Institute Of Pacific Relations Research Articles

Chen Han-seng, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and Changing Ideas About the Chinese Rural Economy

Abstract The famous sociologist, economist, and historian Chen Han-seng was the founder of the Agrarian China Research Association, publishing influential studies on industrial production and class relations, and their effect on peasant living standards. Through the Institute of Pacific Relations (ipr), Chen engaged in a theoretical dialogue with liberal intellectuals and responded to American, British, and Soviet theories about Chinese society and rural China. Unlike American ipr scholars, such as John Lossing Buck, whose agenda was to investigate the consumer power of Chinese peasants, Chen’s study of living standards emphasized their production capability and the role usury played in it. And unlike the ipr British economists, such as R. H. Tawney, who were generally optimistic about Chinese rural industry, Chen’s research proved Chinese industrialization to be unsustainable and to lower peasant living standards. In reaction to these American and British scholars, Chen tactically changed his concept of “living standards” and developed his own theory of Chinese rural economics.

‘What the Far East Means to America’: The Politics of Area Studies during the Interwar Years

Abstract During the interwar years, Americans redefined the meaning of Asianness amid new geopolitical conditions and shifts in global axes of power, thereby relocating the role that Asia played in the U.S. grand strategy to recalibrate the nation-state’s position within the international community. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a consortium of international non-governmental organizations such as the Institute of Pacific Relations and the American Council of Learned Societies collaborated with universities in the production of knowledge. Historians and international relations specialists have touted the creation of area studies at institutions of higher learning at the end of World War ii as one of the principal responses for stemming the proliferation of communism. Instead of focusing on the 1950s and 1960s as the formative era of the academic discipline as many scholars have done, this article illuminates the earlier interconnections between the nascent intellectual fascination with Asia and the reinscription of otherness. Ultimately, anxiety over growing Japanese aggression in the Pacific aided the development of U.S. hegemony as the academic system became part of an inter-imperialist amalgamation of a multitude of economic, intellectual, and political processes and mechanisms that worked together to engineer American influence within and over Asia.

‘South Asia’: Construction and Deconstruction of Spaces and Institutions. Part I

‘South Asia’ in its present meaning was coined in the late 1940s following a reinterpretation of previous approaches to the study of the (ancient) Orient, which proved to be ill-suited under the conditions of the Second World War. The author of the concept was the American Indologist W. Norman Brown (1892–1975) who thus designated almost the entire territory of British India and founded the Department of South Asia Regional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. This innovation led to the institutionalization of the modern socio-political disciplines essential for the familiarization with the area of the languages studied. Later this model spread to the educational institutions of the New World and reached the Old one. In the mid-1970s, the Chair of History of India, Pakistan, Nepal and Ceylon of the Institute of Countries of Asia and Africa of Moscow State University was renamed the Chair of History of South Asia, and 40 years later several units under the heading of ‘South Asia’ sprang up in several Russian academia. Part I sheds light on Brown’s activities in the US Office of Strategic Services and his contacts with the Institute of Pacific Relations, as well as the US reaction to the launch of the first Soviet satellite, the passage of the US National Defense Education Act, and the ‘cold war’ contest between the US and the USSR in the field of training specialists to be engaged as an instrument of influence on the post-colonial world structure within the South Asian countries.

Development of Land Utilization Research Projects at the Institute of Pacific Relations: Focusing on Studies in China, Japan, and Korea

Development of Land Utilization Research Projects at the Institute of Pacific Relations: Focusing on Studies in China, Japan, and Korea

Retraction: Nonlinear Effects of Intellectual Property Rights on Technological Innovation

This study investigates the influence of intellectual property rights on innovation under the assumption that an optimal threshold has been reached beyond which the protection by the Institute of Pacific Relations, the non-governmental organization, is no longer working as an incentive for innovation. We estimate a threshold model applied to panel data on 10 emerging countries for 1985~2015. The results revealed a significant influence of the threshold of the intellectual property rights on innovation. In other words, the impact of protection by the Institute of Pacific Relations on innovation is significant, which implies a nonlinear relationship. It was also shown to play an indirect role by increasing the impact of human capital and economic development on innovation. These results have important implications for designing economic policy. In the emerging country, a minimum level of protection by the institute of pacific relations is needed to ensure an incentive encouraging technological innovation. Therefore, there is an inverse-U relationship between the intellectual property rights and innovation.

Nonlinear Effects of Intellectual Property Rights on Technological Innovation

This study investigates the influence of intellectual property rights on innovation under the assumption that an optimal threshold has been reached beyond which the protection by the Institute of Pacific Relations, the non-governmental organization, is no longer working as an incentive for innovation. We estimate a threshold model applied to panel data on 10 emerging countries for 1985~2015. The results revealed a significant influence of the threshold of the intellectual property rights on innovation. In other words, the impact of protection by the Institute of Pacific Relations on innovation is significant, which implies a nonlinear relationship. It was also shown to play an indirect role by increasing the impact of human capital and economic development on innovation. These results have important implications for designing economic policy. In the emerging country, a minimum level of protection by the institute of pacific relations is needed to ensure an incentive encouraging technological innovation. Therefore, there is an inverse-U relationship between the intellectual property rights and innovation.

The Institute of Pacific Relations: pan-Pacific and pan-Asian visions of international order

Between the world wars, the often under-rated Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) was perhaps the most visible and impressive international foreign policy think tank, an ambitious and idealistic effort to establish a transnational knowledge network. The IPR was among the rather few interwar international organizations that sought to accord Asians genuine input into its administration and activities. By World War II, the IPR had become a focus for nationalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial sentiment within its assorted Asian member states and also in North America. Such tendencies perhaps peaked at the pioneering 1947 Asian Relations Conference organized by one of its member organizations, the Indian Council on World Affairs. Despite its stated pan-Pacific outlook, the IPR may have thereby encouraged the pronounced pan-Asian outlook and consciousness that characterized the 1955 Bandung Conference. Ironically but presciently, the IPR’s checkered experiences also suggested that conflicting national interests dividing member states had great potential to undercut attempts to establish broader transnational groupings.

国際主義知識人のトランスナショナル・ネットワークと満洲問題 : 「太平洋問題調査会(IPR)」における中国をめぐる日米英関係

国際主義知識人のトランスナショナル・ネットワークと満洲問題 : 「太平洋問題調査会(IPR)」における中国をめぐる日米英関係

The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–1964 by Jessamyn R. Abel

Reviewed by: The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–1964 by Jessamyn R. Abel Antony Best (bio) The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–1964. By Jessamyn R. Abel. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2015. x, 331 pages. $54.00. One of the main trends in international history in recent years has been the growing interest in the evolution of internationalism in terms of both its practice and its intellectual development. In regard to Japanese international relations, this has led to a number of important studies, including Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–45 (Routledge, 2002); Thomas Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–1938 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008); and Liang Pan, The United Nations in Japan’s Foreign and Security Policymaking, 1945–1992 (Harvard University Press, 2005). All of these have illuminated the degree to which liberals viewed international organizations as necessary and useful adjuncts to Japan’s national interests. Jessamyn Abel in The International Minimum builds on this foundation and merges it with another significant historiographical shift, the increasing interest in cultural and public diplomacy, in order to shed new light on both the 1930s and the postwar period. Abel’s intention in this study is to demonstrate that one can use the cultural aspects of internationalism as a prism to uncover significant transwar continuities in Japan’s interactions with the outside world. As she rightly observes in her introduction, the opposite of internationalism is not ultranationalism but isolation, and even in the 1930s and early 1940s Japan never desired the latter. Instead, what we find by looking at these years is that Japan began during this period to learn the language and practice of internationalism. Subsequently, this pedagogical experience came to fruition in the postwar period when the country used cultural diplomacy as one means of restoring itself to a position of respectability within the international community. Abel traces the evolution of Japan’s adoption of and adaptation to cultural internationalism through a number of case studies—the establishment of the Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai (KBS), its bids to host the Olympic Games in 1940 and 1964, and its interaction with Asian regionalism at the Tokyo and Bandung conferences of 1943 and 1955, respectively. There is a great deal of interesting material in this volume. The introductory chapters provide a useful overview of Japan’s changing relationship with internationalism, noting how it was an enthusiastic member of the League of Nations up to 1931 and then of the United Nations following its successful bid for membership in 1956. As Abel observes, Japan’s positive [End Page 187] involvement with these organizations very largely arose from, first, an understanding of the need to adapt itself to changing international practice and, second, a belief that the latter could be used to enhance the country’s security and other national interests. In other words, its willingness to associate itself with internationalism did not come about as a result of altruism but rather because this creed could be used to forward Japan’s own international agenda. This is a penetrating and useful observation, which could have been taken further by noting how Japan attempted to use the concept of self-determination to legitimize the establishment of Manchukuo. Abel sees this self-serving interpretation of normative change manifesting itself in the way Japan adopted the instruments of cultural diplomacy. The KBS, as she sees it, was an organization designed to stress Japan’s contribution to world culture in the hope of enhancing its presence in the world arena. Similarly, Japan’s diplomatic efforts in 1936 to persuade the International Olympic Committee to choose Tokyo as the host for the 1940 games were primarily a bid to heighten its international prestige. At the same time, though, she argues that there was also a domestic agenda for both initiatives, in that greater international recognition would, in turn, stimulate national pride and solidarity and help in the drive toward modernization. Provocatively, she identifies the same priorities at play in the bid to host...

Collaborative Autonomy: The Yokohama Agreement of the YMCA, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and Yun Ch’i-ho

The reexamination of the Tokyo Agreement in 1913, the Yokohama Agreement in 1922 and the Institute of the Pacific Relations in 1929 reveal a penetrating theme that the YMCA and its Korean president, Yun Chi-ho, strove to secure. In the midst of political constraints and systemic surveillance of the Government General over the colonial institutions, the YMCA provided a unique space, where information of Korean situations as well as knowledge of international experts streamed in and out. Of utmost importance here was the international exchange that transpired in the space of autonomy. On the loss of Korea’s diplomatic right, the YMCA’s autonomy gave solid leverage to form a network of the East and the West. The Christian missionary organization, the YMCA, provided Korean nationalists an international canopy under which they could champion the Korean cause and cultivate the Koreans’ aspirations. The autonomy and the strength of the Korean YMCA later opened the door to Korean participation in the founding and early conferences of the IPR, where Koreans used the name, “Korea,” with a distinct role in the pursuit of the IPR’s vision for a new world called the “Pacific Community” among Pacific countries. Together with the IPR, Koreans envisioned a new world order, where peace and egalitarianism would govern and transcend a colonial paradigm. Their experience of the YMCA and the IPR consolidated a belief in Christian internationalism, a way to implement nationalistic projects in colonial Korea, and shaped one of their notable characteristics, that is, binary allegiance to nationalism as well as Christian internationalism. The Tokyo Terms of Affiliation, which subjected the Korean YMCA to the Japanese YMCA, displays the signatures of Korean patriots as well as principled missionary statesmen. On the other hand, Yun Chi-ho, a putative collaborator, was the primary force behind the repeal of the Tokyo Terms through the collaborative negotiation at the Yokohama Agreement, which restored the autonomy of the Korean YMCA. Yun, who opposed street rallies for Korean independence during the March First movement, forcefully championed Korean autonomy in the Korean YMCA. He sought to preserve the Korean YMCA from the Japanese government’s suspicion and its operation to emasculate the YMCA’s backbone, as the Korean Conspiracy Case had earlier proven. The crossroads of Yun, the Yokohama Agreement of the YMCA, and the IPR demonstrate the role of Korean Christianity in building the nation of Korea and bridging the world community. Seemingly contradictory stances that often transpire in colonial Korea, this essay propounds, need to be understood in the light of the complexities of the colonial context, in which a monolithic rubric of patriots and collaborators does not easily fit. Their borderline in colonial Korea is fluid.

Collaborative Autonomy: The Yokohama Agreement of the YMCA, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and Yun Ch’i-ho

Collaborative Autonomy: The Yokohama Agreement of the YMCA, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and Yun Ch’i-ho

Think Tanks and a New Order in East Asia

This article considers the work of American think tanks in foreign policy-making immediately before and during World War ii. It argues that two well established organizations, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute of Pacific Relations, were particularly influential. Both became involved in government planning for future u.s. policy in East Asia through their wartime programs. They collaborated with official u.s. government planners through outsourcing projects, hosted official and unofficial discussion groups and conferences, supported networking, and funded policy-relevant research and publications. The activities of these two organizations helped to define the range of policy options planners and politicians considered, include the ideas of outside experts into the work of government, and facilitate cooperation between the United States and its allies on postwar planning. The interaction between the u.s. government and interwar think tanks had a lasting impact on American-East Asian relations.

Applied Anthropology and Interwar Internationalism: Felix and Marie Keesing and the (White) Future of the ‘Native’ Pan-Pacific

ABSTRACTThis paper concerns transnational and international debate about the function of education as a progressive force in modernising colonial and race relations. It focuses on aspects of the published work and careers of New Zealanders Felix and Marie Keesing in the interwar and early post-war years in order to investigate the role these debates played in imagining new processes of adaptation and cohabitation in the settler/colonial Pacific. The paper argues that transnational networks were crucial to that project: as internationally recognised anthropologists, during the interwar years the Keesings were involved in the Institute of Pacific Relations and the Pan-Pacific Women's Association, operating out of Honolulu. Through these communities of expertise, the couple sought to promote and ultimately popularise the contemporary idea that ‘applied anthropology’ would be essential to modernising the norms of governance between ‘native peoples’ and Western citizen-subjects.

The Emergence of International Studies in New Zealand

With acceptance of the responsibilities of a founder member of the League of Nations - including assuming an international mandate in the Pacific - the prospect of a distinctive New Zealand international role and awareness emerged, thus laying the foundation for a local version of international studies. The early figures in the field were a group of intellectuals trained in history, law, or economics, often with experience of British higher education. Members of the League of Nations Union, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and later the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, their activities and publications sometimes challenged the boundaries of Empire-centric discourse. An avowed Internationalism - though sometimes compromised by racial anxieties - was a strong theme in their work; the impact of US foundations especially stimulated a knowledge of the importance to New Zealand of extra-Imperial issues in the Pacific and Asia. Although only intermittently engaged with policy, their influence is nevertheless discernible, especially from 1935.

Tweaking the Lion's Tail: Edgar J. Tarr, the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, and the British Empire, 1931–1950

In its first 2 decades the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA), Canada's premier foreign policy think tank, never functioned merely as a neutral and apolitical research organization. Under the leadership of Edgar Tarr, president of the Monarch Life Assurance Company, and in its capacity as the Canadian Council of the transnational Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), in the 1930s and 1940s the CIIA became an instrument that championed Canadian national autonomy and sought to expand Canada's international role, while challenging British imperialism, racism, and Anglo–Saxon dominance. Prominent Canadian diplomats and other officials were complicit in this enterprise, which reached its apogee at the IPR conference held at Mont Tremblant, Quebec, in December 1942. The CIIA's activities during this period revealed the porosity and imprecision of the boundaries in Canada between the state and non-state realms. Throughout World War II, DEA and other Canadian government representatives attended CIIA and IPR conferences as “official non-officials,” effectively cooperating with private individuals in a network of purportedly non-governmental organizations that enabled Canada to exert leverage on the British government, reject British leadership, align itself with the United States, and secure a greater world role. CIIA leaders and Canadian officials also consciously encouraged nationalist forces in India, China, and Southeast Asia that sought to reject colonial rule and Western dominance. CIIA activities thus became part of a web of diplomatic interactions across a transnational network of think tanks within and outside the British Empire that had their own impact upon international affairs.

Cleared or Covered up?

More than 50 years after his death Herbert Norman remains a controversial figure in Canadian diplomacy. To his detractors he was at best a security risk and at worst a Soviet agent. To his defenders he was the innocent victim of a witch hunt led by unscrupulous American officials and their allies in congress.1 In 1950, Norman, a prominent member of the Department of External Affairs and a leading authority on Japan, was recalled to Ottawa from Tokyo where he had been head of Canada's liaison mission. This was done after his name surfaced during congressional committee hearings into communist subversion in the United States, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for information about him. External Affairs cleared Norman, but it reopened the case in 1952 after MI5, the United Kingdom's counterintelligence and security agency, informed Canadian authorities that it had evidence that he had been an active communist while a student at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s. The department again exonerated Norman even though he had tried to hide his involvement. Norman continued his diplomatic career, serving first as high commissioner to New Zealand and then as ambassador to Egypt, where he took his own life in April 1957 after a congressional committee revived accusations against him.No less controversial are the Department of External Affairs' investigations of Norman. Critic James Barros charges that the department, based on the flimsy consideration of personal acquaintance and collegial solidarity, was intent on giving Norman clearance, despite that fact that answers could not be found to many ofthe items uncovered by the RCMP, the FBI, and MI5. Norman's biographer, Roger Bowen, agrees with External Affairs that communism had been important in his but it had long ceased to be relevant and there was no evidence of disloyalty or misrepresentation during his career. Bowen contends that the department did not do enough to protect Norman from his accusers.2 This essay argues that although External Affairs officials were aware that Norman had not been truthful about his communist past, they viewed him as one of their own whose earlier affiliations had to be balanced against a distinguished record of service in the department. Neither External Affairs nor the RCMP found any indication of disloyalty, although they had different views about his employability. Complicating matters was the fact that the Norman issue became entangled in the larger currents of Canada-US relations at a time when McCarthyism was at its height. The Canadian government's efforts to deal with the case without inflaming domestic opinion or damaging relations with the United States were frustrated by US executive agencies and congress, which made it a public issue despite Ottawa's urgings. The experience had a lasting effect on relations between the two countries.HERBERT NORMAN AND CANADIAN DIPLOMACYHerbert Norman was born in Japan, in 1909, to Canadian Methodist missionary parents. He received his early education in Japanese schools after which he continued his studies in Canada, receiving a BA in classics from the University of Toronto in 1933. While there he became involved in socialist politics. For the next two years Norman studied history at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he came under the influence of a charismatic fellow student, John Comford, under whose tutelage he entered the [communist] party.3 After completing his degree, Norman returned to Canada and taught briefly at Upper Canada College in Toronto, during which time he continued to support communist causes. In 1936, he began graduate studies in Japanese history at Harvard University, participating in Marxist study groups in Cambridge, MA (1936-38) and New York (1938-39), where he continued his research at Columbia University and the Institute of Pacific Relations, a forum for the study of Asian issues. …

The Institute of Pacific Relations and Research on Issues of Northeast China

The Institute of Pacific Relations was an international non-governmental organization in the Asian-Pacific region after the First World War. Chinese Institute of Pacific Relations was an intellectual group with strong liberalism color converted from a desultory organization with Christianism color. In order to investigate the practical condition of Japanese power in Northeast China from all aspects, Northeast China PTPI played an important role. At the same time, major leaders of Northeast China PTPI were present at the international Pacific academic conference, and discussed the following issues: historical origin of northeast China, foundation of treaties signed by foreign countries about their rights in northeast China, and economic interest and railway issues of big powers in northeast China, etc. At the conference, Chinese delegates made known to the world the secret of Japanese imperialism invasion in China and the world, namely, “Tanaka Memorial”.

Dr. Isamu Kawase and Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR)

Dr. Isamu Kawase and Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR)

The Cartography of the Black Pacific: James Weldon Johnson's Along This Way

The Cartography of the Black Pacific: James Weldon Johnson's Along This Way Etsuko Taketani Abstract This essay examines an often overlooked moment in the career of James Weldon Johnson, the novelist, poet, songwriter, journalist, civil rights activist, and diplomat known as the "Renaissance man" of the Harlem Renaissance, and addresses the provocative issue of African American accountability in the discourse of the black Pacific and imperialism. Johnson in his autobiography Along This Way (1933) navigates for a black internationalism—a route that reaches beyond U.S. borders, the Caribbean, and Europe, to embrace the Pacific in the penultimate chapter, and in the process to locate two (otherwise seemingly distinct) memories of the Pacific Rim nations of Nicaragua and Japan on a continuum. Using a sequence of events that constitutes a narrative on the resonance of imperialism along the Nicaragua/Japan nexus, I discuss how Johnson's complicity in U.S. empire-building in Central America was entangled with contemporary discourses of "colored" imperialism. With its movement along both east-west and north-south vectors, Johnson's internationalism ironically emerges in Along This Way as contiguous and continuous with imperial modes that traverse color lines and geographical divides in the Pacific. Johnson in his autobiography performs his remembering of the past even as the past continues to shape the present and future, and painfully takes on his own implication in—and accountability for—the globe-carving imperialism that he denounces. On the morning of October 18, 1929, a ship carrying James Weldon Johnson, the novelist, poet, songwriter, journalist, civil rights activist, and diplomat known as the "Renaissance man" of the Harlem Renaissance, docked in the harbor of Yokohama, Japan. A tumultuous crowd of reporters greeted, interviewed, and photographed Johnson, a delegate to the third biennial conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, as he was gathering his luggage to go ashore. The following day, Johnson's VIP arrival made headlines in the English-language dailies in Japan, startling readers into an anxious sense that African Americans were emerging as integral members of the Pacific community. The host of the conference that Johnson was to attend in Kyoto was the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). The mission of the IPR, which was founded in 1925 in Honolulu, U.S. Territory of Hawai'i, was to promote a new, American-led regionalism, embodied in the notion of a Pacific community, as well as to "study the conditions of the Pacific peoples with a view to the improvement of their mutual relations."1 The IPR was a nongovernmental international organization that envisaged a Pacific-centered perspective on the world that would pose (if implicitly) a challenge to the Eurocentric bias of the League of Nations, along with a corollary reoriented view of U.S. maneuvering in the Caribbean and Central America, as well as in Asia, as mutually constitutive of the affairs of the Pacific. A grasp of the paradigm shift in the conception of the world order reflected in the emergent conviction among IPR members that the Pacific was to be "the stage where shall meet all the races and cultures of the world"2 is crucial to understanding the route that Johnson navigates for a black internationalism in his autobiography Along This Way (1933)—a route that reaches beyond U.S. borders, the Caribbean, and Europe, to embrace the Pacific in the penultimate chapter, and in the process to locate two (otherwise seemingly distinct) memories of the Pacific Rim nations of Nicaragua and Japan on a continuum, as I discuss below. [End Page 79] Germane to Johnson's internationalism across the East/West oceanic divide is recent theoretical discourse involving George Lipsitz, Andrew F. Jones, Nikhil Pal Singh, Gerald Horne, Bill V. Mullen, and others who have staked out a new critical frame of reference often styled the "black Pacific" (and its mutant-variant, Mullen's "Afro-Orientalism") that extends Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic model.3 In this discourse, the racialized Pacific that emerged...

The Evolution of PECC: The First 25 Years

DOI: 10.1355/ae23-21 The Evolution of PECC: The First 25 Years. By Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (various authors). Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, 2005. Pp. 182. Began as a sentimental journey of PECC founders and veterans, a Korean ad hoc spirit of voluntarism organized people and discussions to bring out this twenty-fifth anniversary book project. As tripartite as PECC, joined by Australian and Indonesian old hands, nine chapters have the usual anniversary aims, no less the twenty-fifth. As a PECC worker in the 1980s and 1990s with both fondness and understanding of the environment under which PECC was founded and evolved, some disappointment remains. It is not meant as a critique, but as a hope for another thirtieth anniversary volume as the review finds the effort is as salutary as teasingly unsatisfying. Various authors, not edited, whether because of time and workload as the bane of pro bono work, or the accomplished team is self-sufficient, the same groove with origins and history may be sentimental consensual or offer various points of views. Readers, be they policy-makers, business people, students, fellow academicians and researchers are overdosed on the prologue, not quite satiated in whatever they are looking for in an anniversary book of this nature. Andrew Elek starts off with some before and after, all roads lead to Canberra in 1980 and thereafter, in venue, people and substance contributed to the think-tank. The 1980 Canberra seminar probed precedents like the Pacific Trade and Development (PAFTAD), the Pacific Basin Economic Council (PBEC) and Japanese Prime Minister Ohira's impetus for a co-operation group as background. Throughout the Pacific Economic Cooperation Conferences, 1982 to 1992, the ardent and the sceptic alike cautioned the Pacific Cooperation Committee (PCC) to hasten slowly. With the truly tripartite government-driven Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) by 1989, the PECC maximized its observer role to supplement and complement, firmed up in the PECC's Trade Policy Forum. As a sample or pilot, technical case studies by PECC's more academic resources is a logical extension. The ever-changing world prevails, despite the chemistry of APEC-PECC common denominators in people and ideas. It is neither smooth nor predestined for APEC or PECC; witness the tumultuous financial crisis and thereafter, both equally remiss and negligent in seeing its lead-up. More than an East Asia product or a concert of power, the PECC is no longer a champion with competition in definition of agenda and region. Elek's renewal call for the PECC stems from three main challenges to put PECC back on the map, realign PECC-APEC relationship with the East Asian community evolving and reshape PECC's intrinsic identity and co-operation modality. Mark Borthwick similarly builds the momentum prior to 1980, from as early as the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1925 to the 1967 Pacific Free Trade Area (PAFTA), Kiyoshi Kojima conference and succession of PAFTAD conferences. They served as training ground for young technocrats and leaders. Since 1962, Japanese-Australian bilateral meetings led to PBEC and PAFTAD. Saburo Okita, Kojima with the Australian National University (ANU) forged the Organization for Pacific Trade and Development (OPTAD) and reached out to the United States. The 1970s was Asia-Pacific's golden age. Big power realignment with the end of the Cold War saw advocacy by other interest groups, governments feeling their way to Ohira's Pacific co-operation initiative which follows Japan-sponsored Asian Development Bank (ADB). Soogil Young sees relevancy in PECC agenda, as an intellectual front of dedicated PECCians, tireless efforts to craft an ideal co-operation forum. But a loss of the PECC's pioneering productive pattern of study and discussion is noted due to issues and policies not shared by task forces and Standing Committee. …