Diffusion studies have rightly emphasized external ideas and resources that propel liberalization in the developing world. There remain two gaps: first, the literature has not covered the types of diffusers and the ways diasporas may shape liberalization in their homelands; second, it pays little attention to internal diffusion after national adoption within a country. This article explores the utility and conditions of diffusion by diasporas and examines the roles of diasporas and internal diffusion in China and India's FDI liberalization. In both countries, diasporas were main diffusers that led national adoption of liberalism at home. In China, however, entrepreneurial diasporas' networks with local governments helped expansive internal diffusion. India's professional diasporas did not strongly engage local governments or domestic companies. National adoption in India was followed by reversal and partial internal diffusions. India's software services provide a similar diffusion by diasporas to that in China.

Anti-corruption efforts are inherently political. Corruption charges can be levied against political opponents as an instrument of repression; they can also be used against troublesome allies in the same party coalition to further consolidate power. In this paper, we focus on Indonesia and ask: Do major corruption charges follow a presidential electoral cycle—and if so, how? We contend charges against prominent members of the government coalition are more likely to happen before an election, allowing the government to replace intra-party rivals with loyal allies. Conversely, charges against prominent opposition members are more likely to happen after an election when fears of retaliation are low, opportunities for credit-claiming are high, and there is an incentive to remove veto players who may inhibit implementing the government's agenda. To test this argument, we use an original, newly assembled dataset of all major corruption charges—i.e., those involving high-profile politicians and garnering international attention—in Indonesia from 1998–2015 as reported in the Associated Press. We find a significant and robust relationship between the electoral calendar and major corruption charges. This relationship is robust across presidential administrations. These results yield insights into how anti-corruption efforts can become a political tool and counsel caution about the effectiveness of “good governance,” especially in new democracies. Finally, we discuss how contextual political factors external to Indonesia's anti-corruption commission, reinforce this empirical pattern.

One source of the idea that Taiwan independence would be politically desirable is belief in the concept of “Taiwan subjectivity,” which indicates that Taiwan is not an appendage of China but instead an autonomous actor charting its own course – or trying to do so in the face of huge difficulties. The ruling (since 2016) Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) pledges fealty to the goal of ultimately realizing subjectivity but cannot aggressively pursue the agenda because of opposition from the People's Republic of China (PRC), the United States, and some in Taiwan itself. What might that agenda be? Using a Structural Topic Model, we excavate the subjectivity discourse as it developed from 2008 to 2020 in the mainstream DPP-supporting newspaper, the Liberty Times. We find fourteen topics associated with the concept, the most prevalent of which in recent years warn of threats to subjectivity's realization in the political and sociocultural spheres.

Observers of East Asia frequently claim that Japanese nationalism is on the rise, and that Tokyo is abandoning its longtime military restraint. To determine whether these trends are indeed occurring, we define and measure Japan's nationalism and military assertiveness; we measure whether they are rising relative to Japan in the past, and relative to seven other countries.

Drawing from social identity theory, we distinguish between “nationalism” and a more benign “patriotism.” We find in Japan (1) strong patriotism that is stable over time, and no evidence of rising nationalism. Furthermore we find that (2) military assertiveness remains generally low, but it has risen in terms of decreased institutional constraints and peacekeeping activities. Our findings have important implications for academic debates about nationalism and Japanese security policy, and for policy debates about a nascent balancing effort against China.

We attempt to trace the Hyundai crisis back to its roots with the following questions in mind. What actions taken by the Hyundai Group since its birth contributed to Hyundai's post-1997 afflictions and to the split and the subsequent fall of the parent group? What changes in the corporate environment, in particular, the changes in business-government relationships, brought on by the national financial crisis of 1997 determined the Hyundai Group's fate? The Hyundai crisis was ultimately a test on whether the old business- government relationship could survive the new market environment generated by the 1997 financial crisis. In spite of the government's indecision and inconsistency, however, it was the government itself which eventually yielded and accepted the new market environment it had helped to create after 1997. The government reluctantly transferred the control rights of Hyundai Construction and Hynix Semiconductor to creditor banks via debt-equity swaps starting from March 2001.

This paper argues that “China threat” was largely a myth and that the China factor was not the critical factor leading to the re-affirmation process of the U.S.-Japan alliance in the mid-1990s. It took the 1994 Korean crisis for this to materialize. The China factor was important only as a general background, and the role of the U.S.-Japan alliance in dealing with the rise of China was implicit, remaining in the domain of managing shifting major power relations after the Cold War rather than being directed against the myth of a “China threat.” The paper also argues that preoccupation with Japan as an independent security pole is an important source of confusion about the nature of Japan's security policies and its profile therein, which, as before, will continue to be premised on the U.S.-Japan alliance. It explains actual records of Japanese security behaviors as a series of attempts to cope with the dual identity as a security actor. Japan's readjustment to the post-Cold War security environment, founded upon the re-affirmation of the U.S.-Japan alliance, was a clear case in point.

How do attachments to political parties among the mass publics of East Asia affect the process of democratization in the region? Analyses of the East Asia Barometer surveys reveal that partisanship motivates East Asians to endorse the democratic performance of their political system and embrace democracy as the best possible system of government. These findings accord, by and large, with the socialization, cognitive dissonance, and rational choice theories of partisanship.

The effects of the 1990s reforms to the electoral system of Japan's House of Representatives have been among the most frequently discussed topics in political science research on the country. These reforms saw the replacement of a hitherto single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system by a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system with a strong Single Member District (SMD) and a weaker Proportional Representation (PR) component. Many studies have suggested that the reforms may have had significant impact on the strategies of political parties. Generally, SMD systems have been widely thought to favor larger parties, while PR systems are more beneficial to small and medium-sized parties. On the content side, larger parties seeking control of the government would try to win the support of large numbers of floating voters by campaigning on universal/programmatic policy appeals, as opposed to particularistic interests. In contrast, smaller parties would cater towards their core supporters’ preferences. Previous studies have noted that the old SNTV system in Japan had produced results similar to PR systems (Reed 2003). Japan's electoral reform may have thus changed the strategy of large parties, which would need to win more seats in the SMDs to gain (or hold onto) power, while smaller parties have continued to try and win seats via the PR tier. Therefore, the reform provides valuable research material in so far as we can simultaneously observe different effects by the SMD and the PR systems on parties of different sizes.

Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won another landslide victory in the 2020 general election. Although there was widespread dissatisfaction with the government's poor management of the economy and ethnic conflicts, as well as with the pre-electoral coordination of ethnic parties in several states, opposition and ethnic-based parties had failed to gain more seats. Previous explanations had focused on the economy, electoral system bias, weak party institutionalization, and vote splitting among ethnic parties; however, they underestimated the significance of two contextual factors: military dominance of politics and ethnic conflict. This article argues that military dominance hindered normal political development in Myanmar. The anti-military sentiment favored the NLD, which made most Bamar voters disregard the party's poor economic performance. Despite the electoral system's bias, prolonged ethnic conflicts made ethnic parties that had fought for their community's causes more likely to maintain support. These arguments are verified by survey and electoral data sets. The military nullified the 2020 election claiming that electoral fraud was to blame, but the findings indicate that it was the political environment the military created that led to the victory of the NLD and some ethnic parties in the first place.

Nuclear and missile tests by North Korea, which directly threaten China's national interests, regional stability, and economic development, have consistently irritated China. Since the 1950s, China and North Korea have held high-level meetings aimed at discussing and improving their bilateral relationship. Using empirical analysis, this study attempts to examine the impact of these meetings on North Korea's missile and nuclear tests. The study argues that as the frequency of high-level meetings between China and North Korea increases, North Korea's provocative actions decrease. The high-level meetings serve to address the issue of incomplete information, create avenues for economic aid and cooperation, and reduce the likelihood of future nuclear and missile tests. The empirical findings indicate that while high-level meetings with or without the presence of top leaders can lead to a reduction in missile tests by North Korea, only summits between China and North Korea have a significant impact on the reduction of nuclear tests by North Korea.

This article builds on the theoretical debate over age, period, and cohort effects (APC) and explores how these factors might affect Taiwan's partisan stability. We conducted a two-level multinomial logit random effects model using survey data from 1991 to 2020 to disentangle the APC effects. Our findings challenge Converse's core assumption that partisanship strengthens with age. As a new democracy, Taiwan's party affiliations remain fluid, and we do find evidence of period effects, particularly associated with cross-Strait crises that favor the DPP. However, generational replacement is the most significant factor driving party identity changes in Taiwan. With generational replacement, the Kuomintang is burdened by the image of a century-old party. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had previously fared better among young cohorts but has recently lost its support from millennials. The youngest generation increasingly refuses to associate with the traditional political parties. It seems reasonable to expect that the new generational forces will restructure the Blue–Green cleavage and expand the ideological diversity of Taiwan's party system.

On September 28, 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party was formed in defiance of restrictions set by a decades-old authoritarian regime, heralding the emergence of a fully competitive multiparty electoral system in Taiwan. Existing literature on Taiwan's democratic breakthrough suggests that international factors have played a significant role in bringing about democracy on the island. But what exactly were these external factors and how have they effected political change in Taiwan? A reexamination of the changing geopolitical and normative environments surrounding Taiwan suggests that they were crucial in shaping political development on the island in ways that have not been described in the literature. This article examines how the geopolitical and international normative environment enabled myriad external substate and nonstate actors to form a transnational “protection regime” around the political opposition, preserving the democratic movement and allowing it to reach its full mobilizational potential in time.

Environmental goals are linked to regionalism, but they are often a low priority for advocates of nationalism. Early in the 1990s idealists assumed that reallocations of money, newly active social movements, and a lively process of regionalism would boost environmentalism to one of the top priorities across Northeast Asia. Soon they found, as regionalism floundered, that countries did not have a strong commitment to the environment and some showed little concern. In a region where state-centered development and national dignity remain powerful concerns, environmental hopes rest on gradual acceptance as a secondary theme as part of balanced regionalism. After fading before great power competition in 1996–99, regionalism made a partial comeback in 2000. Hopes for environmental cooperation rest on new gains for regionalism, but strains in the summer of 2001 suggest that progress will be slow.

Are authoritarian successor party (ASP) supporters more likely to protest? I propose that ASP supporters are less likely to protest in general. The post-democratization mobilization environment is shaped upon the pre-democratization mobilization basis. During the pre-democratization period, protest was organized around the democracy movement. Thus, protest tactics and networks were accumulated through it. As former authoritarian ruling party supporters, ASP supporters are less likely to have legacies of participating in the democracy movement, which prevents them from accessing the accumulated protest resources from the democracy movement. However, I argue that this negative association varies based on the ASP qualities and supporters’ age. Supporters of ASPs that maintain strong pre-democratization legacies are more likely to participate in protests than supporters of ASPs that do not strongly highlight their authoritarian legacies. Also, when the ASPs’ characteristics are considered, older ASP supporters are more likely to participate in protests than younger supporters. Using both single-level and multilevel statistical analyses, I examine four Asian countries with politically powerful ASPs and find evidence supporting my hypotheses. Lastly, I compare two South Korean mass movements, the Candlelight movement and the Taegeukgi rallies to unpack the relationships between ASP supporters, protest resources, and mobilization. This study reveals authoritarian legacies among post-democratization citizens through ASP supporters’ protesting behavior.

Many scholars have suggested that Japan aligned its foreign policy with the US War on Terror. Part of Japan's alignment is said to have involved disbursement of foreign aid to support the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with other security interests associated with the War on Terror. To date, however, there has been little empirical study of this question. Employing a data set on Japanese aid to 133 countries between 1995 and 2008, we examine the War on Terror and Japanese ODA. We find that Japanese aid was aligned with some security interests in the War on Terror, but the effects were mixed.

Ample empirical evidence suggests that Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs), which are the core credit institutions in rural China, are not accountable to their member households. This article argues that this conundrum can be explained by an institutional analysis of the credit cooperatives using the multiple principals-agent framework: the credit cooperatives as agents are accountable to multiple heterogeneous principals—with multiple conflicting objectives. The multiple principals are (1) the County RCC Unions, which exercise control using the evaluation criteria on which the remuneration of grassroots RCC officers is assessed; (2) local party secretaries, who exert influence through top personnel appointment and dismissal in the credit cooperatives; and (3) member households, which are a “collective” principal. In a multiple-principals scenario, the “collective” principal has weaker control over the agents due to the “collective action” problem.

The methodologies and assumptions that guide our acquisition of knowledge and interpretation of data are context and time bound. Academic disciplines, sub-disciplines, methodological approaches and research agendas are to a large degree conditioned by the ‘real world,’ and none more so than International Relations. Accordingly, it is important to consider the possible sociological foundations of different epistemologies and paradigms of International Relations. Surely there is more than one way of looking at the world, unless one is steadfastly married to a positivist universal truth. Yet it is interesting that East Asian scholarship and teaching in IR has seemingly not developed strong ‘indigenous’ regional characteristics, perhaps with the exception of Japan with its large market, long tradition, political freedom and economic affluence. In fact IR has absorbed and closely followed Western and particularly North American social science. This introduction and the articles that follow will explore the fortunes of IR scholarship and regional studies in East Asia in the context of national and regional environments. It will consider how IR is taught and researched in various national settings, and examine the interaction between IR as a social science and national/regional historical experiences, cultural and pedagogical traditions, and politico-ideological values. The underlining problematique concerns the idea of an East Asian ‘IR community’: why has this tended to be comparatively weak? How can we envision the development of a more rigorous East Asian IR community, one that is not exclusively judged according to external — and particularly North American — terms of reference and standards? It goes without saying that we are not attempting to antagonize our American friends and colleagues, but simply to stimulate a ‘sociology of science’ reflection of the discipline in the East Asian regional setting. Two questions serve as the organizing themes of this special issue. The first concerns the primary characteristics of the regional IR community. Many of the papers in this collection point to the dominance of US-originated ideas and theories. The second question arises from the first question: whether these predominant approaches help us to understand the region in a time of change.