This article examines the organizational origins of political vulnerability among Chinese military veterans between 1949 and 2006. Recently declassified sources from urban and rural archives show that many veterans, even as they were officially considered core members of the ruling elite and hailed as the “flesh and blood of the revolution,” nevertheless experienced frequent humiliation and discrimination; few citizens sympathized with their plight. The argument here is that much of this mistreatment can be traced to the failure of the state to provide veterans with the opportunity to organize in the context of either fraternal organizations or quasi-autonomous federations. In this respect, their predicament is notably different from their counterparts in democratic, fascist, or corporatist systems, or in other Leninist regimes. Why have veterans in Taiwan, Vietnam, and the former Soviet Union been allowed to form veterans organizations but veterans in the PRC—to their misfortune—have not? This article explains this anomaly.

How can authoritarian regimes effectively control information to maintain regime legitimacy in times of crisis? We argue that media framing constitutes a subtle and sophisticated information control strategy in authoritarian regimes and plays a critical role in steering public opinion and cultivating an image of competent government during a tremendous crisis. Using structural topic models (STM), we conduct a textual analysis of more than 4,600 news reports produced by seven Chinese media outlets during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that Chinese media, instructed by the propaganda authorities, used a heroism frame to feature frontline medics’ sacrifices when saving others in need and resorted to a contrast frame to highlight the poor performance of the United States in the fight against COVID-19. We also show that both state and commercial media outlets used these two frames, though the tone of commercial media coverage was generally more moderate than the state media version.

This study examines the association between Internet use and protest politics in South Korea and Taiwan, using secondary data from the sixth wave (2010–14) of the World Values Survey. The data show that Internet use is positively associated with low-cost protest acts, like signing a petition. Internet use is also correlated with the willingness to consider higher-cost actions such as attending demonstrations and joining in boycotts. But it does not appear to consistently increase actual protests of this sort. Discussion is made to address comparable opportunity structures for protest politics in the two East Asian democracies, where the Internet is deeply integrated into the country's political landscape.

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?

Factionalism is a dimension of informal politics that is hardly unique to China, but it has become well entrenched there for several reasons. We know from available survey data that Chinese political culture is relatively low in trust, and the faction provides a particularly useful refuge from the tiger world of politics, organized as it is around that culturally sanctioned dimension of trust known as guanxi (connections) (Shi 2001 and 1997; Pye 1981). From an individual perspective, although this has been changing more swiftly in society at large via marketization, the institutional landscape of elite politics is still dominated by the looming presence of a single monolithic party-state, to which all auxiliary organizations are subordinated in a corporatist hierarchy; any smaller and more personally useful organizations must be formed sub rosa on a self-help basis. From a structural-functional perspective, the faction serves several functions neglected by party-state corporatism: it services individual careers, in both a defensive and an offensive capacity (i.e., to protect against damaging criticism or purge, and to mobilize support for upward mobility); it provides a way of mobilizing minimal coalitions in policy conflicts; and it may even provide a microcosmic unit beyond the family for social identity and solidarity. Factions have always been rampant in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politics, but precisely because of the universally acknowledged propensity for factionalism, they are formally proscribed by the Leninist rules of innerparty life and hence exist only semiclandestinely, looming more clearly when the central leadership weakens or is in dispute (as, for example, during a succession crisis). Factions are assembled on the basis of a combination of one's formal and informal “bases” (zhengzhi jichu), the formal consisting of trusted colleagues and subordinates in one's current work unit, the informal consisting of ties made during one's previous socialization or career and carefully cultivated thereafter. Factional activities may most easily be understood according to realist or realpolitik methodological assumptions, but as we shall see, they need not operate in an ideological vacuum. Inasmuch as factions exist tacitly and become politically operational opportunistically, the precise affiliation of a given political actor may change over time depending on the issue at stake and other circumstances; hence faction membership can never be tabulated with certainty, even by faction leaders. A given political actor may have at his or her disposal a range of connections that varies in chronological depth (i.e., spanning x generations) and institutional breadth (i.e., spanning x organizational hierarchies). At a given time and place, the actor may need these categories to define him- or herself factionally. On such occasions, a strong factional network (i.e., one that has been assiduously cultivated over time) is useful and perhaps even indispensable to the actor's survival and highly useful for the pursuit of future political ambitions.

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.

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.

Does foreign direct investment (FDI) promote or hinder good governance in a host state? In this article, I analyze the effects of FDI on subnational-level corruption across 63 provinces in Vietnam and find that FDI has both promoted and hindered control of corruption. Initially, FDI creates resources and incentives to improve governance and reduce corruption for early winner provinces. Yet, once FDI begins to pour in, different dynamics start to take effect. While the resources and incentives accrued to FDI-recipient provinces become less effective in further curbing corruption as more FDI flows in, FDI provides leaders of those provinces with growing opportunities and increased abilities to seek and pursue rents, leading to a prevalence of corruption. Using both qualitative and quantitative data, I find strong evidence that the control of corruption is weakest at the extremes: in provinces with the least and the most FDI.

Under pressure to choose between the U.S. and China, Southeast Asian countries have adopted a hedging strategy: deepening economic relations with China while strengthening security cooperation with the U.S. How does the region's public view this strategy? With tensions rising in South China Sea territorial disputes, are more nationalistic individuals more likely to oppose hedging? Using an original public opinion survey conducted in the Philippines, we find that while an overwhelming majority of respondents were concerned about the territorial disputes, more nationalistic Filipinos were no more concerned than less nationalistic ones. Further, more nationalistic Filipinos were more likely to view economic relations with China as important for the Philippines and to approve of Duterte's China policy, which follows the logic of hedging. These surprising findings suggest that under the shadow of great-power competition, the link between domestic politics and foreign policy is nuanced in the Philippines, and Southeast Asia in general.

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.

South Korea's persistent enmity towards its erstwhile colonizer Japan has been a compelling topic of East Asian international relations scholarship for decades. This article argues that the historical evolution of South Korea's democracy offers a vital and overlooked piece of this puzzle. Given that it emerged from one of the most virulently anti-communist dictatorships of the Cold War period, in a society facing an ongoing threat from communist North Korea, any left-of-center opposition movement faced an uphill battle against severe anti-communism. In such circumstances, the only way for a leftist opposition party to survive was by pitting its stronger anti-Japan reputation against conservatives’ anti-communism. After South Korea's democracy stabilized, liberals tried and failed to overturn the anti-leftist institutions left over from the Cold War and then sought equilibrium through parallel rhetoric targeting pro-Japanese elements. Today, neither left nor right can afford to allow a final amicable settlement with its respective target of antagonism. Through analyses of domestic political rhetoric targeting alleged pro-Japanese or pro-communist elements, this paper demonstrates how these competing antagonisms achieved an uneasy equilibrium that undergirds South Korean political dynamics to this day.

Whether political ties enhance or weaken firm performance has been widely investigated in a number of studies, including some on China. Based on a database of non-financial A-share listed firms from 2004 to 2012, we study the effects of political ties on firm performance within a quantile regression framework. We find that there is a positive relationship between political ties and economic performance, but that it is diminishing with respect to firm performance. Political ties appear particularly important for weaker firms.

Taiwan recently adopted a series of administrative reform laws designed to make the bureaucracy more transparent and allow public participation in regulatory policies. Because administrative reform limits the executive's power, it is clear why legislatures would favor strict administrative procedures. But it is less clear why presidents would support them. The passage of these laws begs the question why presidents support administrative procedural reforms designed to restrict their abilities to act freely. I argue that in Taiwan, President Lee Teng-hui's control of his party deteriorated as factional disputes within his own party increased over time. Lee ultimately concluded that the Kuomintang's political survival depended on major reforms. Consequently, the status quo-oriented bureaucracy—hitherto an important source of support for Lee and his key constituencies—became an impediment. Lee supported Taiwan's Administrative Procedure Act in order to reduce the bureaucracy's capacity to impede reform. More generally, I argue that administrative procedures designed to open up the bureaucracy to the public, including previously excluded groups, can serve politicians' goal of redirecting the bureaucracy. Archival data, secondary sources, and interviews with key presidential advisers, senior career bureaucrats, and politicians support my argument.

In nations where the executive has budgetary control, how are spending decisions and allocations affected? Is intraparty conflict relevant? This article sets out to show that institutional rules and leadership roles affect budgetary outcomes. It makes the following argument: if intraparty conflict exists in a one-party dominant or majority-party system, the executive reduces spending to punish the party in the legislature; if no intraparty conflict exists, then the executive increases spending to reward or cultivate loyalty to himself as the party leader. If intraparty conflict exists in a minority government or majority-coalition within a competitive multiparty system, the executive increases spending to reward or cultivate loyalty to himself as the party or coalition leader. Evidence from South Korea and Taiwan between the 1970s and 2000 supports the theory. This study advances scholarship in three ways. First, it shows that institutional rules that provide the executive with agenda control also lead to the strategic use of the budgetary process and outcomes to generate loyalty to the executive as leader. Second, it reveals that this strategy affects spending outcomes in election years; this is an important caveat to electoral spending manipulations. Third, the strategic use of the budget to control intraparty conflict occurred prior to and following democratization; this reveals that institutional changes need to include modifications in rules for policy transformations.

The absence of class voting or the existence of “reverse” class voting under rising inequality remains a puzzling question in South Korea. While poor voters seem to support conservative candidates more than the rich do, this is due to a confounding effect of age, because poverty is concentrated among the elderly in Korea. Using the Korean General Social Survey data (KGSS 2004–2014) covering two presidential elections, two general legislative elections, and two nationwide local elections, we find that Koreans, in particular the poor electorate, engage in class voting in both objective and subjective terms. While regional and generational cleavages continue to be the most important determinants of partisan competition, class by income levels as well as subjective identity significantly impact vote choice when age is adequately controlled for.