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Susan Shirk Featured in The San Diego Union-Tribune

Local woman building bridges to Northeast Asia

05/25/2011
Peter Rowe, The San Diego Union-Tribune

North Korea may be the world’s most isolated country. Tourists rarely enter; residents hardly ever exit.

But one day in March, a dozen subjects of the hermit kingdom descended on Escondido’s Mountain Meadow Mushrooms.

“They were pretty excited about the farm, to see how things operated,” said Gary Crouch, Mountain Meadow’s owner. “They had no idea, no conception of what a farm even looked like.”

The 10 economists and two government figures were the first North Koreans to study the American economy on site. Over two weeks, they quizzed financiers in New York City; roamed a rice farm outside Sacramento; explored Universal Studios in Los Angeles; and spent six days in San Diego. Here, they toured Qualcomm and — of critical interest to citizens of a famine-wracked nation — Crouch’s farm and Catalina Offshore Products, a seafood wholesaler.

Their hostess, Susan Shirk, directs the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Since 1993, she’s led a forum for foreign and defense ministry officials, military officers and academics from the U.S., China, Japan, Russia, South and North Korea. By holding unofficial, off-the-record talks, the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue helps inform official government-to-government parlays.

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Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Ho Miu Lam professor of China and Pacific Relations at IR/PS.

She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the Koreas.

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