The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and China's state-led model for economic globalization more generally, have attracted controversy: Are state-led overseas investment and lending driven by strategic motives or market rationale? How have the recipient economies reacted to the influx of Chinese capital? This special issue sheds light on these questions by first outlining the fragmented state system driving the BRI, a system featuring both Beijing's strategic logic at the top and market considerations in policy implementation. The role of the state is unpacked further in China's globalizing coal industry and in the growth of Chinese industry export to BRI countries. Finally, the issue explores the mechanisms behind public backlash and political pushback facing China in Zambia and Australia. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to shift China's relationship with the world, this special issue contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the modus operandi of Chinese capital going global.

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.

This article compares the public perceptions of various types of migrants in Japan and examines whether Japanese view them equally. Using an original survey, which presented six types of migrants that Japanese people most commonly face in their daily lives, I show several interesting results. First, respondents express the most negative views toward labor migrants. Second, respondents who have migrant friends tend to have more positive feelings for all types of migrants. In contrast, simple coexistence with migrants fails to enhance public sentiment toward labor migrants, particularly those whose stay is temporary. Overall, my statistical results suggest that Japanese people are not pessimistic about every kind of migrant, and their openness increases as migrants acculturate into Japanese society and interact with Japanese people. These findings provide evidence to influence policy discussions on whether Japan should recruit labor migrants in its current form in order to fight its aging population.

Observers have portrayed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) variously, as China's great-power strategy, global infrastructure initiative, or commercial projects. Each characterization has had logical reasoning and evidence to support it. But how? How has one initiative been shown to have such varied motives? This article unpacks the Chinese state and establishes that a “tri-block” structure consisting of political leadership, bureaucracy, and economic arms has accounted for such varied motivations and actors in the BRI in China. In the BRI process, the leadership employed strategic rhetoric, and bureaucracies imposed policy ideas. Yet, more pervasively, the implementers have followed commercial motives in specific projects. BRI's strategic rhetoric and hazardous investment have generated external critiques and anti-China backlash, forcing Beijing to readjust the initiative. However, given the tri-block state structure, Beijing's policy adjustment will not be sufficient. Economic actors’ incentives need to be shifted too.

We argue that the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea, in which 304 passengers perished, was a result of the mode and process of privatization of South Korea's maritime police and rescue services. Through the development of a nuanced theory of privatization and use of a novel conceptualization of corruption, coupled with empirical analysis, our study shows that the outcome was symptomatic of a wider trend of systematic bureaucratic rent-seeking. A pro-active private sector ready to capitalize on the opportunity, in conjunction with a permissive political environment, resulted in a reduction of state capacity, with devastating consequences.

When dealing with autonomous regions, states may utilize Unionist Economic Integration (UEI) programs to forge a stronger sense of unionism. However, the literature has not been able to explain why UEIs work differently across regions. With the identical UEI implemented in Macau and Hong Kong, Macau seems to be firmly within Beijing's grasp, yet protests in Hong Kong are still intensive. Why is economic integration effective in appeasing some regions, but not others in the same polity?

I argue that what makes UEI effective in appeasing a region is the region's economic dependence on the national center. UEIs add to the expected cost of contention, and thus high economic dependence sets that baseline to a higher degree, leading to effective appeasement with UEIs. I illustrate my argument with empirical analyses of two original datasets of protest counts and discontent with authoritarian institutions in Hong Kong, Macau, and Chinese provinces.

This article examines how violence against citizens affects their political attitudes and behavior in the long run, and how those effects vary over time. We construct and analyze a novel dataset on the victims of Taiwan's February 28 Incident, in 1947, with survey data spanning 1990 to 2017. Our empirical analysis shows that cohorts having directly or indirectly experienced the Incident are less likely to support the Kuomintang Party (KMT), the former authoritarian ruling party responsible for the Incident. They tend to disagree with the key conventional policy stand of the KMT (unification with mainland China), are more likely to self-identify as Taiwanese, and are less likely to vote for KMT presidential candidates. Taiwan's residents who were born in towns with larger number of casualties during the Incident are more likely to reject unification. Finally, the effects are found to vary over the period following democratization.

North Korea today is a most unusual post-socialist state. Market actors and market prices are integral to economic life, but private property remains illegal, and private enterprise outside the household is de jure non-existent. In such an institutional context, some market processes are more autonomous in relation to the state, while others are more embedded within state structures. In this article, we offer a theoretical account of the shape that North Korea's market economy has taken, developed from a set of fishing industry case studies. We note four broad categories of enterprises: closely embedded, loosely embedded, semi-autonomous, and autonomous. By relative autonomy/embeddedness we mean control over fixed assets, cash flow, and operational decisions such as wage and price setting. We postulate three major determinants of embeddedness/autonomy: (1) relative strategic resource scarcity between state and market actors, (2) monitoring costs, and (3) institutional evolution that reflects these realities, though to varying extents.

This article examines the political economy of Chinese overseas development finance for coal fired power plants. In just over a decade China's two major policy banks provide more financing for overseas coal-fired power plant expansion than any other public financier in the world economy. We show how China's overseas surge in public financing for coal fired power plants is a function of a number of domestic push and foreign pull factors. Excess capacity, environmental regulation, and structural change are push factors that converge with rising demand for energy, pockets of coal abundance, and the lack of financing in Western capital markets for coal fired power plants. Fragmentation across the Chinese system and the demand for coal outside China's borders allow for a decline sector on the mainland to become a global Chinese powerhouse.

China's overcapacities in manufacturing industries, including pollution-intensive industries, served as an important motivation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The popular Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) therefore expects that the initiative will lead to the relocation of polluting industries from China to the recipients. Focusing on the implementation by local governments, we argue that actual outcomes of the BRI depend on the way local states and businesses respond to the BRI in accordance with their preferences. Through investigating industries’ actual responses to the BRI, we found that pollution-intensive industries have not relocated but rather expanded exports to the BRI countries. This has two implications: on the one hand, it alleviates the overcapacity issue in China and helps sustain the economic performance of the industry; on the other hand, it results in more pollution within Chinese borders and aggravates the environmental challenges facing the country.

Using the case of the Indonesian Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), I seek to measure the actual impact of Islamist parties’ moderation on their electoral performances and voter bases. Statistical analyses find that although PKS has experienced an influx of diverse voters since the early 2000s, the influx was offset by a gradual withdrawal of educated Islamist voters, who had been loyal to the party since its establishment. I further claim that this change in PKS's voter profile was attributable not to moderation per se but to normalization, manifesting in an adaptation of the party elites’ behaviors to the existing patterns in Indonesian politics. The party's recent policy shift with a conservative tone was insufficient to regain votes from its original supporters, who already saw PKS as a run-of-the-mill party. PKS's case implies that it is necessary for Islamist parties to maintain their distinctiveness as an alternative voice in the party system.

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.

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.

In this article, I present a theory of conditional core-swing targeting that focuses on the competition for majority control in legislative elections to explain how presidents use their strong budgetary powers to manipulate the distribution of the national subsidy in South Korea. Presidents whose parties already possess a legislative majority are expected to favor core municipalities to strengthen the foundations of their majority constituency, whereas those who seek majority control are predicted to prioritize swing municipalities in an effort to cross the majority threshold. Presidents are also anticipated to respond to the electoral cycle by shifting subsidies to riskier municipalities when elections approach. Using a novel data set on national subsidy allocations that spans three decades, I find evidence in favor of the hypotheses. This article demonstrates that the beneficiaries of distributive favoritism are not fixed, and that politicians can engage in complex and varied targeting strategies to achieve their objectives.

Despite increasing economic integrations with China, worries exist in China's neighboring countries about China's implicit political intention. Do people view trading with China differently? In this article, we incorporate the political context of trade agreements by showing that trade with partners who come with political costs is less likely to be supported. Using a nationally representative survey experiment from Taiwan, we find that trading with China garners less support than trading with Japan or Malaysia, and nationalism suppresses self-interest when the proposed trading partner is China. We show that national attachment, which is neither a proxy for political identification nor a proxy for national chauvinism, becomes a stronger predictor of trade preferences toward China. While the political tension between China and Taiwan is unique, many countries see at least one other country posing a negative externality. Our finding suggests strongly identified nationalists would oppose engaging with a hostile outsider regardless of their self-interest.

We present a theory on how trust in the central government to remedy grievances combined with a lack of trust in local government to act motivates people to participate in local protests in China. Low trust in local government combined with high trust in the central government gives people expectation that protest will not be an exercise in futility. People protest to redress injustices when they believe that such protests have a chance of producing a favorable resolution of their grievances. Utilizing individual level data from the Asian Barometer Survey Wave 4, our analysis suggests that, in contemporary China, people who have greater trust in the central government than the local government are more likely than others to report having participated in protests. In a society without meaningful elections, participating in protest is an effective strategy for attracting the attention from the upper-level authorities in hope of redressing unfavorable situations.

Civil society actors collectively organized online and offline to nominate themselves and oppose the Vietnamese Communist Party in the 2016 legislative election. The level of opposition coordination among these independent self-nominees exceeded and qualitatively differed from previous atomized attempts in the 2011 election. External shifts in the political opportunity structure offer only a partial explanation for the increased coordination among independent candidates in Vietnam's 2016 self-nomination movement. In this article, I theorize that it is the combination of both opportunity structure and overlapping linkages across spheres of social contention and civil society, all accumulated from a prior history of protests and activism, that provide the conditions for the emergence of independent self-nominees and opposition coordination in single-party-elections. In Vietnam, a cumulative process of participation in social contention and civil society organizations during 2011 to 2016 allowed actors to develop linkages that strengthened their repertoires of contention and resonant frames of collective action. These linkages, combined with favorable political opportunities, effectively facilitated greater mobilization and coordination among independent self-nominees in the 2016 election.

With the globalization of Chinese capital, economic statecraft has become an increasingly prominent component of China's foreign policy. In this article, I examine China's use of economic inducements in developed democracies, a topic of growing concern for policymakers, focusing on the case of Australia. I show how Beijing's attempts to coopt public voices and influence Australia's foreign policy using non-transparent political donations and academic funding generated a strong backlash. At the same time, economic interdependence has provided a buffering effect, with key domestic actors in Australia advocating for cooperative relations, although this effect can in turn be limited by Beijing's coercive economic tactics. My findings underline the reputational costs of certain approaches to economic statecraft, the value of building supportive coalitions, and the challenges faced by China's authoritarian state capitalist model. They also highlight the impacts of globalized Chinese capital in developed democracies, including the resilience and vulnerabilities inherent in democratic political processes.

This article attempts to estimate the effects of informal political coalitions on China's private investment. Theoretically, the party-state clients of China's supreme leaders are expected to have stronger incentives to foster economic growth. One way of doing so is to encourage private investment by reducing its political risks. Analysis of provincial-level panel data from 1993 to 2017 shows that personal connections—based on shared experience in the same work unit—between provincial leaders and the Chinese Communist Party's incumbent supreme leader significantly increase the growth rate of private investment. This suggests that informal institutional relations may assist the development of China's private economy by partially compensating for the weaknesses of formal rule-of-law institutions.

Corruption can erode political trust and a well-functioning democratic system, but it is unclear whether perceptions of corruption are significantly associated with citizens’ perceptions about the fairness of income distribution. This study thus examines the role of political trust in shaping the relationship between perceptions of corruption and perceived fairness of income distribution for East Asian countries. The findings show that perceived corruption has strong detrimental effects on political trust, and that those who have lower levels of political trust are more likely to perceive the income distribution as unfair in their countries. Causal mediation analysis results indicate that political trust plays an important role in mediating the negative effect of perceived corruption on perceived fairness of income distribution. Moreover, the results from examining the mutual causality linking corruption, political trust, and perceived fairness suggest that the reciprocal causal effects are also significant and robust.