Performance Legitimacy Research Articles

Vietnam's Security Objectives in Mekong Basin Governance

The paper examines Vietnam's foreign policy as it translates into strategies toward subregional cooperation in the Mekong Basin. Using transboundary water cooperation as an example, the article argues that Vietnam's prime motivation in Mekong River cooperation is economic development for performance legitimacy. Environmental issues are raised, but only in relation to powerful upstream countries, while Vietnam itself poses similar challenges to less powerful downstream countries. The need for performance legitimacy thus conveys all relevance to the economically oriented Greater Mekong Subregion, while the Mekong River Commission, a basin organization with a mandate to combine economic development with environmental considerations, is sidelined.

Legitimacy‐Building in the Macau special administrative region: Colonial legacies and reform strategies

The retrocession of Macau to Mainland China's sovereignty since December 20, 1999 has initiated an unprecedented process of legitimacy‐building in the new Special Administrative Region. The Chief Executive, Edmund Ho, has implemented a multiplicity of reform strategies for the sake of consolidating his legitimacy. The twilight of the Portuguese colonial era was plagued by a rapid deterioration in law and order and the persistence in public maladministration, thus weakening the departing colonial regime's performance legitimacy seriously. As such, the political environment was conducive to Ho's herculean efforts at establishing his performance legitimacy. While the new Chief Executive's procedure legitimacy was enhanced by his election from an Election Committee composed of political elites, Ho's performance legitimacy has been buttressed by depoliticisation, economic development, civil service reforms, and new constitutional conventions. The abolition of the Municipal Councils in 2000 ran the risk of delegitimising the Ho regime. Yet, such delegitimisation was by no means serious given the relatively weak political opposition. Still, in the face of a more active and assertive citizenry, political reforms will have to be pondered and implemented by the post‐colonial regime in Macau. It will be necessary for the Macau government to utilise democratic reforms in a bid to preempt the increasingly vociferous demands for more participatory channels. The case of Macau corroborates the existence of a dialectical process of legitimisation, which has been strengthened mainly by depoliticisation and economic development, and delegitimisation, which is looming in the midst of a steadily growing political activeness on the part of the Macau people.

The politics of ‘lifelong learning’ in post‐1997 Hong Kong

This article is concerned with the politics of lifelong learning policy in post‐1997 Hong Kong (HK). The paper is in four parts. Continuing Education, recast as ‘lifelong learning’, is to be the cornerstone of the post‐Handover education reform agenda. The lineaments of a familiar discourse are evident in the Education Commission policy documents. However, to view recent HK education policy just in terms of an apparent convergence with global trends would be to neglect the ways in which the discourse of lifelong learning has been tactically deployed to serve local political agendas. In the second part of this paper, I outline what Scott has called HK’s ‘disarticulated’ political system following its retrocession to China and attempts by an executive‐led administration to demonstrate ‘performance legitimacy’—through major policy reforms—in the absence of (democratic) political legitimacy. Beijing’s designation of HK as a (depoliticized) ‘economic’ city within greater China must also be taken into account. It is against this political background that the strategic deployment of a ‘lifelong learning’ discourse needs to be seen. In the third section of this paper, I examine three recent policy episodes to illustrate how lifelong learning discourse has been adopted and has evolved to meet changing circumstances in HK. Finally, I look at the issue of public consultation. The politics of education policy in HK may be seen to mirror at a micro‐level, the current macro‐level contested interpretations of HK’s future polity.

Vietnam in 2002: On the Road to Recovery

Vietnam underwent important changes in 2002. Most notably, the state and Party showed signs of increasing awareness of performance legitimacy as a basis for ongoing political legitimacy. Responses included public statements in favor of the private sector, a reshuffling of cabinet positions, as well as stepped-up efforts to end corruption. A series of events this year, ranging from the country's first trade war to tensions with its important trade partner, Japan, also made clear the growing importance of international political economic factors in shaping domestic politics. All in all, the year has been a successful one for Vietnam.

Governing Hong Kong: Legitimacy, Communication and Political Decay. By Lo Shiu-hing. [New York: Nova Science, 2001. xii+349 pp. $69.00. ISBN 1-59033-095-1.

This book argues that the HKSAR government has encountered a crisis of performance legitimacy. Legitimacy, according to Huntington, has procedure and performance aspects. As the HKSAR's Chief Executive is not directly elected by universal suffrage, his procedure legitimacy is relatively weak and he has to rely on performance to buttress legitimacy. Unfortunately, from July 1997 to April 2001, the performance legitimacy of the HKSAR government was plagued by mismanagement of the civil service and of various crises.

A state-led nationalism: The patriotic education campaign in post-Tiananmen China

The decline of Communism after the end of the post-Cold War has seen the rise of nationalism in many parts of the former Communist world. In countries such as the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, nationalism was pursued largely from the bottom up as ethnic and separatist movements. Some observers also take this bottom-up approach to find the major cause of Chinese nationalism and believe that “the nationalist wave in China is a spontaneous public reaction to a series of international events, not a government propaganda.” (Zhang, M. (1997) The new thinking of Sino–US relations. Journal of Contemporary China, 6(14), 117–123). They see Chinese nationalism as “a belated response to the talk of containing China among journalists and politicians” in the United States and “a public protest against the mistreatment from the US in the last several years.” (Li, H. (1997) China talks back: anti-Americanism or nationalism? Journal of Contemporary China, 6(14), 153–160). This position concurs with the authors of nationalistic books in China, such as The China That Can Say No: Political and Sentimental Choice in the Post-Cold War Era (Song, Q., Zhang Z., Qiao B. (1996) Zhongguo Keyi Shuo Bu (The China That Can Say No). Zhonghua Gongshang Lianhe Chubanshe. Beijing), which called upon Chinese political elites to say no to the US, and argue that the rise of nationalism was not a result of the official propaganda but a reflection of the state of mind of a new generation of Chinese intelligentsia in response to the foreign pressures in the post-Cold War era. Indeed, Chinese nationalism was mainly reactive sentiments to foreign suppressions in modern history, and this new wave of nationalist sentiment also harbored a sense of wounded national pride and an anti-foreign (particularly the US and Japan) resentment. Many Chinese intellectuals gave voice to a rising nationalistic discourse in the 1990s (Zhao, S. (1997) Chinese intellectuals' quest for national greatness and nationalistic writing in the 1990s. The China Quarterly, 152, 725–745). However, Chinese nationalism in the 1990s was also constructed and enacted from the top by the Communist state. There were no major military threats to China's security after the end of the Cold War. Instead, the internal legitimacy crisis became a grave concern of the Chinese Communist regime because of the rapid decay of Communist ideology. In response, the Communist regime substituted performance legitimacy provided by surging economic development and nationalist legitimacy provided by invocation of the distinctive characteristics of Chinese culture in place of Marxist–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. As one of the most important maneuvers to enact Chinese nationalism, the Communist government launched an extensive propaganda campaign of patriotic education after the Tiananmen Incident in 1989. The patriotic education campaign was well-engineered and appealed to nationalism in the name of patriotism to ensure loyalty in a population that was otherwise subject to many domestic discontents. The Communist regime, striving to maintain authoritarian control while Communist ideology was becoming obsolete in the post-Cold War era, warned of the existence of hostile international forces in the world perpetuating imperialist insult to Chinese pride. The patriotic education campaign was a state-led nationalist movement, which redefined the legitimacy of the post-Tiananmen leadership in a way that would permit the Communist Party's rule to continue on the basis of a non-Communist ideology. Patriotism was thus used to bolster CCP power in a country that was portrayed as besieged and embattled. The dependence on patriotism to build support for the government and the patriotic education campaign by the Communist propagandists were directly responsible for the nationalistic sentiment of the Chinese people in the mid-1990s. This paper focuses on the Communist state as the architect of nationalism in China and seeks to understand the rise of Chinese nationalism by examining the patriotic education campaign. It begins with an analysis of how nationalism took the place of the official ideology as the coalescing force in the post-Tiananmen years. It then goes on to examine the process, contents, methods and effectiveness of the patriotic education campaign. The conclusion offers a perspective on the instrumental aspect of state-led nationalism.

The defensive regime and modernization

This paper argues against both conservative and liberal theories of modernization expressed in the “new authoritarianism debate” on the eve of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement. The paper argues that a defensive authoritarian regime, that is a regime that can only rely on and is able to base its survival on performance legitimacy, can lead a successful modernization. Comparing development experiences of historical Taiwan to that of the current mainland China, this paper analyzes the historical background, sources of constraints as well as autonomies of the state power that facilitated the formation of defensive regimes in the historical Taiwan and the current mainland China.

Leadership in School Administration—What Constitutes Performance Legitimacy?

How do school staff members judge a principal's leadership ability? This author suggests that the prin cipal is judged on the basis of performance legitimacy, the congruence between expected and actual leader ship behavior.