Despite having the fifth highest per capita GDP in the world (according to IMF PPP statistics for 2007), and despite numerous government efforts to spur innovation, Singapore has faced difficulties in establishing a durable base of entrepreneurial activity. Many ascribe this failure to the city-state's policies, which are often portrayed as generating a culture of risk aversion and a lack of creativity. In contrast to this conventional view, this article argues that the city-state's institutional arrangements generate conflicting innovation incentives and ultimately undermine innovative activity. Statistical tests across twenty-three countries offer evidence that is consistent with this argument.

In the past several years, the Republic of Korea—a former least developed country (LDC) and aid recipient that became a donor—joined the “club of emerging donors” to Africa. In March 2006, President Roh Moohyun declared Korea's Initiative for Africa's Development. The initiative puts poverty reduction and socioeconomic development of African countries in the forefront. Using pooled cross-sectional time series data, in this study we examine the determinants of Korean bilateral official development assistance (ODA) to Africa for the period 1991–2011. The findings of the study suggest that the approach of Korean ODA does not differ significantly from that of many conventional donors whose ODA disbursement has had a dual purpose: to improve the welfare of developing countries and to serve self-interests.

A well-developed thesis in political economy claims that crises create opportunities for change. Yet despite creating similar preferences for change, the Asian financial crisis led to reform of policies and institutions in some issue areas and in some countries of Southeast Asia, but not in others. In this essay I find that policies and institutions associated with technological upgrading of the economy, and particularly the manufacturing sector, are often immune to reform efforts, for two reasons. First, reform demands that policymakers know what to do; and second, they must know how to do it. Whether countries can discover and adopt new “templates” for reforming technology policies and institutions depends on the capacity of preexisting institutions to foster participative rather than simply consultative public-private collaboration. Such collaboration is most likely when decentralized yet coordinated bureaucracies facilitate meaningful participation from private actors, including business, labor, and academia, in forming, implementing, monitoring, and enforcing development policies.

In the 1990s and into the new century, increased Japanese sympathy toward Taiwan and antipathy toward mainland China led to a series of moves to improve treatment of Taiwan, including enhanced transportation links, a higher level and frequency of official contacts, posting of a military attaché, and expressions of support for Taiwan's participation in regional and international organizations. Nevertheless, Japan remains firmly wedded to a One China policy that opposes both the use of force by the mainland and a declaration by Taiwan of independence from China. Japan's willingness to cooperate with the United States to defend Taiwan is increasingly in doubt. The sources of Japan's supportive but restrained policy include the decline of traditional ties with Taiwan, the increasing size of the mainland market, and above all a perception of security risks that ultimately diverges sharply from that of Taiwan. Serious cooperation in defense and diplomacy requires shared (or complementary) threats, not just shared adversaries.

Technological ties between Israel and China have always been a central and constant element of their relationship. Defense contracts played a leading role here but were also responsible for the severe crisis that erupted between the countries in the early 2000s after Israel, capitulating to US pressure, backed off from its commitment to provide China with military technologies. This not only forced Israel to sever its defense relations with China but also made US-Israel relations a principal factor in the Sino-Israeli connection and imposed tight constraints on Israel's technology transfers to China generally. For Israel, this placed the dilemma of commercial versus political and national security interests at the forefront, since technology connections allowed it to promote its economic, political, and strategic causes through China. Indeed, while technology ties between the states have not stopped entirely—they have shifted to the civilian sphere—technology transfers to China are subject to heavy limitations, and Israel's export control mechanism faces greater challenges to screen them. As China's economic and political influence is ever increasing, Israel's cautious approach to technology transfers to China may be expected to come under mounting pressure.

Since the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution decade (1966–1976), post-Mao China has witnessed a sustained period of unprecedented legal reform. Criminal prosecutions and citizen lawsuits against the government, because they pit individual litigants against the authoritarian Chinese state, are two politically significant areas of law. We examine and critically assess the sociolegal scholarship on criminal and administrative legal reform as it has developed over the past few decades, with special attention to shifts in the conventional wisdom regarding legal reform and political liberalism in China and elsewhere. Additionally, we offer both theoretical and empirical suggestions for enhancing the explanatory power of sociolegal research in China.

East Asia in the post–Cold War era has been the world's most peaceful region. Whereas since 1989 there have been major wars in Europe, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and significant and costly civil instability in Latin America, during this same period in East Asia there have been no wars and minimal domestic turbulence. Moreover, economic growth in East Asia has been faster than in any other region in the world. East Asia seems to be the major beneficiary of pax Americana.

Leading theories of transitions from single-party dominant systems begin with economic crisis, the party's loss of patronage resources, and elite-level defections. The multiparty elections that are then held exert no independent effect, but instead register neutrally the party's decline and the democratization of politics. This article, however, shifts attention from the dominant party to citizens and elections in noncrisis conditions. It argues that citizens assess on key dimensions the dominant party's legitimacy or worthiness of support. Further, where they grow critical of its policy outputs, they scrutinize more closely its conformity to procedures. And as they anticipate that their voting preferences will be thwarted by electoral manipulations, they vote in protest, perhaps producing a “liberalizing electoral outcome.” Elections, then, do not simply indicate the dominant party's decline. By deepening alienation, they help citizens to cause it. Analysis is set in Malaysia, long an exemplar of single-party dominance, but recently a case in which the government was dealt a striking electoral setback.

Fearing war on the Korean peninsula as a result of the current nuclear crisis, China has attempted to restrain its risk-taking ally in North Korea and push it toward a negotiated solution. In the process, Beijing has reneged on security commitments made in its bilateral alliance with Pyongyang. We should not be surprised by this behavior because China has acted similarly in other alliances with Asian neighbors. In particular, the PRC has demonstrated a wariness of being dragged into unwanted conflicts, has (since the economic reforms began in 1978) placed its own strategic economic development interests over fulfilling security pledges to allies, and has taught unruly allies a lesson for defying Chinese interests and advice by allowing them to be bloodied in combat. China's refusal to honor its security commitments in order to restrain North Korea and avoid entrapment in an undesired war raises the issue of the future of this alliance.

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).

This article, adapted from the author's new book, Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge University Press, 2001), argues that Mao and the Chinese Communist Party's “war” to bend the physical world to human will often had disastrous consequences both for human beings and the natural environment. The Chinese ideal of “harmony between heaven and humans” was abrogated in favor of Mao's insistence that “Man Must Conquer Nature,” and the link between the abuse of people and the abuse of nature became unusually stark and transparent. Shapiro argues that the Mao years offer a cautionary tale with wide-ranging implications for societies struggling to achieve a more harmonious relationship with nature.

A new myth is in the making. Once held as a model of development by practitioners and theorists alike, East Asia's Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) are now identified as an epitome of ‘crony capitalism,’ a perversely deformed system of political and economic exchange driven by rent seekers. The privileged few have allegedly captured the state to pillage banks and sabotage market forces in pursuit of rents. But imbued with Confucian norms, which Francis Fukuyama (1995) once characterized as limiting the ‘radius’ of trust to familial ties, society cannot weed out rent seekers. The emphasis on personal loyalty is held as breeding clientelistic networks, which easily degenerate into a collusion for monopoly profits. Hiding behind a profoundly opaque corporate governance structure and protected by dense political patronage networks, business firms engage in shady deals to share rents with party politicians and state bureaucrats. From this perspective, the 1997 financial crisis was a logical outcome of East Asia's exclusionary cultural proclivities, opaque institutional arrangements, and shady business practices.

North Korea is often characterized as some form of highly centralized rule: totalitarian, posttotalitarian, corporatist, or personalistic. This article argues that much of the confusion around understanding North Korea's actions stems from misplaced models. Much of the current thinking on North Korea's politics does not account for the limited institutional plurality in the system. The article documents how the state's political institutions have changed since the country's founding and highlights the formal and informal roles of each major bureaucracy today. The Korean Workers Party and the role of Juche have declined, but the National Defense Commission and “military-first politics” have not taken their place as reigning supreme. Rather the interaction between the Korean Workers Party, military, and cabinet helps explain and moderate policy outcomes.

This study explores collaboration between state actors and non-state specialists in the market for coercion. We focus on the case of forced evictions in South Korea, where violence carried out by private companies has occurred with the implicit, and at times explicit, sanctioning of the state. This level of government–private security cooperation has traditionally been explained by various hypotheses, including arguments about the weak capacity of a state to enforce compliance, trends in the neo-liberal marketization of state power, or as the outcome of a state being captured by the capitalist classes. Documenting the history of urban redevelopment projects and changes in government responses to major protest incidents in Korea, we instead argue that this niche market for private force is an observable implication of a shift in state–society relations in the wake of democratization. This phenomenon is, in effect, a very undemocratic response to democratization, by state elites.

Electioneering for the Japanese Lower House has undergone significant changes in recent years. While voter mobilization strategies still figure prominently in the local-level campaigns of individual candidates, political parties increasingly use voter-chasing strategies at the national level. Such chasing strategies, whose manifestations in Japan have so far included the manifesto and the media-spin approach, target in particular the growing number of independent voters. The concurrence of elements of continuity and change in electioneering has led to a “hybridization” of Lower House election campaigns. The article examines this phenomenon in the light of newer conceptual and theoretical approaches to electoral politics in democratic settings.

How does the choice of electoral rules affect politicians' incentives to campaign on the basis of personalized support? This article examines to what extent the adoption of new electoral and campaign finance rules affects the incentive of politicians in Japan's Liberal Democratic Party to rely on personal support organizations called koenkai. The core of the analysis utilizes newly collected campaign finance data. The empirical analyses confirm a considerable weakening in the number of koenkai across systems as well as a decreased need for politicians to spend money in the proportional representation tier. These results highlight the importance of previous organizational legacies as well as the efforts of political actors to mitigate the effects of rule change on their election and reelection prospects.

Patterns of party switching in Taiwan have played an important role in the development and relative stability of its party system. In this study I aim to track key patterns of how politicians switched their partisan affiliation during the critical periods of party system change. I examine the level of party switching, where party switching was most prevalent, when switching was most common, and the most common types of switching since the advent of multiparty politics in Taiwan. Party switching is an important phenomenon in the development of party politics in Taiwan but thus far it has received surprisingly little systematic attention. This is the first comprehensive attempt to tackle this understudied topic.

When citizens are offered cash and gifts by candidates, they can either vote for candidates offering the money, refuse the money, or take the money and vote for whichever candidate they prefer (e.g., “vote their conscience”). Which citizens “vote their conscience” versus the other options available to them? This manuscript examines the effect of poverty, education, and social pressure on how citizens in the Central Java city of Semarang, Indonesia react to offers of cash from politicians. We find that poverty and education interact to create important and interesting patterns of responses. The citizens most likely to “vote their conscience” are those with lower income yet higher levels of formal education whereas higher income, more highly educated citizens are most likely to refuse the money. We also examine factors that create social pressure for citizens to “sell” their votes by supporting the candidates offering cash.

South Korea is currently undergoing a process of industrial restructuring. As competitors in the Asian region have begun to catch up—in terms of technological know-how, investment mobilization, price competition, and human capital development—advanced Asian economies such as South Korea's have had to shift their industrial focus away from conventional manufacturing sectors toward postindustrial sectors including biotechnology, nanotechnology, and advanced information and communications technologies. As such, the ongoing processes of postindustrial restructuring in South Korea have involved a transition from the industrial learning paradigm to a new knowledge creation paradigm where technology innovation, rather than technology borrowing, is key. This article examines this transformative process in the area of biotechnology and bioindustry development. It specifically looks at how the South Korean developmental state has begun to reinvent itself in order to meet the challenges of innovation-driven industrialization.

On the eve of the tenth anniversary of its democratization, Korea was hit by an unprecedented financial crisis marked by massive capital outflows, a sharp depreciation of the won and severe distress in the corporate and financial sectors. Korea's anniversary gift from the interntional community was an IMF conditionality program that imposed a comprehensive package of neoliberal economic reforms. Compared with the South American and East European experiences, economic reform in Korea has been implemented without significant policy obstructions, political instability or social disruptions. Despite much skepticism, the backbreaking reforms quickly began to pay off. The reforms created a V-shaped (rather than U-shaped) pattern of recovery, though more determined financial and corporate restructuring is needed in order for the nation to achieve sustainable growth. And, the quality of democracy has not deteriorated because of conflicts resulting from the economic reform program (neither, however, has it improved).