China's involvement in the world and its economic modernization are expected to lead to its democratization and adherence to the liberal international order. However, after several decades of development, the authoritarian system remains resilient, and China's foreign policy appears to be more assertive. The limited nature of scholarship on the public opinion in a rising power has prevented a better understanding of China's domestic changes and foreign policy. This study seeks to unveil the micro-foundations of the unexpected trajectory of China's rise by investigating the public's national and international orientations using nationwide representative survey data. The results show that international orientations had a very limited effect on Chinese popular attitudes toward domestic politics and foreign relations, while national orientations strengthened public support for the authoritarian system and China's assertive foreign policy. Intergenerational variations existed in public opinion in China, with the Xi generation showing a different pattern of political values than the preceding generations.

In this article, we propose a causal relationship between a region's communist revolutionary legacy before 1949 and the variation in private sector development after 1949. In the case of Zhejiang, the pre-1949 revolutionary experience led to the power struggle between two elite groups, the guerrilla cadre group and the southbound cadre group, in the province after 1949. As the weak side, guerrilla cadres were willing to protect local economic interests in exchange for local popular support, which improved their odds of political survival. As a result, in contrast with counties where the guerrilla forces were historically weak, counties with strong guerrilla forces before 1949 saw significantly more robust private sector development throughout much of the Mao and post-Mao periods. In this article we provide preliminary historical and statistical evidence to support this hypothesis.

What drives public discontent about Chinese investment on the ground? This study probes the “ground truth” of public reaction in Zambia by documenting both the public perception and the actual impacts of Chinese investments. We find a “reputation deficit” for Chinese investment: Zambians are significantly less likely to support Chinese investment than investment from other countries. Combining results from an original household survey, interview records, and official statistics, we examine the drivers of this reputation deficit. Chinese firms are no worse at generating employment or adhering to labor and environmental standards than Western corporations operating in Zambia, according to official statistics as well as public opinion. However, Chinese firms possess a lower degree of localization, specifically in managers’ knowledge of local languages and the provision of culturally relevant benefits, and they are less likely to engage with the media. Our study highlights these previously overlooked causes of the reputation deficit.

This article compares the process of corporate structural reforms in Japan and South Korea in the late 1990s and raises two questions. Why have state-led economies such as Japan and South Korea engaged in politically costly corporate structural reforms in the late 1990s? What explains the variation in the reform process between Japan and South Korea?

I argue that the process of structural reforms in state-led economies has been the result of state mediation of global financial forces. The rise of portfolio capital inflows increases the pressure for domestic reforms, a change that is common to Japan and Korea in the late 1990s. However, the actual success of structural reforms depends on the ability of the elite bureaucracy to mediate among between global investors, domestic interest groups and the general public. In contrast to Korea, Japan exhibits a low level of bureaucratic control over the legislative agenda and a situation of tripolar deadlock.

The evidence presented here includes quantitative data, government documents, and legislative records as well as information gathered from over 100 interviews with bureaucrats, politicians, business leaders, labor leaders, and other actors in the two countries.

What determines cross-national variations in the extent of anti-government protests in Asia? Anti-government protests have surged across Asia in recent years, with many contributing to consequential political change. However, systematic cross-national comparison of the determinants of protests in Asia is still largely missing. This article fills this important gap by quantitatively examining the explanatory power of the three main theories of contentious politics—grievance, resource mobilization, and political process theories—in the Asian context with new data on anti-government protests in all 25 Asian states from 1990 to 2016. The analysis finds that urbanization, information and communication technology, and regional demonstration effects are the strong catalysts of anti-government protests in Asia, while repressive state capacity particularly dampens protests. The findings offer important insights into the dynamics of the anti-government protests that have become increasingly salient in Asian politics.

On March 18, 2000, Taiwan experienced an electoral earthquake. After half a century in power on the island of Taiwan and eight decades of an undisrupted ruling position dating back to its heyday on the Chinese mainland, the Kuomintang (KMT) lost power in a free and fair presidential election. The power rotation at the close of the century is historic by any measure. It has closed an epoch of one-party dominance and inaugurated a period of party dealignment and realignment. It deflated Lee Teng-hui's charisma and brought his era to an abrupt and calamitous end. At the elite level, it has triggered a generational turnover, pushing the baby boomers to the forefront of governing responsibility. Most significantly, it pushed the island's political system for a major step forward toward the consolidation of democracy.

In this paper, we review and summarize recent trends of international relations studies in South Korea on three distinct dimensions and, on the basis of this, suggest future directions of research in the field. Our focus throughout the paper is on the constraints and opportunities for the development of indigenous international relations theories and models. Although the confrontational Cold War legacy on the Korean Peninsula sustains the validity of the powerful realist paradigm, we argue that critical challenges are breathing a new life into the academic field of international relations in a time of great change when a new global and regional order has been taking shape since the end of the Cold War. In order to accommodate these new changes and call attention to epistemological pluralism, we posit liberal constructivism, which combines liberalism with constructivism, as a new epistemological alternative to the existing lines of international relations theories. Given the opportunities and intellectual resources, we conclude, the future of the discipline of international relations in South Korea is quite promising.

Although it is commonly believed that democracy promotes public services such as education, efforts have just started to evaluate empirically how the recent trend of democratization affects education services in the developing world. This article reports on the first regionwide investigation in East Asia. By studying the effects of democracy on multiple education indicators in a time-series-cross-section dataset of eight East Asian countries/political entities, the article examines whether democratic governments increase education spending and access and which social groups are favored in the process. The statistical results, which are corroborated by findings from two case studies, show that democracy plays a progressive role in promoting education spending and school enrollment at the basic level in East Asia.

North Korea is widely seen as having among the most corrupt governments in the world. However, the Kim family regime has not always been so accepting of government wrongdoing. Drawing on archival evidence, this study shows that Kim Il-sung saw corruption as a threat to economic development and launched campaigns to curb it throughout the 1950s. I find that these campaigns were at least somewhat successful, and they contributed to post-Korean War reconstruction and rapid development afterwards. So when and why did the regime shift from combating corruption to embracing it? I argue that changes in the country's economic system following the crisis of the 1990s, especially de facto marketization, made corruption more beneficial to the regime both as a source of revenue and as an escape valve for public discontent. This study's findings contribute to our understanding of the politics of corruption control in authoritarian regimes.

More than ninety people died in political violence linked to the March–May 2010 “redshirt” protests in Bangkok. The work of the government-appointed Truth for Reconciliation Commission of Thailand (TRCT) illustrates the potential shortcomings of seeing quasi-judicial commissions as a catch-all solution for societies struggling to deal with the truth about their recent pasts. The 2012 TRCT report was widely criticized for blaming too much of the violence on the actions of rogue elements of the demonstrators and failing to focus tightly on the obvious legal transgressions of the security forces. By failing strongly to criticize the role of the military in most of the fatal shootings, the TRCT arguably helped pave the way for the 2014 coup. Truth commissions that are unable to produce convincing explanations of the facts they examine may actually prove counterproductive. Following Quinn and Wilson, we argue in this article that weak truth commissions are prone to politicization and are likely to produce disappointing outcomes, which may even be counterproductive.

Are scientific or nonscientific factors most influential in initiating international cooperation on newly emerging transboundary environmental problems in the Asia and Pacific region? In a case study of long-range atmospheric transport of dust, which is linked to desertification in China and Mongolia, the relative influence of scientific versus nonscientific factors in promoting cooperation in the region is analyzed. The study examines two dimensions of the problem—Northeast Asia and North America—and demonstrates that similar to the distance-dependence of the problem (i.e., dust concentrations decrease the greater the distance from the sources), cooperation follows a parallel relationship (i.e., motivation to cooperate decreases the greater the distance from the sources). Scientific cooperation in Northeast Asia is being institutionalized, but North America has not joined this effort. A synergy between factors must be invoked to explain this situation. In both cases, obvious and often dramatic negative impacts of massive dust storms are an enabling factor allowing more subtle science-related factors to come to the fore.

Why did the unified government led by Taiwan's president Ma Ying-jeou experience gridlock? In this article, I answer this question by modifying the veto player theory to explain how policies are made in Taiwan's semipresidential system, in which the president can unilaterally appoint a premier who is accountable to the national legislature. Given this constitutional design, the premier represents the president rather than the legislature, so the agenda setter is either the legislature or the president. A veto player model shows that the legislature, as a collective veto player, has the last-mover's advantage when it sets the agenda and that the two executive heads are more likely to be incongruent if a policy has to be deliberated by the legislature. The president sets the agenda only if he can discipline the legislators in his party and the legislature is not allowed to amend an executive proposal. This theory explains why policies involving lawmaking give Taiwan's Legislative Yuan considerable bargaining powers, even to the disadvantage of the president. These theoretical arguments are confirmed by hypothesis-based case studies and can be generalized to study other semipresidential regimes.

This article argues that weak local governments increase levels of taxation by “borrowing” institutional capacity from certain types of businesses. While many businesses lobby against taxation, businesses that are locally owned, nationally connected, and logistically complex build robust associations that support taxation. These types of businesses benefit from improvements in public infrastructure, so they empower their associations to monitor members’ tax compliance and to pressure officials to uphold their spending commitments. The article demonstrates the necessity of business support for taxation in the absence of state capacity by comparing two Philippine cities that differ in their ability to tax despite a number of similarities between them. The case studies show that tax increases co-varied with business support, and that business support waxed and waned depending on over-time variation in the capability of business associations to discourage tax evasion and to enforce official commitments to spend on infrastructure.

New democracies face the arduous task of determining how to deal with gross human rights violations committed during their authoritarian pasts, or the “torturer problem,” to quote Samuel P. Huntington (1991). A new democracy can enhance its legitimacy if it brings human rights violators to justice, thus demonstrating the supremacy of democratic values, including the rule of law. By ensuring that no wrongdoer will go unpunished, the democratic regime prevents the danger of a future military coup d'état and future human rights abuses. Equally critical, it strengthens the power base of democratic forces by delegitimizing or even occasioning a purge of key authoritarian leaders, who often wield influence within the institutions of power, including the military, even after democratic transition. Punishing past wrongdoings constitutes an act of preempting a democratic reversal. In this sense, the question of the past becomes a struggle over power with today's authoritarian forces and for the future of third-wave democracy.

In this research note, we introduce a new dataset on China's national legislators. It provides descriptive information on one key parameter: the nature of the business owned by private entrepreneur deputies in China's National People's Congress (NPC) from 2003 to 2017. The dataset contains information on whether the deputy once worked as a government official, whether the deputy was a former top manager of a state-owned/collective enterprise, and whether his/her current company was a state-owned/collective enterprise before being privatized. We categorize deputies as “insiders” as long as they stratify one of the aforementioned backgrounds, whereas others as the “grassroots.” This dataset thus reveals two types of private entrepreneur deputies who are significantly different with regard to how they started their own businesses. These findings shed new light on the relationship between private entrepreneurs and the party-state in China.

Using data drawn from the Taiwan Social Change Survey, I investigate how citizens' incomes affect turnout and partisan voting. In contrast to studies of other countries, I find that lower-income voters are not less likely to turn out in Taiwan. Moreover, although income does not have strong effects on patterns of partisan voting in Taiwan, there is some evidence that people with income levels just below the middle-income group are less likely to vote for the left-wing party

In this study, I examine the effect of US foreign policy on the relationship between South Korea and North Korea. In particular, I analyze whether two different foreign policy approaches—the hard-line approach and the soft-line approach—have played a role in advancing or slowing steps toward peace in the Korean peninsula. I use the Integrated Data for Events Analysis dataset for the period 1990–2004. By employing a Vector Autoregression model, which analyzes the behavioral patterns of South and North Korea and the United States, I find that US foreign policy affects the relationship between the two Koreas by affecting North Korea's behavior toward South Korea. The triangular relationship among the United States, North Korea, and South Korea shows a reciprocal behavior pattern. This finding suggests that a soft-line and reciprocal US foreign policy toward North Korea is critical to maintaining peace in the Korean peninsula.

What effect do natural disasters have on political participation? Some argue that natural disasters decrease political participation because of the way they reduce individual and group resources. Others argue that they stimulate political participation by creating new social norms. Previous studies have been limited both by their focus on a specific disaster type and a lack of regional variation. This article advances the literature by assessing the effect of the 2011 triple disaster in Japan on political participation at both the individual and district level. Drawing on multiple sources of data, I use a difference-in-differences identification strategy to show that the 2011 triple disaster in Japan resulted in a 6 percent increase in participation in political groups in regions heavily affected by the disaster, and a 2.5 percent increase in voter turnout in districts in prefectures that were significantly affected by the disaster. The results also show that the effect at the individual level is largely confined to individuals with large social networks, suggesting that the effect of natural disasters on political participation is a combination of their direct and indirect impact on variables that operate through different subpopulations. Directions for future studies are suggested.