most of it goes unheeded. It is crucial in my view to retain the policy focus on the most critical issues to give them some sense of urgency and priority.

Drawing up a long list of desirable actions can often end up in virtual policy paralysis due to the inevitable trade-offs amongst the objectives and not enough implementation capacity.

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Author: Robin Jeffrey, Australian National University

What happened in Mumbai will not shake India to its foundations. India is tough and has weathered bigger storms. But the highly symbolic attacks dramatise a much wider set of struggles: the product of growing wealth for some and a revolution in communications.

The spectre haunting the nation is the old ghost in new clothes – class conflict, propelled by the same communications revolution that enables it to launch moon probes and claim recognition as a global power. In the new media age, awareness of injustice and disparity is growing among the poor, along with a sense that “we’re not going to take this any more.”

It will be some time before anyone knows for sure who was responsible for yesterday’s calculated lunacy. But we can be almost sure among them will be young men left out of the prosperity a growing minority of Indians have experienced. Religion sometimes propels violence, but deprivation and injustice are felt around the country. Last month 12 police were killed by suspected Naxalites in Bijapur, eastern India. It was the latest encounter between police and Naxalites or Maoists, who are leading a resistance by tribal people and landless labourers in a belt snaking from Nepal down the highlands of eastern India. Near Kolkata, the attempt by Tata, a giant conglomerate, to build a factory for the new cheap mini-car the Nano was chased away by landholders mobilised against inadequate compensation for their land. Tata announced earlier this month it would build the factory elsewhere.
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Author: Kent Anderson

A report submitted to Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda this week from 80 members of his Liberal Democratic Party proposing a drastic increase in the number of immigrants allowed into Japan. The report recommends immigration to a level of 10 per cent of the population. As the population is now roughly 128 million people, this would be roughly 13 million people or about 11 million more foreigners than there are in Japan today (yes, a population around half that of Australia’s moving to Japan)

The first issue I ask about (see ABC Radio) is Japan’s homogeneity, multiculturalism, and xenophobia. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki has most convincingly taught us, Japan is not purely homogeneous. Yet, by any standards it is probably the most homogeneous country in the world by ethnicity, religion, social-economic class, media and educational socialisation, history (and had a long period as a closed-country — the sakoku period). The introduction of a large number of people not within that mainstream will without a doubt result in friction. I assert this without commenting normatively on whether that is a good thing or bad thing. The virtue or otherwise of homogeneity is a matter for another day.

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