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.

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.

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.

The contention over the quantity and quality of regional missile defenses forward-deployed by the United States in the Asia-Pacific region animates much of the US–China disagreement about strategic stability. The Chinese argue that the deployed assets exceed reasonable defensive requirements and suggest that if these missile-defense deployments continue, they will be forced to increase the size of their nuclear arsenal. In disagreement, the United States claims that regional missile defenses are defensive by design, limited in scope, and necessary to defeat a North Korean missile campaign. In this article, a series of simulation experiments were developed to empirically test these opposing arguments over missile defenses and strategic stability. The simulations indicate that current deployments are necessary for defense and proportional to the threat. The analysis also argues that current deployments do not possess the ability to alter the US–China strategic nuclear balance significantly. The article concludes with a discussion of other subjective aspects of national security that may explain Chinese concerns and explore possible ways to reassure China.

This article assesses the relative importance of partisanship in explaining level of citizens' political engagement within a multivariate framework. In particular, we examine if the relative worth of partisan attachment in explaining civic engagement differs systematically between East Asian emerging democracies and established democracies. We find that partisanship in East Asia exerts just as much influence on citizens' engagement in politics as in established democracies. The global trend in which interest associations and social movements are becoming vigorous competitors to parties for the opportunity to represent and mobilize citizens in democratic process has also spread to East Asia.

This survey of books in English on North Korea, 1997–2007, identifies nearly 240 titles—mostly by US authors but also by authors in Australia, Europe, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Russia. The books fall into eleven categories: history and culture; the Korean War revisited; the DPRK regime and its leaders; human rights and humanitarian issues; the economy: Juche, Songun, collapse, or reform; DPRK military assets and programs; relations with the United States; arms control negotiations and outcomes; regional and world security; prospects for North-South unification; and North Korea's future. A final section includes useful websites. This survey points to a wide interest in North Korea and underscores the serious and ongoing efforts of many scholars and policy analysts to understand developments there.

Under what conditions would Japanese leaders visit the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and why? Previous studies have focused primarily on the domestic benefits and effects of such visits, claiming that leaders employ visits to follow their own conservative ideology and gain domestic political support. Given the harsh international criticism that tends to ensue, however, political leaders should also consider the cost and international effects of such visits. This study proposes three necessary conditions for such visits: a conservative ruling party, a government enjoying high popularity, and Japan's perception of a Chinese threat. With regard to the latter, a security threat from China has allowed Japan to use these visits as a credible signal of its resolve against China. Comparative analyses of Japanese cabinets after the mid-1980s support this argument.

On March 18, 2000, Taiwan experienced an electoral earthquake. After half a century in power on the island of Taiwan and eight decades of an undisrupted ruling position dating back to its heyday on the Chinese mainland, the Kuomintang (KMT) lost power in a free and fair presidential election. The power rotation at the close of the century is historic by any measure. It has closed an epoch of one-party dominance and inaugurated a period of party dealignment and realignment. It deflated Lee Teng-hui's charisma and brought his era to an abrupt and calamitous end. At the elite level, it has triggered a generational turnover, pushing the baby boomers to the forefront of governing responsibility. Most significantly, it pushed the island's political system for a major step forward toward the consolidation of democracy.

Although it is commonly believed that democracy promotes public services such as education, efforts have just started to evaluate empirically how the recent trend of democratization affects education services in the developing world. This article reports on the first regionwide investigation in East Asia. By studying the effects of democracy on multiple education indicators in a time-series-cross-section dataset of eight East Asian countries/political entities, the article examines whether democratic governments increase education spending and access and which social groups are favored in the process. The statistical results, which are corroborated by findings from two case studies, show that democracy plays a progressive role in promoting education spending and school enrollment at the basic level in East Asia.

In this paper, we review and summarize recent trends of international relations studies in South Korea on three distinct dimensions and, on the basis of this, suggest future directions of research in the field. Our focus throughout the paper is on the constraints and opportunities for the development of indigenous international relations theories and models. Although the confrontational Cold War legacy on the Korean Peninsula sustains the validity of the powerful realist paradigm, we argue that critical challenges are breathing a new life into the academic field of international relations in a time of great change when a new global and regional order has been taking shape since the end of the Cold War. In order to accommodate these new changes and call attention to epistemological pluralism, we posit liberal constructivism, which combines liberalism with constructivism, as a new epistemological alternative to the existing lines of international relations theories. Given the opportunities and intellectual resources, we conclude, the future of the discipline of international relations in South Korea is quite promising.

This article compares the process of corporate structural reforms in Japan and South Korea in the late 1990s and raises two questions. Why have state-led economies such as Japan and South Korea engaged in politically costly corporate structural reforms in the late 1990s? What explains the variation in the reform process between Japan and South Korea?

I argue that the process of structural reforms in state-led economies has been the result of state mediation of global financial forces. The rise of portfolio capital inflows increases the pressure for domestic reforms, a change that is common to Japan and Korea in the late 1990s. However, the actual success of structural reforms depends on the ability of the elite bureaucracy to mediate among between global investors, domestic interest groups and the general public. In contrast to Korea, Japan exhibits a low level of bureaucratic control over the legislative agenda and a situation of tripolar deadlock.

The evidence presented here includes quantitative data, government documents, and legislative records as well as information gathered from over 100 interviews with bureaucrats, politicians, business leaders, labor leaders, and other actors in the two countries.

What determines cross-national variations in the extent of anti-government protests in Asia? Anti-government protests have surged across Asia in recent years, with many contributing to consequential political change. However, systematic cross-national comparison of the determinants of protests in Asia is still largely missing. This article fills this important gap by quantitatively examining the explanatory power of the three main theories of contentious politics—grievance, resource mobilization, and political process theories—in the Asian context with new data on anti-government protests in all 25 Asian states from 1990 to 2016. The analysis finds that urbanization, information and communication technology, and regional demonstration effects are the strong catalysts of anti-government protests in Asia, while repressive state capacity particularly dampens protests. The findings offer important insights into the dynamics of the anti-government protests that have become increasingly salient in Asian politics.

Are scientific or nonscientific factors most influential in initiating international cooperation on newly emerging transboundary environmental problems in the Asia and Pacific region? In a case study of long-range atmospheric transport of dust, which is linked to desertification in China and Mongolia, the relative influence of scientific versus nonscientific factors in promoting cooperation in the region is analyzed. The study examines two dimensions of the problem—Northeast Asia and North America—and demonstrates that similar to the distance-dependence of the problem (i.e., dust concentrations decrease the greater the distance from the sources), cooperation follows a parallel relationship (i.e., motivation to cooperate decreases the greater the distance from the sources). Scientific cooperation in Northeast Asia is being institutionalized, but North America has not joined this effort. A synergy between factors must be invoked to explain this situation. In both cases, obvious and often dramatic negative impacts of massive dust storms are an enabling factor allowing more subtle science-related factors to come to the fore.

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.

This article argues that weak local governments increase levels of taxation by “borrowing” institutional capacity from certain types of businesses. While many businesses lobby against taxation, businesses that are locally owned, nationally connected, and logistically complex build robust associations that support taxation. These types of businesses benefit from improvements in public infrastructure, so they empower their associations to monitor members’ tax compliance and to pressure officials to uphold their spending commitments. The article demonstrates the necessity of business support for taxation in the absence of state capacity by comparing two Philippine cities that differ in their ability to tax despite a number of similarities between them. The case studies show that tax increases co-varied with business support, and that business support waxed and waned depending on over-time variation in the capability of business associations to discourage tax evasion and to enforce official commitments to spend on infrastructure.

New democracies face the arduous task of determining how to deal with gross human rights violations committed during their authoritarian pasts, or the “torturer problem,” to quote Samuel P. Huntington (1991). A new democracy can enhance its legitimacy if it brings human rights violators to justice, thus demonstrating the supremacy of democratic values, including the rule of law. By ensuring that no wrongdoer will go unpunished, the democratic regime prevents the danger of a future military coup d'état and future human rights abuses. Equally critical, it strengthens the power base of democratic forces by delegitimizing or even occasioning a purge of key authoritarian leaders, who often wield influence within the institutions of power, including the military, even after democratic transition. Punishing past wrongdoings constitutes an act of preempting a democratic reversal. In this sense, the question of the past becomes a struggle over power with today's authoritarian forces and for the future of third-wave democracy.

Using data drawn from the Taiwan Social Change Survey, I investigate how citizens' incomes affect turnout and partisan voting. In contrast to studies of other countries, I find that lower-income voters are not less likely to turn out in Taiwan. Moreover, although income does not have strong effects on patterns of partisan voting in Taiwan, there is some evidence that people with income levels just below the middle-income group are less likely to vote for the left-wing party

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Chosòn Korea government designed and utilized hierarchical tribute systems for managing interactions, in particular, trade, with Japanese and Jurchen elites. Korean officials separated maritime and overland contacts, divided the contacts further into carefully delineated reception grades and diplomatic statuses, and designed detailed procedures for interaction. More specifically, diplomatic status determined the regulations by which the court provided reception and then trade to a contact.

In this research note, we introduce a new dataset on China's national legislators. It provides descriptive information on one key parameter: the nature of the business owned by private entrepreneur deputies in China's National People's Congress (NPC) from 2003 to 2017. The dataset contains information on whether the deputy once worked as a government official, whether the deputy was a former top manager of a state-owned/collective enterprise, and whether his/her current company was a state-owned/collective enterprise before being privatized. We categorize deputies as “insiders” as long as they stratify one of the aforementioned backgrounds, whereas others as the “grassroots.” This dataset thus reveals two types of private entrepreneur deputies who are significantly different with regard to how they started their own businesses. These findings shed new light on the relationship between private entrepreneurs and the party-state in China.