Independent Candidates in China’s Local People’s Congress Elections

In the Chinese political system, according to the constitution, the people’s congresses at the primary level are the only institution which the voters can directly elect. However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightly controls the “direct elections” and takes every measure in the elections to prevent grassroots power from entering even the primary-level people’s congresses. In recent years, grassroots power has kept struggling for its legal rights in the “direct elections” held in a few localities. The conflicts between the grassroots power and the authoritarian party in the “direct elections” have become an interesting political phenomenon, a subject deserves close observation and research. This paper studies the background of the independent candidates, their motivations and behaviour in elections. The paper also examines the party’s control in the elections and thus exposes the true nature of China’s people’s congress “direct” elections. The paper argues that independent candidates can have little impacts on China’s political structure at the current stage because of the party’s tight control, but their political participation has the most democratic value, compared with the “reforms” instigated and carried out by the CCP.     

Washington’s Cold War Diplomacy in Italy in the 1970s

This article examines Washington’s cold war diplomacy in Italy as a case study of policy making. Italy caused concerns to US leaders throughout the cold war because of its strong and dynamic communist party (PCI). Worries became even more acute in the 1970s after the PCI spelled out its “historic compromise” strategy whose objective was to propel the communists into cabinet positions within a broad coalition government. How did the White House, Foggy Bottom, the Rome embassy, the CIA and Congress view such a development and who got the final word? How strong were domestic factors? This paper tries to analyze the differences in opinions and their influence in policy making.     

The Role of “Parallel Institutions” in China’s Growing Participation in Global Economic Governance

China is creating or co-creating new international economic institutions in areas such as trade, development finance, currency settlement and credit rating that parallel those that arose out of the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 or are tied to the interests of rich, developed countries. What are its reasons for doing this? What are the characteristics of the new institutions? How do the new institutions relate to the old institutions? Will China’s initiatives lead to better global economic governance? This paper attempts to answer these questions. Its main conclusions are that China is trying to create a new international economic order in which its political power is more commensurate with its economic power, its creation of new international institutions is an important part of this strategy, the institutions that China is creating are meant to be open and inclusive and to introduce “better practices”, and it is possible – though not necessarily probable – that China can make a major contribution to global economic governance provided it can overcome operational challenges, skepticism about its intentions and too narrow a view of its national interest.     

Policy’s role in democratic conflict management

Policy Sciences - This article proposes rethinking democratic conflict management by acknowledging the increasingly important role policy plays in it. As the debate on the health of democracy...     

Turkey’s diminishing policy options in Syria

The increase in the Islamic State's power vis-a-vis the moderate Syrian opposition has reduced Turkey’s ability to shape the course of the Syrian conflict in line with its long-term goals of uprooting the Assad regime and expanding its influence in the Middle East. ISIS's rise has also degraded Turkey's domestic security. Ankara currently appears caught between its inability to realise its regional objectives with respect to Syria and its refusal to moderate them, but may soon find political compromise unavoidable.     

Who Governs in God’s City?

After clearing away some misconceptions about the power of the religious right in Colorado Springs, this article will examine three areas, education, medical marijuana, and gay rights, where the city’s religious conservatives have tried to influence public policy. With each area their efforts have only been partially successful. While the reasons for this uneven success are often particular to each policy dispute, taken together these issues point to discernible changes in the political behavior and ambitions of the city’s religious conservatives. Most importantly, religious conservatives have become far less confrontational and have turned away, to a significant degree, from direct political action and are focusing much more on community outreach programs. The paper will conclude by discussing some of the reasons for those changes and how they might have national implications for religious and social conservatives.     

History and Thought in China’s Traditions

The recent turn to China??s traditions has the potential to correct for the Eurocentrism of Political Science theories. Nevertheless, the overwhelming emphasis on political thought, especially Confucianism, may have its drawbacks. This article suggests that political scientists who are interested in building theories and drawing policy implications should study the verifiable, i.e., history. Unless the purpose is to study philosophy for its own sake, political scientists should study political thought in practice, rather than political thought divorced from history. This article first discusses why it is important to examine history beyond thought. It then analyzes why scholars should not conflate political thought with historical practice. It anchors the analysis with a high-profile recent book on ancient Chinese thought.     

China’s Coherence in International Economic Governance

This article analyzes China’s coherence in international economic governance. When and how is China challenging the rules and norms of the prevailing international economic order? Has China adopted the current rules and norms across the board, or is it proceeding in an ad hoc or piecemeal manner? How can its (in) coherence be explained? To address these questions, I compare China’s profile vis-à-vis three dimensions of the global economic order: trade, investment, and development aid. I argue that in international trade and investment, China has neither sought nor brought about significant change. China is however, offering an alternative to the Western norms that until now have dominated the global development aid regime. China’s establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is notable in this regard, though it is still soon to determine if the Chinese-led development bank will break with existing norms. The article then considers possible theoretical explanations for the variation in China’s behavior across the three areas.     

India’s non-alignment in the telecommunications sector

India has long been wary that telecommunications firms from China and the US would come to dominate the sector. After the June 2020 border skirmish with China, India has redoubled its efforts to limit the influence of Chinese firms on its networks, while at the same time relying on funding from China and the US to become an international leader in its own right in 5G technology.     

The “dictator’s endgame”: Explaining military behavior in nonviolent anti-incumbent mass protests

This article introduces a configurative theory to explain military reactions to nonviolent mass protests in dictatorships. An empirical analysis of three cases of such “dictators endgames” (Burma in 1988, Sudan in 1985, and East Germany in 1989), shows that militaries will defend the dictator against the masses if the military leadership’s physical and economic well-being is linked to the dictator’s survival in office. In turn, military leaders will defect from the regime incumbent only if the alternatives of siding with the opposition or staging a coup d’état is expected to be more beneficial to their interests than staying loyal to the regime.     

Joseph’s Squinting Eye: Race and Individualism in Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country

Peter Matthiessen’s novel Shadow Country offers a fictionalized account of the life of real-life character Edgar Watson. Matthiessen’s portrayal illustrates Jack Turner’s argument in Awakening to Race that atomistic individualism both justifies an individual’s success as a product of that person’s hard work and masks the racial inequality on which that success is actually predicated. Turner advocates an “awakening to race” as an important step toward replacing atomistic individualism with democratic individualism in American society. Matthiessen’s work deepens Turner’s analysis by showing that the whiteness of Watson’s atomistic individualism is inflected by masculinity. Further, Matthiessen depicts the difficulty of awakening to race for many white Americans. The Edgar Watson narrative serves to show that while closing one’s eyes to race may appear to be an advantage for most white people, not awakening to race actually exacts a devastating psychological tax. That kind of insight, which approaching political theory through literature affords, may help white Americans circumvent psychological mechanisms of denial and acknowledge the difficult history of their country.     

Comment on Christina Gerhardt’s “Germany’s Renewable Energy Shift: Addressing Climate Change”

Christina Gerhardt’s claim about Germany’s energy policy leading the way toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and therefore providing a model for other nations is confronted with actual data for roughly the past fifteen years. It is shown that the data does not support the claim.     

China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea

China's defiance of the arbitration tribunal ruling overwhelmingly rejecting its extensive territorial claims in the South China Sea has exposed competition between the United States and China, attracting regional states into their respective strategic orbits. China's attempt to challenge America's traditional position as the regional maritime power is gaining strength.     

Reconciliation Arguments in John Rawls’s Political Philosophy

Abstract

Recently debates about the worth of “ideal theory” have directed attention to the functions that an account of a perfectly just society can serve. One function is that of “reconciliation”: learning that a seemingly undesirable feature of the social world would exist even in the perfectly just society can show us the value that it has in the present as well. John Rawls has emphasized reconciliation as among the roles of political philosophy. For instance, Rawls claims that his theory of justice can reconcile us to the pluralism of liberal democracies. In this essay, I argue that Rawls’s political theory also can reconcile the inhabitants of liberal democratic societies to the fact that such societies may be cognitively confusing on account of their complexity. Then I contend that Rawls’s work offers valuable theoretical resources for analysing a society’s transparency or lack thereof.     

Levi’s Auschwitz and Dante’s Hell

On reading Primo Levi’s Holocaust memoir If This is a Man, one is immediately struck by its literary quality, and especially its generous use of Dante’s Inferno, both of which point to the more general problem of Holocaust witnessing. This paper focuses on Levi’s reasons for using Dante’s poem in particular to communicate his experience. Levi’s choice of Inferno is pointed, not only because of the obvious trope of existence in Hell, but also because Levi conceived of Auschwitz as an experiment designed to destroy the “human,” created in part, at least in the West, by Dante’s poem. What I will be suggesting is that Levi emphasizes the distinctions between his and Dante’s experiences by including in his conversation with Dante’s Inferno (paradoxically) his rejection of that conversation. There may or may not be something “human” which persists after Auschwitz, and the only way to ask this question, without preconceiving an answer, is to dramatize silence. The resultant ambiguity urges readers to, as Levi puts it, “participate in” the events described and/or dramatized.