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The Development of Public Administration in East Asia: Historical Overview and Future Prospects
Pan Suk Kim
Modern public administration as a new discipline was introduced by Western scholars in East
Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Japan, public administration, though administrative-law-based
administrative science, was introduced by a German scholar, Karl Rathgen (1856-1921) in 1882 and
followed by the translation of writings of another German scholar, Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890) into
Japanese. China first learned the phrase “public administration” from overseas and introduced the
disciplinary content of modern public administration from the US in the 1930s–1940s. In Korea, a laworiented German tradition had been transferred to Korea through the Japanese influence before 1945,
but, after the Korean War (1950-1953), management-oriented American public administration
significantly affected the development of Korean public administration.
Today, East Asia is one of the most economically successful regions of the world. As of 2015,
China is the world's second-largest economy by nominal GDP, followed by Japan and South Korea as the
world’s third and eleventh-largest economies, respectively. Arguably, public administration as a
discipline as well as a practice has played an important role in this modernization. Accordingly, I would
like to discuss the development of public administration in East Asia, focusing on three countries (China,
Japan, and South Korea) in a comparative perspective for the 2016 Braibant Lecture in Chengdu, China.
I will first discuss the theme of the developmental state in the modernization process, followed
by discussion of the civil service entrance examination because these are common denominators in
these three countries in terms of public administration practice. The term “developmental state” refers
to the phenomenon of state-led macroeconomic planning in East Asia and it is characterized by having
strong state intervention in the national economy. Originally, the imperial examination, the so called
“keju,” was a civil service examination system developed in Imperial China to select candidates for the
state bureaucracy and it was used until the end of the Qing Dynasty in China. This system was also
transferred to other East Asian countries in the pre-modern period, although its adoption time and
formats varied. Needless to say, “imperial examinations” were abolished a long time ago, but its
tradition in a new form of the civil service entrance system still remains in the three countries.
After that, I will discuss a different process of the development of modern public administration
as a discipline in these three countries in a comparative perspective, followed by discussion of the
current status and challenging issues of public administration in these three countries and will close my
remarks in sharing a perspective on the future development of public administration in these countries
and other Asian countries.
Pan Suk Kim’s biographical statement
Dr. Pan Suk Kim was the President of the International Institute of Administrative
Sciences (IIAS) in 2010-2013 and a Vice Chairperson of the United Nations Committee of
Experts on Public Administration (UNCEPA) in New York. He is currently the President of the
Asian Association for Public Administration (AAPA) and a Professor of Public Administration
in the College of Government and Business at Yonsei University in South Korea. He has broad
experience as an expert in governmental affairs. He was Secretary to the President for Personnel
Policy (Presidential Appointee) in the Office of the [Korean] President. He had also served as a
member of the Administrative Reform Committee (ARC) and several Policy Advisory
Committees of the Korean government.
He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Review of Public Administration (ARPA)
and editorial board member of several major international journals. He had been the Deputy
Editor of the International Review of Administrative Sciences (IRAS), the Editor-in-Chief of the
Korean Policy Studies Review and the International Review of Public Administration, and the
president of the Korean Association of Public Personnel Administration. He published several
books and over 200 scholarly articles in major domestic and international journals. He is an
expert on public sector reform, civil service system, public management, and governance
innovation.