The Nature of Japanese Governance and Seikai-Tensin in Postwar Japan
The Nature of Japanese Governance and Seikai-Tensin in Postwar Japan

Author: Nara Park

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-21

Total Pages: 95

ISBN-13: 1000849953

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What shapes characteristics and types of state governance in a specific country? How do they change over time? More importantly, what will they look like in the near and far future? This book addresses these fundamental yet timely questions by introducing and analyzing a distinctive group of Japanese statesmen: Seikai-Tensin, which means one’s transformation into politicians in Japanese. The book looks at the Japanese developmental state through a time-series analysis on historical data to determine the dynamic pattern of a prototype developmental state. It offers comparative implications for other developmental states, including South Korea and Singapore, to have a better understanding of themselves and their counterparts and useful lessons for governance practitioners to pursue a better balance between politics and administration. This book will interest those researching governance, comparative politics, government bureaucracy, and public policy.

China’s Pension System
China’s Pension System

Author: Jun Peng

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-25

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 1040026923

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Since 1978, when China started remaking its economy, it has also embarked on an unparalleled effort at remaking its pension system to accommodate its hybrid economic model. This book tells the story of how China has managed to build a national pension system that now covers most of its population and what this system holds for its future. This book covers the following topics: evolution of Chinese pension system to its current form; benefit design, financing, and governance of current pension system; challenges facing the pension system, especially the looming funding shortage due to accelerating population ageing; solutions to the challenges; and lessons learned from the Chinese experience. Due to the fragmentation of pension system among 31 mainland provinces, we also select three provinces as case studies to help readers gain a richer understanding of how economic and geographic diversity has created disparity in pension benefit design and financing between provinces and within a province and how such disparity adds complexity and challenges to the pension system. This timely and important study provides up-to-date and in-depth analyses for policymakers and stakeholders to make informed decisions and will be relevant for all scholars and students of public administration and public policy studies.

Managing the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Korea
Managing the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Korea

Author: Kilkon Ko

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-05

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 1000935264

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This book examines the importance of accumulated disaster management experience and the risk awareness of civil society by analyzing Korea’s COVID-19 response from the perspective of policy learning. Prior to the spread of COVID-19, Korea was a country with active exchange with China, with over six million Chinese visitors and over five million Korean visitors to China. Korea also has the highest population density among OECD countries and an urbanization rate exceeding 90%, making it vulnerable to the spread of infectious diseases. However, Korea had very low fatality and infection rates among OECD countries, despite foregoing border closures or city lockdowns. Korea is known as a representative example of state-led economic development called the developmental state model. However, Korea’s COVID-19 response emphasizes citizen-led efforts, the use of information and communication technology, and successful disease control through cooperation between the government and civil society. This book presents examples that demonstrate the effectiveness of disaster response based on democratic values, by enhancing the capacity of civil society through social interaction resulting from various models such as rational models, heuristics, cooperative governance, policy networks, and complex adaptive systems. Additionally, it argues that the lesson learned from Korea’s COVID-19 experience is not that a strong state should control citizens’ freedom to increase the effectiveness of disease control, but rather that sharing the awareness of the risk enables voluntary citizen responses and solidarity consciousness of civil society is essential. The book is a useful reference for anyone interested in learning more about the value of actors in policy networks.

Asymmetric Neighbors and International Relations
Asymmetric Neighbors and International Relations

Author: Ian Roberge

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-09

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1000892387

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With a range of case studies from every continent, the contributors to this book analyze the challenges that arise for states living with much larger neighbors, and the policies they develop to account for this asymmetry. Bringing together the perspectives of bilateral relations and the study of small states, this book analyzes a range of scenarios where one or more smaller countries must manage relations with a much larger neighbor or neighbors, from the perspective of the smaller countries. Each case presents different priorities, depending on the relationship between the states concerned, while highlighting the commonalities across the various scenarios. The range of cases and contributors is wide and diverse, with examples including Togo’s relationship with Ghana, Mongolia’s with China, and Colombia’s with Brazil – as well as more widely known examples such as Canada and the United States, or Australia and New Zealand. A valuable resource for scholars and students of international relations, and public policy of small- and medium-sized states.

Embracing Defeat
Embracing Defeat

Author: John W Dower

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2000-07-04

Total Pages: 692

ISBN-13: 9780393320275

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This study of modern Japan traces the impact of defeat and reconstruction on every aspect of Japan's national life. It examines the economic resurgence as well as how the nation as a whole reacted to defeat and the end of a suicidal nationalism.

Japan's National Security
Japan's National Security

Author: Peter J. Katzenstein

Publisher: Cornell East Asia Series

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13:

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Japan's National Security offers a detailed examination of Japan's distinctive security policy. It traces in considerable detail the evolution of Japan's approach to the economic, political and military dimensions of national structures of government as well as a particular set of relations between state and society. One of the noteworthy aspects of this book is its detailed attention to the transnational links between the Japanese and the American militaries. The book accords a special place of the interaction between the legal and social norms that have affected Japanese conceptions of national security since 1945. Japan's National Security offers an important, meticulously researched, and up-to-date perspective on the role that Japan is likely to play after the Cold War. Together with Defending the Japanese State, these two monographs analyze the structures and norms that are shaping Japan's policy on internal and national security. The specific focus is on governmental, state-society and transnational structures as well as the social and legal norms that affect the policies of Japan's police and self-defense forces.

The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism
The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism

Author: Sidney Xu Lu

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1108482422

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Shows how Japanese anxiety about overpopulation was used to justify expansion, blurring lines between migration and settler colonialism. This title is also available as Open Access.

Amakudari
Amakudari

Author: Richard A. Colignon

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780801440830

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The widespread migration of civil servants to high-profile positions in the private and public sectors is known in Japan as amakudari, or "descent from heaven." Recent media stories associate the practice with corruption as the former officials seek government favors for their new employers. In their timely book, Richard A. Colignon and Chikako Usui offer the first systematic exploration of this influential yet poorly understood Japanese institution.Colignon and Usui analyze amakudari as a ministry-level phenomenon that is consciously constructed and reproduced with intricate networks in many political and corporate spheres. Drawing on five decades of qualitative and quantitative data delineating the post-retirement careers of leading bureaucrats, they examine changes in traditional job patterns. Although not as strong a force as in the 1960s and 1970s, amakudari, in their view, remains a critical feature of Japanese society and heavily shapes the relationship between government and business.The authors warn that despite the Japanese media criticism of amakudari, it comprises a power structure resistant to radical change. Most important, their book demonstrates that a gradual weakening of this practice may not lead to a more democratic, meritocratic society.

Local Government Innovativeness in China
Local Government Innovativeness in China

Author: Youlang Zhang

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2023-01-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780367636487

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Local government innovation has become one of the most important topics on China's policy agenda in recent decades. This book explains why some local governments are more innovative than others. This book uses a novel theoretical framework and points out that in China's multi-level government structure, the administrative hierarchy and the span of control could shape local governments' innovation motivation, innovation capability, and innovation opportunity, thus influencing local government innovativeness. The author systematically analysed the 177 winners and finalists of the biennial Innovations and Excellence in Chinese Local Governance (IECLG) Awards Programme from 2001 to 2015 to provide convincing empirical evidence to support this theory. This book adopts an institutional approach to explaining local government innovativeness in China and may be a useful reference to help us learn more about local government decisions and behaviours.

Political Economic Perspectives of China's Belt and Road Initiative
Political Economic Perspectives of China's Belt and Road Initiative

Author: CHRISTIAN. PLOBERGER

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-02

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 9781032090689

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The book begins with an overview on China's Belt and Road Initiative, highlighting its complex character as a domestic and international development strategy, and offering an up-to-date evaluation of it. In response to this complexity, the book attempts to highlight the Belt and Road Initiative's double character and how it will address primary domestic development challenges that the Chinese government is facing by adding an international focus to a domestic development strategy. This in turn supports the understanding of China's political-economic policy and strategy formulation by reminding that supporting China's domestic development is still the primary task of its government. Even as the domestic aspect of the Belt and Road Initiative is highlighted, its regional and international relevance cannot be ignored either. The Belt and Road Initiative will support a continuation of the persisting debate about the impact that China's rise generates, and to what extent China can be characterised as a satisfied status quo power or a dissatisfied, revisionist power. In this context, the book draws attention to the various impacts that the Belt and Road Initiative generates in different regional settings. However, the book also identifies some of the limitations that China's Belt and Road Initiative encounters, despite the seemingly convincing economic goals it offers, and explains why a few of the countries, like India, are resisting the lure.