Socialist Asia Research Articles

Exploring a Public Interest Definition of Corruption: Public Private Partnerships in Socialist Asia

As conventionally understood, corruption relies on a set of universally agreed rules that determine what constitutes the appropriate allocation of organizational resources. This article explores whether rule-based approaches to corruption are applicable where business organizations, such as public private partnerships (PPPs), and the public fundamentally disagree about what constitutes an appropriate allocation of resources. Drawing on empirical research about PPPs in Vietnam, this article compares how government, business organizations, and the public conceptualize the transfer of public assets into private ownership. It argues that a public interest approach to corruption is needed where PPPs privatize public assets within the law, but against the express wishes of the public.

Transforming Land‐Taking Disputes in Socialist Asia: Engaging an Authoritarian State

Few studies have responded to the calls by sociolegal scholars to explore how disputes evolve. This article takes up the challenge by examining how intermediaries in socialist Asia resolve land‐taking disputes that are intractable for administrative appeals and courts. Exploring alternatives to state‐based dispute resolution is a pressing issue for conflicts that pit citizens against authoritarian regimes. Using in‐depth interviews, this article investigates how intermediaries such as retired state officials navigate in and around authoritarian regimes, flattening power asymmetries between citizens and land officials. This analysis draws from, links, and advances three literatures that examine dispute resolution in different ways: the sociolegal “naming, blaming, and claiming” literature examines the trajectory of disputes, regulatory studies use legitimacy expectations to analyze how disputants evaluate and prioritize competing regulatory frameworks, and the collective identity literature analyzes how communities respond to disputes. This article contributes to the literature by developing a theoretical framework that explains how intermediaries circumvent conceptual differences and transform disputes. The findings compel researchers to consider the use of intermediaries as an alternative to state‐sponsored dispute resolution in authoritarian settings.

Transforming Land-Taking Disputes in Socialist Asia: Engaging an Authoritarian State

Few studies have responded to the calls by sociolegal scholars to explore how disputes evolve. This article takes up the challenge by examining how intermediaries in socialist Asia resolve land‐taking disputes that are intractable for administrative appeals and courts. Exploring alternatives to state‐based dispute resolution is a pressing issue for conflicts that pit citizens against authoritarian regimes. Using in‐depth interviews, this article investigates how intermediaries such as retired state officials navigate in and around authoritarian regimes, flattening power asymmetries between citizens and land officials. This analysis draws from, links, and advances three literatures that examine dispute resolution in different ways: the sociolegal “naming, blaming, and claiming” literature examines the trajectory of disputes, regulatory studies use legitimacy expectations to analyze how disputants evaluate and prioritize competing regulatory frameworks, and the collective identity literature analyzes how communities respond to disputes. This article contributes to the literature by developing a theoretical framework that explains how intermediaries circumvent conceptual differences and transform disputes. The findings compel researchers to consider the use of intermediaries as an alternative to state‐sponsored dispute resolution in authoritarian settings.

Sarah Turner, ed. Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia

Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork in Upland Socialist AsiaSarah Turner, ed.Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2013, 320p.One of most striking changes observed while working in uplands of Laos over past decade is rapid growth in number of tourists, as ecotourism and minority cultural experiences become increasingly popular. The opening of these areas to tourism seems to indicate that a significant barrier has been removed in socialist countries of mainland Southeast Asia. Recognition of cash income that can be derived from tourism has certainly made region's landscapes and people more accessible to those who are interested. With political stability and economic opening, researchers' access to these regions has also become easier over decades. However, as Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork in Upland Socialist Asia illustrates, challenges to conducting ethnographic research in this region remain formidable.This volume's most valuable contribution is way it unfolds and then fills in framework of dilemma. The chapters are a rich selection of many difficulties that ethnography faces in this region, although authors come at their studies from primarily anthropology and geography. In addition to well-known problems associated with spending extended time in places that are difficult to travel to and lack many of basics that are taken for granted in researchers' home countries, at center of these personal stories is political minefield that one must navigate in order to get approval for, carry out, and maintain relationships within, field-based research within socialist administrative structures of Vietnam, China, and Laos. Here, uplands means minorities, and this immediately puts us in a politically sensitive landscape of extreme complexity. Not only is it difficult for researchers to get there and do their work, but also it is risky and dangerous for local people, including both villagers and officials, to participate in telling of local stories and writing of ethnography.Relationships with officials come out in all stories. In different ways, we learn how quickly loses its salience when we start to approach field, as Communist Party and line ministries often tell us very different things. These two hands of the government frequently do not know what each other is doing, perhaps pointing to an inherent tension between red stamp and gold star. Indeed, fact that there is never one monolithic cannot be emphasized enough in these countries.Neither is boundary between and citizen obvious or reliable. Arriving in village, our informants often become our friends, and may also be official representatives of some part of officialdom. The way we perceive our roles and responsibilities, across personal and professional divide, is a source of ongoing stress. The chapters of this book offer new insights on old question of how one embeds oneself in a community, striving to observe from as close a vantage point as possible, yet struggles to maintain some sort of objectivity in those observations.The 15 chapters of fieldwork dilemma are organized into three sections, which provide an introduction to book's approach, an engaging body of case study reflections, and final discussion of positionality project in this specific region. In Part 1 Heading to Field, Sarah Turner sets stage with Dilemmas and Detours: Fieldwork with Ethnic Minorities in Upland Southwest China, Vietnam, and Laos, introducing us to tradition of reflexive discussion of position of field researcher that has grown and deepened since 1980s. Jean Michaud then provides a review of minority policies in three countries in Comrades of Minority Policy in China, Vietnam, and Laos, taking us through pre-Socialist, core-Socialist, and reform eras. …

Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia

Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia

Resolving Land Disputes in East Asia: Exploring the Limits of Law

1. Resolving land disputes in East Asia: exploring the limits of law John Gillespie and Hualing Fu Part I. Theorizing Land Disputes in Socialist Asia: 2. Property rights, commodification, and land disputes in contemporary Socialist Asia Frank Upham Part II. China Case Studies: 3. Legal and institutional analysis of land expropriation in China Lei Chan 4. The judicial role in land-taking cases Jie Cheng 5. Contending conceptions of ownership and property in urbanizing China Eva Pils 6. What does Wukan offer? Land-taking, law, and dispute resolution Hualing Fu 7. Protest-supported housing demolition litigation and social change in China Xin He 8. Courts and political stability: mediating rural land disputes Hau Shao and Susan Whiting 9. Power and rule by law in rural China: state-initiated mediation in land disputes Changdon Zhang and Christopher Heurlin Part III. Vietnam Case Studies: 10. An historical overview of Vietnamese land law and dispute resolution Toan Le and Nguyen Hung Quang 11. Narrating law disputes in three Vietnamese communities John Gillespie Part IV. Taiwan Case Studies: 12. An overview of Taiwanese land law and dispute resolution Po-Fang Tsai and Duan Lin 13. Customary law and modern society: land disputes of Jisigongye (ancestral worship property) in Taiwan Duan Lin and Po-Fang Tsai Part V. Hong Kong Case Studies: 14. An overview of Hong Kong land law and dispute resolution Say H. Goo 15. The small house policy and Tso and Tong land: finding the interface between State and customary land in Hong Kong Say H. Goo 16. Flexibly applying the law to regulate illegal buildings in Hong Kong Alice Lee.

From Peace to the Panthers: PRC Engagement with African-American Transnational Networks, 1949-1979

The image of a globe divided into ‘blocs’, ‘camps’, ‘systems’, or even ‘worlds’ is familiar to histories of the Cold War. Less common are studies which focus on transnational relations spanning the gulf between the Soviet Union and United States of America, and rarer still are accounts exploring patterns of exchange between the US and socialist Asia. This article focuses on an overlooked chapter in the history of Cold War contact between the US and the People’s Republic of China—trips to the PRC made by African-American dissidents, peace activists, and black nationalists and internationalists during the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to recent attention to the Cold War ‘battle for hearts and minds’ in Asia, it is now well-established that the PRC was not closed off to influences from the US and its allies during this critical period in global geopolitics. 1 On the contrary, information and disinformation campaigns, cultural exchanges, and covert person-to-person recruitment carried out by both sides not only reshaped popular perceptions of the conflict, but also sustained the movement of people and ideas. Radio Peking and Voice of America vied for control of public opinion, while lesser-known organizations like the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries—which in style and function was akin to Soviet predecessors VOKS and Intourist— facilitated programmes of travel and exchange. 2 These latter patterns of cross-bloc contact were not reciprocated by the US, but through them a slow trickle of US citizens reached the PRC and, as a result, were introduced to life on the other side of the ‘bamboo curtain’. These individuals included African-American reporter William Worthy, intellectual and activist

Commentary: Theorising Dialogical Property Rights in Socialist East Asia

Economic and political reforms have triggered the return of individual property in socialist Asia brought these countries into the globalized economy that is characterized by legally protected property rights. Reforms have also provoked debate in the media, academic circles, and among state regulators and landholders about market values and social values, legal rights to property and how to balance infrastructure development with private interests. This article proposes a theoretical framework for considering how dialogical exchanges shape the way states respond these social problems generated by land reforms.

How Far is Indochina from ASEAN?

The enlargement of ASEAN to include the Indochinese countries is an important step in the creation of an integrated Southeast Asian marketplace. Nevertheless, the divergent levels of economic development between these countries will pose important challenges for the acceding countries as well as for ASEAN itself. This article considers the economic of the Indochinese countries from the ASEAN norm and ponders the implications of this divergence from the perspective of regional integration, with the experience of the European Union (EU) and the Central and Eastern European countries as a yardstick. I. Introduction Except for North Korea, the Indochinese countries' are the last countries in Asia to emerge from economic backwardness. Political isolation, captiveness in the economic system of central planning and autarky, and civil war have been powerful obstacles against capital formation and economic growth in Indochina for more than two decades. Now, after the demise of the ancien regime, Indochina has been released from external (Soviet Union) subordination. This is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for take-off. Since economic liberalization is (correctly) purported to shape fundamentally political weights, overcoming politically-rooted internal resistance against market opening is still an unfinished job. Yet, time is on the side of the reformers. Political leaders in Indochina increasingly understand that market opening in low-income, unregulated countries neighbouring vibrant emerging markets will more rapidly promote economic recovery than in over-industrialized (as a heritage of the socialist system), highlyregulated Central and Eastern European countries neighboured by low-growth high income countries. Hence, if the transition period in former socialist Asia is shorter than in former socialist Europe, and there are good arguments why this can be expected (Sachs and Woo 1994; Diehl 1994), political leaders with high time preference rates will not oppose market opening. This can be expected since market opening strengthens their tax base and allows them to nourish political entitlements of their political clientele without depressing real incomes of the mass of population. In this situation, regional co-operation within ASEAN offers a helpful hand for market networking, access to know-how and risk capital, and institution building at easier terms than is provided by joining the multilateral institutions. The latter requires a process which is more tedious given higher political and economic hurdles imposed by non-Asian countries and the legal complexities of multilateral institutions. This article reviews and evaluates which arguments for integrating Indochina into ASEAN can be derived from the new theoretical literature treating regionalism as an endogenous response to the development of the multilateral trading system (Section II). Section III investigates the degree of divergence between the two regions, which has increased over the entire life span of ASEAN, and identifies leading indicators of emerging convergence attributable to policy changes and the transformation of economic structures in Indochina. Comparisons to the EU and its eastern neighbours are drawn. Section IV stylises the distance between AFTA and the most advanced Indochinese economy, Vietnam, in terms of trade policies. Section V integrates the theoretical discussion introduced in Section II and assesses its practical relevance for Indochina and ASEAN enlargement. Section VI gives some concluding remarks. II. Small Countries Linking up to Successful Integration Schemes: The Underpinnings of a Qualitative New Regionalism The underpinnings of new regionalism have been introduced by Ethier (1996) as follows: Multilateral liberalization among OECD countries and the NIEs is so advanced (at least with respect to trade in manufactures) that the old Vinerian dichotomy of trade creation versus trade diversion has lost much of its empirical relevance. …