Confucianism has been considered mainly to have had a negative influence on capitalistic development since Max Weber's theory on non-Western societies became widespread. However, in this article, we champion the positive role of Confucianism and attempt to explain Confucianism as providing fundamental “significance” to social development by imbuing it with religious significance. We present the self-sacrificing work ethic and zeal for education that characterizes Confucianism as having become the foundation for Korea's economic growth. In particular, we examine the religious significance inherent in the Confucian value of “filial piety” and illustrate how the value came to be a powerful economic motivator during the process of industrialization. The religious tendency of filial piety, which attempts to “remember” and “represent” one's ancestors, acted as an important spiritual ethos in Korea's social development centered on economic growth. Filial piety did not stop at being an ethical standard; it was the fundamental basis for macrosocial dynamism that was closely linked to the development of capitalism in Korea.

Indonesia's 1999 decentralization law gave local governments in Indonesia an unprecedented opportunity to adopt prodevelopment policies. In this article, we study whether decentralization has in fact generated improved economic performance in Indonesia. Using a synthetic case control methodology, we argue that Indonesian decentralization has had no discernable effect on the country's national-level economic performance. To explain why not, we use subnational data to probe two political economy mechanisms—interjurisdictional competition and democratic accountability—that underlie all theories linking decentralization to better economic outcomes. Our findings suggest that extreme heterogeneity in endowments, factor immobility, and the endogenous deterioration of local governance institutions can each undermine the supposed development-enhancing promises of decentralized government in emerging economies such as Indonesia.

Democratization should reduce incentives to engage in corruption, by expanding the size of the winning coalition, heightening transparency, increasing accountability to the electorate, and multiplying the number of veto points required for a corrupt deal. Yet many young, consolidated democracies, such as South Korea, have recorded higher levels of perceived corruption following democratization.

I argue that the apparently higher level of corruption accompanying democratization results from overdependence on perception surveys to measure corruption. As democratization frees the press, more stories of graft lead the public to higher levels of perceived corruption without any corresponding rise in real corruption. A more effective measurement strategy is to objectively “follow the money,” by focusing on outflows of rents and any related personal receipt of favors by relevant officials. Applied to the Korean case, contrary to popular perceptions of increased corruption, objective measurement of elite corruption reveals that democratization produced a sharp reduction in the corrupt exchange of rents through industrial restructuring programs, bank lending, and government procurement contracts.

Why have China's petrochemical and steel industries behaved so differently in seeking trade protection through antidumping measures, especially given that both industries face the full force of the global economy? We argue that the patterning of antidumping actions is best explained in terms of industrial structures, inclusive of degrees of horizontal concentration and vertical integration. These structures determine a firm's motivation to seek protection as well as its capacity to overcome collective action problems within its industry. In the petrochemical industry, the shift toward greater horizontal consolidation and vertical integration reduces the collective action problems associated with antidumping petitions among upstream companies. It also weakens downstream companies lobbying in favor of the general protection of highly integrated conglomerates. In the steel industry, by contrast, national industrial policy fails to weaken local state interests sufficiently. Fragmented upstream and downstream channels instead persist, with strong odds against upstream suppliers waging a successful defense of material interests. Such distinctive industrial structures, we show, were a direct result of whether the central government could restructure these designated priority industries in its preferred direction. We find that exogenous price shocks proved particularly helpful in this regard.

Our goal in this article is to explain how South Korea's Hyundai Motor Company successfully transferred its production system to the United States. When a production system is transferred to another country, it is modified under the influences of different institutional environments. The key to the success of Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama, Hyundai's transplant in Montgomery, Alabama, is found in Hyundai's relatively low dependence on skill formation and high reliance on numerical flexibility of its production system relative to its Japanese counterparts. While Japanese automakers had difficulties transferring their production system to their US transplants, Hyundai did not because its production system did not require highly skilled labor. Alabama's flexible labor market and the absence of labor unions enabled Hyundai to more efficiently utilize the numerical flexibility of production workers than was possible at its original plant in Korea, which suffered from adversarial labor relations. This case study casts doubt on the convergence model of technology and globalization, because it shows varieties of production systems developing under different institutional environments.

Overhaul of administrative procedures is an important part of most democratic transitions, and procedural regularization and transparency are often seen as steps toward the consolidation of democracy. Administrative procedures affect policy decisions, but whether particular procedural reforms facilitate or hinder democratic responsiveness depends on the details of the procedure and the political environment. In this article, we examine a particular procedural reform: the adoption of a sunset provision in Korea as part of an omnibus administrative procedures package at the end of Kim Young Sam's presidency. A sunset provision might be seen as clearly promoting democratic responsiveness by requiring the winner of the most recent election to explicitly decide whether to keep or drop old rules and regulations. Alternatively, it might be seen as limiting a democratically elected leader's ability to change policy in accordance with his mandate, by requiring expenditure of effort and resources just to maintain a status quo. We argue that the second interpretation applies to the Korean case. We use a spatial model and evidence from regulatory decisionmaking to argue that Kim Young Sam favored the sunset provision because it would constrain the policy decisions of future presidents. Our model offers an explanation for why Kim Young Sam would propose a sunset provision that limited the life of his own regulations.

A commonplace view holds that the trend toward Asian financial regionalism is a relatively new phenomenon, developing in response to the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis in particular. In this article I challenge this view by analyzing financial regionalist projects before the crisis. Asian countries, especially Japan, sought to establish an Asia-only financial cooperation framework throughout the 1990s. The policy stance of the United States, in contrast, was to participate in Asian forums and/or by itself propose and establish regional groupings that included the United States. This competition between Japan and the United States is a key factor in understanding the rise and fall of various regionalist projects and also has theoretical implications for membership politics in regional financial cooperation frameworks.

In this article, we explore why oil import patterns differ between states with a view to understanding the relationship between agent-based explanations such as strategy and structural explanations—for example, geography. We compare degree of diversification between China and Japan in an effort to explore the relationship between agency and structure in the formation of energy security policy. The China-Japan comparison is contextualized with reference to the baseline case of the United States, a well-diversified importer. We employ the Shannon-Wiener index of diversity to assess the extent of oil import diversification, and temporal changes in diversification for China, Japan, and the United States. A key finding is that China's statist approach has allowed it to diversify its sources of imported oil more quickly than Japan's hybrid approach. In fact, since becoming a net oil importer in 1993, China's sources of imported oil have diversified quite rapidly. Japan's overreliance on the Middle East for much of its imported oil has been endemic since 1973.

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.

In 1986, Kenneth Lieberthal observed that the study of China in the United States had had little effect on the evolution of political science. Over twenty years later, its impact on the core debates in comparative politics seems to have been no more significant. Why have some of the most influential books in the study of contemporary Chinese politics not been significant in the discipline of comparative politics? Based on a quantitative overview of forty-two comparative politics syllabi, my argument is twofold. First, China scholarship has isolated the study of Chinese politics by primarily publishing in area journals, building analyses around debates exclusive to Chinese politics, and generating knowledge with limited contemplation of its potential for generalization outside China. Second, comparative politics seems to have been caught in a “democratic prism,” which has impeded scholars' ability to adapt some of the debates to empirical changes associated with China's rise and development.

Nearly two decades after central bankers began to call for interest rate liberalization, the central bank continues to impose stringent rules on the fluctuation of deposit interest rates. This seems an unlikely outcome given widespread endorsement of liberalization by technocrats and experts both in and out of the government, China's accession to the World Trade Organization, and the technocrats' insulation from popular pressure. To be sure, local interests and central bank lobbying have driven gradual liberalization of interest rates. However, senior Chinese technocrats held on to control over interest rates because of their need to maintain state banks' dominance and to mobilize bank funds in times of economic downturns. As such, progress toward interest rate liberalization only took place during “Goldilocks” phases when the economy enjoyed healthy growth without high inflation.

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.

In “Diversionary Dragons, or ‘Talking Tough in Taipei’” (Journal of East Asian Studies 9, 3: 369–398), Yitan Li, Patrick James, and A. Cooper Drury presented a newly created data set to show that Chen Shui-bian used independence rhetoric and confrontation with the mainland as a diversionary tactic in the face of domestic political difficulties. In the present exchange, Jonathan Sullivan challenges the authors' understanding of how the Democratic Progressive Party used the Taiwan independence issue—and the authors' interpretation of independence—and raises questions about the coding of press coverage as a means of identifying underlying preferences. The authors respond, concluding that the future use of such diversionary tactics is by no means foreclosed.

After the downfall of President Suharto in 1998, communal violence occurred in several Indonesian provinces, producing an image of the country as one characterized by strong ethnic politics. In this article, I propose that this image is mistaken. The political salience of ethnicity has subsided greatly as a new democratic system has settled into place. Overall, Indonesia is a weakly ethnicized polity. Ethnicity still counts in arenas such as local elections, but what prevails is a soft form of ethnic politics, with few of the deep disputes about ethnohistory or cultural policy that occur in more ethnicized polities. Moreover, rather than producing ethnic polarization, democratization has created powerful new norms of compromise. I present this overarching argument by advancing nine general theses on Indonesian ethnic politics and by pointing to explanations concerning institutional crafting, historical legacies, and the deep architecture of politics, notably the prevalence of patronage. Rather than positing definitive answers, I propose new questions and frameworks for investigating the weakness of ethnic politics in contemporary Indonesia.

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.