Asian Regimes Research Articles

MEASURING THE REACH OF ASIAN REGIONAL FOOD REGIMES IN THE WTO ERA

abstract Although the food regime concept has become an important approach for addressing the global food trade, most of its applications have utilized qualitative methods. This article applies a quantitative social network analysis (SNA) and a more-than-qualitative relational approach, drawing from the geography literature to explore regional food regimes in Asia in the World Trade Organization (WTO) era. Employing data from the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT) and the Design of Trade Agreements (DESTA) project database, this paper’s analysis of the governance of Asian regional vegetable trade networks reveals the multiplicity inherent in food regimes under the WTO. In this context, the topologies of food regimes—including degree centrality, betweenness centrality, and closeness centrality—reveal the emergence of a multi-polar food system in Asia.

Doing Family in “Times of Migration”: Care Temporalities and Gender Politics in Southeast Asia

The prevailing labor migration regime in Asia is underpinned by rotating-door principles of enforced transience, where low-wage migrant labor gains admission into host nation-states based on short-term, time-limited contracts and where family reunification and permanent settlement at destination are explicitly prohibited. In this context, we ask how migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian “source” countries—Indonesia and the Philippines—sustain family life in the long-term absence of one or both parents (often mothers). Through temporal concepts of rhythm, rupture, and reversal, we focus on how temporal modalities of care for left-behind children intersect with gendered power geometries in animating transnational family politics around care. First, by paying heed to the structuring effects of rhythm on social life, we show how routinized care rhythms built around mothers as caregivers have a normalizing and naturalizing effect on the conduct of social life and commonplace understanding of family well-being. Second, we explore the potential rupture to care rhythms triggered by the migration of mothers turned breadwinners and the extent to which gendered care regimes are either conserved, reconstituted, or disrupted in everyday patterns and practices of care. Third, we examine the circumstances under which gender role reversal becomes enduring, gains legitimacy among a range of poly care rhythms, or is quickly undone with the return migration of mothers in homecoming. The analysis is based primarily on research on Indonesian and Filipino rural households conducted in 2017 using paired life story interviews with children and their parental or nonparental adult caregivers.

Drugs and drug wars as populist tropes in Asia: Illustrative examples and implications for drug policy

BackgroundThe Philippines may be the face of today's ‘drug wars’, but its experience is by no means exceptional - as the contemporary examples of Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka show. In the early 2000s Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra also embarked on a ‘drug war’ with striking parallels to the Philippines in terms of its human toll and failed outcomes. This paper uses the framework of populism - defined as a political style - to survey punitive drug regimes in Asia and make sense of their social and political efficacies. It identifies the divisions mobilized and reinforced by populists as well as the ways in which they perform and spectacularize national crises. MethodsDrawing from journalistic and scholarly sources, as well as official documents, four case studies are presented: two historical (1970s Philippines and 2000s Thailand) and two contemporary (Bangladesh and Indonesia) to show how this style travels across the region. FindingsWhile drug wars can be understood in terms of the moral panics that surround them, this paper highlights the role of individual political actors who mobilize these panics by dramatizing crises, forging divisions, and making knowledge claims about drugs and the people who use them. Particularly for the region's ‘drug wars’, common elements include the conflation of the ‘drug menace’ with ethnic, economic ‘others’ - as well as misleading or exaggerated epidemiological and medical claims. ConclusionIf, as demonstrated by the illustrative examples in this article, those who choose to invoke drugs do so by making knowledge claims and forging divisions, then possible responses include challenging those claims (and providing evidence to do), uncoupling drugs with particular groups, and furnishing historical perspectives that belie populist claims of exceptional crises and the purported efficacy of punitive, dramatic responses.

What Democracy Indices Tell Us about Political Regimes in Asia

What Democracy Indices Tell Us about Political Regimes in Asia

Hostile Takeover Regimes in Asia: A Comparative Approach

The market for corporate control (operating through hostile takeovers) acts as a key corporate governance mechanism to discipline corporate managers. However, the process and substance of regulating hostile takeovers differs remarkably among various jurisdictions. Existing and influential scholarship has focused on the differences in hostile takeover regulation between the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), with the explanations being founded in interest group politics. We pose the question whether the theory can be extended outside of the US and the UK, particularly to their legal transplants in Asia. In the last few decades, several Asian jurisdictions have drawn heavily from the US and the UK when framing their own takeover regulation. Yet, Asia differs significantly from the US and the UK, particularly in respect of the much higher concentration of shareholdings among their publicly listed companies, and their institutions supporting takeover regulation, such as the securities regulator, the stock exchange and the judiciary. Thus, it is not surprising that the outcome of the substantive regulation also differs despite the legal transplantation, though there may be superficial formal convergence. The differences in takeover regulation and the reasons therefor have not been the subject matter of extensive study in the existing scholarship. Our study fills the gap by focusing on the regulation of hostile takeover regimes in Asia. In this article, drawing from an earlier work that studies, among others, takeover regulation in six significant Asian economies of China, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Korea and Singapore, we examine the differences in the takeover law and regulation between the exporting countries (US and the UK) and recipient countries (the six Asian economies), and we explain the reasons for the differences. In particular, we focus on three questions. First, what interest groups are relevant to the choice of initial takeover regulation in Asian economies? Second, after the selection has occurred, what are the reasons for the continued lack of functional convergence? Third, are there any unintended consequences of legal transplantation of the US or UK model of takeover regulation in the Asian economies? We argue that takeover regulation in Asia must be viewed through a lens that is different from the Anglo-American approach in view of the institutional factors that are at play when choices were (and are continuing to be) made. Our study has important implications on the academic debates on the efficacy of legal transplantations, comparative studies of hostile takeover regimes and the role of interest groups in shaping takeover regulation to a wider set of Asian countries than examined by current scholarship.

중국 근세Ⅰ] 연구주제의 다양화와 새로운 경향 : 송요금원사 회고와 전망 2016~2017

Over the last two years between 2016 and 2017, researchers in the Song-Liao-Jin-Yuan studies have greatly expanded the research scopes. They have dealt with not only the traditional research fields such as political and diplomatic history and socio-economic history but also the relatively new areas such as cultural history or history of Sino-Korean relations. This article mainly deals with the overall impression on the qualitative growth in the researches of the Song-Liao-Jin- Yuan studies. Lastly, I would like to mention two significant challenges to solve.BR Firstly, it is obvious that both the researchers and researches on the socio-economic history of the Song-Liao-Jin-Yuan studies have gradually declined since the early 2000s. Although it became conspicuous in the aftermath of obsolete socialism in the 1990s, it will be serious matter since a comprehensive understanding of the socio-economic history may become basis to carry out researches on various fields. Therefore, it is necessary to invigorate the field through finding a new detailed topic.BR Secondly, researches on the history of Sino-Korean relations also need to expand the range of the researches. The researchers will understand the relations between the Korean Dynasties and the Chinese ones more clearly if they see it from the broader perspective of the history of multilateral relations among the ancient East Asian regimes, which includes Kamakura Shogunate, Ryukyu Kingdom, and Tamra(Jeju). By doing so, for instance, we will find out the right answer to the problems that we could not have understood from the narrow perspective so far.

China’s silk road economic belt initiative in Central Asia: economic and security implications

The Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) initiative, launched by Xi Jinping in 2013 as the Central Asian component of the Eurasian Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is presented as a trade and infrastructural developmental initiative that benefits all to deliver stability. It consolidates Beijing’s existing economic investments and security-building measures, while launching new projects to link the regions of Central Asia and South Asia more closely with China and extend the arc of security westward and develop these as a transport corridor linking China to Europe. This article examines the interaction between China’s infrastructural investments and security dynamics in the Central Asian region, exploring why the BRI/SREB, presented by China as primarily as a developmental vision, is fraught with wide-ranging security implications. We examine the reception of China’s BRI/SREB in Central Asia focusing on the following three dimensions: (1) the lure of Chinese investments which makes SREB particularly attractive for Central Asian countries; (2) the securitization thrust of the Silk Road initiative which consolidates the power of the Central Asian regimes but also grants considerable role to China in managing security arrangements; (3) elite maneuvering between the lure of Chinese investments and appeasing popular anxieties about China’s growing influence. It points to the overall positive reception in the region to the aid and investment offered by China, while noting the variance in their responses based on the implications of SREB for their sovereignty and security and also concerns on whether the promised benefits of connectivity and development (a “win-win” scenario) will materialize. The article concludes by outlining the implications of China’s rising economic and security engagement in Central Asia and the close Sino-Russian partnership for European financial and security interests and highlights the areas of cooperation and complementarity between China and EU in the region.

Asia’s Conservative Moment: Understanding the Rise of the Right

ABSTRACTRecent scholarship has identified a new era of post-democracy or democratic crisis in the West, characterised by the increasing resort to authoritarian measures and the erosion of mechanisms such as representative parties and unions that link citizens and social forces with the political process. Conservative political movements, right-wing governments and populism have also emerged in the democratic states of the Asia-Pacific. The existing literature, with its focus on the crisis of social democratic institutions and forms of representative politics, provides inadequate frameworks for explaining these trends in the region. This article suggests that a better way of understanding the emergence of these new forms of political regime in Asia is to locate the origins of democratic crises in processes of global capitalist transformation and political incorporation and disincorporation. The articles in this special issue show that previously dominant modes of incorporation are fracturing under the conditions of neo-liberal capitalist transformation. In the wake of this fracturing, political elites have struggled to created new forms of political incorporation. This has inadvertently resulted in the sharpening of the conditions that give rise to political crisis. The political responses to crises have predominantly been conservative and have led to attempts to restructure the state to limit dissent and electoral competition.

The Central Asian Militants: Cannon Fodder of Global Jihadism or Revolutionary Vanguard?

Central Asians have long been present within the ranks of organisations linked to the global jihad movement, but has there been an acceleration in their recruitment in recent years? There is growing evidence of substantial numbers of Central Asians (mostly Uzbeks and Tajiks) present in Syria in the ranks of the Islamic State and of a number of organisations linked to Al-Qaida. There is also growing evidence of recruitment inside Kyrgizstan and Tajikistan at least (as opposed as among Central Asian emigrants). The authors argue that distrust towards information provided by the Central Asian regimes should not blind analysts towards an emerging trend, which has substantial destabilising potential. The factors driving this recruitment also seem to be much more complex than a rejection of the authoritarianism of the ruling elites.

Fear of floating in Asia and the credibility of true floaters?

Quite often, countries commit to free floating exchange rate (ER) regimes but do not allow their ERs to float freely, exhibiting a fear of floating. We revisit ER regimes in Asia following the work of Calvo and Reinhart (2002), and also develop a new flexibility index based on probabilities gauging interventions in FX market. In light of our findings, we cannot disregard the existence of fear of floating in Asia, and find that economies widely known as truly floating economies exhibit this fear too. Further, the results validate our concerns regarding the IMF’s methodology of regime classification intermingling credible inflation targeting with fear of floating.

A new financial order in Asia: Will a RMB bloc emerge?

The objective of this paper is three-fold. First, the monetary and exchange rate regimes of the Asian countries are described and analyzed. The degrees of flexibility in exchange rates and capital controls vary across countries. Some countries have adopted a flexible inflation targeting framework, while others have pursued exchange rate targeting. The paper presents a new result of a tradeoff between price stability and exchange rate stability in the hyperbolic relationship of Asian countries. Second, a framework that analyzes and quantifies the degree of currency internationalization is proposed and applied to the RMB. In every indicator, the RMB’s weight in private-sector international finance has grown in the last several years, both in the private and public sectors. In the settlement role of currency, the RMB is ranked 8th in the BIS survey and 7th in SWIFT usage. This paper exploits data of a recent period when the RMB became de-pegged from the USD and show some of the emerging Asian currencies co-moving with the RMB, more so than the USD. In the official sector, RMB is also increasing its weight. The Chinese central bank has extended the currency-swap agreements with 30-some countries, so that the RMB can be used for trade finance and liquidity assistance. The RMB is adopted as a composition currency of the Special Drawing Rights (SDR), effective in October 2016, with 10.92%, ranking number 3, surpassing the JPY and GBP. Finally, potential impending changes in the Asian monetary and exchange rate regimes in Asia are discussed. Projecting the growth of the Chinese economy into the future, the weight of the RMB in the financial markets will increase globally as well as in Asia.

The fatal affinity of the ‘Sonderweg’ revisited: The diffusion of emergency powers in Germany, Japan and Korea (1871–1987)

AbstractMany authoritarian regimes in Asia have utilized emergency powers to legitimize their measures of suppressing political opponents and maintaining power. In opposition to previous interpretations that categorize Asian experiences as ‘exceptional cases’ when compared to ‘normal’ Western liberal democracies, this article suggests that this issue should be viewed within the context of the broader ‘affinity’ of the ‘Sonderweg’ phenomenon. The paper compares Germany, Japan and Korea by examining the complex ‘diffusion’ processes of constitutional emergency powers and also by illuminating systemic affinities and fundamental differences. It argues that elites and technocrats in Germany, Japan and Korea exhibited diverging patterns in adopting, filtering and utilizing these constitutional powers.

Long Live the Tributary System! The Future of Studying East Asian Foreign Relations

Long Live the Tributary System!The Future of Studying East Asian Foreign Relations Saeyoung Park Keywords international relations, Westphalian system, Sinocentric world order 中華世界秩序, IR turn in history, David Kang, East Asia before the West, China’s rise, hegemony, Sino-speak, imperialism Almost a half century has passed since the publication of John King Fairbank’s edited volume, The Chinese World Order.1 Since then, the tributary system has come to serve as something of a synecdoche for pre-1900 East Asian international relations. Briefly, the “institutional and textual complex” known as the tributary system describes the practices, norms, and structures of East Asian foreign relations.2 As an aspirational “Chinese world order,” this hierarchical system cohered around the premise that China represented the apical center of civilization. The tributary system became a professional and canonical object of enquiry through Fairbank’s work during the mid-twentieth century, but it has older origins.3 The tributary [End Page 1] system as we know it was born in the moment of its imperial destruction—in the global harmonization of Westphalian norms, when “modern” diplomatic practices and ideas of sovereignty replaced preexisting East Asian regimes of international relations.4 In terms of its contemporary scholarly relevance, the tributary system’s capacity to inspire research outside of History and Area Studies no doubt makes it one of the field’s most famous exports. Yet, the very community of specialists that has given birth to it has also consistently exhibited an uneasy relationship with the tributary system. An object of critique from the moment of inception, a public and dissatisfied fine-tuning has characterized most of its existence; even its most well-known iteration, such as Fairbank’s Chinese World Order, is framed as a corrective response to enduring and persistent problems in tributary system literature.5 A flawed yet powerfully resonant paradigm, acceptance of the tributary system’s existence has been given most grudgingly. As recently as 2009, James Hevia remarked (in another introduction to a special issue) that their project had been motivated by John Wills Jr.’s observation that the “‘tribute system’ was a wreck” and one could wonder “if there was anything to be salvaged from it.”6 Optimistically and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I would like to start this HJAS special issue by “officially” declaring that the tributary system is not dead. Long live the tributary system! In fact, recent signs of life suggest a flourishing return far beyond the mere whispers of new perennial shoots. But readers need not fear, this special issue offers insights for both those [End Page 2] who are dismayed as well as those who are thrilled by the tributary system’s putative resurrection. But which tributary system’s health am I cheekily exalting in this essay? This question is tricky because the tributary system possesses multiple, contested, and overlapping dimensions. Some scholars posit the tributary system as (a) a historical, lived experience, (b) a research category of analysis, (c) an explanatory theory that organizes historical phenomena, and sometimes (d) a theoretical model that may have predictive applications. Hence, critical discourse first requires a determination of which tributary system is in play, as a scholar’s estimation of its historical accuracy and viability may not match that same scholar’s assessment of its power as an International Relations (IR) model. Some tributary systems never died and were never in danger of being ignominiously retired as an outdated topic.7 Disambiguating the congeries of tributary systems not only facilitates clear scholarly communication it also ensures efficacious critique that can travel across disciplinary spaces to audiences with variable concerns. The stakes in reappraising early modern East Asian international relations are not the same today as they were when John Wills led the first wave of revisionist scholarship on the Sinocentric world order. The past decade has witnessed a significant and transformative resurgence of interest in premodern foreign relations and the tributary system. This new “IR turn” has been driven primarily by scholars outside of History and early modern Area Studies.8 The IR turn’s interpretive scope has accommodated an enormous range of questions, including recent scholarship on the “American tributary system” as well as a...

Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War, by Sergey Radchenko

Our images of the international history of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, writes Sergey Radchenko in this excellent book, remain overwhelmingly dominated by the triumphs of Central and Eastern Europe. We remember the East German protesters who broke through the Berlin Wall, that object which, more than any other, marked the East–West division of the Cold War. The 1980s, according to that particular narrative, mark the journey from Communism to Europe. Yet, as Radchenko shows, ‘the Cold War ended differently in Asia than it did in Europe’. The Soviet-sponsored regime in Kabul aside, none of the Communist regimes in Asia collapsed. If ‘the power of the powerless’ triumphed over state socialism in Berlin, authoritarian power made clear the reverse message on Tiananmen Square. Perhaps most importantly, after nearly two decades of bitter enmity, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China reconciled their differences and achieved a normalisation of relations.

Mixing states of aerosols over four environmentally distinct atmospheric regimes in Asia: coastal, urban, and industrial locations influenced by dust.

Mixing can influence the optical, physical, and chemical characteristics of aerosols, which in turn can modify their life cycle and radiative effects. Assumptions on the mixing state can lead to uncertain estimates of aerosol radiative effects. To examine the effect of mixing on the aerosol characteristics, and their influence on radiative effects, aerosol mixing states are determined over four environmentally distinct locations (Karachi, Gwangju, Osaka, and Singapore) in Asia, an aerosol hot spot region, using measured spectral aerosol optical properties and optical properties model. Aerosol optical depth (AOD), single scattering albedo (SSA), and asymmetry parameter (g) exhibit spectral, spatial, and temporal variations. Aerosol mixing states exhibit large spatial and temporal variations consistent with aerosol characteristics and aerosol type over each location. External mixing of aerosol species is unable to reproduce measured SSA over Asia, thus providing a strong evidence that aerosols exist in mixed state. Mineral dust (MD) (core)-Black carbon (BC) (shell) is one of the most preferred aerosol mixing states. Over locations influenced by biomass burning aerosols, BC (core)-water soluble (WS, shell) is a preferred mixing state, while dust gets coated by anthropogenic aerosols (BC, WS) over urban regions influenced by dust. MD (core)-sea salt (shell) mixing is found over Gwangju corroborating the observations. Aerosol radiative forcing exhibits large seasonal and spatial variations consistent with features seen in aerosol optical properties and mixing states. TOA forcing is less negative/positive for external mixing scenario because of lower SSA. Aerosol radiative forcing in Karachi is a factor of 2 higher when compared to Gwangju, Osaka, and Singapore. The influence of g on aerosol radiative forcing is insignificant. Results emphasize that rather than prescribing one single aerosol mixing state in global climate models regionally and temporally varying aerosol mixing states should be included for more accurate assessment of aerosol radiative effects.

Strategic Censorship in a Hybrid Authoritarian Regime? Differential Bias in Malaysia's Online and Print Media

We analyze and compare three separate efforts to code bias in Malaysia's media and find strong empirical evidence of an ongoing and profound progovernment bias in coverage. We also find, however, significant variation in bias between different types of news outlets. While Malay and Anglophone sources tended to be strongly progovernment, Chinese-language and online outlets were far more impartial. We demonstrate that both the general bias and the variation in it are largely the result of two factors: (1) government censorship and (2) ownership structures that link many major outlets to the ruling coalition. These findings provide a detailed view of the struggle for media independence in a less-than-democratic regime and supply insight into media bias across both authoritarian and democratic regimes in Asia, as well as outside it.

Beyond the neoliberal orthodoxy: alternative financial policy regimes in Asia’s financial centers

This article conceptualizes the financial policy regimes of London, Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, in the process of comparing and contrasting the sociopolitical relations that exist within the four cities. Based on the data collected from extensive field research, I identify four distinct financial policy regimes. First, a combination of low state intervention and influential industry actors in London reflects a financial policy regime that features dominant industry interest groups. While Hong Kong similarly features low state intervention, its industry actors are not influential. In contrast, financial sector development in Singapore features a ‘cocreation’ of financial policies by a close-knit network of state and industry actors. Lastly, Shanghai’s financial policy regime is largely dominated by state actors from both the central and local levels. By delineating and analyzing the policy regimes of the four international financial centers (IFCs), this article provides the first step toward a clearer and more critical understanding of how sociopolitical relations impact IFC development. In the process, it extends the analysis of IFCs beyond conventional neoliberal understandings of economic development.

The Right of Return: Chinese displaced persons and the International Refugee Organization, 1947–56

AbstractThis article examines the rise of the international refugee regime in Asia, focusing on the work of the International Refugee Organization in repatriating overseas Chinese from mainland China back to their homes in Southeast Asia from 1947 to 1956. It looks both at how the International Refugee Organization inherited this repatriation project from its predecessor—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration—and its survival after a civil war installed a new, Communist government on the Chinese mainland. Doing so reveals the extent to which both Chinese governments had to rely on outside assistance to fulfil an important task of maintaining positive ties between Chinese abroad and the homeland. Using research from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives in Beijing and Taipei, as well as records from relevant parties in the British and American governments, this article places the repatriation programme and the larger efforts of the International Refugee Organization in Asia in a broader context of regional foreign relations and the origins of the Cold War.

Three Challenges in Comparative Studies of Care Regimes in Asia

Three Challenges in Comparative Studies of Care Regimes in Asia

Kill One to Warn One Hundred

Recent literature on “soft authoritarianism” has called into question the extent to which policy, rather than personality and patronage, sets the direction of elite politics in the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). This strand of thinking argues that the state’s direction toward “reform” is not as coherent as commonly believed, a relevant model for examining the role of the state-owned print and online press as an arm of Vietnam’s post-communist marketization project. It argues that Party leaders, facing a breakdown of consensus across the spectrum of political and business elites, are using the press in an attempt to manage a growing number of voices in the political system, but that reporting on many political and corruption scandals has simply become unmanageable for state leaders. Under this paradigm, policy debates between “reformers” and “conservatives” in Vietnam fall short of explaining press censorship. This semidemocratic concept of the media’s role opens up room for a wider understanding of civil society under transitional regimes in Asia. This paper draws on twenty-nine interviews with Vietnamese journalists, editors, media executives, Vietnamese and foreign journalism trainers, and government officials from 2010 to 2011, as well as an analysis of press coverage and internal newsroom documents.