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In 2007, the Chinese government adopted a law granting individuals the right to control their property. This is a major change in Chinese law as land had formerly been considered the property of the state. The law was an attempt to increase the market oreintation of the economy. However, increased individual control of land has come into conflict with government efforts to speed commercial development through the power of eminent domain. This paper tells the story of one such conflict in Hubei Province, where a property owner sued the government when it tried to deprive him of his land rights, in order to make way for development. The surprise in this case comes not only from the access the individual had to the courts, but from the more remarkable fact that, when the land owner won his case, the government has respected complied with the court's decision. The point of the paper is to explore the democratic potential of judicial support for rights in the "new China." Comparison will also be made to the use of courts to resist eminent domain in the US and other democracies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China’s hosting of Olympic Games has caused great controversy. Facing criticisms and pressure from international community, Chinese government must defend China’s national interests on the one hand and demonstrate its respect for human rights and democracy, its commitment to the improvement of human rights conditions and the promotion of democracy, and its responsiveness to international public opinions on the other hand. Chinese government assigns different priorities to different national interests and adopts different foreign policies accordingly. This paper is aimed to explore the foreign policies taken by Chinese government toward issues of different importance. Yet Chinese government is by no means the sole actor on the arena. Driven by patriotic enthusiasm, Chinese people not only exert great pressure on Chinese government to make it take hard-line foreign policies, but also take action to defend China’s national interests themselves. Consequently, Chinese government must react to domestic demands when making foreign policies. This paper is also designed to investigate the interaction between Chinese government and Chinese people in “Olympic Diplomacy”. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Villagers’ Committee elections in Chinese rural areas highlight the promise as well as the challenge of democratization in a one-party state. Why are there huge regional variations in terms of voter turnout rate? Drawing on the vast literature of voter turnout, we develop a number of hypotheses in this paper. Data from a large survey conducted in 2005 have confirmed some (but not all) of them. Like voters in other countries, Chinese villagers are rational players and motivated by individual interests. More importantly, social organizations and electoral institutions have exhibited positive influence in voter mobilization. These empirical findings reveal important dynamics in China’s village democracy. They also imply some major challenges facing China’s rural democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will highlight major features of the Chinese political system and elaborate a China’s model of democracy. In a world where democracy has been regarded as a universal value, the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been a suspect. There have been calls for democratizing the Chinese political system, implicitly after the fashion of Western democracies, in particular the American model. Few scholars have questioned the desirability of building a democracy in China, yet it is far from being clear what the Chinese model of democracy should be. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to show that there is stronger correlation between the level of economic development, rather than propensity of government, and openness of foreign policy. It has been known that a general rule of nations’ reaction in terms of foreign relations is difficult to materialize due to contextual particularities of each society. However, it is crucial to examine the society as a body of diverse interests and modes of projecting such interests that leads to the formation of particular foreign policies. Specific interests will be noted along with coinciding interests shared by the losers of the economic reform and the level of openness within a given society. Level of economic reform and democracyâ€"independent variableâ€"and the openness of foreign policyâ€"dependent variableâ€"or willingness to cooperate and dependency towards transnational institutions will be examined. This, as a result, will show that the level of economic development and the concomitant national pride promotes cooperation among nations, thus enabling the formation of regional communities. Some aspects of NATO will be noted in to draw positive conclusions about the prospects of security community formation within North East Asia. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper chooses Japan's top two largest newspapers and examine their coverage patterns of China. It seeks to offer a contextualized and nuanced picture of how reporters from a democracy deal with and are dealt with by an authoritarian government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that ideology played a minor role in the early Cold War by demonstrating that containment was initially directed to halt the expansion of a potential hegemon rather than the expansion of a socio-economic system of government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a close connection between political trust and overall regime-legitimacy in authoritarian systems such as the Chinese. It analyses the effects of perceived performance (in terms of perceived political and economic performance and perceived financial well-being) and political culture (in terms of hierarchical and conflict orientations) on political trust in the imagined, central state and the real, executive state. It also includes other previously tested variables such as internal political efficacy and media consumption. The results show that political trust is an outcome of aspects of per-formance (in particular political performance) and parts of political culture. Political trust can be better understood when we try to gauge the interaction patterns between both. The detailed analysis reveals important indirect effects of performance being shaped by as-pects of political culture and well-being. The results also suggest that there is a strong effect of trust in the real state on confidence in the imagined state. However, media con-sumption seems to no longer affect political trust while internal efficacy does affect attitudes on the imagined state. Lastly, indirect and direct effects from structural variables such as age, education, and income on political trust suggest that trust levels and probably also regime legitimacy are structurally inclined to decrease in the future unless the regime finds a way to make its political system less vulnerable to an increasingly skeptical citizenry. ..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]

This paper relaxes the informational assumptions of Weingast's (1997) model of democratic stability by applying the solution concept of quantal response equilibrium (QRE). Case studies of The American Colonies, Mexico, and China illustrate the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role does teaching in democratic theory have in a democratizing nation? Using the example of Hong Kong, we develop a framework for teaching and analyzing democratic theory in democratizing contexts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal institutions may not be established as originally designed or expected. The conventional "backward induction" approach adopted by many students of institutional change to explain the choice or design of institutions in terms of their respective expected effect may not be justifiable, particularly when institutional transplantation is involved. Institutional syncretism might better capture the reality of institutional change in most developing countries when formal institutions are externally borrowed or imposed. In this case, society may play a much more active role in institutional change than conventionally assumed. Using an empirical example from mainland China on the evolution of electoral institutions in its grassroots democracy, this article tries to shed light on the complex, sometimes unexpected, dynamics involved for the establishment of any designed or preferred forma institutions, and derive some implications for future studies on institutional change and performance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the lack of previous democratic experience in China’s recent history hinder the current attempts at democratic reforms at the local level? Many researchers have pointed to prior democratic experience and “political memory” to explain the relatively smooth democratic transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America. The People’s Republic of China lacks political memory of any democratic experience at the national level; however, in northern Shaanxi province, democratic elections did occur at the local level throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, historians have demonstrated that these were indeed free and fair elections. Given the previous democratic elections at the local level in Shaanxi, we ask: Are current village elections in the Northern Shaanxi region more democratic than those areas without any history of free and fair elections? In the year 2000, we conducted a six county survey of Shaanxi province. In our sample, two counties had a history of local elections in the 1930s and 1940s, while the other four counties in southern Shaanxi did not. Using local historical records and the 2000 survey, we show that previous democratic experience in northern Shaanxi has no significant influence on current democratization efforts at the village level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues China's priority upon maintaining regime stability in a country with a substantial minority population forces it to support surrounding non-democracies in order to prevent instability from spilling over the border. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the driving force behind democratization? What makes institutions of representative democracy eventually possible under authoritarian regimes? The past two decades have witnessed at once robust and successful liberal economic reforms in China as well as strong political control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, while scholars and political observers still complain about the lack of appropriate progress of political reforms in China, we do see significant institutional changes taking place. Especially in China's vast rural areas, a national trend is the creation and operations of Village Councils, an institution of representative democracy surprisingly supported by the local party-state. This paper explains the reason for the increasing popularity of Village Councils in rural China and the rationales behind the local party-state's decision to give its blessings . ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to address the challenge to the liberal paradigm of democratization posed by China's recent political reform to bring public participation and consultation into the administrative decision-making and legislative process. I argue that a paradigm change is necessary for the theories of democratization to illuminate the deliberative dimension of democracy, which may or may not be in conjunction with the liberal dimension of democratizing process. A brief survey of literature demonstrates that the mainstream paradigm of democratization, or transitology, has come to too narrowly identify "democracy" with territorially based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices. Then I trace the deliberative turn in democratic theory, but primarily focus on the distinction between contemporary deliberative democracy and classical direct/participatory democracy in relation to liberal ideals of democracy. Evidently, for most deliberative democratic theorists, including Rawls and Habermas, deliberation constitutes democratization only in the sense of being supplemental to or "deepening" liberal democracy in public will- or opinion formation. What if the deliberation, such as the governance-driven deliberation (GDD) in China, takes place in an authoritarian regime? I argue that a critical understanding of deliberation suggests that deliberation has two empowering effects in societies across regime types: first, in communications, giving reasons accessible to all the citizens affected by the issue transforms individuals' mentality in relation to others and to the political community; second, in a plural and complex society, deliberation provides mechanisms to challenge the dominating discourse. A few cases of GDD reforms are introduced to illustrate the above mechanisms of empowerment; some empirical evidence is also discussed regarding the democratic effects of GDD along the three dimensions critically defined by John Dryzek, which are franchise, scope of issue areas, and authenticity respectively. I also point out that the changing society structure and state imperatives in reformist China strengthen the democratizing effects of GDD: first, the prospect of dialogue and contestation is positive considering increasingly divergent interests and the technological revolution in communication; second, the state retreats from the totalist control of society while trying to maintain stability in its demanding task of governance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores four different sources on institutional trust in China: modernization, mobilization, political culture, and institutional performance. It also discusses the impact of institutional trust on the prospect of democracy in China. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [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]

Against conventional wisdom, I propose that the impact of public opinion on high salience issues in authoritarian regimes is akin to that of public opinion on low salience issues with a diffuse constituency in democratic regimes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comparative study of four Asian countries that have embraced information technology-China, Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea-attempts to move beyond a dichotomous debate about whether the Internet will or will not lead to democracy, by articul ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the emergence of E-Government in China and its implication on China’s transition to democracy. The Government Online Project was formally launched by the Chinese government in 1999, and today about 80 percent of all government agencies--local and national--have web sites. It is widely accepted that this new technology will improve the quality of governance because it is in concert with values such as democracy, openness, accountability and effectiveness. In this article, we review the current condition of E-Government in China by a detailed analysis of 30 provincial and metropolitan websites. We look at what kinds of features are available on-line, such as information posted and services provided. We also examine how E-Government sites respond to citizens’ requests by conducting an e-mail response test. Finally, we discuss how E-Government sites vary by region of the country and what factors cause the differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]