No abstract

This study explains the ideational sources of China's proactive multilateral diplomacy towards Asian financial co-operation by employing a learning thesis. Challenging prominent materialist explanations (power-transition thesis, realist balancing thesis and economic utility thesis), this study argues that the collective learning of Chinese policy elites through cognitive dissonance, feedback effects and transnational persuasion explains much of the change in China's relational identity and philosophical beliefs regarding regional co-operation. These prior ideational shifts helped to determine China's behaviour change from its muted opposition to Asian financial co-operation in the 1990s to its active support of regional financial co-operation in the early 2000s, as evidenced in the emergence of the Chiang Mai Initiative, Chinese-Japanese-South Korean trilateral financial cooperation and the Asian Bond Fund Initiative. Chinese learning also suggests that more fundamental changes in China's national preference may make its support for Asian financial co-operation more consistent and stable in the foreseeable future than sceptics might anticipate.

Why does a re-emerging China pursue institutional strategies to expand its multilateral ties all over the world? This study explains the genesis of China’s new multilateral diplomacy toward Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. The central argument of the study is that many strands of structural arguments drawn from realist, liberal, and constructivist insights cannot provide complete explanations about China’s multilateral activism without recourse to cognitive feedback dynamics. China fed its regional experiences of multilateralism back into its global policy formation. This experiment-based approach has been a pervasive feature in Chinese multilateral diplomacy as well as Chinese domestic reforms during the post-Mao period. The cognitive feedback model developed in this study intends to complement the prominent structural explanations by identifying micro-level dynamics and seeks to contribute to today’s debate over power transition and international order.

No abstract

Under what conditions do unemployed youth engage in hostile collective action? To address this question, this study focuses on the youth unemployment of South Korea and Taiwan in comparative perspective. A high youth unemployment rate by itself is not necessarily a determinant of hostile collective outbursts, as in the case of South Korea. Instead, outbursts can occur in the context of other contributing factors. This article identifies three important ingredients of hostile outbursts of collective action: dysfunctional political institutions, generalized beliefs, and precipitating forces. These factors can explain different levels of political mobilization across South Korea and Taiwan, despite their similar structural constraints. The findings of this study will provide useful insights into how to manage the potential for hostile collective action, and the implications for populist movements and regional stability in East Asia.