The Origin of the 1960s Korean Developmental Regime: Manchurian Modern

In The Origin of the 1960s Korean Developmental Regime: Manchurian Modern, Suk-Jung Han traces the current Korean dynamism through Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in northeast China from 1932 to 1945, which has been frozen as the sacrosanct stage of nationalist resistance. Han proposes the factor of colonial diffusion in the lineage of East Asian state-formation, which has been overlooked in the discussion of the modern state-building. He also traces the cultural flow from the Manchurian setting, which contained the seed of the future cultural prowess of Korea.

Suk-Jung Han is an emeritus professor and former president of Dong-A University. He taught at the University of California, Irvine as a Fulbright lecturer in 1999-2000. He was a visiting scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto in 2005 and 2015 and at Asia Research Institute of National University of Singapore in 2015. He is now a visiting scholar at the Asian-Pacific Studies Institute of Duke University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.