On December 14, 1959, amidst much fanfare and tears, the first repatriation boat carried thousands of Koreans from Niigata, Japan, to Cheongjin, North Korea. In the remaining two weeks of December 1959 alone, a total of three trips were made, transporting 2,942 persons to North Korea. Between 1959 and1984, a total of 93,340 persons were relocated from Japan to North Korea. This number included Koreans who had moved from Korea to Japan during the colonial period and their descendants, including family members who had been born in Japan, as well as some 1,830 Japanese spouses; including the descendants of Japanese spouses, the estimate total of about 6,800 Japanese citizens were repatriated to North Korea over the course of this process. Most Koreans who repatriated from Japan to North Korea originated from southern provinces in the peninsula, i.e., today’s South Korea. Reflecting recent declassification of the International Committee for Red Cross papers, scholars have revisited this issue, yet questions remain: how should we understand this phenomenon? In this presentation, Sonia Ryang approaches this question from multiple angles and addresses the issues of power and forms of life.

Registration is free and open to the public.

This event will be recorded and will be available on the Sigur Center YouTube channel after the event.

Speaker

Sonia Ryang was born in Japan to Korean parents and grew up speaking both Korean and Japanese. Ryang received a Ph.D. degree in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University, England, and worked as a Research Fellow at the Research School for Pacific and Asian Studies, the Australian National University, before being appointed as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Ryang moved to the University of Iowa as an endowed chair of Korean Studies and professor of Anthropology. At Iowa, she directed the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and also served as the Director of Academic Programs in the University of Iowa International Programs. She came to Rice in 2014 as the Director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies; after six years of directorship, she joined the Department of Transnational Asian Studies, her home department.

She has been elected the President of the Society for East Asian Anthropology (2020-2022).

Sonia Ryang is a social anthropologist by training, having obtained her PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. She began her anthropological career with research on the Korean minority in Japan as her primary focus of investigation. While, in many senses, this field of research continues to constitute the core of her work, she now also concerns herself with a much broader set of conceptual and ontological questions pertaining to human existence, encompassing ethnic minorities, diaspora, totalitarianism, ideology, romantic (and other forms of) love, language, food, and, more recently, science. While her books explore a wide range of themes, they are all underpinned by a desire to explore and elucidate the socio-historical functions and materiality of ideas that humans have created and subjected themselves to through the self-imposition of various rules, codes, and institutions. While this human journey has been marked by countless demonstrations of imagination and ingenuity, it has also witnessed innumerable examples of tragic error and loss. Sonia’s scholarship tries to address these. Thus, it is unequivocally interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary in nature and orientation, combining area studies, literature, history, gender studies, diaspora and transnational studies, philosophy, and ethics, among others. Geographically, she has focused on Korea (North and South) and Japan (the Korean diaspora in Japan) throughout her career. More recently, envisioning the concept of transnational Asia, she has begun to explore the best means by which the boundaries between Asia and Asian America can be undone, for, when viewed from multiple angles, such a distinction is rapidly becoming an artificial one.

With the grant funding by the National Science Foundation (Proposal ID: BCS-1357207) Sonia Ryang has recently finished a project which forms the sequel to her 2012 book on North Korea’s cultural logic, Reading North Korea: An Ethnological inquiry (Harvard University Press, 2012). The book, based on this research, will be published from the University of Hawaii Press in 2021, under the title Reading North Korea. With the Academy of Korean Studies funding (AKS-2020-R24) Sonia Ryang is currently working on a research that reconsiders the repatriation of Koreans from Japan to North Korea (1959 through 1984).

Moderator

Gregg A. Brazinsky works on U.S.-East Asian relations and East Asian international history. He is interested in the flow of commerce, ideas, and culture among Asian countries and across the Pacific. He is proficient in Mandarin Chinese and Korean. He is the author of two books: Winning the Third World (2017), which focuses on Sino-American Rivalry in the Third World and Nation Building in South Korea (2007), which explores U.S.-South Korean relations during the Cold War. Currently, he is working on two other book projects. The first examines American nation-building in Asia during the Cold War. The second explores Sino-North Korean relations between 1949 and 1992 and focuses specifically on the development of cultural and economic ties between the two countries. He has received numerous fellowships to support his research including the Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Smith Richardson Foundation junior faculty fellowship, and a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Center. Professor Brazinsky also currently serves as the director of the George Washington Cold War Group.

As director of the Asian Studies Program, Professor Brazinsky has attracted some of the brightest students from around the country and the world who share a commitment to pursuing careers related to Asia. He helped to launch a special mentoring program for Asian Studies MA students and has worked to expand fellowship and professional opportunities for students in the program.

Thursday, April 25, 2019
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM EDT

State Room, 7th floor
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Washington, District Of Columbia 20052

About the Event:

This event is open to the public and media. Light Refreshments will be served.

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies holds an annual memorial lecture to honor the legacy of the Center’s namesake — Gaston J. Sigur. The Gaston Sigur Memorial Lecture has featured many distinguished and high-level experts from various backgrounds and professions related to Asia. You are cordially invited to attend this year’s Annual Gaston Sigur Center Memorial Lecture with Dr. Sumil Amrith to discuss “Water and the Making of Modern India.”

Agenda:

5:00 PM – 5:30 PM | Registration and Welcome Reception

5:30 PM – 5:45 PM | Opening Remarks and Introductions (Professor Benjamin Hopkins)

5:45 PM – 7:00 PM | Gaston Sigur Memorial Lecture and Q&A Discussion (Professor Sunil Amrith)

Professor Sunil Amrith is Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies and Professor of History, and a Director of the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. His research is on the trans-regional movement of people, ideas, and institutions, and has focused most recently on the Bay of Bengal as a region connecting South and Southeast Asia. Amrith’s areas of particular interest include the history of migration, environmental history, and the history of public health. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and received the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities. Amrith sits on the editorial boards of Modern Asian Studies. Sunil Amrith grew up in Singapore, and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge. Before coming to Harvard in 2015, he spent nine years teaching at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Professor Benjamin D. Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, is a specialist in modern South Asian history, in particular that of Afghanistan, as well as British imperialism. His research focuses on the role of the colonial state in creating the modern states inhabiting the region. Professor Hopkins regularly teaches courses on South Asian history, the geopolitics of South and Central Asia, as well as World history.

Transcript

Ben Hopkins:
Good evening everyone. Why don’t we go ahead and get to the goods, as it were. It is my distinct pleasure to welcome you this evening to what is the 24th annual Gaston Sigur Lecture, which celebrates and is done in memoriam of the life work and achievement of Gaston Sigur, who is also the namesake of the Sigur Center, which I am the director of.

Ben Hopkins:
I’m Ben Hopkins, the Director of the Sigur Center, and it is my great pleasure this evening to welcome a distinguished guest and a very old friend, Professor Sunil Amrith from Harvard University.

Ben Hopkins:
Before we get to Sunil, it is my duty and pleasure to talk a little bit about our namesake, Gaston Sigur, give you some background on the Sigur Center, as well as Professor Sigur himself, who arrived here at George Washington University in 1972 to be the first head of what was then the Institute of Sino-Soviet Studies, and has subsequently transformed into being the Center that carries his name today.

Ben Hopkins:
Gaston Sigur was tapped by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 to be the Senior Director of Asian Affairs on the National Security Council, and in 1983 he was appointed as Special Assistant to the President on Asian Affairs. By 1986 he moved real estate down across the street to Foggy Bottom, being appointed and approved by the Senate as the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He’s remembered for his strengthening of the American-Japanese alliance, as well as his push for democratization in Korea. He finished his illustrious career in public service in 1989, having carried through into the first Bush administration, and returned here to GWU, where he ended up retiring in 1992.

Ben Hopkins:
In light of his service, both to the University and the country, the elders of GW decided to name the newly established Center for East Asian Studies, which is today the Center for Asian Studies, after him: The Sigur Center.

Ben Hopkins:
Gaston Sigur passed away in 1995, and in memory of his longstanding works and contributions intellectually and to the policy world, we gather here today annually for our lecture, partly in his memory. His son Paul sends his regards; he could not attend this evening, and we do miss him, but we look forward to sharing this event through the website with him as soon as possible.

Ben Hopkins:
Now the Sigur Center today is the largest center for Asian Studies in the DC area. We focus no longer solely on East Asia, but as we can see from today’s topic, right the way across Asia, including South, Southeast Asia, and even venture as far afield as Central Asia.

Ben Hopkins:
I would also draw your attention to the back of the program, which announces, for those of you that have not heard, our success in recently winning a National Resource Center Title VI grant, which has designated us as one of 15 National Resource Centers in the country, joining Columbia, Harvard, and a few other universities you may have heard of. And as he’s here, it is also my pleasure to point out that much of the work for that was done by Ed McCord, who is going to be retiring next month.

Ben Hopkins:
So with that said, let me turn to the business of the day. As I mentioned, it is a distinct pleasure to welcome a distinguished academic. Very rarely is it that I actually get to say I stand in the presence of a genius. But as you can see from his featured speaker bio, Sunil won the MacArthur Fellowship, known as the Genius Award, in 2017, and a well-deserved win it was. I’ve known Sunil for a number of years; we were at Cambridge together. And apart from being an incredibly acute mind, he is also a very, very nice person, so it’s with that warmth that I also welcome him.

Ben Hopkins:
Sunil is currently the Mehra Family Professor of South Asian studies, and to my horror I just found out he’s the Chair of the South Asian Studies Department at Harvard; apparently even if you’re a genius, you get sentenced for your sins. And he is Director of the Joint Center for History and Economics [at Harvard].

Ben Hopkins:
Sunil has written a number of award-winning and truly groundbreaking books, the latest of which will, I think, form the basis of his talk this evening. His latest book, which he will address in his talk this evening, is Unruly Waters, which just recently came out with Basic Books and Penguin, is a history of the struggle to understand and control water in the South Asian subcontinent.

Ben Hopkins:
His previous extremely well received book, Crossing The Bay of Bengal, was published with Harvard University Press in 2013, and was recognized by the American Historical Association with the John F. Richards Prize for South Asian History in 2014. He also is the author of Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia with Cambridge University Press in 2011. His first book, Decolonizing International Health: South and Southeast Asia, was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2006, and in fact, that was the first time I remember hearing Sunil speak on Dr. Malaria, which was a long time ago, back in Cambridge.

Ben Hopkins:
Additionally, Sunil has authored a number of articles in the American Historical Review, Past & Present, and EPW. He’s on the editorial board at Modern Asian Studies, is a book editor for Cambridge University Press, as well as Princeton University Press.

Ben Hopkins:
Sunil arrived at Harvard in 2015, having served his time at Birkbeck, one of the University of London colleges, for nine years, and he has a longstanding connection as well, familial and professional, to Singapore, where he grew up.

Ben Hopkins:
With that, it is my great pleasure to cede the floor to a true genius, Sunil Amrith.

Sunil Amrith:
Thank you so much Ben, for a very, very kind introduction, which I will struggle to live up to. But it’s very, very nice, it’s a particular honor to be here on the invitation of Professor Hopkins, whom I’ve known for—I don’t want to count how many years, but close to 20, I think. It’s an honor to be here giving the Sigur Memorial Lecture. Thank you all for being here at a busy time at the end of the semester.

Sunil Amrith:
My subject today is “Water and the Making of Modern India,” and I’d like to begin with a well-worn cliche. In 1909, the finance minister in the British Imperial government of India declared that, “Every budget is a gamble on the rains.” That phrase has been repeated countless times since then. It still appears in Indian newspaper reports every year.

Sunil Amrith:
Half a century later, the sentiment held. “For us in India, scarcity is only a missed monsoon away,” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said in the late 1960s. And then just last year, in a lecture that she presented at Harvard, one of India’s best known environmentalists, Sunita Narain, declared in an off-the-cuff remark, “India’s Finance Minister is the monsoon.”

Sunil Amrith:
At ground level, this is to simply state a basic truth. Even today, close to 60% of India’s agriculture is rain-fed, subject to a monsoon climate that has always been intensely seasonal, and subject to a good deal of internal variability. But the story I want to tell this evening is not one of climate as destiny. Rather, it’s a story of how the idea of climate as destiny has had significant political implications in modern India.

Sunil Amrith:
When I mentioned recently to somebody that I was working on the history of the monsoon, they asked, “Does the monsoon need a history? What sort of history?”

Sunil Amrith:
For a start, the monsoon has a natural history, and we can see this in Pranay Lal’s wonderful book, Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent. And in that, Lal sketches a story of a monsoon that has evolved over tens of millions of years, leaving an archive of its natural history on the seabed and on land. Traces embedded in tree rings tell us that the Asian summer monsoon has strengthened during warm inter-glacial periods, and weakened during periods of planetary cooling, as during the so-called Little Ice Age that lasted through the middle of the 16th to the early 18th centuries.

Sunil Amrith:
Since the late 19th century, meteorologists in India have pioneered the study of the periodicity of the monsoon’s internal variability, leading to the discovery of how the monsoon is tele-connected, as they say, with other parts of the planet’s climate, including especially through the El Nino-Southern Oscillation.

Sunil Amrith:
But the monsoon also has a modern history, a human history, which is what I will be concerned with this evening. The monsoon has shaped, and continues to shape patterns of economic life in India, but one of the most fundamental shifts over the past half century is really the coming together of the monsoon’s natural and human histories, reflected in mounting evidence that human activity is itself reshaping the monsoon.

Sunil Amrith:
It has a human history in the sense that this is also a history of science, a history of climate science in India. It has a history in the sense that it is part of a history of ideas about climate, nature, and society. And I shall suggest this evening that water has been central to different conceptions of India’s freedom and India’s future.

Sunil Amrith:
The monsoon has long evoked many emotions: Anxiety, longing, wistfulness. This is a very well known photograph of Raghubir Singh, which hangs in MoMA: Monsoon Rains, Munger, Bihar. I’ll focus on the prosaic in my lecture today, but I think we also need histories of the monsoon in Indian art, literature, music, photography.

Sunil Amrith:
I’d like to begin with a moment where, really for the first time, it seemed that the monsoon might just be a problem that could be solved. Reflecting on the state of India’s development, the members of the Indian Industrial Commission wrote confidently in 1918, that: “The terrible calamities, which from time to time depopulated wide stretches of the country, need no longer be feared. In a monsoon climate,” they said, “failure of the rains must always mean privation and hardship, but no longer need it lead to wholesale starvation and loss of life.”

Sunil Amrith:
This conveyed a strong sense that something fundamental had changed in India over the first two decades of the 20th century. The risk posed by climate had been mitigated, both by policy, by the early warning system of the famine codes, and by technology; above all, by irrigation. As long as India remained predominantly agrarian, some level of risk would remain, but the Commissioners envisaged a future in which industrialization would provide new employment and greater security as India’s population moved from the countryside to the cities.

Sunil Amrith:
In the 1870s, the idea that famine was inevitable in India prevailed amongst British administrators. By the 1920s, most observers believed that India had conquered famine, and yet the worry about water did not go away. We can see this deep anxiety about the material underpinnings of life in the ways that many leaders in Indian politics, leaders in the nationalist movement, scientists, engineers, thinkers wrote about freedom, because in many of these conceptions of freedom, water was crucial.

Sunil Amrith:
“Modern science claims to have curbed the tyranny and the vagaries of nature,” Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in 1929, but there remained a large gap between that potential and the reality of life for millions of Indians. Nehru, amongst others, was clear about the material urgency behind every vision of freedom. “Our desire for freedom is more a thing of the mind than the body,” Nehru said. He was talking to his colleagues. “But for most Indians,” he said, “they suffer hunger and deepest poverty, an empty stomach, and a bare back.” “For most of India’s population,” he said, “freedom was not the thing of the mind, but a vital bodily necessity.”

Sunil Amrith:
For his part, Mahatma Gandhi made a different sort of link between nature and freedom. We see this during his iconic Salt March. Choosing the British Salt Tax as the symbolic focus of his nonviolent protest, Gandhi observed that next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. The vital properties of salt linked the coastal ecosystem with the lives of millions inland. Gandhi’s was an argument about climate and society. He pointed out that the poorest who labored outdoors in the heat, were those most in need of salt and sustenance.

Sunil Amrith:
So a wide range of Indian thinkers, scientists, activists, drew different lessons from their awareness of this pressing material need, and the centrality of water to that need.

Sunil Amrith:
We can see this, for example, in the divergence of opinion between the sociologist, Radhakamal Mukerjee, and the scientist, the astrophysicist, Meghnad Saha. Both of them were concerned with Bengal’s rivers. Both of them recognized the centrality of water to the livelihood of people, to agriculture, to health. And both of them saw the importance of water to India’s future, but they saw that future very differently.

Sunil Amrith:
Mukerjee believed that a restoration of what he called writing in the 1920s and thirties “ecological balance and respect for the distinctive nature of each riverine ecosystem” would provide the seeds for revival.

Sunil Amrith:
Saha’s prescription could not have been more different. Saha was scathing in response to those like Mukherjee, who’d argued that afforestation and local efforts of soil conservation would strip the Damodar river, for example, of its destructive power. He called the claim – which was widely believed in the 19th century – that deforestation affected rainfall, absurd. Saha wrote that this was a claim for which there was not a single iota of positive proof. If changes in forest cover and land use had any effect on local climate, Saha argued, these must be extremely small compared to the huge monsoon currents, which are responsible for India’s rainfall. So rainfall, in Saha’s imagination, was beyond human intervention.

Sunil Amrith:
But human intervention to transform the landscape could neutralize the threat posed by hydraulic uncertainty, securing rivers from the alternating paucity and excess of water. And here Saha was confident about the future. “We are fortunate,” he wrote, “to live in a time where the large-scale experience of thousands of dams constructed in the United States are at our disposal.” He believed that the global circulation of ideas and technology, a process of learning would come to India’s aid.

Sunil Amrith:
In valorizing the Tennessee Valley Authority, and also the Soviet example, Saha indicated that his dreams for India extended beyond anything that the sluggish British colonial stage could carry out. He envisaged the construction of dams in eastern India that would last for hundreds of years.

Sunil Amrith:
My invocation of Saha brings us to the topic that, I think more than any other, has dominated discussion of India’s water policy, and that is large dams. As I’ll discuss in a moment, large dams have undoubtedly been of pivotal importance symbolically, socially, ecologically, but I think it’s also a mistake to search the early 20th century only for the roots of India’s later enthusiasm for large dams. Instead, what we see, I think, is a multiplicity of ways of addressing India’s dependence on the monsoon, and these were at once more vocal and more global than the exclusive focus on large dams as a matter of national policy would suggest.

Sunil Amrith:
In 1951, India carried out its first census after independence. It was, at that time, the largest census ever undertaken in the world. The average life expectancy in India stood at just 31 years for men and 30 years for women. Already in the US, at that time, that figure was 65 years for men, and 71 for women. For every thousand live births in India at the time, more than 140 infants died. And in the minds of many of India’s leaders, this was an indictment of two centuries of British rule.

Sunil Amrith:
The political theorist, Pratap Mehta, has argued that the immediate converts of political power in post-colonial India was dictated by the intensity of mere life. That is to say, poverty and destitution put most Indians – and Mehta in this sense echoes the quotation from Nehru that I gave out just a few minutes earlier – under the pressing dictates of their bodies, and the imperative to address these needs, Mehta observed, can have no limiting balance. “This simple logic,” quoting Mehta, “transports power from a traditional concern with freedom to a concern with life and its necessities.” In this quest, the conquest of nature was pivotal.

Sunil Amrith:
The 1950s were characterized by a newfound ambition and confidence that the dictates of nature might be conquered. There’s no question that large dams, perhaps more than any other technology, came to symbolize progress and freedom in post-independence India. It was an era when, in Sunil Khilnani’s memorable phrase, “India fell in love with concrete.” Excellent visual illustration of the allure of large dams that was mounted an exhibition held at the Nehru Memorial Museum a few years ago, called Dams in the Nation. And a lot of this was really about the symbolic power of dams as symbols of freedom and independence in newly post-independence India.

Sunil Amrith:
This is a picture of Nehru at the ceremonial inauguration of the Bhakra Dam in Punjab, addressing a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people. This is taken from one of dozens of public information films which played before the feature blockbusters in the cinemas of the 1950s, telling a heroic story of India’s war against nature.

Sunil Amrith:
Nehru’s reflection that these dams were the temples of new India has often been cited. Kanwar Sain, the second head of India’s Water Authority, wrote that, “These river valley projects constitute the biggest single effort since independence to meet the material wants of the people, for full irrigation brings ultimately, the sinews of the man from power to sinews of industry. And these were multipurpose projects designed simultaneously to provide irrigation, water, and hydropower. Cruel reality: More than 90% of the dams of India have been used primarily for irrigation.

Sunil Amrith:
Sain voiced the hopes of many of India’s planners and architects when he declared that dams are indeed the symbols of the aspirations of new India, and the blessings – note this shift to a religious language – that stream forth from them are the enduring gifts of our generation to posterity. Note the fusion of the language of science and faith, reason and eco-rapture.

Sunil Amrith:
So one aspect of the story has been very well studied, and that’s the very tangible influence of American hydraulic engineers, people like David […]. On the Damodar Valley Corporation in particular, Dan Klingensmith wrote an excellent book on this. And my friend David Engerman’s exhaustive recent history of India in the Cold War adds a lot of detail to that. But the point I’d like to make here is that the Americans and the Soviets were not the only influences on India’s love affair with dams. India in turn shaped approaches to the challenge of water across Southeast Asia.

Sunil Amrith:
So in May 1954, Kanwar Sain – who I just quoted – chairman of India’s Water Commission, and KL Rao embarked on an official visit to China. Their goal was to report back on China’s water projects in the first years of the People’s Republic. They focused in particular on Chinese attempts to use dams to control flooding along the Yangtze and other rivers.

Sunil Amrith:
Sain and Rao were in fact amongst the first outsiders to see firsthand China’s massive hydraulic experiment. They arrived in China in May 1954, and they stayed for two months. They spent much of their time on the water. They actually traveled by boat along the Yangtze for most of their journey. They were the protagonists of India’s colossal efforts to control water, and yet the scale of work that they saw in China dazzled them. They undertook their tour of China exactly half a century after the Indian irrigation Commission had traveled through India in search of water. And in a sense, theirs was part of the same quest. The farmers of the late 19th century had unleashed in India a desperate and continuing search for sources of water to mitigate the dependence on the monsoon.

Sunil Amrith:
Sain and Rao were both trained squarely within a colonial tradition of Indian water engineering, but now they represented an independent nation, and for inspiration they looked not only to Europe, to America, but to revolutionary China.

Sunil Amrith:
And consider the contrast between the two tours. When the Indian irrigation Commission, at the beginning of the 20th century, traveled with a retinue of servants and specially chartered trains, Sain and Rao were given strictly limited foreign exchange and accompanied by just two interpreters.

Sunil Amrith:
Their report contains an extended list of every single Chinese official they met, from ministers to field engineers to water scientists at the College of Hydraulic Engineering. They were struck by the quality of China’s hydraulic engineering. They delighted in the firm emphasis given to technical education in China. They praised the Chinese capacity for improvisation, building huge dams from local materials when imports were in short supply. Naturally, their thoughts turned to comparisons with India.

Sunil Amrith:
There were clear differences in the challenges that each country faced. One sharp contrast between India and China was indeed climatic. Once again, what made India distinctive was the monsoon. “Unlike India, hemmed in by the Himalayas,” they wrote, “China is open to Central Asia. This meant that in the summer, China, unlike India, is not the single objective of the air circulation of a whole ocean.”

Sunil Amrith:
By contrast, China’s rivers were more menacing than India’s, more prone to burst their banks. So in Sain and Rao’s stark comparison, India’s great need was irrigation, China’s was flood control. Both our countries bide an industrial future. Of course, the promise of hydroelectric power attracted them both.

Sunil Amrith:
Sain and Rao returned to India with a firm sense that there were lessons that India should learn from China. But there were ominous portents, too. In his farewell speech bidding Sain and Rao farewell, the Chinese Director of Water Resources had described how China’s water projects had been extended to the border regions of our fraternal minorities to promote national unity. There was no attempt on the Chinese side to disguise the fact that water was intrinsic to political power. The conquest of water meant the conquest of space. Unspoken at the time was the sense that some day the border regions in question may include China’s borders with India.

Sunil Amrith:
Sain and Rao faced another problem when they returned with the first ever maps of China’s water projects to be seen outside China. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs was rankled by what Sain and Rao had missed; that the maps they’d been given by Chinese water officials claimed as Chinese territory a large part of the borderland that the Indian state saw as integral to India. The maps were destroyed.

Sunil Amrith:
Interestingly enough, in the Indian edition of my book, Unruly Waters, the maps were deleted at the very last minute, before it was published. These are still very, very sensitive issues, particularly the maps illustrating that chapter on India and China in the 1950s. The maps were destroyed, redrawn to accord with India’s understanding of its territorial boundaries.

Sunil Amrith:
Sain later wrote in his memoirs that he was deeply grateful this had been done before the volume was published. If it had not, it would have been a source of great embarrassment a few years later, when India and China went to war over just those borders. Tellingly, Sain and Rao’s report was, after 1962, treated as a classified document until the 21st century.

Sunil Amrith:
Just as China’s experiences inspired India’s water engineers, so India became a model to the rest of Southeast Asia. In 1955, the director of the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, the South Indian economist […], commissioned Kanwar Sen to join the UN mission to survey the Mekong river. “The prick has gone too deep to be halted.” That’s how Sen described his sense that large scale hydraulic engineering was inevitable now in the Mekong as elsewhere in Asia, given the bold claims that had been made on behalf of big dams, given the hunger for progress and development that he saw wherever in the world he went.

Sunil Amrith:
The Mekong commission was quickly overshadowed by the escalation of American involvement in Indochina as the US became caught up in military conflict in Vietnam, then engulfed Vietnam’s neighbors as well. But Sen actually continued in his job. He was a patriotic Indian engineer at the pinnacle of his profession, enamored of China, but with close personal and professional links to the US Bureau of Reclamation. He chose to spend a decade of his career with what became the Mekong River Commission, trying to coordinate the development of Asia’s most international river, notwithstanding the palace politics that the scheme was stymied by.

Sunil Amrith:
In his memoir, Sen hints the material reward of working with the UN might have been one incentive for him to stay, but his motivations went much deeper than that. He believed, like so many of his generation, that taming the waters was a goal beyond ideology. Working for the UN alongside many former colonial civil servants, engineers now turned to development consultants, Sen held a vision of Asian nations working together to claim their rightful place in the community of nations.

Sunil Amrith:
In a memoir that is detached, even clinical in tone, a rare moment of emotion comes when Sen describes what he says was his pilgrimage to the site of Angkor Wat in Cambodia while on his first Mekong mission. “I was very much moved by the ancient glory and culture of India reflected in Angkor Wat,” he wrote. Just as many of India’s water engineers at home presented their new temples as really standing within an ancient historical tradition of Indian water engineering, so here Sen appealed to a deep history of cultural exchange across borders to provide ballast for his vision of an Asia united by the challenge of water.

Sunil Amrith:
By the mid 1960s, this approach to water that had epitomized the post-independence period ran into trouble. In 1965 and ’66, large parts of India suffered from drought. This threatened food shortages, even led to famine being declared in Bihar, the first since Indian independence. India’s growing and uncomfortable dependence on American food aid was clearly illustrated by the monsoon fairies of the 1960s. “How helplessly we are at the mercy of the elements,” a newspaper editorial lamented in 1965, arguing that really all India had to show for the previous decade of development efforts were some shallow and tentative improvements in irrigation.

Sunil Amrith:
The crux of the Indian government strategy from the mid 1960s onwards was to concentrate modern inputs in irrigated areas. This is a very prosaic way to describe a fundamental change. From the 19th century India’s geography of water had shaped plans for the country’s future. Now the difference between irrigated and rain fed lands would be accepted as a necessary inequality even as a matter of strategy. It drove what we know as the green revolution, which combined the substantive irrigation inputs with new high yielding seeds that had first been tried in Mexico and the Philippines. The precondition for the growth of the green revolution in India was a massive expansion in irrigation, and however large the downs, however monumental, they were insufficient.

Sunil Amrith:
Cultivators in arid parts of India have known for centuries, and the British recognized the 19th century that India’s groundwater resources provided perhaps a better insurance against drought. As early as the 1880s British authorities in Bombay and Madras had experimented with electric pumps to extract groundwater. In 1950, there were already around 150,000 electric pumps in use in India. By the end of the century that number was 20 million, and India was the largest user of groundwater in the world. Until the 1960s groundwater could not be mobilized on a large enough scale to meet India’s requirements. The widespread use of tube wells and electric pumps changed that decisively. And if you look at this graph of irrigated India, you see a very sharp increase around the end of the 1960s. All of that is groundwater.

Sunil Amrith:
As a lawyer for the […] show, India’s groundwater law, however, continues to be shaped by colonial precedence that accorded absolute rights over groundwater to property owners, with no recognition of its growing public importance for Indian agriculture. I’ll talk about some of the consequences of this in the last part of my talk. Large dams had held out the promise of irrigation water plus hydroelectric power. In the groundwater era, demands for water and energy came together in a different way. State governments encouraged the pursuit of productivity by subsidizing the capital costs of infrastructure for this intensive exploitation of groundwater.

Sunil Amrith:
State electricity boards reduced the cost of electricity. By the 1970s, unable to bear the cost of monitoring energy use by millions of farmers dispersed across the country, state electricity boards opted for flat tariffs. As a result, agriculture’s share of total energy use in India grew from 10% in 1970 to 30% by 1995, even as the state electricity boards accumulated huge losses. Groundwater today accounts for 60% of India’s irrigated area, surface irrigation. The large dams only 30%. All the while, and despite the declining importance of surface irrigation, the profusion of large dams continued.

Sunil Amrith:
In fact, the 1970s were the peak decade of dam construction in India, and the social and ecological costs have multiplied. Since the 1950s, large dams have displaced millions of people in India compounding the loss of land and livelihood with the rupture of communities through the process of resettlement. The range of estimates for the number of people displaced specifically by dam projects in India ranges from 16 to 40 million people since 1947. These estimates come from the World Commission on Dams. The Red Cross, in 2012, went for the higher end of that range, as has the work of activists like Warren Fernandez and the geographer Sanjay Chakraborty.

Sunil Amrith:
So between 16 and 40 million people displaced by large dams. Under classes have been by far the worst affected, least able to negotiate adequate compensation from state and local governments. The environmental consequences of large dams have also been concentrated in the areas of the dam’s construction. Reservoirs have drowned millions of hectares of forest. Canals and barrels have disruptive water flow and drainage, often accompanied by a rise in vegetable diseases.

Sunil Amrith:
There was nothing inevitable about this outcome. I think we should not lose sight of the ambivalence and complexity with which these questions were viewed, even as these policies were being enacted. Even as large projects were pushed forward heedless to protests, this was accompanied by a growing consciousness of sustainability and loss, and the rise in India of one of the world’s most diverse and large environmental movements. It’s the first UN conference on the environment, as many of you know, it was held in 1972 in Stockholm. And Indira Gandhi was actually one of the very few heads of state to attend that first conference on the environment.

Sunil Amrith:
And in her speech to the plenary session she discussed the ecological problems that were already a matter of public discussion in India. She set out a position that saw environmental degradation is primarily a problem of poverty, a problem of distribution, not of numbness. She reminded her audience that we inhabit a divided world, and I think rightly many scholars have drawn a straight line from Indira Gandhi’s speech to the sorts of positions that the Indian government took right through the nineties and two thousands in climate negotiations. Indira Gandhi attributed historical responsibility for environmental destruction to the wealthy countries of the world. Many of the advanced countries of today reached their present affluence by their domination of other races and countries, she said, and through the exploitation of natural resources.

Sunil Amrith:
“We do you not wish to impoverish the environment any further,” she insisted, and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people. Her most resonate phrase, the one for which the speech is usually quoted, was in the form of a question. “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?” She concluded by describing to her audience how she saw India’s quest since independence. “For the last quarter of a century,” she said, “we’ve been engaged in an enterprise unparalleled in human history. The provision of basic needs to one sixth of mankind within the span of one or two generations.”

Sunil Amrith:
It is such a startlingly simple insight, but one that we’ve perhaps forgotten in this application of speed, urgency, and scale by her recognition of the demographic and material transformations that were sweeping the world in the 1970s. She was pointing to a phrase that subsequent environmental historians have really labeled the great acceleration. As I mentioned a minute ago, the 1970s were also the moment that India saw the rise of a diverse but interlinked set of environmental activists. These included rural movements like the famous Chipko movement as well as urban activism. A group in Bombay in the 1960s and 70s, for example, called so clean, which took an early interest in air and water pollution.

Sunil Amrith:
Since the 1970s the wave of local opposition to large dams, in particular, has grown into one of the largest social and political mobilizations that India has seeds since independence. The best known of them is the non mother movement, but there are many others alongside it. The first citizens report on the state of the Indian environment, which was published in 1982, was something of a landmark intellectually in the development of India’s environmental movement, and articulated this very specific connection between social justice and environmental protection, which I think has characterized environmentalism in India. Interestingly for me as a historian, many environmental activists in India in the 1980s began to look to the past.

Sunil Amrith:
They began to look to what we can probably conclude is a romanticized idea of a past of harmony and ecological balance. This is a very influential publication from the mid-1980s, “Ding wisdom, the rise fall and potential of India’s traditional water harvesting systems.” They drew on a tradition of thought that went back to rather common Mukherjee and Gandhi. They sought the principles of ecological balance and traditional practices of farming, fishing, and artisanal production.

Sunil Amrith:
Their edition of the past was in many ways a useful fiction. It doesn’t really accord with what environmental historians and archaeologists have shown us about the environmental history of South Asia over many centuries. But nevertheless, this particular vision of a past of ecological balance was mobilized in a very powerful way politically. So let me come to a conclusion. I suggested at the beginning that from the beginning of the 20th century, the monsoon has been seen as a fundamental problem in modern India. Geological research has shown that the monsoon over the last twenty, thirty years has exhibited increasingly erratic behavior.

Sunil Amrith:
Regional drivers of changes in the monsoon circulation, chiefly driven by aerosol emissions and land use change interacts with planetary warming to make the monsoon increasingly erratic, increasingly prone to extremes. The monsoon does less well than almost any other climatic phenomenon in global climate models because it is so complex. As ever, most attention has been given to solutions that are squarely in the tradition of top down water engineering. For example, a river linking project, which is underway now in India with the strong support of the current government to build tens of thousands of kilometers of canals to link India’s Himalayan rivers right down to the Southern tip of the peninsula.

Sunil Amrith:
Interestingly enough, the architects of the river linking project quite explicitly see their inspiration as the 19th century British water engineer, Arthur Cotton. In constant, we’d see that Arthur Cotton in the 1870s wrote about: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could bring the Himalayan rivers down to the tip of the peninsula?” It embodies a view that the civil servant Ramaswami Iyer, who was a big proponent of large dams, but towards the end of his life changed his mind, decried just a few years before he died, as reflecting a Promethean attitude to the control of water. The space of dam building in the Himalayas in particular has met with resistance, and it comes with heightened risks. And this is a map from a few years ago of all the proposed dam sites in the Himalayas. And this was from the geological mapping that on top of the most seismically active zones in the Himalayas.

Sunil Amrith:
The risks are ecological, the risks are geopolitical, given that each one of these rivers is transnational and crosses boundaries in a part of Asia where there are very few treaties governing water sharing. Meanwhile, groundwater levels in parts of Northwestern and South Eastern India are particularly depleted, and this is a NASA satellite image that shows the shift just from 2002 to 2008 in ground water levels in India’s agriculturally most productive region. I am neither a water policy expert nor an engineer. I am concerned with what the perspective of history can bring to illuminating some of our public debates about water and climate.

Sunil Amrith:
So a few words and conclusion on what I think a historical perspective can bring. Living with the uncertainty of the monsoon has been an inherent part of life in South Asia from the earliest times. Over centuries, South Asian societies have evolved complex social and economic institutions, including, not limited to sophisticated irrigation systems to mitigate the fundamental problem of uneven rainfall and variable river flow. Between the mid 19th and the mid 20th century, the management of India’s water resources changed scale, underpinned by confidence and technology’s capacity to channel, even maybe to conquer nature. The intellectual and infrastructural legacies of that era epitomized by a belief and an investment in massive hydraulic engineering still shape water policy in South Asia. As the legal scholar Jed Perdy has argued in a wonderful book called After Nature, the material world that we inhabit is in many ways a memorial to a long running legacy of contested ideas about nature.

Sunil Amrith:
And in just this way, the current landscape of water in modern India is an outcome of a legacy of contested ideas. Colonial responses to an unfamiliar and unpredictable climate, in the context of agricultural capitalism, nationalist ideas about securing India from famine and deprivation, provisions of scientists and engineers who imagined new ways to harness water, and not least, the claims of hundreds of millions of Indian voters who demanded for their communities and their regions the fruits of progress and development. It is also an outcome of vast inequalities.

Sunil Amrith:
Inequalities in access to land, to water, and to energy. Inequalities in different groups’ ability to participate in the decisions that govern their lives and livelihoods. So we contend today with the consequences both of success and of failure in that endeavor. And by extension with the successes and failures of Indian democracy, in what Indira Gandhi called its unparalleled effort to provide for the basic needs of one sixth of mankind within the span of one or two generations. The scale of the water crisis facing India today is sobering. But the most important lesson that I think a historical perspective holds is that water management never has been and never can be a purely technical or scientific question. Ideas about the distribution and management of water in India are deeply inflected with cultural values, with notions of justice, with hopes and fears of nature.

Sunil Amrith:
Thank you very much.

Ben Hopkins:
I think Sunil just – I think Sunil just demonstrated why we won a 2017 corporate prize. Thank you for a very thought-provoking talk, Sunil, and I’m sure there’s many questions for all of you’s fine privilege, just briefly.

Ben Hopkins:
But I’ve got one question for you, and that is very clearly sketched out a tradition of technocratic modernism for water management in India the water dam maintenance, economic development. But then my attention was drawn in particular to your picture of the overlay of seismic zones and dams. And actually, Dan Hanes a while ago gave a little presentation that had something similar, and that drew my attention to that map was also a map of security issues for South Asia, right?

Ben Hopkins:
You mentioned, of course, that Adivasi threshold being disproportionately affected by displacement, which makes me wonder how does that feed into state insecurity domestically, along frontiers and the borders. Then even talking about geopolitics – who’s going to control the […] for the Indus that the part of governing water isn’t intimately linked with the art of governing the hills.

Ben Hopkins:
And, so I wonder if you might comment on a third area you hinted at in your talk, and that is perhaps, the security, securitization of the water.

Sunil Amrith:
That’s a vastly important dimension of this. One thing that strikes me is really how relating 20th century the hills came to be the focus of this water engineer. And I’ll get into that specifically, precisely as you asked, that it’s only as both Beijing and Delhi have sought to position themselves in this frontier area that this infrastructure is part, and that part of that establishing presence in the stage.

Sunil Amrith:
Road building usually precedes dam building, almost every one of these cases. I think you have many ways Chinese instance of the post-1980s liberation dams, perhaps even a better example than the Indian one I have given today of how close the security, governability, governance and water management are.

Sunil Amrith:
So then we turn the question that the frontiers of water engineering in this entire India are also regions which central governance have the disingenuous hold over, which are regions where local populations are being disenfranchised. Often feel alienated from exactly those kinds of nation-building, modernizing projects from the 20th century on, providing and aligning logical moves […].

Ben Hopkins:
Now, let’s open it to the floor. My questions, my only request would be if you could identify yourself before you ask your question. Yes?

Speaker 3:
Hello. Hi. My name is […]. I am a senior and double majoring in history and international affairs. My question is sort of related to the question that Dr. Hopkins asked. The rationale is that dams in India are a symbol of progress and modernity, and also the indigenous peoples and central tribes seem to be disproportionately affected by these.

Speaker 3:
I was wondering if you thought there was some sort of connection between the fact that internal development for roads in India conceptualize […] backwards populations? And […] progress, as related to the fact that there are the people who are most easily displaced in this vulnerable are you find, because of these symbols of progress.

Sunil Amrith:
I think you put more eloquently than I did, and that’s because it is exactly one of the reasons why they have been disproportionately affected is because their state’s view of themselves to progress is something that’s rooted. […] doesn’t change very much after Indian independence. So if in a sense, there are many scholars and then Adivasi activists who almost write some new channel for those and these are often I think some of the terms of the state’s approaches to those communities.

Sunil Amrith:
So there’s that, but there’s also the fact that of course, the Adivasis’ lifestyles and livelihoods depend on forests. And it those forests that are both economically valuable, but also precisely where these dams are to be built, make way for a different kind of primitive landscape and for a different kind of infrastructure. But I think that […] is important.

Sunil Amrith:
We know people are asking the question, but why are they not heard? Why does it take until the 1970s, 1980s for there to be large-scale protests against these types of displacements? But I think a lot of that has to do, also it has to do with more so that has to do with inequalities of power, and it has to do with precisely that. I think Mary says in the late 1940s the very first group people who are displaced in India was for the […]. “If you want to suffer, at least you suffered for the issues.”

Sunil Amrith:
And I think that that mentality is still current, that these are necessary costs for progress. But perhaps, the question that isn’t asked so much is well progress, but who is going to be disadvantaged for this? And who is there are certain groups disproportionately burying those costs.

Linda Yarr:
I’m Linda Yarr, here at the Sigur Center. You mentioned that the two engineers went to the Ghaghara River, you mentioned. So as you know, there is a quite pushback of civil society throughout Southeast Asia, the international rivers network, any number of organizations in Thailand, Vietnam, in Laos and elsewhere. To what extent do you see a connection between civil society and anti-movements in Southeast Asia and South Asia?

Sunil Amrith:
Very good question. And it’s something that is very close to my heart, in terms that it’s one aspect of the story they’re continuing to delve into. I think there are lots of connections, and they actually go back to the 1970s. One of the interesting things about this publication and other publications in this group is […].

Sunil Amrith:
Their first publication was called Citizen’s Report on Saving the Environment, and it was published in 1982. And it was a very short preface which says something that I find profoundly interesting, which is that their inspiration for that book actually came from Malaysia. And that it was actually going to Penan, which in ’70s was a real center of consumer activism, which by the late ’70s had turned into consumer/environmental activism that they got the idea because it had to be this consumer’s association of the lying cup, it had to be late ’70s published a citizen’s report of the state of Malaysia’s environment. Focusing particularly on deforestation, on how vastly the tribal peoples of Malaysia were being impacted by some of this development.

Sunil Amrith:
The same network around Penan, it morphs into something a little bit above the network. By the 1980s, they’re the ones who published Bruno Manser’s first book. I mean, Bruno Manser becomes perhaps the best-known environmentalist in the ’80s and ’90s. Really a spokesperson for the anti-localization movement. And in fact, he’s also first published out of Malaysia, and these networks that I think really are really important to the 1980s and ’90s.

Sunil Amrith:
I don’t know that the intent of the situations around the Indian environment that those links are as strong as they might have been on both sides. I suspect that through the 2000s these kinds of networks between civil society groups and trying to come together to see a shared government and were in search of these things.

Deepa Ollapally:
Deepa Ollapally from the Sigur Center, as well. But similarly we spent our possible alternative scenario to a securitization of water. And I will, I may suggest, that when you look at the China, India area that looks valuable in the area, one of the things that comes up is, of course, the Tibetan water tower, where all these rivers are in fact flowing from the headwaters. But then, when you look beyond the India, China and go further into Pakistan as well as Bangladesh, India is a midway area.

Deepa Ollapally:
So, the point is that when you look at relationships among these countries, your political relationships, because that’s what I look at. The idea that somehow China being the argument of control and having other forms of water, and so, if there’s dam building that constrains water to India, it’s also constrained to Pakistan and Bangladesh, who happen to be very good friends of China.

Deepa Ollapally:
So there is, I see a more complex set of relationships that then, perhaps the technical and political coming-together, where they only have to sort it out in a way that it could be an area of cooperation, rather than competition. How do you see that?

Sunil Amrith:
I mean, I think the goal of the whole confluence on that emphasis is sometimes neglect, but this is seen as a deal by both Indians and the Chinese are heavily invested in that construction in that part of the job. And I think that it’s precisely that level of complication.

Sunil Amrith:
It certainly led me not to conclude in my book that geopolitical conflict is the only way to get this to work out. I mean, I know some people are very strongly of that view, but I think I really agree with the theme dealing more around the geopolitical scenarios in that there are such complicated relationships.

Sunil Amrith:
Now, obviously, they’re also very much private sector investors involved. That’s one way we see things very different from that period of […] I was talking about when this was all state-financed or bank-financed, into such demand. I mean, now you have, of course Chinese engineering companies they’re such role models in the region, in parts of Africa. But there are also some private interests, too. So I think it’s become a much more complicated scenario than simply thinking about it in such a simple way.

Kristen:
Hi. My name is Kristen, and I’m studying history. I was particularly moved by your conclusion that […] provides the goods to alternative fuels to think about these problems, cultural to […]. Preservation issues in thinking about certainly the way that water has been controlled and incorporated into architecture, as these advanced use cases.

Kristen:
But also, the symbolic power of water, and particularly that the Indians should have a […] from the rivers. And I was thinking about river […] and the wonderful depictions that we have, and especially for it.

Kristen:
Did you find in any time of your research thinking maybe about what they do […]? In what ways have this cultural power, this sacred power of rivers, of these waters, has that come to play in these kinds of conversations about dam building or not?

Sunil Amrith:
That’s a wonderful question. What I’m struck by is that the sacred and spiritual power of the water is very edited in the 50s and 60s. And yet, somehow completely distinct from the conversation about dams, developers and the future. It’s not that one displaces the other, but that it’s that it’s sort of – so my colleague Diana Eck wrote that wonderful book India: A Sacred Geography, the chapters on rivers ends on the discussion: how could the Ghangra be the most revered and the most the future river of the world?

Sunil Amrith:
And she works through, without focusing a clear answer, she works through that question. And so the 50s, just when they’re building these big dams, there’s a massive complement out of the 1950s, which the burst after independence, which brings so many tens of millions of people to converge precisely on some sacred carrier river.

Sunil Amrith:
[…] in his last will and testament, he writes in a sort of spiritual sense about the Ghangra and about how he wishes his ashes to be buried there, not because he’s religious but because nevertheless, it represents the continuity within history. The narrative recalls that the dams are the temples of India comes this other side, there is this other vocabulary, there is this other way of thinking about water. Really in everyday life, the sacred power of the waters means as much as any of these infrastructure projects do to a lot of people in that area of existence.

Sunil Amrith:
And it’s sometimes when these things clash with one another, as I think they start to do in the 1980s that you see interesting ways of trying to address the relationship between the two. I think the main thing that’s happening is actually in the Indian courts.

Sunil Amrith:
So the National Green Tribunal of India actually recognized sacred groves, the preservation of sacred groves, as falling under the region of religion in the constitution. And there are ways in which even some decisions in Indian Supreme Court are almost personified nature in a way, not quite giving it rights in the way that some communities do it. But nevertheless, bringing in these arguments about the spiritual and sacred value of these rivers. It interestingly enough, is in the courts post-1908s that you see that tension really coming into form.

Harmony:
Hi, my name is Harmony Gale I’m a student at this school. The question I explore in my project, as you mentioned it, it is given a right and it is starting with the British power. Why do you think it’s getting that wide revival? I mean, we took the […] when in 2015 started and it began, but based along an opponent of it. There’s not opposition on it, and it started in 1917, and it’s a bit more […]. Why is that?

Sunil Amrith:
It really is an idea that just won’t go away. I mean, it was there in the 1870s, and there’s a moment in the 1960s where they start talking about it again. And I think some of it is just this profound sense that India is so shaped by the real inequalities of the water there, that it really does condense the waters in some of the driest places on earth. And that has clearly been something that’s wrangled in the minds, particularly of water engineers, of how we fix this?

Sunil Amrith:
I mean, I think there is that sense starting around the late 19th, early 20th century that the technology is there to do something about this. I think Madden makes the same comment in the 1950s, he says: “So much river in certain part of China, we need the gods to give us some.”

Sunil Amrith:
Across the ideological spectrum, I think there’s something profoundly attractive about this. I don’t think it will ever happen, and one of the reasons is purely that we think we controlled little today about water conservation and transform a way, but profound water advantage within it today. And I think that is what more than anything else, will stop a project like this. The common dispute has been going on since, depending on how you look at it, 1920s or 1950s. It continues to escalate to take on others, but nobody knows what they want.

Sunil Amrith:
How the river damming project will be governed on a integral level, is I think one of the things why it keeps running into trouble, and quite a large cost of it which is estimated now to […] dollars. And of course, there are profound concerns about being able to handle the impact and not taking rights. But even if those are featured in the compilations of both forms of government, I think these are these federal obstacles in this kind of project in India that are always a subject.

Speaker 8:
This is a question about – when I was in Chennai a few years ago, it seemed like there was a revolutionary water, rain water collection technology that was really changing the face of local water environments. Before actually having water for people in particular, on a regular basis was before, to buy it at a very dear price. Has it indeed changed things in […]? Has it changed things throughout India?

Sunil Amrith:
It has certainly not changed things throughout India. I think there are particular regions where there really has been a far greater investment in managing just thinking about water and I think Gangnam is one of them, Rajasthan is another. Meera Subramanian wrote a book called A River Runs Again, in which she investigated and interviewed some deeper […].

Sunil Amrith:
She investigated the revival of all water valleys in parts around Rajasthan, which did rely on these large technologies. But I mean, there is this about this romantic return to a […]. And some things are very new technologies, but then small-scale technologies, technologies that really do bring water to progress in ways that even the large dams often can’t.

Sunil Amrith:
And I think this is part she is very concentrated. I think it has a lot to do with particular political cultures, as well as particular other cultures, and Gangnam how the water activists since the 1990s have been pushing in this kind of direction.

Sunil Amrith:
They’ve got major public figures involved, including musicians and authors. And there’s a lot of brands about these things. But there is also an infrastructure of chance in Gangnam, which even if it was in decay, and it had been in neglect for a long time, some of which can be used in way to save Rajasthan. But by and large, if you read the work of the architect of this story, and […], it’s not happening.

Speaker 9:
I wonder if I can get you to go back to actually your starting point when your colleague asked you about the history of the monsoons about what sort of history. And I look at the title and you have Water and the Making of Modern India, and to be slightly provocative and push back, evocative national history in a way. And I wonder, what are the opportunities, but also the consequences of giving an ecological history with a national frame?

Sunil Amrith:
I’m not sure we really can. I mean, I think this is one of the things that gave this particular frame where a project and the book that this is from, one of the things that we again think is, we can’t write this story with a national lens. Not least because the monsoon – […] of monsoon is a dramatic phenomenon […] wants in science, wants specifically the story of monsoon sands from centuries of realization in the fact that monsoon has gotten a whole planet’s worth. And that is not something that can be delivered in the Indian subcontinent in say the 1850s or the 1860s.

Sunil Amrith:
But that it’s a real issue and that the issue and it’s effect on climate, as well as arguing on health. Every single one of these is regional trans-national sort of issue. And this is one of my challenges in starting to write my book. What would it mean to go to those certain areas, which there are a lot of people here.

Sunil Amrith:
We are so concerned with regions, how regions come about, what binds them together, where the boundaries are, how flexible their boundaries are. What would happen if we married that area of misconception with building an ecological conception?

Sunil Amrith:
So one of the things that started me on this whole project was the fact that in the social sciences, we all can agree monsoon Asia. There’s not one that we use. It’s one that colonial geographers used in the 1920s and 1930s, but it was a conversation. But that’s what is uncontroversially used by water scientists.

Sunil Amrith:
And, so that for me, really is one of the things that got me thinking about the monsoon, national distance of the monsoon, and how do you put scenarios that have perspective on this, with the focus on the fact that it is for a period in the 19th century the national states, which most tribes intervene to reshape the landscape of water. And yet, this is all what is seen in the boundaries.

Speaker 10:
I have a question about the politics of big dams. When I think about the politics of irrigation in India, I think of the Green Revolution: seeds, to wells, subsidies, and the farmer’s movements in the 1980s and 1990s that lead to a lot of that type of provisioning in that cultural sector.

Speaker 10:
Your talk portrays the politics of water; it’s very top-down, very technocratic. And I’m wondering if there is at all a broader politics of what public sentiment is with respect to dams? And how affluent parties have positions on dams, beyond just the Adivasi issue?

Sunil Amrith:
I think there absolutely is growing politics with water. I think it’s a very important politics of water. I think a lot of this does come down to who the groups that have benefited from these dams. And I think a lot of those farmers movements in the 1980s, 1990s were calling for more subsidies, for more two worlds, and I think as they were beneficiaries of this.

Sunil Amrith:
On the other hand, you have the farms who presented in the more recent past, the generation in un-irrigated parts of India, and who – maybe they want more irrigation? I mean, I don’t think this by any means had […] coming from the ground up. It’s not a story of top-down position dams. I think the opposition to dams is very specific and very pragmatic about the environmental level. You have those displaced by particular projects, like […], which of course, was huge at its peak.

Sunil Amrith:
But in some sense, there’s allowed nominees, because some of its supporters probably found that element of project might not have been in their interest, and water was not very often a major platform. But now, I think you will know this as more than I do about this perhaps, but I very rarely see water issues on election manifestos. Certainly elections have water like health, which is in fact both valuable but often politically invisible.

Sunil Amrith:
I don’t think most political parties have a major position on – I think most of the main political parties are more in favor of dams. Except those, who can make political capital out of a specific dam project, which perhaps […] constituents. And the politics of dams is also, I think in the interstate politics of dam building. So it’s a bit of a huge […] politics over the particular plans that the other side might have for those river waters.

Sunil Amrith:
So in that sense, there’s a politics of dams which has to do with control, which has to do with state boundaries, the state interests, the state rights. So I think every level of farmers movements to the geopolitical, which some of the other questions were suggesting towards.

Speaker 1:
We have time for one more question.

Joshua:
I’m Joshua […], I’m an undergraduate history major. So my question has to do with the economics of Pakistan, and taking time along their water scarcity crisis. Are there any lessons you can take away from what India’s doing, in how they’re working on the preservation of water? Anything specific that you can think of in how that might be something worthwhile […]?

Sunil Amrith:
I think Pakistan’s water crisis isn’t anything worse than India’s case. But there is measures that list them as the most stressed country in the world … Whether there are direct lessons from India, and whether those lessons would be palatable is another question. Particularly, given the rise in tension over the … in the recent months, that the Indians tried to withdraw the industry for the second time in the last four or five years.

Sunil Amrith:
I think there are conversations that are happening in other levels, going back to the earlier question. Indian and Pakistani environmental activists talk to each other. I think they exchange information. There are forums, neither in India nor Pakistan, where they can actually share the fact that some of these are very much shared problems and there are solutions to them.

Sunil Amrith:
I think there is a movement in Pakistan, particularly after the terrible floods of 2010, to think about the implications of climate change, thinking about the implications of that particular water infrastructure that Pakistan has become so dependent upon. And how it is in fact, the intensely engineered landscape that made floods so bad. And I think there is a movement within Pakistan, albeit on a small scale, that allows you think about perhaps other models. They may not come from India, I think there are many other places that re just as lacking.

Speaker 1:
Well, I think that takes us to the end of this evening’s formal program. Please, join me in thanking Sunil for his insights and really thoughtful questions about water in this part of Asia.

Transcript

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Good evening everyone. We’ll go ahead and get started. I recognize many of the faces in the room. For those of you who I don’t recognize, my name is Dr. Benjamin Hopkins. I’m the Director of the Sigur Center here at the Elliott School. It’s my great pleasure to welcome you for our 23rd Annual Lecture. This evening, we have a distinguished guest from Harvard this evening, Professor Arne Westad. Before I introduce Arne however, it’s my pleasure as well to say a couple of words about the Sigur Center. The Sigur Center, for those of you who don’t know, is the university’s center for Asian studies. We have a long and illustrious history and for our namesake, Gaston Sigur, some of his family’s here this evening and I’d like to recognize them. Paul and Susie Sigur are upfront joining us for this evening’s lecture, both of whom are Elliot School alumni. I’ll spare them the years, but in the not too distant past, and I should also note the remembrance of Paul’s mother, Estelle, who passed away peacefully in November of 2017 and we were very sorry to hear of that loss.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
With that said, it’s my pleasure to introduce Professor Arne Westad, who is the S.T. Lee professor of US and Asian relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Before coming to Harvard in 2015, Arne was the school’s professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science [LSE], where he arrived as a professor in 1998, the same year I arrived at the same institution in my first year of undergraduate studies.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Now, while at LSE he directed the LSE IDEAS Institute, which is a leading center for international affairs, diplomacy, and strategy. Then, like any good academic, he jumped the pond to join us over here in 2015. A leading global thinker, he is an expert on contemporary international history and on Eastern Asian region particularly. His numerous publications include The Global Cold War, Third World Interventions, and The Making a Modern Times, which was the winner of the Bancroft Prize, amongst other many recognitions. He served as General Editor for three volumes of the Cambridge History of the Cold War and is the author of the Penguin History of the World, presently in its sixth edition. He has also authored Restless Empire: China in the World since 1750, which was published in 2013, and the winner of the Asia Society Book Award, and just recently published The Cold War: A World History, hot off the presses in autumn of 2017.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Today he will be speaking to us about his new book project, which is both a return to form with its focus on East Asia but also an extension of his repertoire back in time. He has entitled today’s talk, Chinese-Korean Relations, Empire and Righteous Nation, 600 Years of China-Korea Relations. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Professor Arne Westad.

Professor Arne Westad:
Thank you very much Ben for that wonderful introduction. It’s great to be back in Washington. It’s wonderful to be back at GW – one of my favorite institutions this side of the pond because it’s done so much to develop research in the areas that I’m interested in. Not just here at the Sigur Center at the Elliott School, but in more general terms as well. Dealing with Asia, dealing with the Cold War, the things that I’m most preoccupied with. It’s wonderful to meet up with old friends. Ben said, I’ve known him since he was an undergraduate at LSE and it’s been wonderful to see that he has really made his mark in terms of international affairs and history, and done so here. Good match if I may say so, both for GW and Ben. But also a number of other people who I see in the audience who I’ve interacted with over the years here in Washington.

Professor Arne Westad:
I want to thank the Sigur Center, I want to thank the Elliott School of International Affairs, and Ben of course especially for inviting me to do this lecture. I also want to, since I had a chance to talk a little bit with Gaston Sigur’s family before we started up here, to recognize Gaston Sigur in his role, maybe first and foremost, as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs during the Reagan administration. I had the privilege of working on Mr. Sigur’s papers in the Reagan Presidential Library. Both of them were released not long ago, and some of his efforts have a very direct connection to what is the situation today between United States and South Korea.

Professor Arne Westad:
That was one of the many issues that he worked on us as Assistant Secretary and where I think quite a lot of progress was made at the time, some of which didn’t quite materialize later on, but may in part, I’ll get to this later on, form a pattern for some of the interactions that we see on the Korean peninsula today. So it’s doubly meaningful to be here tonight to give a lecture in his name.

Professor Arne Westad:
It’s a pretty tall order that we have before us tonight, ladies and gentlemen. It’s not easy within about 50 minutes, which is what I promised them, that I would stick to, to give an overview of a very important bilateral relationship over a period of roughly 600 years. I will divide this into three parts. In the first part, the first 15 minutes or so, I will deal with 500 years of China-Korea relations, in the second 15 minute interval, I will deal with about 100 years of China-Korea relations, and in the third part, I will deal with the last two weeks or so of China-Korea relations. I think that’s about right in terms of where people’s interests are. But one mustn’t forget the first part in order to try to make sense of what is going on today.

Professor Arne Westad:
That’s the reason why I chose this particular topic and why I’m making a small book that Harvard Press will publish probably at the beginning of next year on this topic coming out of these lectures. I gave a first version of the lectures at Harvard last year, then they went into three lectures over three consecutive evenings. I also have done versions of this in Beijing and in Seoul. I’m looking forward to the discussion of them here. Now I’ve done the three capitals, but now I’ve done it here in Washington as well.

Professor Arne Westad:
So first of all, the title. The title is always important when you try to address something, particularly if you do it as an undergraduate lecture, but also when you do it for a broader audience. So why on earth have I called this lecture, “Empire and Righteous Nation”? Now let’s start with “righteous,” and not surprisingly, that refers to Korea. It doesn’t mean that all Koreans are righteous. It doesn’t mean that any Korean states at any point or any form has necessarily been a righteous state. But the term is used here to indicate that a search for a righteous approach to domestic and international affairs has preoccupied generations of Koreans very, very much. Perhaps more than what you’ve seen in many other countries.

Professor Arne Westad:
Some of my Korean friends say that I mix up “righteousness” and “rectitude,” which are not exactly the same, but I’ll talk more about that later on in terms of the overall approach. But do bear in mind that slight tongue in cheek reference to righteousness that’s here in the title. Before I get to the Korean definition of the interactions, we have to start with China. The reason why we have to start with China is because China is the empire of the title. The heavier, if you like, of the two entities. In order to understand something about China’s relationship with Korea over this long period of time, I think it makes sense to think a little bit about what an empire is.

Professor Arne Westad:
Now, empires come in many different forms and in different shapes. They’ve been around for a very long time, at least for 5,000 years, since the Assyrian Empire around 2000 BC. So what is it if we try to compare these various forms of empire that connect them? A central authority obviously connect them. If there is no central authority, there is no empire. There also has to be a systematic form of thinking to regulate the relationship between the center and the various peripheries that exist within an empire. That’s roughly where the comparisons end, because after that, empires tend to be very different and behave very, very differently.

Professor Arne Westad:
Some empires colonize externally, not all empires do. Some employers are born more or less in the shape that they have later on and can stay with for a very long time. If you think about it in the European context, Ireland for instance, Nigeria, both settled by colonialists coming from the Imperial center. That tends to raise a certain reference to Korea and the Korean experience in this, being on the borders of the imperial center. But in this case, Chinese settlements in Korea were exceedingly rare during the period that we’re looking at. There were people who settled on both sides of the border, but in very, very small numbers and certainly very different in terms of numbers from the only real attempt at settling foreign colonialists in Korea, which was during the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, when more than one million Japanese settled in Korea. That was a much bigger wave than anything that you saw during the long period of China-Korea interaction.

Professor Arne Westad:
If you really want to go back in time, and I think this makes sense for people who want to look at this relationship, it is useful to think about the similarities and the differences between the Qing and Han Empires in China, or in the Chinese area, and the Hellenistic and Roman Empires in the West. Not because of the similarities between the two or the differences, so much that of them created the format for empire in Asia and Europe. Some of the aspects of these formats have been with us for the last 2000 years and are probably still around when we discuss what empire means in a sort of broader sense.

Professor Arne Westad:
On the Chinese side, I think what most of the various Chinese empires that have developed since Qing and Han, and there have been many of them of course, what they have in common are first and foremost, two things. There is on the Chinese side, a sense of cultural centrality within its wider region. The region is in many ways, by all of these Chinese empires going up to the People’s Republic today, a definition of their world. But it’s also important to see this within a framework of China’s orientation, and this is what many Westerners get wrong. China has always been oriented eastward, towards the Eastern seaboard, with some very brief exceptions. During the Tang Empire for instance, and maybe briefly during the Song. But for most of Chinese history, its orientation has been towards the east, away from the rest of Eurasia but towards Korea, towards Japan, towards Vietnam. I think that’s important. Cultural centrality, but within a direction in terms of where the gaze is turned.

Professor Arne Westad:
Secondly, in terms of connecting these various empires, going from the Han and up to today, a strong emphasis on hierarchy. Hierarchies internationally, hierarchies domestically, and through that an emphasis on bureaucratic governance. This is what Benjamin Schwartz calls this tremendous weight of the state in China and in Chinese governance systems. Many empires and many national states have an emphasis on the state for understandable reasons. Russia, for instance, is often used as an example of this, but you find other European examples as well, but there was nothing quite like China in terms of the longevity, the durability of this emphasis on the state as being at the center of Chinese civilization and Chinese society. I think it’s important to bear that in mind when we think about its foreign relations as well, which brings us to the tribute system. I promise to bring up the tribute system in this talk tonight and I will.

Professor Arne Westad:
The tribute system is, as my Harvard predecessor John King Fairbank defined it, was a system to which China, through – in slightly different ways and he was open to that – through various empires regulated its relationship with its wider reach. Now I must confess that the more I have looked at this in terms of Chinese foreign policy over the past 2000 years, the more it has struck me that the tribute system has been more of a system at Harvard than it ever was in Asia. There is no doubt that tribute existed and that it was important, and there is no doubt that various Chinese empires integrated their neighbors, particularly culturally, in a very deliberate kind of way. But it was done differently towards different areas and at different times. So emphasizing these differences is essential for understanding the relationship between China and Korea because there is no other relationship within the region that it can really be compared to.

Professor Arne Westad:
It’s a different kind of relationship, today and in history than what China has with any of its other neighbors, and I think that is important. So tribute existed but there was no unified system. There were different frameworks of tribute, of trade, of terminology, of the East that governed this longer period in terms of China’s interaction with the outside world. So the two Chinese empires that we cover tonight are the Ming and the Qing. The Ming, as most of you here will know, runs for almost 300 years from the 1360’s to the 1640’s or thereabouts, and the Qing from the 1640’s to 1912, also for almost 300 years. So these are long time periods, right? These are qualities that survived for a very long period of time – also by Chinese standards, by the way. That is important because if you look at the relationship between China and Korea, that sense of durability, endurance in terms of how the qualities were organized, has a very significant impact on the relationship itself.

Professor Arne Westad:
It also has a great deal of impact in terms of how the two sides saw each other. How authority, for instance, is understood. I often, when I lecture on this, draw on Max Weber’s and his typologies of the state with regard to this, both on the Chinese, and as we’ll hear later on, on the Korean side, what Weber calls “traditional authority.” If there’s going to be anything that’s meaningfully called tradition, it has to be around for a while. That’s true, I think, for these two Chinese imperial institutions and even more so for the Joseon on the Korean side of it, we’ll get to a little bit later on because it lost it even longer. What’s particularly important with Weber, is not so much the characterization and sometimes had been made into a caricature. It is whether this insistence that, and I caught him on this, the bureaucratic administration as in China means “fundamentally domination through knowledge.” So that emphasis on knowledge lasting for a long period upon the accumulation of knowledge as a ordering factor within these empires and how it deals with the outside world. That’s where I think the emphasis ought to be, not on an integral system or of political integration, but on how knowledge is used from the Chinese perspective, first and foremost, to understand the world around them because some of the elements of that knowledge are still with us today and that’s something that I think is crucial. It’s not just crucial for China, of course, it’s true with other empires as well. Knowledge reframe empires, right? In general. I think Ben can tell you a great deal about this. And that’s important, but it’s particularly important when you deal with an empire, which is acting towards immediate and contiguous neighbors.

Professor Arne Westad:
But Russia perhaps is the only other modern example that we have of that kind of imperial expansion. Which then brings us to nation, and this is the more controversial part of what they have to say initially. So Ming and Qing China, they’re many things, but no one can meaningfully imagine them as nations. There were empires consisting of different pots with an imperial institution at the center, which was deliberately transnational, always was. It had to be because there were so many different people’s groups, identities or where which it ruled. Under one predominantly leads an attempt at expanding a central culture. Absolutely. But with an emphasis necessarily on difference and differences. But if we don’t draw the similarities over to Korea, does it make sense to speak of 20th century Korea, as I do indirectly in my title, as a nation.

Professor Arne Westad:
So historians have tried their best to be good at this, at eluding that question by simply pointing to the great coherence in cultural and linguistic terms of people who today live on the Korean peninsula, right? A process that goes back in genetic terms at least 3000 years. And it’s relatively interrupted, the relatively uninterrupted. In linguistic terms and many of you here will know this modern Korean, derives from middle Korean, which in turn derives from, you probably guessed it, old Korean, which has its roots in some form of proto Korean. You know, if you go back 2000 years or so. So this is something that’s been around for a very long time and there is still two ways about that. You can’t get away from that. There is a continuity in these particular terms, which is of course not everything right, but is significant in terms of the population and in terms of the language that they speak.

Professor Arne Westad:
But some of this, as I wrote it elsewhere, it’s a typical historian’s copt, right? So not everything that is distinct becomes a nation. In any meaningful sense of the term. I like, quite alright, the Oxford English dictionary definition of a nation, they say that nation is specified as a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture or language inhabiting a particular state or territory. So that definition emphasizes something in common and it emphasizes co-location, which is in my view, about as far as you can go when you are talking about nations. If you want to be more specific than that, you always get into trouble.

Professor Arne Westad:
So one of my older colleagues at LSE on a [inaudible 00:22:49] was the one who first pointed out with great force that in order to understand nations, you have first to understand nationalists, right? And his was very much a contemporary European take on the concept of nation. Gellner said nationalists create the nation not the other way around, right? And that’s been followed up by other people, they said, no we never see tradition on this, totally a myth, it’s more recent, all of them who query and challenge the concept of nation in terms of how it’s being created and I’m in favor of all of it. I think it’s, I think it’s very, very important to do, but I also think it’s important to see differences between different cultural traditions in terms of how you understand that cohesiveness that we sometimes put under the heading of “nation.”

Professor Arne Westad:
So “Korean,” is defined in terms of its history possibly in terms of it’s an ethnicity, certainly in terms of its culture and civilization, something which became particularly important against the Qing. Being in it, at least for me in a meaningful comparative sense, much of what those who defined concepts of nation in 19th century Europe seem to have been looking for. So therefore I think it’s meaningful at least for the sake of debate. If you think about Korea going back at least to the late 16th century as some kind of national, a proto nation, in terms of its cohesiveness, probably wouldn’t have been a wrong [term] otherwise.

Professor Arne Westad:
Okay, so what then about the righteousness in all of this? Now righteous in classical Chinese is “yi” or “we” in Korean, which means defined in different forms, moral fitness, loyalty, fidelity to principles, possibly also rectitude. I mean meaning the quality of being correct or being true. But I particularly like righteousness. I mean the state or quality of being righteous and just. And the reason I like that so much is that in this classic Neo-Confucian concept coming out of 11th and early 12th century China, that’s where most of the discussion has been. What does it mean in a Confucian context to be righteous or to be just? How do you organize your life and your state and your society in order to live up to those kinds of ideals? How do you fight for it when necessary?

Professor Arne Westad:
It’s not unimportant that in this context that the Korean popular army that was raised against Japanese invasions into 1580s was named the Righteous Army or we’d be wrong, right? This has a significance in terms of the definition and that’s not the same thing you’re saying that all Koreans are righteous, but it is saying that this concept has had a particular meaning in Korean Neo-Confucianism that goes all the way up to today. And I think it also plays a role in terms of the days reductions between China and Korea, and the United States and Korea for that matter. So let me then just provide a brief overview of Korea and China coming out of the late 14th century and why the late 14th century? Well, this is because the Ming and the great Joseon Dynasty were created roughly at the same time.

Professor Arne Westad:
I never meant very much about the same kind of things. So the Ming was about a revitalization of Chinese tradition. But it was about regulating China’s relations to surrounding states. It’s fascinating to look in the late 14th early, 15th century, how quickly that ordering of China’s relationship with the outside world appears on the main agenda, right? It was something that they were really preoccupied with. In that sense, the Ming was a project. It was a specific project connected to various forms of Neo-Confucian thinking.

Professor Arne Westad:
But if the Ming was a project, the Joseon in Korea was even more of a project connected to the same kind of ideas. It could be said to be in many ways the supreme Neo-Confucian project, right? Because it was so distinctly ideological, ideological within the sense of state building. But what did it consist of? I think it’s important to understand that as an attempt at a complete remaking of Korean society, according to the principles of Neo Confucianism. It was very narrow in many ways, but it was also deep in terms of what the state and significant parts of society outside of the state eventually came to do. So state and society were structured according to the moral principles that the Joseon elites saw as governing the universe; harmony, hierarchy, family, self-cultivation and learning.

Professor Arne Westad:
And not so surprised to hear this, the concept of righteousness: how you should live your lives. So Joseon was an ideologically driven state to a remarkable degree for as long as it lasted, all the way up to the beginning of the 20th century. It was also remarkably successful to the degree that it survived the biggest challenge of the time, which was very much as Korea is today, being caught between China and Japan. To expanding Chinese empires, the Ming and the Ching, and the reconstitution of Japanese power.

Professor Arne Westad:
And it outlasted all of the political rearrangements in China and Japan simply by going on and on and on and never giving up, which again, is very much, I think, dependent on the ideological framework that underpinned it and the conviction about these values. Surviving the great East Asian wars, which I don’t have time to go into today, of the late 16th century, was quite a feat. And the Joseon were able to do it simply because the refuse to capitulate, because capitulation would have meant giving up on these ideas that they believe govern not just Korea, but governed the region or for that matter that govern the universe. So ideology is a very important part of this.

Professor Arne Westad:
From that idea also came the concepts of China, when the Qin then replace the Ming in the early 17th century. With the Korean idea of that transition being that it was fundamentally illegitimate. Now, the Korean state was not suicidal, so it didn’t try to proclaim to everyone that the Qing, the new project that they’re taking power in China, was illegitimate.

Professor Arne Westad:
But it’s no doubt that there’s your evidence from Korea for that time period to show that that’s what they actually believed. To the point of thinking that civilization – at least in the 17th century – that civilization was a lost cause in China and it therefore had to be preserved in Korea. And from that period comes this idea, which you can sometimes find in Korea, even today, North and South, that Korea is – to some extent compared to China -civilizationally superior.

Professor Arne Westad:
It has been able to keep ideas intact that have not quite worked out on the Chinese. Now Koreans have always been divided under this, right? So the majority of Korean elites, when you get into the 18th century, possibly even the late 17th century, we’re happy to make the peace with the Qing, because it figured within the Korean world system. The system had to have a center and that center was China. More about that in a little bit.

Professor Arne Westad:
But it also meant that much of this relationship was undertaken with a significant degree of skepticism. And thinking again about current China-Korean relations, I mean where much of this comes from, North and South. And this is what so many policymakers in this town do not get, that that has always been there, right? Or at least it’s been there for a very, very long time in the Qing-Joseon case, accept the Qing as rulers of China.

Professor Arne Westad:
Accept a vassal relationship to the Qing state paying tribute to Qing emperor, but set up very clear regulations from the Korean perspective in terms of interactions with China limiting tribute missions. For instance, going in both directions so that the incorrect understanding, or righteousness if you like, or on Neo-Confucianism, should not spread in Korea because that would be very bad. So for about 300 years, the Koreans were able to stick to this.

Professor Arne Westad:
This came under pressure only much later, when the Qing, very much inspired by the West in the late 19th century, started to reinvent themselves as a more ordinary imperialist. Not the kind of traditional relationship that had existed between China and Korea. But up to then there was a certain ritualism that was important, you could call it if you like, a very uncommon form of sovereignty on the Korean side.

Professor Arne Westad:
The idea that Korea existed in a special relationship with China, which was the [inaudible 00:03:32] under which Koreans operated. But in a way, by accepting limitations to Korean sovereignty, The Joseon were able to solidify its domestic power. I sometimes think about this a little bit like Western European elites and United States after the Second World War; a role that was gradually taken over by the European Union.

Professor Arne Westad:
You give away some sovereignty in order to rescue the state and the roles of the elite within the state, right? But you never give up on the idea of sovereignty per se, and that resides in your own country. That’s a similarity with China and Korea that I find actually quite meaningful. On the other hand, one has to be extremely careful. We’re thinking that all of Korea’s relationship in this long period to China is mere pretense and this is an era that you sometimes find among young Koreans today. There’s sort of a very Realist, with a capital R, approach to China, Korea relations over a long period of time, basically saying, “Oh, all of this is something we had to do because they forced us to do it.” That’s also not true. I mean the relationship, ideologically, is much deeper than that. If you look at Korean texts from the early Qing era, you find that it’s full of it. The perception on the Korean side, or China as the center of most things, it’s something that has lost it for a very, very long time, certainly up to the 20th century. In some ways even to the 20th century. And when I teach this, I often quote, I can relate Korean Neo-Confucian, a guy called Yi Hangno, who wrote under the impact of the Opium Wars in China in the early part of the 19th century in reaction against Western thinking that would replace China with Western ideas as the center of world development. And Yi was a Korean Neo-Confucian, what a particular conservative one either point or way. I mean, Yi was regarded as being one of the most interesting political philosophers of his time. This is something he wrote in the 1840, I’ll quote it.

Professor Arne Westad:
A little bit of length, but it’s an important quote. So this is what Yi writes after the Qing empire has lost its first wars against the British [from “Sinifying the Western Barbarians”]. “When Chinese civilization encounters a barbarian people, the barbarians are transformed by Chinese ways into a civilized people. Barbarians look up to China and they are delighted to receive its civilizing influence. This is the way things are, this is the natural order of things. This is the way human beings ought to feel. China is like the root, a plant supplying nourishment for the branches and leaves. It’s like the hands and feet, the protected belly and chest of the human body. This can never change. These Europeans, referring to the British, these Europeans come from a land far away from China. So it’s only natural that their customs are quite different from Chinese customs. Like children of peasant households in Korea, though they study Confucian writings as hard as they can, they can never grasp the structure and organization of those writings as well as children from families that have been studying Confucianism for generations.” And on and on it goes like this. This is not just pretense, right? This is a fairly deep understanding of China as being at the center of what is a common culture, a common civilization of which Korea is also part. It’s not the same thing as recognizing any kind of Chinese state, but it’s a way of recognizing China’s cultural centrality. So in my view, this only starts to change very late in the 19th century. And it starts to change in pretty catastrophic ways under pressure from emperors in Japan and from domestic pressures because of rebellions and political dissension within Korea itself, right? Some of which not all of which, some of which has set off by foreign interventions. So as I said earlier on, the Qing empire, which also goes on for a very long time, much longer than most people in the West in the 19th century thought that it would, it fights back, right? And one of the ways in which it fights back is that it tries to transform its relationship to surrounding states in the image of Western appearance. So, from the 1870s on, China very much starts to redefine its relationship with Korea as say France or Britain would do with regard to its colonies. And it’s no chance of working. I mean, in my view and most historians view.

Professor Arne Westad:
For two reasons, one is that it does violence entirely to the traditional relationship that had been established between the two countries. But also because of the rise of Japan that happened simultaneously. So this is what then leads to the 1894-95 war between China and Japan. The first war that China [inaudible 00:09:20] loses against another East Asian state and a war that’s very much fought over the relationship with Korea. And I think this is something that influences Korea very, very deeply, but in different kinds of ways. People think differently about this, not just in terms of the ideologic competition of Korea, which I’m going to talk more about in a second, but also because of the idea or different ideas of what China really tried to do in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Some would say, what China was trying to do was to protect Korea against Japan.

Professor Arne Westad:
But others would say the Chinese and the Japanese were two thieves on the same market. Both of them were out to dominate Korea. They only did it in very different ways. What is really important to me is that it is during this time period that what you could call modern Korean nationalism comes of age. In many ways, this is Korea’s deepest tragedy. That many Koreans stopped to envisage themselves as the very first population group in Asia as a nation.

Professor Arne Westad:
As an integral nation, just as the time when Korea loses its national independence and becomes a Japanese colony, which is in itself a gradual process, I think that all of Korea’s history in the 20th century and up to today is influenced by that relationship and by that set of events. It’s not going to give rise to an intensity of Korean nationalism, which is still with us today in two other different folds, which do have something in common.

Professor Arne Westad:
So one is what you could call the … For lack of a better word, a traditionalist approach to Korean nationalism. The [inaudible 00:11:32] Syngman Rhee approach to Korean nationalism. Rhee was the first Korean to get his PhD from the United States from Princeton in 1910 the very year in which Korea lost its notional independence to Japan. And what he wanted to see was a return to the roots of Korean nationhood the way he saw it, supported by more than organization and technology.

Professor Arne Westad:
So it’s not traditionalism in terms of, I mean, it’s a reinvented tradition, as most traditions are, right? But it’s still something that he believed echoes out of the Korean past. And the alternative coming roughly at the same time, slightly later is Korean communism, also intensely nationalist with, very gradually up to 1945, Kim Il-sung becoming the key figure mainly as we know, thanks to his role in working with the Soviets.

Professor Arne Westad:
Now the Korean communist tradition is very interesting, because in it you also find deep echoes of Korea system. I mean, the idea that Korean communism is just something that’s constituted in some very problematic ways in the 1920s, doesn’t really make that much sense. What is more important I think in terms of the relationship with China, is that Chinese and Korean communism grew up roughly at the same time and got intertwined. Chinese Communist party was from the very beginning uncertain whether Korean communism should be regarded as separate from China. I think that’s something that also lasted for a relatively long period of time. And as we know today, and several of the people here on the audience have worked on this, we have a lot of Soviet documents that show this very, very clearly. How difficult it was for the Chinese communists to figure out that Korean communism was a separate tradition from the old. Some of that I think is still with us today. What bound them together? What bound Chinese and Korean communism together was the fight against a common enemy. Meaning first and foremost Japan, but also the traditions that they saw within their own countries as holding their communities back. And one thing that I always feel sorry that Rhee would put emphasis on is the degree to which the Koreans who lived and worked in China on the 1920s and 1930s for that matter, both in communist and nationalist areas, how they came to define much of the ideas about what a modern Korea would be.

Professor Arne Westad:
We have some literature on that, but not very much. So the idea here, both on the traditionalist and the communist side is the need to find a specific Korean modality, free from Japanese occupation and in some form of communication with Korea’s past. When learning from the mistakes of the Joseon as they saw it, but also having some kind of relationship with other forms of nationalism in East Asia. And maybe first and foremost through China. That’s a pretty tall order.

Professor Arne Westad:
I mean, it’s not easy to do, particularly at the point where you have already lost your national independence, right? And most of this happens in exile away from your own country. This helps me to understand the intensity that the ideological framework for competition within Korea was fueled by after the Japanese collapse in 1945. I think the idea, which is very much held in Korea, both North and South, that the division of Korea in the late 1940s came out of the Cold War. It came out of the Sino-Soviet US set of rivalry. I think that’s only partially true. I think it also came out of the ideological division among Koreans themselves. I mean, how really difficult that is to recognize today. I sometimes go as far when I really want to provoke my Korean friends by saying that, I don’t think it’s entirely farfetched that after 1945 for the first three years or so, there were real opportunities for a united Korea if there had been any willingness among the traditionalists and communists on the peninsula to pursue that kind of path. Later on it became more difficult, when the Cold War hardened as an international system, it became much more difficult to do. But I do think that parts of the responsibility for that not happening after the collapse of the Japanese empire, actually has to do with ideological developments within Korea itself. Not all of it, but some of it does. And this of course then leads to the tragedy, the ultimate tragedy of the Korean, which I won’t have time to go into in detail here today. But of course it’s the defining part of what happened. It’s not just in Korea but in all of Eastern nations of the day.

Professor Arne Westad:
The Chinese involvement in the Korean war is also an enormous significance for understanding China, Korean relationship today. The idea that any Chinese hold that China was sacrificed its own in order to protect Korea against Western imperialism is something that is very, very deeply held in China. Even among the more contemporary generation of policymakers. And that’s sort of why the end of the Maoist era in China – I mean it lived on, I think – up to the group of leaders that are around there now through to the Deng Xiaoping reforms.

Professor Arne Westad:
This sense, that there is some kind of responsibility, particularl responsibility because of it’s sacrifice during the Korean war, that China has all of Korea, not just the North but for that matter the South as well. And of course you can hear the echoes here of that earlier time period that I spent so much time here on explaining. So where does that leave us in terms of China and the two Koreas today?

Professor Arne Westad:
So as we’ve seen recently, not only is this a complicated relationship, but it’s also a very uncertain relationship. I’m just back from Beijing where I spent a lot of time discussing Korea with Chinese friends and colleagues and others. The current Chinese leadership is absolutely convinced that they have to be connected to whatever solution comes out of the conflict on the Korean peninsula. And for that matter of US policy, both with regard to North and South Korea.

Professor Arne Westad:
The Chinese are aware of the weaknesses of the North Korean state. Maybe more aware of it sometimes than what people are in other countries. I generally, when I teach this, go as far as saying that I’ve never met any informed Chinese. I mean, people who actually work on this problem, who believe that the North Korean state is going to survive. They think it’s going to go in one form or another. They don’t like that idea. They want to postpone it for as long as possible. What China wants more than anything else in state terms on the Korean principle is stability. But that’s not the same thing as believing that North Korea, even with its current reforms is an entity that would survive on its own. If they listen more to the Chinese, of course that’s another matter. If they went through the same transformation in social and economic terms that China has gone through, they could survive, they could even flourish.

Professor Arne Westad:
But as I said, I’ve yet to meet any Chinese who believe that the North Korean leadership is actually willing to do that, in a form that the Chinese would recognize anyway. Because some of this is also based on more recent history, the North Koreans coming in the mid 1990s where according to Chinese estimates at least half a million people starved to death, which is not a good advertisement for any regime in terms of what you are capable of doing, when you need to reform yourself, and when you need to transform your policies.

Professor Arne Westad:
So, what is the most likely outcome in terms of the situation that we have today. I mean, China has invested a lot in trying to put pressure on the North Korean regime to come to some kind of negotiated reduction of tension. Including crucially negotiating about the North Korean nuclear arsenal. What was really striking this time when I was in Beijing was that absolutely everyone I spoke to underlined the need for eventual full denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. I didn’t find a single person who said what you sometimes can here in this term, that the relationships North Korea now should be about arms limitation rather that denuclearization. But you can see how that goes together with all the Chinese policies, right? I mean, particularly if things on the Korean peninsula are going to get unstable for internal reasons, the last thing that Chinese want to see is that happening under a circumstance in which a nuclear weapons could possibly be on the loose, right? That’s a worst case scenario from a Chinese perspective. Big question is of course, how much influence China actually has in North Korea? And my view of that is that it is limited and in decline. So, that’s the other thing that is often misunderstood. In Washington, is that China could fix this. China can’t, but it could play a positive role and it should play a more positive role than what it has played so far particularly in working together with United States, maybe most crucially of all working together with South Korea, which is the last best hope that the Chinese have more long-term for stability on the Korean peninsula. This is what makes the current Chinese position so immensely contradictory. And I think it’s only possible to understand in light of the post that I’ve been reviewing today. It’s clear to any Chinese who wants to see that China’s interests, more long term, lie with South Korea with which it has a very powerful relationship in economic terms, but also increasingly in cultural terms.

Professor Arne Westad:
So I mean, in all parts of Beijing or Shanghai or Tianjin or Hangzhou where I was recently, where you could always think that you’ve been transplanted to Korea: K-cosmetics, K-pop, K-surgery, lots of it around. Popularity of South Korean television, lots of soft power, all the kind that you wouldn’t find elsewhere. So some people, again, very often in the United States would write this off in time and say, “This doesn’t matter, it’s the power relations that matter.”

Professor Arne Westad:
I think that would be wrong. Young Chinese today have a very powerful impression of South Korea as a country that has got a lot of things, right, including sort of [inaudible 00:24:21] as they would say. Things that have not been solved in China or things that they do not particularly like about China, and the government needs to take that into consideration. And additional costs to the tremendous significance of economic and technological cooperation that happens between the two countries.

Professor Arne Westad:
So to me the solution is not so much an attempt to return to the past in terms of negotiations, but to try to think, can you? To try to think about how we can get hopefully through the next stage a meeting between Kim Jong-un and President Trump that doesn’t blow up on all of us. Two people actually sitting around the table talking about the only thing that at the moment really matters, which is a denuclearization and the peace treaty, and I think they have to come together. On this I actually do agree with some of the points that the Chinese make. You can’t look at one without looking at the other. What the Chinese would want to get out of this is some kind of guarantees that they’ve looked at what happened in Germany in 1990, 1991 and they do not want to repeat of that under any circumstances. So, for China to accept a form, an integrated, if not united Korea, that still has a close security alignment with United States is out. I mean, China is not going to accept that. So if one on the US side thinks that the German solution is possible, a united Germany within NATO is possible in the Korean peninsula, forget it. The idea that China could be confronted with a fait accompli in Korea, forget it. China would take action to prevent that. That’s how significant Korea is with China. So the stakes are incredibly high with regard to this, right, even when you get to the negotiating stage. So this is what I’m hoping for the region, I mean we now have a unique opportunity to get people to sit down and to talk about these things. And also just because before we’ve been unsuccessful, does that mean that we shouldn’t try again? Absolutely not. This is the best opportunity probably in our lifetime so far that we’ve seen for dealing with some of these issues.

Professor Arne Westad:
We don’t know whether it will be successful, but I do think that the overview of China-Korean relations that are given tonight give us some hope that in terms of the values and ideas and concepts, images that go into it, that that past can actually play a positive role with regard to a solution of some of our current problems. So maybe this is just the historian in me being too optimistic. Normally historians are not optimistically, we’re quite a pessimistic race. But on this I do see some of the echoes of the past actually playing to our advantage. So thank you very much. [Audience clapping]

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Well, thank you Arne for, I think what we all can agree, was the very thought-provoking and in-depth consideration of the long history of the Korean-Chinese relations and how that continues to affect today. I won’t abuse my position of the chair greatly, I have one comment and then one question, then we’ll open to the floor. My comment is that at the end as you were portraying the cultural capital that Korea now exerts in China, that the K-pop in Shanghai and such.

Professor Arne Westad:
The K everything.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Yeah, the K everything in Shanghai. I was looking over my notes and how when you were talking about the Joseon civilization project that it very much echoed the constancy or continuity through that. My question actually goes back to something you mentioned with regard to the Joseon in the earlier period. And I’d be interested in both hearing its current manifestation if there is one. But you characterize the relationship between Qing China and Joseon Korea as an uncommon form of sovereignty, in which China performs a [inaudible 00:28:52] and as you portrayed it, Korea accepts that limited external sovereignty in order to solidify its internal sovereignty. And I thought it was interesting that you almost contradicted but offered a paradox and then comparing that to a contemporary situation, namely the United States and post-war Europe.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Given my own specialty of South Asian history, I also heard residences of the princely states within British India and the idea of paramountcy. And it also brought to mind some of my own current work in which British legal scholars in the 19th century, very contrary to the way political science thinks of it today, did not see sovereignty as indivisible, but rather saw it as infinitely divisible.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
What is indivisible according to these scholars was independence. So, I wonder if you could maybe, if it applies at all, that uncommon form of sovereignty that you talked about in the Imperial context of the early modern period. Does that resonate today and does that give a template or idea of where this might be moving forward?

Professor Arne Westad:
That’s very good. So, if we start with the latter, will Korea, like all other countries in Eastern Asia, see a China that is more predominant economically, strategically, politically, and eventually militarily, than what we have seen over the past 150 years? That’s certainly true. I think one has to be very careful with believing that China – you hear this very often – I think part of the reason why my last China book, Restless Empire sold so well, particularly in this part of the United States, inside the beltway, is that some people believe that the region now is returning to High Qing, returning to what East Asia looked like around 1750.

Professor Arne Westad:
I don’t see that. Nationalism in China has been on the rise. China is, in my view today, an empire in form that has begun to think of itself as a nation state, which is problematic. But nationalism has also been on the rise everywhere else. So the idea that China today could deal with Korea, not to mention a country like Vietnam on its southern border, in terms of anything that could meaningfully be construed as as sovereignty or even tribute, I think is very, very far-fetched. Countries have tried to do that sort of thing to Vietnam in the past and it’s never ended well.

Professor Arne Westad:
So in that sense, that solution is out, right, for today. But if we go back and if we think about how the 19th century is infinitely interesting with regard to this in Asia as a whole. From the Ottoman lands and all the way to Japan, right? Because you have so many different kinds of sovereignty and sovereignty of connection. So various forms that are at play, some of which come from within Asia and some of which come from elsewhere, not just from Europe by the way, but also from other parts of the Middle East. And they become very, very quickly – and India is the best example of this, of course – they become hybrid, right? This is how international law is created in many ways. Out of that colonial moment, but not just in a form that can be dictated by European empires and that’s what the princely states meet, right, in the Indian context. And this is what the difference between sovereignty, the divisibility of sovereignty, and the special position to use the legal term, of independence, actually have to tell us that very often this is about capability. It’s about capability. First of all, it was in terms of imagining different kinds of world order, sorting how things are supposed to work, but also practical capability. In terms of what you are, or capacity, you know, what you are able to do, where you would prioritize your efforts.

Professor Arne Westad:
And on that I see a direct connection both to Ming and maybe especially as you indicated too, early Qing China with regard to Korea. So one of the reasons why the idea of a Chinese colonization of Korea was never on the table with exception of very, very brief periods, was that China’s imperial attention was needed elsewhere. Why on Earth create difficulties in a relationship that is reasonably well-established? Here you can see, 19th century British presence in India coming out very, very clearly, when there were so many borders to be defended, when there were so many people that you had to subordinate because if you didn’t subordinate them, they would do very bad things to you, at least where you imagined a threat. That was not the case between China and Korea. And I think that’s significant even for today, the special sense of ordering.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Wonderful. From the floor. Questions? Comments? Yes, sir.

Q&A #1:
So I have a question here. As a nominated speaker, I just really appreciated your sophisticated presentation and trying to come up with a highly simplistic thought process to understand your point. It seemed to me that you are trying to argue in this presentation that traditional Korea was living under the shadow of the Chinese empire. And i order to deal with this and in order come to terms with this, really very high luxury from China. So the Korean educated elite, they developed a very distinctive identity. That is harder to describe identity, right? So ideology is more important than political views. So that’s my understanding of your presentation, right? I guess my question for you is in the 20th century, so how two Koreas, right, there are two Koreas. How do they deal with this very distinctive legacy, right? So [inaudible 00:05:50] told Xi [Jinping] that ideology is the most important thing for society, but how about South Korea? So do we still consider South Korean people continuing this traditional way of viewing themselves in this [inaudible 00:06:05] world? We find that studying of righteousness, or this is something that are different, today’s South Korea? So that’s my question.

Professor Arne Westad:
Again, it’s a very, very good question and it’s an important one primarily because of misunderstandings in this country and elsewhere about how some of these discourses work and do not work in Korea, or in China for that matter. So ideology, I think is quite useful to think about in this context, but only if you define it as a kind of operative system in a way. If you think of ideology the way we sometimes think about this in the past, many of you are too young to pick this up, Marxism, Leninism, right, or ideologies that come out of particular forms of religion – think Europe back in the 17th century, great religious wars. Then I think one is missing the point. This is informal rather than formal. It’s about manners of thinking, of understanding the world, that come out of the past and that people think would be helpful in order to understand today’s world. United States is very much like this as well. There’s a deep sense of what United States is about, which in my view constitutes, at least in foreign policy terms, an ideology, right? It’s a way of trying to understand how the world works, which is sometimes successful and sometimes less successful, but that’s sort of the main point. The main point is that it’s there and that it comes out of one’s experiences and one’s thinking about [inaudible 00:07:48] situation and in the past. That I think is true also in the Republic of Korea. Sometimes when you’re in downtown Seoul these days, you will sort of forget that because it seems to be a very international place and things of course have happened very much over the past, yes, now two generations. One and a half generation that’s transformed the country because of its tremendous economic growth and the social changes that have gone with them. But if you look at it in terms of people’s preferences, both in social terms and in political terms, I think you still find very deep echoes of that past in South Korea. I’ve been fortunate enough to teach at a couple of the best universities in Seoul and it’s very interesting to see how young people in Korea today understand that legacy of the past. They certainly narrow it down. That’s true for people everywhere, but in terms of the relationships that come out of that particular kind of Confucian background that I’ve talked about, I still see quite a lot of that that is there today. I probably, and this is the crux of my answer, I think to your really good question. I see more of that in Korea than what I see in China. China is more cut off from its past than what Korea is. I think that has a lot to do with recent Chinese history. I think it has to do with language, language changes. It’s harder for young Chinese now to go back and read a text from the past. You could argue of course that that’s true for young Koreans as well, but many of these would be available in Hangul translation, right, from classical Chinese. So, that sense of Korean identity, that it is somehow in a communication with the Korean past. That’s something which I think people who have not spent considerable amounts of time there do not rate highly enough. And I think when we think about the potential for solutions, political solutions on the Korean peninsula, it’s well worth bearing that in mind.

Jisoo Kim, Director of GWIKS, Q&A #2:
Thank you so much for your fascinating talk. I really enjoyed it. I have a conceptual question. So when you use the term righteous nation and you’re explaining about your usage of the term. So, I guess my question is sort of related to his question. So are you trying to refer, to my understanding is, you were trying to refer “righteous nation” to a certain period, but then are you trying to sort of use that concept onto modern Korea as well? In other words, are you using in your research right now, are you using “righteous nation” to refer to Korea, either early modern or modern Korea, trying to see some continuities there. So I guess in your answer, it seems like you are, in that case – what I want to know more is your usage of righteous. You did explain, but I think it’s not enough. As a scholar of Joseon history, I kind of want to ask more and ask for you to elaborate on your usage of righteous. The concept of righteous army that first emerged in the Imjin War. And, actually I edited the book, my late advisor’s book. JaHyun Kim Haboush’s book.

Professor Arne Westad:
Oh yeah. Great.

Jisoo Kim, Director of GWIKS, Q&A #2:
The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation.

Professor Arne Westad:
It’s a great book.

Jisoo Kim, Director of GWIKS, Q&A #2:
And there she discusses about how the concept of nation emerged and challenges the Western notion of nation there. But, so, are you trying to extend that notion in using the term “nation,” or so what is, well, because I think just explaining that it was, I mean, Joseon Korea was an ideologically-driven state. Righteous was obviously a very important principle and concept of Confucianism. But I think there should be more explanation, because here if you were to use “righteous nation,” I think I would like to hear more of your usage on the term.

Professor Arne Westad:
Sure. And why that is particularly important among all the Neo-Confucian concepts that could have been picked. Yeah. So, if I’d had time today, I would have gone back and discussed some of the literature, including the one that you contributed to, on the late 16th century, which is in a way a seminal moment for defining the practical content of Neo-Confucian culture in Korea. This is true for any ideology. Ideologies only prove themselves when they come up against a kind of situation that they have to provide meaning to. Not necessarily a solution to, but that ideology has to be able to explain what’s going on. And part of the reason for the longevity of Neo-Confucianism in Korea is that that’s exactly what it did is to sort of explain why Korea was attacked from the outside, why it ended up in this situation. It was because it was there, the Korean state was there, the Joseon state was there, to protect these Confucian values, of which righteousness is one, against attacks from the outside and tried to undo this established world, right? So in that sense, it was perfect, right, because it explained that totally. So the reason why I use this for this lecture, which after all is intended mainly to bring us up to today’s situation in Korea, is that I think that of all the Neo-Confucian concepts, righteousness is the one that has preserved Korea in terms of identity up to today, but also the one that has made the inner Korean strife that has gone on over the past three generations, so difficult to resolve. Because of the belief in one’s own righteousness and the righteousness of one’s aims, which I think was as deeply held by those who created modern day South Korea as those who created modern day North Korea. It’s just that it’s different, right? It’s different in terms of the form of state and social organization that was created, but it’s very deeply held and that’s the part that I think is really important for today. So those who think that you can negotiate with North Korea in a way, believing that North Korea would in the end negotiate itself away in a kind of, sort of, East German kind of solution, I think are entirely wrong because even in, now, in the third generation of revolutionary leaders in North Korea, the idea that they are the last best hope for the Korean nation, in total, is very strongly held and it can only be understood out of these concepts that their actions are righteous. They come out of a period of weakness, subordination, terror for the Chinese nation during the Japanese occupation, which they understand and many people in the South understand, not just as an attempt to colonize in Korea, but exterminating the Korean nation. That’s the reason I think why these concepts have to be taken seriously today because they are distinguishing features of the two states that were created in Korea in the latter part of the 20th century.

Tian Han, PhD, #3:
Okay. I got to speak. So I’m Tian Han, I’m a second year PhD student in the history department here. So my question is specifically about what do you think of the importance of communist ideology and also the communist way of governing the state in Chinese-Korean relations because I think in the history of China’s foreign relations, some scholars like Professors Niu Jin and Chen Jian actually emphasize on the importance of this communist ideology in China’s foreign policy. I’ll ask, how would you think of this communist ideology in China-Korea relations and also, I’m thinking that if you think in terms of these communist ideology lens, it’s probably come to a more pessimistic picture about nowadays situation in Korea because we see two communist countries, whereas South Korea, America, Japan are all democratic, so it’s a big division here. So I would like to hear your opinion on this issue. Thank you.

Professor Arne Westad:
That’s a good question. I think, the work of people like [Professor] Niu Jin, who by the way is not with us at Harvard for the semester and my friend and colleague Chen Jian is important for understanding this, but in a way I think that it’s more historical than contemporary. So, this is what I tried to underline in my remarks earlier on is that, one has to understand that both of these phenomena in a way come out of a common route, right? They have a lot to do with each other. There’s this discussion among Chinese communists in the 20s and 30s is whether Korean communism should really be a branch of Chinese communism, right, because they are so closely connected. What happened later with Korean communism, I think, establishes it also in the Chinese image as being something that is related to but also very different from communism in China. It is a very difficult question. It’s hard to say when that actually happens. The way I see it, is this was a gradual process from the establishment of the North Korean state and up to now. The idea on the Chinese side, it’s always been there, that communists in Korea ought to learn more from China, but also the realization of the unwillingness of Korean communists to do just that is not something that has come about over the last five years. It’s something that has been there since the 1950s. So whenever China has tried to significantly alter the course of Korean communism, they have failed in doing so. Even on the occasions back in the 50s, as many of you would be aware, when they were able to act in conjunction with the Soviets, even then, Korean communism, Korean communist organizations were strong enough within their own territory to completely blunt these attempts. And I think that realization is there in Beijing now. What I see in China is a particular relationship that’s not so much created by the relationship between two communist states. The distinctions are too significant for that, but more one that is historical and to some degree sentimental that goes back to the Korean War that we fought and lost a lot of our own young men for this country and implicitly fought for this regime, right, for the North. So we therefore have a stake in all of this. We cannot be shut out from it, right, which I think is not always a helpful position to take, but it certainly is one that is understandable.

Professor Arne Westad:
North Korean communism on the other hand, has taken a direction that many Chinese find increasingly hard to recognize. There are elements in Korean communism as practiced in the North Korean state which are very far from any kind of Chinese model of communism. The emphasis for instance on ethnicity, even race that you find in some of the North Korean discourse. And that you do find sometimes directed implicitly against China is of course very hard for the Chinese to swallow. One of the things that people in this city ought to look at more closely is the degree to which the North Korean regime over the past few years have been able to turn on China when China acted in ways that North Korea did not like, both domestically and in more public terms. So I was, not on this occasion, on the last occasion I was in Beijing, I was by some Chinese officials who work on North Korea. They presented me with a long list of complaints against North Koreans. They did this not because I asked for it, but I think because they believed that it was necessary to point it out. One of them goes as follows: This is from 2016. A North Korean circular. This is a domestic circular on China where it refers to China as, “This country styling itself a big power is dancing to the tune of the United States when defending its mean behavior with such excuses that it was meant not to have a negative impact on the living of the people of the DPRK, but to check its nuclear program. If the country keeps a prior economic sanctions to the DPRK.” They say the country. They never say China. “If the country keeps applying economic sanctions through the DPRK while dancing to the tune of someone often misjudging the will of the DPRK, it may be applauded by the enemies of the DPRK, but it should get itself ready to face the catastrophic consequences in its relations with us.” Now, this is the kind of talk that sets off the alarm bells in Beijing, right? And not in terms of lack of influence, but in terms of what could really go badly wrong in that relationship, particularly when we’re thinking about the country on its border that has its own nuclear program.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
I think we have time for one more question.

Young-Key Renaud, Professor Emeritus, GWIKS:
Hi, I’m Young-Key Renaud. Actually, when you think of the word Koreans use when they think of China, with its “sadae,” meaning like “serving the great.” I think this is very much related to the condition notion that many perfecting Koreans always go for the best, not necessarily the biggest country. So it relates very well to the current situation. They go to America to study certain things. Maybe to France to study something else. So they, they, and then all the impartation of different thought systems, they have done it themselves. They were not proselytized. So when you think of this, even through this system, it is really not losing something to maintain their independence. I think it is really some of them, they really admired in the Chinese civilization. They were persuaded by the value of different systems and also ideas. So, they are not afraid of criticizing big powers today. More confident in dealing with [inaudible 00:25:04]. So, we don’t have to say they were really forced to do this, or they had to do it. I think a lot of it was voluntary. The whole city system should be actually considered in a bad light and very word, “the righteous,” I agree with Jisoo. I think we might try to look for another word because in some sense every civilization, everybody thinks they’re righteous. Don’t you think?

Professor Arne Westad:
Well, to some degree I think that’s true. I think there are differences of degree though, that are important here. The concept of righteousness is never played – if you compare China and Korea – has never played in the whole of the Neo-Confucian era in China, as much of a role that it clearly did in Korea, right? So it was a favored term. It was not non-existent in China and elsewhere, but it seemed to have attracted for a very long period of time, a particular attention in Korea. Now, linking that to the first point that you made, which I entirely agree with, I wonder, and this is purely speculation, but I sometimes wonder whether that has to do with being the smaller country within the region and needing to find some way of defining itself against somewhat intrusive, certainly bigger, and sometimes rather violent neighbors. There has to be a particular quality to being Korean.

Young-Key Renaud, Professor Emeritus, GWIKS:
I think Koreans are in fact very proud to be part of that greatness. So it’s not just a matter of survival. They actually were proud to be able to kind of do the things Chinese would do. Because they were culturally, philosophically, and scientifically persuaded in modernity. They wanted to be part and not miss the boat and same thing goes on today.

Professor Arne Westad:
Sure. But don’t you also think that there was a need within all of that, that I fully agree with, to distinguish what was Korean?

Young-Key Renaud, Professor Emeritus, GWIKS:
Yes, of course. It’s like the invention of the Korean alphabet. They studied all the theories, but they said it was proper for them, it was something else. And they were not afraid of inventing one after using it for thousands of years.

Professor Arne Westad:
Right, right.

Young-Key Renaud, Professor Emeritus, GWIKS:
Like Chinese characters.

Professor Arne Westad:
Sure.

Benjamin Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center:
Well, I think that fully takes us to time. Arne, you transported me back to my first year as an undergrad in the Hong Kong theater and being properly put in my intellectual place, shall we say. Thank you very much for an expansive and engaging talk, which is befitting for our commemorative lecture and thank you as well to the audience for coming in and joining this evening with us.

Professor Arne Westad:
Thank you very much. That was great, thank you.