What areas of the country does the Chinese government prioritize for drinking water provision infrastructure? Chinese policy prioritizes ethnic minorities and minority autonomous areas due to concerns about inequality and interethnic harmony. However, the implementation is not always equitable or favorable for ethnic minorities. Drawing on a new data set of more than 10,000 drinking water projects, I explore how ethnicity and autonomy influence public goods provision in rural Guizhou Province. I find implementation concerns trump official policy priorities when it comes to drinking water infrastructure. Such facilities are more likely to be built in Han-majority areas, because implementation and project completion are easier for officials. The findings have implications for ethnic politics and public goods provision in nondemocratic contexts. They also demonstrate why regions with larger minority populations are often slower to develop and slower to receive better access to basic public services.

In recent years many former heads of foreign governments have visited China, appearing at various forums, conferences, and other events. China’s engagement with these former leaders may appear to be a form of public diplomacy, but even more importantly it has been a strategy of political legitimation adopted by the Chinese Communist Party. Based on an original database of hundreds of cases, we provide a systematic analysis of the visits of former foreign leaders to China and of their role as external validators for the party-state and its policy initiatives, particularly the Belt and Road Initiative. By shedding light on the Party’s search for external consent and support, we seek to fill a significant gap in the literature, which tends to focus narrowly on the domestic sources of legitimacy and domestic strategies of legitimation.

The Chinese Communist Party stresses the regime’s role in presiding over the unity of China’s minzu (ethnic groups) and their shared stake in China’s prosperity. However, an examination of the quality of interactions between Han and ethnic minorities illustrates the regime’s vulnerability to counterclaims based on these lived experiences. This paper conducts a case study of Han–Hui relations to argue that physical separation between Han and Hui prevents the two groups from interacting in ways that transmit substantive knowledge about the differences between the groups. Instead, interactions perpetuate stereotypes and distrust. By continuing to push narratives about the unity of all groups and shared family relations, the state highlights the shortcomings of its own policies, and undercuts its own legitimating narrative.

In just over six years, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has swiftly expanded to vast swaths of the globe, with as many as 138 countries signing on. In 2017, President Xi Jinping’s signature project was incorporated into the Chinese constitution, assuming extraordinary significance as the “project of the century.” China has couched the program in multilateral terms, with a promise of shared benefits through road and maritime connectivity projects, reviving the ancient Silk Road and revivifying the spirit of commercial, cultural and academic exchange. Cooperation among member countries is envisaged in policy coordination, facilities connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and people-to-people bonds. However, an active debate has ensued surrounding China’s motivations and the initiative’s potential outcomes for the host countries. Against this backdrop, I examine the economic implications for host countries and regions, using a geo-economic analytical framework.

This study analyzes the attitudes of core policy stakeholders in South Korea to multiculturalism and immigrant integration policies, as well as the factors affecting such attitudes, and suggests theoretical and policy implications. I conducted a survey of public officials, program operators, and academics. The responses suggest that public officials, program operators, and academics in Korea have more positive expectations for immigrants’ societal contributions and less fear of social clashes or conflicts due to increasing immigration, compared to the general public. They prefer the assimilationist model, which means that immigrants fully adopt the Korean culture and language as a matter of integration policy. The study sheds light on the stakeholders’ attitudes to multiculturalism and immigration integration policy, how their views differ from the general public, and the causes and policy implications of these differences.

This article examines Japan’s trade policy on significant geo-economic developments by focusing on its engagement in three large free trade agreements: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and the Japan–EU Economic Partnership Agreement. Under the Abe administration, Japan has produced successful outcomes in mega-FTA strategy, concluding the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Japan–EU Economic Partnership Agreement in 2018. The making and diffusion of high-standard rules were given high priority in Japan’s mega-FTA strategy, and Prime Minister Abe’s political leadership in employing his political allies and executive aides and managing the opposition activities of veto players has enabled his administration to produce these successful outcomes.

A powerful pro-Palestinian transnational advocacy network has emerged in Malaysia since the Gaza war of 2008–09. Taking the cooperation between the Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia, the Islamist Hamas, and the United Malays National Organisation as an example, I analyze the network and argue that the three actors are engaging there to promote the Palestinian struggle for an independent state but at the same time, each actor is using the network to pursue its own interests.

Bangladesh continues to face a threat from Islamic terrorism. However, the drivers of this phenomenon remain under-studied. Research has traced terrorism in Bangladesh to wider processes of Islamization; a political context marked by conflict between the country’s two main political parties and by authoritarian governance; the institutional weakness of the Bangladeshi security and justice system; and international factors, such as the Afghanistan War, influences from the Gulf, and more recently the Rohingya refugee crisis, as well as the increased interest of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in South Asia. Based on an analysis of the literature and interviews, I argue that while the growth of terrorism in Bangladesh has been a complex process in which all of these factors have interacted, different constellations of them have been decisive at different historical stages.

We use spatial econometrics on a unique data set covering 229 Korean regions to analyze the outcome of Korea’s 2017 presidential election. We see strong statistical evidence of spatial correlation, suggesting that neighboring regions vote similarly, which is in accord with findings in the international context. Our findings are distinct in that we see little evidence that Korea’s 2017 outcome was driven by the economic disparities between the southeast and the southwest, a highly sensitive political issue in the country. Voters’ region of origin and age are the two most important factors in vote choice, irrespective of the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of their regions.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is often portrayed as the flagship project of the Belt and Road Initiative. While much attention has been devoted to its geopolitical repercussions, its impacts on Pakistan’s federal system and interprovincial relations have not yet been explored. Organized around interviews conducted in 2015, 2018, and 2019, this article demonstrates that the construction of the economic corridor is acting as a centripetal force in Pakistan’s federal structure, despite the potential for such a large external investment to redress the disparities between provinces.

This paper discusses the dynamics between Myanmar’s peace process, its mismanagement of the Rohingya crisis, and China’s strategic interests in Myanmar. It examines how internal ethnic conflicts in Myanmar will transpire and the implications for China’s grand strategy of One Belt One Road in the region.

In the South China Sea territorial disputes, China has shifted from a delaying strategy characterized by strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity and an increasingly assertive stance. Yet, this power play, asserting sovereignty over a large portion of the South China Sea, has not prompted a decisive push-back from regional states or major powers, raising the question of what kind of norms China will bring to the regional order and indicating the difficulty of building rules-based order in a region characterized by unbounded power politics in a twenty-first-century Hobbesian struggle.

This article explores the politics surrounding the recent data transfer agreement between Japan and the European Union, with a focus on the linkage between Japanese domestic politics and foreign pressure on Japan’s personal information protection policy. The agreement may be seen as one of mutual recognition, in that Japan and the EU mutually recognized the other as providing an “adequate level of protection” for personal data. However, a close examination of the case suggests that Japan made substantial efforts to meet the EU’s standards for adequacy in order to enhance the interests of transnationalized Japanese firms that rely on the flow of personal information across borders. In sum, the latest changes in Japanese personal information protection regulation paved the way for the Japan-EU data transfer agreement; these changes were precipitated by the extraterritorial effect of the EU’s data protection laws, which had resonated within Japan’s domestic politics.

I coded 166 pieces published in the Kantipur and Nagarik daily newspapers from 2008 to 2016 to analyze Nepalese media perception of the growing claims of India–China competition in Nepal. India is perceived as primarily responsible for the political instability in Nepal, and India–China competition is perceived as a secondary, much smaller factor. China itself is not perceived as contributing to political instability in Nepal; it is perceived as indifferent to Nepalese politics. Indian over-engagement, suggestions, and even pressures in Nepal are perceived as interventions in Nepalese politics, while China has successfully cultivated an image of cooperation and of indifference to internal Nepalese affairs.

Democracy is a contested concept; this article empirically examines how Chinese people understand the concept of democracy in practice when they use this term. Using four rounds of national survey data, we seek to clarify the characteristics of the Chinese people’s perception of democracy and its longitudinal changes during the past few decades. The results show an increase in the percentage of people who view democracy procedurally. The popular perception of democracy does matter. People who view democracy substantively tend to see democracy as less suitable for China, and to overrate the democratic level of the current regime, compared to those who view democracy procedurally. No matter how people perceive it, satisfaction with democracy has declined over the past decade. The demographic analysis shows that Chinese youth adhere to a procedural concept of democracy more than a substantive one, which has important implications for China’s future political development.

South Korea and Taiwan are former Japanese colonies that have undergone similar processes of state-building since WWII. But they have chosen different rhetorical frameworks in their maritime disputes with Japan. In South Korea, negotiating with Japan can be viewed as threatening the country’s independence and pride, whereas in the Taiwanese government, cooperation with Japan is considered mutually beneficial. Why have these two countries taken such divergent stances toward Japan? This article examines the territorial disputes between South Korea and Japan over Dokdo, and between Taiwan and Japan over the Senkaku Islands. It sets forth a rhetorical framework of comparison, and it proposes a constructivist perspective in understanding South Korea’s and Taiwan’s legitimation strategies toward Japan from the late 1990s to 2018. This comparative study suggests that the differences between their legitimation strategies can be traced to their different colonial experiences with Japan.

Representation is always a dynamic relation, a tatonnement , in which the represented adjust their preferences on the basis of beliefs induced by the representatives. All rulers—those selected in clean elections, those who hold such ceremonies without putting their power at stake, and those who do not even bother to hold them—claim to have reasons to be followed, and people are willing to follow them if they believe these are good reasons. Thus, individual preferences, “wills,”are influenced by the relation of representation. The controversial issue is whether the relation of representation can be assessed when preferences are endogenous, in particular when people are not exposed to a plurality of reasons.

China’s growing development assistance has become commonly perceived as a threat to the autonomy and development of Southeast Asian countries that had promoted by Japan in the past. This paper challenges that understanding by comparing China’s development assistance with Japan’s engagement in the region. The comparison supports an alternative perspective, which sees Chinese development assistance as favorable for Japan’s interests.

It is widely believed that Pakistan’s newly demonstrated nuclear weapons capability emboldened that country to launch what became the Kargil conflict of 1999 and correspondingly restrained India in responding to the attack. This article argues, however, that decision-making on both sides was driven by non-nuclear factors.

One of the public’s popular beliefs about politics is that politicians engage in rent-seeking behaviors, such as accumulating property, using their political power. By applying a regression discontinuity design, this study examines whether members of the National Assembly of South Korea gained assets during three elective terms (2004–2008, 2008–2012, and 2012–2016). The results contradict the public’s claim. In general, there is minimal evidence that election winners accumulate more assets than runners-up. And observing the winners’ premium for newly elected politicians in the 2012–2016 term, I find that it is related to a political support fund, which is a legitimate channel for politicians’ funding. The results suggest that an information disclosure policy can play a pivotal role in restricting politicians’ rent-seeking behaviors.