Hong Kong as the ‘Neoliberal Exception’ of China: Transformation of Hong Kong Citizenship Before and After the Transfer of Sovereignty

The formation of Hong Kong citizenship was under tensions and struggles after the change of sovereignty in 1997. In spite of the limited political and social rights, many incidents showed that the promised civil rights were declining. More importantly, subject to the intensified transborder population mobility of Chinese citizens, there were public discourses addressing that the social rights of Hong Kong citizens were threatened. Protests in response to the intensified transborder population mobility were found, with the rightist public discourses advocating to conserve the essences of Hong Kong citizenship. Being the neoliberal exception of China, Hong Kong is positioned to contribute for China by its market economy, as well as the relatively well-established socio-economic institution. However, as this article argues, in spite of the logic of exception, i.e. the zoning technology that the state deploys, the intensified transborder population mobility and economic activities between the neoliberal exception and the sovereign state can lead to the struggles and contentions concerning the citizenship of the former.     

Building New Vital Mutual Interests for a Better Future: a commentary on Wang Jisi and Kenneth Lieberthal's Addressing US–China Strategic Distrust

This analysis of the dangerous forces increasingly dynamizing Beijing–Washington relations explains why the usual proposals for increasing the cooperative aspects of USA–PRC relations will not succeed. It builds on the policy analysis and policy proposals of others who understand what a disaster it would be if China–America relations were to continue to grow worse. It makes a suggestion for restructuring the institutions of the international political economy so as to construct fundamental over-lapping interests between America and China. The author finds that without some difficult and basic changes in the relations, worst case outcomes become ever more probable.     

Incomplete Democratization and the Outbreak of Military Disputes

Whereas most research on the democratic peace has focused on relations within pairs of states, research on the relationship between democratization and armed conflict has centered primarily on the behavior of individual states. Moreover, the existing literature has placed primary emphasis on explaining the effects of democratization on war, rather than military disputes more generally. In this article, we find that certain types of democratic transitions markedly increase the risk of such disputes within dyads, even when economic and political relations between states are taken into account. Particularly prone to violence are dyads in which either state undergoes an incomplete democratic transition; that is, a shift from an autocratic to a partially democratic (or anocratic) regime that stalls prior to the establishment of consolidated democratic institutions.     

Congressional Voting on Term Limits

Between 1990 and 1995,twenty-three states unilaterally imposedterm limits on their own delegations toCongress. In 1995 the House ofRepresentatives defeated a constitutionalamendment that would have limited the termsfor all of Congress. Only weeks later, theSupreme Court struck down the individualstate laws. In 1997 the House againbrought the issue to a vote, which alsofailed. This paper models congressionalvoting on term limits with a simple gamewithin an interest-group theory withlegislators as imperfect agents ofconstituents. The game foremost predictsthat members from term-limited states wouldbe more likely to support term limits inthe first vote but no more likely on thesecond vote. The empirical section employsprobit, multinomial logit, and orderedprobit maximum likelihood estimations toconfirm the stated hypotheses. Among otherresults, in particular both the joint andconditional probability of a `yea' on thefirst vote and a subsequent `nay' on thesecond vote is higher for members fromstates that had unilaterally self-imposedterm limits. The results are robust tomodel specification, estimator, andalternative sampling. Implications areproposed in the concluding comments.