12.00 p.m. Mr. Noriaki OZAWA (Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Japan) What is Japan? A Look at Japan's Changing Sociocultural Identity. 12.20 p.m. Mr. Nobutake SHIRAI (Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, Japan) Internet Business in U.S. and Japan: A Comparative Study. 12.40 p.m. Mr. Raita SUGIMOTO (Toyota Motor Corporation, Japan) Reorganization of the Automobile Industry and its Impact on the Asian Market. 1.00 p.m. Mr. Takeo TAKIUCHI (The Patent Office, Japan) Entrepreneurship through Technology Transfer in Silicon Valley. 1.20 p.m. Mr. Kenji UCHIDA (The Kansai Electric Power Co., Inc., Japan) Setting Up New Ventures In-house at Kansai Electric Power Company. 1.40 p.m. Mr. Zhi-Jie ZENG (CITIC Pacific, Hong Kong) China's WTO bid and the Effect on China's Internet Business. Research Introductions: Mr. Yong-Ky EUM (Hyundai Heavy Industry, Korea) Mr. Jiang FENG (People's Bank of China, PRC) Ms. Xiaohui ZHANG (People's Bank of China, PRC)

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum completed its first ten years in 1999. It is appropriate to pause and look back at its evolution over this period, and look forward to assess its future role in the multilateral world of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This paper attempts both of these tasks from a New Zealand perspective. The factors and forces behind regionalism, its points of confluence and conflict with multilateralism, and its future role in a globalised international economy are all addressed in this paper. How the forces of regionalism are shaping up in the Asia-Pacific region, and how New Zealand - a small open economy - is linking itself into it are anlysed to put New Zealand's recent economic reforms in an international perspective. To what extent New Zealand and other countries in the Asia-Pacific area can learn and benefit from the experiences of one another is brought into sharper focus in the paper. Professor Srikanta Chatterjee is a professor of international economics at Massey University in New Zealand. A native of India, Professor Chatterjee studied economics at the Universities of Calcutta, India, and Surrey and London, England, receiving his Ph D from the London School of Economics. Besides New Zealand, Professor Chatterjee has been on the full time faculty in universities in India, U.K., Australia, Japan and Fiji. He has also been on the visiting faculty in Australia, Bangladesh, Botswana, China, Italy, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mauritius, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Swaziland and Vietnam. In 1997, Professor Chatterjee was a Japan Foundation Fellow at the Tokyo Keizai University, and, in 1998, he spent a semester at the Kyoto Ritsumeikan University as a New Zealand Asia 2000 Foundation Visiting Professor of Asia-Pacific Studies. Currently a Fulbright Travelling Fellow, Professor Chatterjee is visiting Berkeley, and attending a conference in San Diego before going on give lectures at the University of Colima in Mexico. Professor Chatterjee's teaching and research interests include international economics, international business, the Asia-Pacific economies, inequality and income distribution, and the economics of the household.

The bundling of race and ethnicity with nation is common in state ideology and popular perceptions in East Asia. These beliefs in racial homogeneity deeply held by the societies that make up this world region are now being challenged by the international migration of workers, most of whom are themselves from Asia or ethnic Asian origins. The advent of multicultural societies has already begun and, given both the globalization of migration and demographic trends in the higher income economies, it will increasingly become an issue for public policy in the coming decades. While central governments tend to continue to reify the race-nation ideology, local governments and citizen groups have in many instances become more positive in their responses to the issues of cultural diversity and social justice for foreign workers working and living in their communities. Mike Douglass is professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Hawaii. He has lived in East and Southeast Asia for more than twelve years, where he has carried out research and practice in urban policy and planning. His current research interests and projects include globalization and urban policy in the Asia Pacific region; urban poverty, environment, and social capital; foreign workers and households in Japan; and rural-urban linkages in national development. His recent books are Culture and the City in East Asia, edited with Won Bae Kim (Oxford, 1997); Cities for Citizens: Planning and the Rise of Civil Society in a Global Age, edited with John Friedmann (John Wiley, 1998); and Coming to Japan: Foreign Workers and Households in an Age of Global Migration, edited with Glenda Roberts (Routledge, 2000).

An eminent historian of China and Overseas Chinese, Wang Gungwu has served as President of the University of Hong Kong, Professor and Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, and Dean of Arts at the University of Malaya in Singapore. He is currently Director of the East Asian Institute at National University of Singapore and Distinguished Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. His many books include The Nanhai Trade: The Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea (1958, new edition 1998); Community and Nation (1981, new edition 1993); China and Southeast Asia: Myths, Threats, and Culture (1999); The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (2000).

Professor Gomes will discuss the role of computer-mediated communication in the construction of diasporic identities among Goans. This is part of a broader project focused on the politics of culture among Goans, examining the trends and identity expressions that relate to the re-establishment of Indian "roots"and heritage. Professor Gomes is a Malaysian-born Australian of Goan Indian descent. He teaches anthropology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He has researched and published extensively on Malaysia's indigenous peoples (Orang Asli), focusing on demographic patterns, ecological issues, and political economy. Apart from his Goa project, he is currently writing a book, partly autobiographical, on cultural politics in Malaysia.

Between four and five thousand years ago, elephants were found in China as far north as the location of present-day Beijing. Today, wild elephants are confined to a few protected enclaves along the southwest border. To some degree, this retreat was due to a long-term decrease in the mean annual temperature, but the most important cause was the destruction of habitat by Chinese-style agricultural development. Mark Elvin uses the pattern of retreat of the elephants as a means of defining to a first degree of approximation the complementary pattern of the spread of forest clearance for farming in China across space and time, and to discuss the economic and other causes for the historical deforestation. Mark Elvin is Research Professor of Chinese History at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU, and Emeritus Fellow of St. Anthony's College, Oxford. He is author of The Pattern of the Chinese Past (1973), Another History: Essays on China from a European Perspective (1996), and Changing Stories in the Chinese World (1997, among other works. Elvin was educated at Cambridge University and Harvard.