Chinas Governance Puzzle: Enabling Transparency and Participation in a Single-Party State by Jonathan R. Stromseth,Edmund J. Malesky,and Dimitar D. Gueorguiev

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

The Chinese cultural revolution revisited: The role of the nemesis

This paper takes issue with the tendency to ‘reduce’ the Cultural Revolution to elite conflict, specifically the ‘two‐line struggle’ between Mao and his erstwhile heir apparent, Liu Shaoqi. There was elite conflict before the Cultural Revolution but the basic reason for the elite split was the Cultural Revolution itself, which Liu Shaoqi and most other members of his generation of senior officials strongly opposed until Mao reprimanded them. Liu was subsequently made the focal ‘human target’ as an expedient designed to unify the movement against a common adversary. Although unsuccessful in coordinating the movement, his role as nemesis infused the movement with negative meaning as its more positive goal of reviving a revolutionary ‘spirit’ was discredited by Red Guard excesses. Liu Shaoqi leaves an ambiguous legacy, consisting on the one hand of a pragmatic endorsement of economic and social reform that has since become extremely successful, and on the other hand of a classic defense of Confucian‐Leninist ideals of organizational rectitude that have proved difficult to resuscitate.     

Taiwan as a Factor in China's Quest for National Identity

The premise of this paper is that China has a divided national identity, characteristic of a category of nation-states divided for political reasons since World War II. Until 1999, responsibility for this sense of national division could be diffused, but since the retrocession of Hong Kong and Macao, frustration and blame have focused on Taiwan, the last remaining symbol of China's ‘national humiliation’. Characteristic of such a divided identity are ambivalent feelings, aiming on the one hand to idealize and desire to incorporate the ‘missing’ or ‘lost’ segment of the nation, and on the other to punish it for refusing to return. It is important to understand that Chinese feelings about Taiwan are not a simple reflection of empirical developments on the island, but also project latent ideas about China's own unresolved national identity. China's attempts to overcome this division have undergone several changes, making significant progress while encountering difficult (and as yet still insuperable) obstacles.     

American Asia Policy and the U.S. Election

This article reviews post-Cold War U.S./Asia policy and its potential electoral impact even as the United States selects its future foreign policy leadership and course of direction. This essay is presented in three parts: the first focuses on the U.S. security architecture in the Asian region, a brief second section on the relevance of recent changes in regional political economy, and the third attempts to determine how this emerging economic-security model might dovetail with perceived American political interests at a time of national resolution.     

The Sino-Russian Strategic Partnership

The Sino-Russian Astrategic partnership, formed after decades of rancorous verbal (and sometimes lethal) dispute, we find to be genuine, bespeaking a genuine desire on both sides to put the past behind them and forge a more friendly and mutually profitable relationship. Certainly there are underlying problems and suspicions, but the painstakingly institutionalized, multi-stranded network of exchange and consultation seems quite capable of containing areas of friction. Though primarily oriented to bilateral concerns, the partnership also has a more ambitious international agenda, oriented essentially to the protection of national sovereignty from the forces of globalism and human rights, as typically symbolized by the United States.     

The Sino-Japanese-Russian triangle

This paper attempts to understand the relations between three important actors in Northeast Asia — China, Russia, and Japan — since the end of the Cold War. Whereas the political changes attending the collapse of the communist bloc have opened new foreign policy opportunities to all three actors, only China and Russia have been quick to move on them. Japan’s relative inflexibility, attributable to its alliance with the US on the one hand and its territorial dispute with Russia on the other, has had the effect of impeding the application of triangular diplomacy. Editor ofAsian Survey, has written or editedSino-Soviet Normalization and Its International Implications (1992),China’s Quest for National Identity (with Samuel Kim, 1993), and many other analyses of Chinese domestic and foreign policy. His most recent book (with Haruhiro Fukui and Peter N.S. Lee) isInformal Politics in East Asia (Cambridge, 2000).