Min-Hua Huang

How East Asians View the Rise of China

Its newly acquired status as the worlds second largest economy has entitled China to a more prominent role in global affairs, and increasingly, its behavior has drawn scrutiny from the world in ways that the country is ill-prepared for. The attention to Chinas rise, however, focuses not only on its economy but also on other aspects, including its military, diplomatic moves, domestic politics and its ‘soft power’, namely, its own image or self-projection and the worlds perception or attitudes toward China. And yet, there has been no systematic investigation to evaluate how the world views a rising China. In this article, the authors applied the latest dataset from the Asian Barometer Survey to investigate whether East Asians recognize and welcome the rise of China. The findings suggest that geographical and cultural proximity have a great impact on peoples perception of China. Countries which are territorially adjacent or culturally close to China tend to regard China as the most influential country in Asia. With the exception of Japan and Mongolia, most Asian countries hold positive views about the impact of China on the region. However, such benign evaluations are weaker in countries which have potential security conflicts with China, such as Taiwan and South Korea, when only the bilateral impact is considered. The overall picture shows that the rise of China has been largely recognized and welcomed by East Asians, despite some apprehension about Chinas strategic intentions to its neighboring countries.

Popular discontent, divided perceptions, and political polarization in Taiwan

Popular discontent with political performance has been a preeminent feature in Taiwanese politics since the first power alternation in 2000. Potential explanations include economic decline, deteriorating quality of democratic governance, and electoral over-competition. For an emerging democracy like Taiwan, the political experience under the Chen Shui-bian administration was a crucial test for the transition to a mature democracy. While popular discontent with various political agencies might convey different messages, the author argues that the synthetic outcome is a partisan-laden perception of political accountability, which led to serious political gridlock and ingrained partisan rivalry that could have jeopardized Taiwans fledgling democracy. More importantly, polarized politics in Taiwan under the Chen administration can be seen as a lesson, one that illustrates how the process of democratic consolidation can be possibly reversed in an emerging democracy.

Islam and Democracy: A Global Perspective

This article tries to answer the question of why many Islamic countries are far away from achieving democracy, while people in these countries have a faith in democracy as strong as those in Western societies. Two different hypotheses are proposed and tested. The symbolization hypothesis suggests that faith in democracy reflects cognitive mobilization for symbolic capital of Islam and moral justification of politics. The awareness hypothesis claims that faith in democracy reflects cognitive mobilization for better governance and political accountability. Applying hierarchical linear modeling, empirical findings show that the symbolization hypothesis is well-supported globally, while the evidence for the awareness hypothesis is very limited and not applicable to Islamic countries. The implication is that, while Islam is not the major factor contributing to the lack of democratic orientation, cultural factors do affect what people think about religion and politics, and that modernization theory still provides a powerful explanation to account for that cultural difference.

Procedural quality only? Taiwanese democracy reconsidered:

Over the last decade, a growing number of students of democracy have sought to develop means of framing and assessing the quality of democracy and identifying ways to improve the quality of democratic governance. In this article, we review the recent efforts to conceptualize and measure quality of democracy by way of introducing a comprehensive method for measuring some essential properties of liberal democracy. Next, we present an empirical assessment of the quality of democracy in Taiwan based on the sub-dimensions formulated by Morlino – specifically, rule of law, accountability, participation, competition, freedom, equality, and responsiveness. We find that in the areas of accountability, participation, and freedom, Taiwan has made considerable progress. However, Taiwan’s young democracy still has room for improvement in the areas of the rule of law, equality, and responsiveness.

How Can Political Culture Be a Useful Independent Variable

For the past four decades, Almond and Verba’s pioneering work, ″The Civic Culture″, has remained one of the most popular books in political science, despite many criticisms. Indeed, the continuing popularity of ″The Civic Culture ″in the academic community is evidence of its groundbreaking quality and subtlety in treating culture as an independent variable. However, the number of criticisms and the lack of alternative paradigms paradoxically reflect the poverty of originality and progress in this field. The key question not only lies in the methodological problem of variable formation, but also originates from the expedient treatment of culture as a residual category. In this article, I examine two major debates in political culture studies and argue that culture should be treated as an implicit logic internalized in people’ s mind as common knowledge. Finally, this article will demonstrate how to formulate political culture as a useful independent variable by using survey data from Pakistan and Morocco.