Background. This article reports on pedagogical experiences of designing and teaching an active learning international relations (IR) course utilizing the classical board game DIPLOMACY, with added game elements and modified game rules to make the game better suited for educational purposes. Aim. Game adaptations include team play, a dedicated peace mediator team, altered win rules and a post-game debriefing discussion on different cultures of anarchy. These elements were designed to overcome a shortcoming that the game approximates a worldview akin to offensive realism, which is not practical in contemporary international relations, and also normatively objectionable to many IR scholars. Method. Teacher experiences designing and modifying the course, coupled with student feedback on the course concept from three consecutive years. Results. Student feedback has been exceedingly positive, with a 4.61 average grade (n = 210 grades) on a five-point Likert-type scale, where 1 signifies poor and 5 excellent. Conclusions. Through game modifications, students turned a game infamous for its backstabbing and breaking of promises into a game that resolves in a mediated and negotiated outcome. The findings suggest that DIPLOMACY can be useful beyond teaching the realist worldview, and adapted to create a more accurate microworld approximation of international relations.

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This paper reviews recent regulatory and policy changes that affect the Chinese central government's ownership and authority over the capital allocations of strategic state-owned enterprises (SOE). The paper examines the reform of the central government's relationship with key SOEs as a consequence of the establishment of the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) in 2003, the coming introduction of a centralised operating and budgeting system for SOEs, and the government's ongoing re-evaluation of its ownership policy. SASAC appears to have the potential to develop into a major actor in China's domestic capital allocation, with an active role in strategic financing and restructuring of key sectors of the Chinese economy. The data reviewed for this paper strongly suggests that the Chinese central government aims to retain significant ownership control over key SOEs and, by extension, over a major part of the domestic economy. The new operating and budgeting system is set to significantly enhance central government control over SOEs' capital allocation.

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The nature of the political party in Taiwan has been insufficiently problematized in recent writings on the island's elections. Based on field research this article argues that the informal structure of political support in Taiwan takes the shape of nested pyramid structures, built of successive dyadic support relations between politician and supporter and two politicians at different hierarchical levels, culminating in a handful of top political leaders. The political party is only the widest kind of support network, and in lower-level elections not the central agent. The dyads in Taiwan politics differ from traditional patron–client relations in being more dynamic, equal and voluntary. This informal political structure coupled with generally weak party loyalty and large benefits of incumbency produces pervasive party instability and subsequent election instability at higher election levels. The number of top political leaders and relations between them are critical in structuring the party scene.