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This article examines the impact of political empowerment in Taiwan on the political trust and efficacy of "Mainlanders," which are the minority in Taiwan, in 2002. It describes Taiwan's political history as antagonism between the "majority" Taiwanese and the "minority" Mainlanders. It reveals that political empowerment has a big influence on promoting the political attitudes of the Mainlanders and has led to the thinning of the differences in political trust and efficacy between Mainlanders and Taiwanese.

The article examines the fundamental aspects of China's unification with Taiwan using survey data collected in Taiwan. The researcher considers the island residents' changing national identity and policy preferences regarding Taiwan's future relations with China. The survey revealed that less than 10% of the residents subscribe to the greater Chinese nationalism, while the majority of them sees the island as an independent and separate political entity from the Chinese mainland.

The article examines the interaction of domestic and international factors in determining relations and policies associated with Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait. It considers the possibility of direct military confrontation between the U.S. and its regional challenger, China, over Taiwan. A review of the literature on cross-Strait and the triangular relations of U.S.-China-Taiwan is presented. It considers the impact of U.S. presidential elections on the China policy since 1980.

The article offers a game theoretic view of the Taiwan issue. It is stated that the U.S. strategic ambiguity policy may or may not deter a conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. It may or may not deter from pursuing bolder measures to gain independence from China. As such, it is an effective policy in deterring both China and Taiwan from deviating from equilibrium strategies.

This article describes the different variants of single-party authoritarianism. There are three distinct classes of single-party authoritarian regimes during the Third Wave, namely "closed," "hegemonic electoral," and "competitive." Among these three, competitive authoritarian dictatorship is most likely to transform into some other form of authoritarianism or to democracy. The transformation of Mexico, Senegal, and Taiwan into competitive authoritarian regimes is discussed.

The article presents a study which examined the influence of Confucianism on the development of multi-party system in Taiwan's democratization from 1983 to 2004. It found that Confucian values related to harmony contribute to the public's support for the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Democratic Progress Party (DPP). It argues that people who believe in Confucian values support the two parties during different historical periods because the Confucian ideology promotes loyalty and dedication to status-quo regime and authority.

According to a survey of 178 states' internet accessibility by the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union (ITU), South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan ranked in the top ten, but China, the Philippines, and Indonesia placed outside the top fifty. Despite efforts to reduce this chasm by governments and international organizations, the digital gap between those who have and those don't have continues to widen particularly in Asia. In an attempt to smooth out differentials of the Digital Access Index among Asian nations, the ITU and other international organizations encouraged government-sponsored initiatives to broaden accessibility. Thus the South Korean government, NGOs, and major electronics companies such as Samsung and LG have been supporting the digital have-nots within the region to construct basic IT infrastructures. Two questions arise: why are South Korea's grants centralized around Asia, and do the efforts focus on hardware? A hypothesis to the first question is that the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 made the general public in South Korea realize that Asian countries are closely related in their history, geography, culture, politics, and economy. Moreover, policy makers comprehended that narrowing the digital divide is essential for the sustainable development of South Korea. Secondly, there are two aspects of the contributions of South Korea's Official Development Assistance (ODA.) The material aspect is supporting of infrastructures to increase access for rural or remote areas and human resources development. The South Korean government and companies are helping to build a digital network; NGOs and volunteer ICT experts educate government officers in underdeveloped countries using software, and develop localized content. Many of them share the basic assumption that their efforts will bring to Korea political and economic advantages someday. For example, the ICT Hub that links regional key players and major institutions can be regional influence. The ethical aspect comes from the special experience of the Korean economy. As late as the early 1960s, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world; South Korea was an ODA recipient until 1991. However, in 2005, South Korea became the 11th biggest contributor due to rapid economic development, especially in the information technology field. South Korea's experience, therefore, can be a good lesson for today's developing Asian nations. This argument is supported by documentation from the 1990's, governmental websites, newspapers/periodicals, and journals from Asian communities, and should be compared with prior works including Hans-Dieter Evers (2005) and Robert Hunter Wade (2002). South Korean annual assistance would be analyzed by regional and sectoral priorities before and after 1997. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores Taiwan's political geography from a viewpoint of policy preferences of the general public. By using national survey data and a simulation procedure that combines Bayesian multilevel estimations with post-stratification, we first generate public opinion measures toward an array of policy issues at the local level. We then compare issue opinion measures across counties/cities and among regions and find that there exists no significant geographical cleavage in our specific opinion measures. The regional patterns found in previous research on partisanship and vote shares do not emerge in this study. Additionally, at the local level, while ethnicity is strongly related to most of our issue opinion measures, partisanship does not seem to play a significant role in shaping policy preferences except that for economic relations with China. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]