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This paper wants to study how the PRC perceive the Taiwan Problem and explain how it made and implemented Taiwan policy incrementally from three perspectives(individual actors,domestic structures, and contextual constraints). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes 30 interviews conducted in three major cities in China in summer 2004, and tests hypotheses on the changes in trust generating mechanisms, and the influence of expectations embedded in one?s trust the processes of targeting, framing, and resource mobilizing in micro-political tasking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, one of the most studied topics in Chinese politics has been village elections. Among the hypothesized sources of explanation for why a village holds successful elections or not, are socioeconomic conditions of the village (e.g., Shi, 1999; Lawrence, 1997; O’Brien, 1994). Though some have revealed empirically that the quality and competitiveness of rural elections are associated with economic factors, the very role of the state, especially the role of local governments, in the promotion of grassroots political change, has been largely ignored. Without support from officials in county or township, the central initiative of village elections had little chance to be put into reality even in economically favorable areas. It is the purpose of this paper to develop and test an elaborated theory of the behavior of local governments in promoting village elections. Our theory is based on Lampton’s bargaining model of the Chinese bureaucracy, assuming that local authorities have bargaining power with the center concerning policy implementation. Since the late of 1980s, the center has required local governments to achieve two policy goals: a participatory goal that aims at increased participation, accountability, and village autonomy through elections and an administrative goal of the execution of conventional state tasks such as tax collection, grain procurement, birth control, etc. It is proving difficult to accomplish the two goals simultaneously. For local officials, fulfilling one goal well will increase their bargaining power to get the central tacit permission to evade or resist another goal. Moreover, without central push, local governments would have little motivation to extend mass participation. So it is proposed here that the better the performance of a local government in state tasks, the less motivation it has to improve local elections, and thus the lower the quality of elections. To test this proposition, we are going to employ a set of indicators to measure the township’s performance in state tasks, such as grain procurement, rural taxation rates, birth control fines, etc. All these are hypothesized to be negatively related to election excellence, which will be an index of election quality of villages in the township. Data for all the variables are currently in the process of collection by the authors. Through a Ford Foundation Project on Local Governance in China (Grant# 1035-1122), the authors are conducting a three-province interview and survey from September to December 2003 to gather information of socioeconomic and political conditions at township and village levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important yet overlooked dynamic of political and economic reform in China has been the recent centralization of three bureaucracies governing China’s economy with the goal of regulating and disciplining local governments and eliminating local protectionism. Centralization has shifted authority relationships within these bureaucracies so that individual offices within them are no longer beholden to their local government hosts. They are now directly controlled by their functional administrative superiors and share only a consultative relationship with their former bosses. Centralization thus establishes new economic and political incentives that guide officials’ behavior, creates new winners and provides them with benefits they are unlikely to relinquish voluntarily, and forges new institutional arrangements that are likely to endure far into the future. However, this centralization is distinctive in that it only extends to the provincial level – what I term “soft centralization.” This paper addresses several questions. Why has China undertaken structural changes to increase state intervention in local economic decision making by centralizing three commercial and regulatory bureaucracies when its economy is firmly embracing market principles? Which bureaucracies are involved in this shift and why? What are the actual institutional mechanisms accompanying soft centralization? Finally, what are some of the implications of soft centralization on the future evolution of the Chinese state? By engaging these questions, this analysis deepens our understanding of the current institutional changes unfolding in China, adds to the literature on decentralization, and contributes to the debate on market-preserving federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the Chinese government's strategy in dealing with a loophole of the fiscal system in the reform era. It argues that the central government selectively tolerates local exploitation of the loophole to encourage local efficiency. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the political sustainability of China's social security program, which is challenged by an aging population and a pay-as-you-go financing that will put increasing economic strains on workers and political strains on government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do the Chinese people prefer democracy if they distrust the authoritarian government? They do. Drawing on survey data, the paper shows that Chinese villagers who are less trusting in the current leadership have stronger preference for popular elections. It argues that distrust induces preference for elections rather than the other way around. It further argues that preference for elections represents in effect preference for system change, because popular election is incompatible with the one-party authoritarian rule. As regards the theoretical debate on whether distrust in government induces preference for regime change, the China case suggests that two mechanisms are at work. The extent to which ordinary people can engineer desired leadership changes through institutionalized channels affects the generation of idealistic wishes for a better system. Perceived availability of better and viable alternative systems affects whether idealistic wishes for a better system congeal into practical preference for regime change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments will have more freedom to implement trade liberalization over the objections of societal actors when three conditions are present. First, smaller selectorates give governments more possible combinations of coalitions from which to choose from. Second, the ability to offer selective incentives allow governments to organize, and thereby empower, preferred coalition partners, while offering side payments to potentially powerful opponents. Third, greater capacity to control information increases the time needed for prospective opponents to discover the negative effects of a liberalizing trade policy, during which a few will succumb to the rigors of competition. Governments taking credible liberalizing acts, such as free trade agreements, can further solidify their coalition as societal actors assessing a low probability of government retrenchment will adjust to the new environment. In the Ricardo-Viner framework, this requires capital to be allocated from uncompetitive to competitive sectors; in the IRS framework, this requires firms to merge and form international ties. The latter scenario poses less of a burden to firms, so governments acting in a society where IRS cleavages predominates will need less room for maneuver before being able to undertake self-sustaining credible commitments. Trade liberalization in Mexico during the de la Madrid and Salinas administrations is examined under this framework, while brief discussions of the politics of trade liberalization in Brazil in China is discussed as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A case study on Volvo AB (trucking) as it relates to specific government actions in China will highlight the role infrastructure plays in attracting a foreign firm to a country due to policies that make that country more competitive compared to other states. The trucking industry is fundamental to the economic success of China, yet it is surprisingly absent in the literature. The competitive state model has yet to be applied to this industry and examining infrastructure as it relates to this model will reveal a dynamic that has not been fully explored in political science..x000d.Volvo did not begin to produce trucks in China until 2004, nearly three decades after China began to open up to the world. Taking a look at the competitive state model, specifically the overlooked aspect of infrastructure, will provide an excellent basis for understanding government involvement in economic affairs, and as a result better the understanding of how a state competitively attracts a foreign firm such as Volvo. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will the future of hegemonic politics resemble the past? In the post-Cold war world, emergence of new actors will likely reshape hegemonic politics and potentially reconfigure the balance of power. As the world shifts from one era to another, the behavior of emerging actors like China will have far reaching implications. As the post-Cold war world's emerging hegemonic power, China presents the most challenging questions for scholars of international politics. This study draws from historical patterns detected from the behavior of two key hegemonic powers of the past fifty to a hundred yearsâ??Germany 1866-World War 11 and the United States 1898-end of the Cold warâ??in order to understand and to better predict China's behavior in the next fifty to a hundred years. Most scholars of hegemonic politics in the twenty-first century believe that it is essential to understand China's emergence and its implications for the international system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to demonstrate the role of intellectuals in the political contestation in modern China through shaping of collective memory. The paper focuses on the collective memory of the Republican era the post-communist period. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is interesting in the subject that since China is an authoritarian government, why does China need NGOs to deal with the international cooperation or interaction. The development of the NGOs in China will be examined in the paper. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks into Sichuan culture,national culture, and the relationship between them, and analyzes their cultural implications on political decision-making processes and outcomes in the Chinese government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains why student movements of Burma (1988) and China (1989) failed in producing a democratic transition based on each country?s state capacity and each states use of structural power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the surprisingly rapid process of South Korea's rapprochement with China in the last decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the literature of local corporatism, this paper attempts to address the socioeconomic determinants to the behavior of the Chinese local state in choosing different strategies of political control over village governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first develops a theory of state agency and then applies it to the case of China's human rights foreign policy. I find that China's HR policy can be better explained by domestic factors rather than international factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we try to borrow Bruce Russett and John Oneal?s argument to discuss whether China can rise peacefully. We argue that China?s rise would be an imperfect triangulating peace since it is not a democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how the different institutional context in China influence the development pattern of two industrial sectors -- automobile and telecom manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a typology of the term “culture” as used in contemporary political theory, arguing that for most liberal, postcolonial as well as comparative political theories, the political significance of “culture” (however defined) is articulated almost exclusively in terms of the concerns and experiences of individual persons. Although this move enables greater traction on what is otherwise a protean concept, it reduces the complexity of a social meaning-making to the experiences of one (clearly bounded) individual. Informed by this circumscribed concept, the goal of much comparative political theory is to enhance mutual intelligibility between two culturally embedded individuals, rather than to come to terms with the claims of a heretofore self-sufficient system of ideas. I offer an alternative concept of culture, building from a late 19th century Chinese debate that took culture more seriously as a marker of complex, socially distributed ways of living and thinking. Employing this more holistic model, political theory can treat its encounters with foreign ideas in a way that is both more attentive to their complex sites of origin, as well as more potentially disruptive of its own categories of thought. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to explain the differences in the strategies between African and Latin American countries towards the expansion of economic power of China in the two regions by comparing their domestic economic structure and political consideration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an alternative, non-Western approach in which the Internet's ascension acts as a viable avenue for a new form of political participation enabling citizens to emerge from the chrysalis of the Chinese state under authoritarian rule. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the major factors behind the rise of legal mobilization against the post-colonial Hong Kong government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the relationships between religion and state in Mainland China and Taiwan after 1949, trying to explore their experiences in the past, and to tell the possible development tendency in the future. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By comparing the cases of the Three Gorges Dam and the Nu River Dam projects in China, the paper examines the patterns and effects of transnational anti-dam advocacy under different combinations of international and domestic opportunity structures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About village elections, elite and voters have their own perceptions and preferences, which affect their behaviors during electoral processes and further shape electoral outcomes. From this perspective, this paper examines the roles of elections. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, China's electricity reform has become a major issue because of its close relation both to people's daily lives and to further economic development. Even though the Chinese government has claimed that great achievements accrued from the early stages of electricity reform, the reality is that this process has been accompanied by widespread power shortages. China's electricity reform, in fact, faces many obstacles during the implementation that underdeveloped market mechanisms and immature market culture have created an unfavorable environment. This paper addresses this gap between the government's statements and reality by conceptualizing and explaining two interrelated outcomes: the development of state regulatory structure and the process of corporatizing state-owned enterprises (SOEs). It highlights the relationship between the state and SOEs which has resulted in the reform projects failing to achieve their goals. When a monopoly status has been broken up by the state in China's electricity industry, an oligopoly has emerged rather than market competition, which resulted in the power crises. The state lost its ability to coordinate among different sectors in the industry. A debate on SOE reform centers on property rights and budget constraints. I argue that they are both insufficient due to the blurred line between socialism with Chinese characteristics and capitalism and the related capitalist concepts have been gradually rooted as economy develops. At this point, a regulatory state approach is emerging.With regard to the causes of the failure in reform implementation, two factors matter. The first is the role of Chinese state is transforming from owner to regulator during the economic reform. The second is the SOEs are gradually being independent from the state and tend to act like interest groups in the Western sense during the process of corporatization. Thus, while the reform project is designed to decouple the state and SOEs and to restructure the electricity industry, the changing relationship between them determines how the SOEs respond differently. The "heterogeneity" of the SOEs has further resulted in variations across the electricity industry. The state no longer has a monopoly of reform initiatives during its interaction with the SOEs and, in fact, has been 'captured' by the industry it regulates. China's electricity reform only goes half way. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses three issues, the concept of media trust and its relationship to political trust in China, the change of media trust over time, and the impact of media trust on media consumption and on attitude change. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The administrative structure in Hong Kong appears to be overly stable in the face of changing circumstances, yet punctuates occasionally by substantial volatility or accumulated problems, which is unexplainable by incentive structures alone. This paper applies and extends the punctuated-equilibrium theory to analyze the distributional patterns of administrative reorganizations in post-war colonial Hong Kong. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars assume that there is no popular input in policy-making in single-party states. Empirically based on environmental protection in China, this paper shows that citizens do have a variety of means through which they can affect policy-making. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I will discuss how institutions influence the development of corruption and the making of anti-corruption policies in China. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using interviews with both masses and agents of institutions, this paper explores the processes in which institutional trust originates, develops, gains momentum, and reaches threshold of the diffusing effects in Chinese local political environment. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the structures, the processes, reform trends of local governments in China and in the United States. It aims to evaluate the potentials of their reforms in promoting global engagement as well as in promoting sustainable social, eco ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the recent central and local experiments of reforming the personnel control of local government leaders in China, which are extremely limited and tightly controlled yet introduce some elements of downward accountability. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of attempts by Chinese government actors to channel social disputes through various institutional channels.  It finds that re-channeling disputes through new institutions creates potential for social disorder. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the dynamics of Chinese food and agricultural politics and policies in the reform period. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The radical anti-Japan sentiment in the Chinese cyberspace becomes a landmark of "Internet nationalism" in China. It leads to a boomerang effect on China?s foreign policy making. However, such effect is still limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the case of China's power groups, I illuminate the political logic of the state-owned enterprise reform with a strategy of corporatization rather than further privatization and describe the predicaments the Chinese state has encountered. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pattern of FDI inflow of Southeast Asia is highly conditioned by the region's relations with the rest of the world. Technology, China, and regional problem contribute to a decrease of FDI inflow in Southeast Asian countries in 1990s. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Post-rationalist PE perspective is used to inspect Taiwan?s debate over the movement of wafer fab to China. Besides materialist interests, non-materialist discourses have resulted in a less predictable but contested sphere for public discussions. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I explore a unique Chinese political participatory institution, Xinfang (letters and visits) in the Post-Mao reform to see how the CCP and its soft authoritarian regime resolve the citizen's increasing political recognition and demand. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]