Huawei, the telecommunications company based in the People's Republic of China (PRC), has presented the governments of several middle powers with a policy dilemma. On the one hand, Huawei's affordable 5G network technology is attractive to telecommunications operators in these countries, which do not have domestic producers of this equipment. On the other hand, the U.S. government and intelligence agencies in other countries maintain that Huawei gear presents intolerable network security risks, a charge that the PRC government and Huawei forcefully reject as they insist Huawei merits access to foreign markets. Facing the question of whether and how to allow the installation of Huawei's 5G equipment in their domestic networks, the governments of Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany have been caught between the competing demands of the two rivalrous superpowers and faced internal divisions among communities of government experts. At first glance, Japan, the UK, and Germany each appear to have responded to the Huawei dilemma in a different way. The Japanese government moved quickly and without formal announcement to exclude Huawei from its market, while publicly denying a ban. The UK government initially allowed Huawei to supply some of its national 5G infrastructure, but then reversed itself to ban the company's equipment outright after a U.S. regulatory change. The German government has yet to officially ban Huawei, but has taken successive steps to curtail the PRC company's continued involvement in its domestic networks. In spite of their apparent differences, the three national responses to the Huawei dilemma share a fundamental commonality: all amount to ‘non-decision decisions’ on the question of whether and how to allow Huawei to supply domestic 5G networks. In one way or another, each government avoided making policy decisions that were either explicit, definitive, or singular on the issue, but nonetheless reduced the likelihood of Huawei's participation in its domestic 5G infrastructure. After developing the concept of a ‘non-decision decision,’ we explain why these maneuvers are not isolated responses to a specific policy conundrum, but may presage a mode of middle power coping with competing demands from two increasingly rivalrous superpowers.

This paper examines US public opinion after the drastic changes in US–China relations during the Trump presidency. I argue that the perceived China threat influences Americans' evaluation of the China–Taiwan tension. Based on the US dataset of the 2018 Survey on Global Attitudes and Trends by the Pew Research Center, Americans tend to perceive the China–Taiwan tension as a serious problem for the USA when Americans identify China as a major threat and its military strength as a concern. As US public opinion shapes the US foreign policy on China, the findings shed light on the public support for the ongoing US–China conflict.

Taiwan's opposition to PRC demands such as acceptance of the ‘92 Consensus’ and ‘One Country, Two Systems’ formula since 2016 has invited a series of retaliatory measures from Beijing, designed to coerce Taiwan into compliance. Given the stark asymmetry in economic size, military capability, and diplomatic status, Taiwan provides a case for studying coercive diplomacy that takes the form of threats to punish. Material differences suggest that Taiwan should capitulate, and ‘cheap talk’ theses expect PRC threats to have no discernible effect, while balance of threat arguments expect resolve. In this article, we use the survey data collected in the 2016, 2019, and 2020 rounds of the Taiwan National Security Study to examine how Taiwanese respond to China's intensifying and expanding threats. Our paper identifies four strategies that the public sees as responses to PRC coercion: isolation, bandwagon with China, balance against China by allying with the USA and Japan, and hedge by deepening economic ties with China while aligning with the USA and Japan against China. We show that the popular support for balancing against China rises as PRC coercion grows and Taiwanese citizens increasingly perceive China to be a threat. Our findings imply that citizens in a liberal democracy can develop the will to pushback against pressure from an authoritarian regime despite sharp asymmetries in capabilities and material limitations.

We present a theoretical explanation for why migrant workers in China should be less likely to participate in protests than other categories of workers. While grievance-based theories of protest would suggest that migrant workers have more incentive to protest than other categories of workers, resource mobilization theory suggests that their capacity to mobilize for collective action is impeded by the conditions of their work situation and their residence. Using survey data from CGSS 2010, we test propositions derived from this framework. We find that a greater sense of relative deprivation is associated with a greater likelihood of participating in protest across all categories of workers. However, we also find that migrant worker status functions as a moderator between grievances and protest participation: compared to urban registered workers, migrant workers are significantly less likely to take part in protest activities when both of them have high levels of perceived unfairness. These findings are robust across all models.

We address how democracy has influenced the ways in which the Korean state has managed the issue of labor-based collective action and suppression thereof. During the authoritarian period, the state, through specialized riot police, frequently, and violently, cracked down on protest movements and other forms of collective action. During democratization and post-democratic consolidation, private specialists in violence, operating with the consent of the state, began to replace public forces on the front lines, while working in concert out of the view of the public. Although such state/non-state collaboration in the market for oftentimes illegal violence has been addressed in scholarship elsewhere, we demonstrate through detailed evaluation that the extant explanations are largely incomplete, as they fail to capture the effects of changing relative levels of state-based autonomy from societal and corporatist influence.

This study discusses why South Korea has not always succeeded in the ‘entrepreneurial state’ approach – defined as policy efforts to move away from the old developmental state model to a new industrial system of innovation in which small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are incorporated – by focusing on the limitation of new semiconductor industrial policies of the former Moon Jae-in government (2017–2022). Conventionally, many scholars have exclusively ascribed this limitation to large businesses' (chaebol's) practice of in-house production. Building upon historical institutionalism and its concept of increasing returns, alternatively, we shift attention to the way the Moon government played its entrepreneurial role. We argue that, as the government sought increasing returns from the developmental state idea and institution, the likelihood of wider SME incorporation decreased. Nationalism enabled the government to control the policymaking process but made it difficult to obtain new information through policy contestation. The government depended on developmental alliance to increase policy visibility through the chaebol's capabilities, but demands of small firms were downplayed. This study proposes to construct a more theoretical framework with which to explain how the old political economy model affects new entrepreneurial goals.