East Asia has developed into one of the most promising regions. This volume of essays by leading European, Asian, and American scholars provides a comprehensive look at the key themes relating to politics in East Asia today. The contributors explore the formidable obstacles on the road to democratic consolidation in the region's new democracies, and the prospects for democratic transitions among the region's remaining authoritarian polities. The essays address issues of institutional design, media reform, electoral politics, and religious movements.
This text explains political change and the shaping of political order in modern East Asian states: China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Examining the transformative role of power, authority, and political culture in the shaping of political order, this book: Describes the emergence of statist and pluralist political order in East Asia. Outlines the dual process of state-building and nation-building, revealing the transformative role of the state. Highlights the causes and consequences of the reversion to centralized political order, describing the structure and institutions of Cold War regimes in East Asian states. Explores the structural and institutional consequences of industrial development on politics and state in East Asian states. Discusses the methods and outcomes of the democratization movements in the 1980s and 1990s and public sector reforms in the 1990s and 2010s. Utilizes survey data and newly developed indicators to measure and reveal the shaping of national political culture in each East Asian state. Features structural, institutional, and normative analysis of political change in modern East Asia. This will be an essential textbook for students of Political Science, International Relations, East Asian Politics and East Asian History, as well as policy analysts of East Asian states.
Offers students and general readers an understanding of the modern East Asian region from a global perspective. This book describes East Asia's geographical, human, cultural, economic, social, and political setting as it has evolved, and the three major belief systems - Confucianism, Buddhism, and Islam.
This innovative, interdisciplinary introduction to East Asian politics uses a thematic approach to describe the political development of China, Japan, and Koreas since the mid-nineteenth century and analyze the social, cultural, political, and economic features of each country. Unlike standard comparative politics texts which often lack a unifying theme and employ Western conventions of the 'state', "Political Systems of East Asia" avoids these limitations and identifies a common thread running through the histories of China, Korea, and Japan. This common thread is Confucianism, which has shaped East Asian perspectives of the universe and how it operates. The text describes and explains the ways in which each country has employed this shared tradition, and how it has affected the country's internal dynamics, responses to the outside world, and its own political development.
For students of international political economy, it is hard to ignore the growth, dynamism, and global impact of East Asia. Japan and China are two of the largest economies in the world, in a region now accounting for almost 30 percent more trade than the United States, Canada, and Mexico combined. What explains this increasing wealth and burgeoning power? In his new text, Ming Wan illustrates the diverse ways that the domestic politics and policies of countries within East Asia affect the region’s production, trade, exchange rates, and development, and are in turn affected by global market forces and international institutions. Unlike most other texts on East Asian political economy that are essentially comparisons of major individual countries, Wan effectively integrates key thematic issues and country-specific examples to present a comprehensive overview of East Asia’s role in the world economy. The text first takes a comparative look at the region’s economic systems and institutions to explore their evolution—a rich and complex story that looks beyond the response to Western pressures. Later chapters are organized around close examination of production, trade, finance, and monetary relations. While featuring extended discussion of China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, Wan is inclusive in his analysis, with coverage including Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. The text is richly illustrated with more than fifty tables, figures, and maps that present the latest economic and political data to help students better visualize trends and demographics. Each chapter ends with extensive lists of suggested readings.
Using a comparative and thematic approach, this textbook looks at key aspects of the new dynamics in East Asian politics: security, political economy and society.
In the twenty-first century, East Asia has been increasingly marked both by tensions at a government level and a chauvinistic mood among the polity. While China’s rise is in one respect the proximate driver of these changes in tone, it draws on a range of unresolved grievances among the respective historical narratives of Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan and the Koreas. These conflicting views of the region’s past are a crucial barrier to its cohesive and stable future. This book brings together East Asian scholars from a range of academic disciplines, including China historians, political historians and political scientists to illuminate the interconnectedness of East Asia and discuss how a shared historical narrative might be constructed. Their contributions are organised into 3 parts focusing respectively on historical narratives of China, historical narratives of East Asia, and reconciling historical narratives. The book will appeal to researcher interested in the historical narratives of international relations in East Asia.
The rise of China, along with problems of governance in democratic countries, has reinvigorated the theory of political meritocracy. But what is the theory of political meritocracy and how can it set standards for evaluating political progress (and regress)? To help answer these questions, this volume gathers a series of commissioned research papers from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, historians and social scientists. The result is the first book in decades to examine the rise (or revival) of political meritocracy and what it will mean for political developments in China and the rest of the world. Despite its limitations, meritocracy has contributed much to human flourishing in East Asia and beyond and will continue to do so in the future. This book is essential reading for those who wish to further the debate and perhaps even help to implement desirable forms of political change.
