This article examines Japan's evolving commitments to technology development and technology diffusion in Asia. It explores Japan's technology strategies in three areas—Internet protocol, open source software, and horology—focusing on the importance of technology standards. The development and diffusion of technology standards has become one of the core elements in establishing industrial competitiveness. The importance of technology standards encouraged the Japanese government and firms to pursue a regional policy to develop and diffuse new technological ideas and standards in Asia. Japan's commitments were accepted by its neighbors because they could obtain various benefits from collaboration with Japan, such as technological exchanges, technology transfer, and financial aid.

We focus on the elite decision-making process in China, analyzing the formation of coalitions around particular policy options. We apply a framework that simulates collective decision-making processes (CDMP): the KAPSARC Toolkit for Behavioral Analysis (KTAB). KTAB facilitates the application of a Spatial Model of Politics, an open source model similar to Bueno de Mesquita's (1997) Expected Utility Model and the Senturion model (Abdollahian, et al 2006). KTAB provides a framework to understand logical consequences of subjective data inputs, enabling contrasting scenarios to be analyzed. We examine the interactions of actors' interests that drive China to reform its energy sector policies, in particular the structure of the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). In the case of private companies' entry into energy markets in China, we find that little reform is likely. The inertia of key actors holds back the potential for a significant opening of the energy sector. Despite the erosion of CNPC's political clout, there is little consensus for major reform to China's market position.

This paper empirically tests bellicist theories of state building in the East Asian context, paying attention to the interplay between external threats and internal challenges and their implications for these states’ extractive power. How much variation in state building in the region can be attributed to war and war preparation as a result of both external threats and internal challenges? In particular, it provides more fine-grained analysis on the different types of internal challenges and their impact on state capacity building. The article argues that in the East Asia region, both external threats and internal challenges are crucial to explaining the variation in state capacity across the region. However, we also find that different types of internal challenges have different effects. Particularly, communist insurgencies seem to have both an immediate and long-term positive effect in compelling the state to respond with more extraction to engage in state-building efforts.

Post-1997 Thai politics have been shaped by the effects of two momentous events that occurred almost at the same time: the introduction of far-reaching structural changes by the 1997 constitution, and the appearance of a singularly overbearing and centralizing political leader—Thaksin Shinawatra. To political analysts, this situation has provided uniquely rich opportunities to observe over a number of years whether constitutional engineering had the envisaged effect of restricting the politicians' “undesirable” actions, and whether the intended institutional change was realized. However, the coincidence of constitutional change and the occurrence of Thaksin has also made it necessary to distinguish the effects of structural changes from the effects of the new form of political leadership.

Why do some economies grow for several years and then stall? One obvious answer is that these economies have “overheated.” Another is that foreign demand for their products has dried up. This article explores a longer-term explanation—namely, that the institutions favorable for one stage of economic growth are less suitable for a subsequent stage. This idea of “growing into trouble” is consistent with Dani Rodrik's argument that the institutions required to stimulate growth may not be sufficient to sustain growth. We push this idea further by exploring the different requirements of structural change versus upgrading. Structural change connotes an economy's diversification through new investments, often producing real income growth. But economies can diversify without being more efficient, or their initial competitiveness can be based largely on transient factor endowment advantages. Upgrading refers to the competitiveness of these diverse activities achieved through locally based productivity improvements.

Studies of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have focused on the strategic intentions of Beijing, with much less attention paid to its political effects. The argument that the initiative can improve political relationships with BRI countries is assumed rather than empirically grounded. This paper bridges the gap by studying countries’ cooperation and conflict with China. I find that (a) the initiative appears to marginally improve BRI countries’ cooperation and significantly reduce low-intensity conflict; (b) the cooperation-promoting effect is driven only by neighboring countries while the restraining effect for low-intensity conflict results primarily from non-neighboring countries; and (c) there is no systematic evidence so far that the initiative has any effect on high-intensity conflict. These results offer mixed evidence of commercial liberalism in the context of the BRI: money (or the potential thereof) can induce cooperation in the short run, but it may not be enough to fundamentally change interstate relations.

We collected original experimental data, using the matched-guise technique, to examine the Taiwanese people's evaluational reactions to two major spoken languages in contemporary Taiwan: Mandarin and Taiwanese. Taking advantage of the effectiveness of the experimental technique in controlling for possible unobserved confounding variables, we clearly and systematically demonstrate that (1) language stereotypes do exist in today's Taiwan, and (2) there are some serious and significant implications for Taiwan's public opinion and democratic politics. Our data show that such language stereotypes are of great salience and consistently decoded for political issues, less so for socioeconomic issues, and almost insignificant for personality features. Our data also confirm that these language stereotypes are not just proxies of Taiwan's regional divisions; the Taiwanese people cognitively differentiate between the spoken languages' political and socioeconomic implications (despite some mild halo effect between the two).

To what extent is a diverse news media environment good for activists who seek attention for their cause? Scholars agree that activist groups depend on the media to reach policymakers and bystanders. Yet prior scholars have overlooked how factors that contribute to media environment diversity—including journalistic norms, market structures, outlets’ partisanship, and audiences’ news consumption habits—can have contradictory implications for activist groups. Disaggregating questions of gaining publicity from questions of the message and reach of coverage, this article shows that while pluralistic media environments are more accessible to activists, more homogeneous media environments help groups that manage to break into the mainstream news reach wider audiences with more coherent narratives. These findings challenge common assumptions about the news media in Japan and Korea. A paired comparison of hepatitis C-related activism in both countries demonstrates how the forces democratizing access to the media are paradoxically reducing the persuasive potential of publicity.

When do citizens take costly collective action against government corruption? When citizens act in concert, their demands are credible and not easily discounted by governments, which should be more likely to respond. In this study, we use the stag-hunt game, supplemented by Granovetter's threshold model of collective action, to investigate the conditions under which citizens coordinate to collectively act against government corruption. We use survey experiments in laboratory settings in Australia, Singapore, and the United States. The results show several conditions motivate participants to pursue collective action; using the wellspring of the theoretical argument, they clarify that information that others pursue collective action, together with clear mutual benefits as measured by rewards, are primary motivators of the individual's choice. Correspondingly, other considerations, including initial costs or final potential penalties, do not bear on the individual's choice. The findings have implications not only for the empirical literature on policy but also for policy debates on how to control it.

In this article, I analyze diverging political pathways of labor market reform with an empirical focus on the cases of Japan and Korea. Despite similar trends of regulatory reform toward the increase of labor market flexibility, the patterns of labor market reform differed in the two countries. Japan adopted labor market liberalization for nonregular workers with the persistence of employment protection for regular workers. In contrast, Korea opted for regulatory reform for all workers while simultaneously strengthening workers' basic rights and improving protections for nonregular workers. I argue that the institutional features of the employment protection system determine the diverging patterns of labor market reform in Japan and Korea.

Although Korea has made significant strides to strengthen its democratic system since the successful transition in the late 1980s as part of the “third wave” of global democratization, a look into the process of making budgetary policy in the National Assembly would suggest that Korean democracy is far from consolidation. Korean politics has shed itself for the most part of its authoritarian past, when the military was the main conduit of action and oppression. The principle of free, regular, and fair competition has taken root as the procedural norm in both national and local elections. Korean citizens enjoy civil liberties to a degree unprecedented in the authoritarian era, and civil society transformed into an increasingly open, transparent, and pluralistic field of political action.

How have China's princelings benefitted from their family backgrounds in their careers? This study seeks to answer the question and, in so doing, to add to the existing factionalist and meritocracy approaches to Chinese political elites. Based on biographical data of 293 princelings, quantitative analyses show that princelings have various advantages over non-princeling officials on the Central Committee. This is not simply familial advantage, however, as regression analysis finds parents’ rank and longevity do not significantly affect princelings’ career outcomes. Rather, the findings suggest that princelings benefit from membership in an affiliative status group, which differs from factions. The qualitative analysis find princelings’ status is formed and reproduced in a “collective” manner: (1) princelings’ status and early advantages originated in the state's centralized resource allocation system; (2) princelings’ education and career choices are intertwined with the state's practical and ideological goals; (3) princelings’ shared life courses strengthens their collective identity; (4) princelings’ career advantages are secured by the party-state's cadre management system. These factors combine to reproduce princelings’ elite status within the party and state, what I term “collective elite reproduction.”

The end of the Cold War has given rise to a wide-ranging debate about the future of international relations in the Asia-Pacific. This debate has been difficult to assess in part because of the elusive quality of the outcomes being explored, such as whether the region is characterized by “stability” or “rivalry.” What exactly do we want to explain?

Recent scholarship on communal violence in Indonesia since the late New Order has focused on identifying causal mechanisms of particular subtypes of communal violence such as large-scale communal violence, town-level communal rioting, intervillage violence, and lynching. While such analyses are useful in understanding aspects specific to each subtype of violence, analyzing each subtype separately risks the analytical problem of selection on the dependent variable if there are important similarities across subtypes. Drawing on the observation that each of these subtypes appeared to rise and fall together since the late New Order, I propose a common factor that can explain the broad temporal patterns of communal violence. In particular, I point to increasing restraints on the military that arose from intraregime infighting, greater scrutiny of military actions during the keterbukaan (political openness) period, and the withdrawal of the military from police duties during Reformasi. I examine four cases of communal conflict: (1) a case in which intravillage violence was averted, (2) a case of lynching, (3) a case of lynching and subsequent intervillage reprisals, and (4) a case of large-scale communal violence. The first three cases are from Lampung province, and the fourth is the case of Poso district, Central Sulawesi.

The years since 2004 have been marked by a level of insurgency in the southern region of Thailand unknown for decades. An accurate perspective on this conflict requires a deeper understanding of differences between the Buddhist and Muslim Thais of the region than has been evident in public and academic discourse. This study utilizes data from a survey taken in 2006, of attitudes and political orientations across all regions of Thailand, including an independent sample of the southern region. The data indicate that southerners are different from the rest of Thailand, whether Buddhist or Muslim; that Malay-speaking Muslims are different from other Muslims; and that sympathy for the insurgency lies not in religion, but in defending practices associated with loyalty to specific forms of Malay culture that characterize the region.

The history of leadership change in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exemplifies Pareto's notion of circulation of the elite. To analyze it we have compiled a partially ranked dataset of members and alternates of the Politburo Standing Committee, Politburo, and Central Committee for the 1st through 18th National Party Congresses. Quantitative studies of leadership change in the CCP have typically focused on the fraction of new members in each political body from one Party Congress to the next, but the existence of partially ranked data calls for a more subtle quantification of leadership change. Thus, we define a new family of metrics which consider change within each political body, the magnitude of such change, and the importance of each change to CCP structure and policy. We use two of these metrics to compute the distances between each pair of successive, partially-ranked leadership lists in our dataset. Our results capture important political developments from the irregular leadership change of the early years to the subsequent transformation of the CCP into a more institutionalized polity. This metric-based analysis also supplements our understanding of anomalous leadership transitions, intra-Party dynamics, and systemic change in the CCP.

China has largely been cut off from direct transfers of military systems and technologies since the announcement of the EU arms embargo in 1989. Nevertheless, the EU and its member states remain a major source of high technologies for China, namely, by means of trade, investment, and scientific cooperation. This is mainly because the EU-China relationship continues to be dominated by the economic interests of individual member states, both in trade and increasingly in investments. Furthermore, due to a lack of direct security interests in the Asia-Pacific, Europeans do not generally see China as a security threat or a strategic competitor. Therefore, the EU has so far failed to develop a strategic approach toward the potential security implications of transfers of European militarily sensitive technologies that goes beyond the existing arms embargo and currently lacks effective mechanisms to control the flow of such technologies to China.

When and why does a perpetrator state take a contrite stance on its past wrongs? More specifically, why do Japanese behaviors differ over time in addressing apology and compensation with regard to the comfort women issue? In this article I address these questions by testing two hypotheses, utilizing an instrumentalist approach and a transnational-political activism model. The former posits a perpetrator state is more likely to take a contrite stance on its past misdeeds when it calculates such action is in its security and/or economic interests. The latter hypothesizes that when transnational activism is powerful and a perpetrator state is led by a progressive ruling coalition, the state is more likely to adopt conciliatory policies toward historical issues. I find that the transnational-political activism model possesses more explanatory power than instrumentalism for within-case variations in Japanese behavior toward the comfort women issue. The two approaches are not, however, mutually exclusive and are complementary in some regards. The effect of transnational activism is heightened when the target state is faced with other geopolitical incentives and/or when the target state is led by a progressive ruling coalition and has weak conservative reaction.