Political Order in Modern East Asian States

Xiaoming Huang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000556360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This text explains political change and the shaping of political order in modern East Asian states: China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

Examining the transformative role of power, authority, and political culture in the shaping of political order, this book:

• Describes the emergence of statist and pluralist political order in East Asia.
• Outlines the dual process of state-building and nation-building, revealing the transformative role of the state.
• Highlights the causes and consequences of the reversion to centralized political order, describing the structure and institutions of Cold War regimes in East Asian states.
• Explores the structural and institutional consequences of industrial development on politics and state in East Asian states.
• Discusses the methods and outcomes of the democratization movements in the 1980s and 1990s and public sector reforms in the 1990s and 2010s.
• Utilizes survey data and newly developed indicators to measure and reveal the shaping of national political culture in each East Asian state.
• Features structural, institutional, and normative analysis of political change in modern East Asia.

This will be an essential textbook for students of Political Science, International Relations, East Asian Politics and East Asian History, as well as policy analysts of East Asian states.

1 A Theory of Political Change

DOI: 10.4324/9781003171522-1

Political change has been a fascinating subject for political scientists as a good understanding of what drives political change can help us to interpret the present forms and colors of state and politics, and enable us to foresee where they evolve from here. Political changes in modern¹ East Asia have been overwhelmingly approached as instances of political modernization or political development, as informed by liberal, or more broadly, progressive ideals of the modern state.

The notion of political change here is more neutral. It is concerned with change in the relative coercive capabilities of influenctial political forces, and change in institutional mechanisms and procedures as well as behavioral norms and values in politics. Political change leads to the rise of political order where institutions and norms inform and, indeed, enforce a set of stable and executable authority relations among influential political forces contending for political domination. This notion of political change allows us to see the real dynamics that have driven political change and shaped political order in modern East Asia. It is in this broad framework that some of the puzzling elements in the political change in modern East Asian states become clearer and can be more effectively investigated.

The puzzle

Scholars have been overwhelmed by waves of political change in various forms and shapes in modern East Asia. In more recent instances in the 1980s and 1990s, we have seen mass movements and violent revolutions to change political institutions and culture, and the way the political society is organized, and profound reforms of state institutions in how the state performs its functions and relates to social elites and the people.

This wave of political change was predated by another round of political change at the end of World War II, when new states were formed on the idea of nation-state and the more progressive and even radical ideas of modern state. Communist and progressive forces dominated the new states. This round of political change started even earlier in Japan in the late nineteenth century and in China in the early twentieth century. In Japan, a diffused, decentralized power structure was reverted to the centralized, hierarchic and hegemonic imperial model. In China, a similar political order collapsed into a diffused power structure of warlord competition, autonomy and domination after the 1911 Revolution that changed the empire to a republic, and from the Manchu rule to the rule by the Chinese.

The question generations of scholars have asked is what these waves of political change were to achieve or have achieved? What drove or motivated political changes in these forms, pace and rhythm? What consequences these waves of political changes have on how politics works, and how the state is organized in today’s East Asian states? After all, what has changed with this long twentieth-century political change in East Asia? Ernest Gellner summarizes one principal idea used by generations of scholars to explain political change. The idea or ideal of nation-state is believed to have influenced the designers of the Westphalian order that brought change in the institutions and norms of international society. In this ideal, the national population is the natural basis for marking the boundaries of the state and hence the sovereignty of the political community. Gellner famously interprets this classic nationalism as “a political principle … that the political and the national unit should be congruent” (Gellner 1983: 1) in the organization of a polity and the society of polities. However, as we will see later in our discussion, it is unclear what this “national” means in this classic nationalism; and confusion and contention over the nation, or the people, has been a very divisive force driving modern state-building, and indeed political change, in modern East Asia.

While the idea of nation-state provided an effective basis for settling disputes among competing national populations at Westphalia Negotiations (1648) over the nature and scope of their political authority and jurisdiction in the collapsing monarchic system, nationalism became an ideology of wider appeal that drove nations around the world to seek matching statehood. It is also taken by scholars as a theory to explain, for example, political change in modern East Asia in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. In this theoretical framework, political change in early modern East Asia was a change in the type of state where the ruling authority is sovereign over a national population or community. This political logic explains, for example, in the case of Japan, that competing, autonomous and influential regional daimyos² and their hans surrendered their governing authorities to the imperial court, and the emperor during the Meiji Restoration. In the case of China, the Qing Empire was replaced by the Republic of China (ROC). Movements in Korea and Vietnam to seek independent statehood from colonial rule, on the basis of the Koreans or the Vietnamese being a nation, are classic instances of how nationalism drives political change.

The nation-state theory seems to explain the political change in modern East Asia to a point where the national basis of state authority was sought. Further developments following this earlier wave of political change seemed to go beyond what nationalism can explain. An imperial Japan rose from the Meiji Restoration to build an empire in East Asia. The Qing Empire collapsed to warlord regimes, and civil conflict raged on between the Communists and Nationalists, and eventually the People’s Republic of China (PRC) rose to claim authority over almost the same political boundaries of Qing China, with the ROC moving to Taiwan. In both Korea and Vietnam, the nation was divided politically, with a separate state forming over half of the country. There is something else other than the nationalist inspirations and dynamics that drove these political changes.

Max Weber is widely credited for the idea of the modern state in explaining political change in modern East Asia. At the core of this idea, Weber sees the state as “the monopoly on the legitimated use of physical force that is limited to a certain geographical area” (Weber 1919: 136). The capacity to use coercive force legitimately by political forces in these polity concentrates at the top in the hands of state bureaucracy. State domination is achieved through the long process of expropriation of such capacity from entities within the polity and is intrinsically justified as being of traditional, charismatic and legal authority.

The idea of modern state came to influence East Asian politics much earlier than Weber made his “politics as vocation” speech at the end of World War I. Culture, society, economy, and government in modern European states convinced East Asian elites that an authoritative state with a capable bureaucracy, strong army and entrepreneurial industrial capital is essential for East Asian nations to catch up with European nations in wealth, power and influence. The Meiji Restoration in the late nineteenth century in Japan was in part also driven by such a vision by political elites about Japan becoming such a modern state. So were the constitutional reforms in China and Korea at the turn of the twentieth century. The Meiji Restoration led to the rise of modern state in Japan that quickly embarked on a campaign for Japan to be a “rich country with strong army” on the imperial path. Similar reforms failed in Korea and China, and the movement for a modern state was taken over gradually by a more progressive idea of state organization in the interwar decades and even a more radical idea of state origination in Cold War continental East Asia.

The idea of modern state was clearly taken up in a particular way in early modern East Asia. Great emphasis was on the strengthening and centralizing of state authority and capacity. This strong and centralized state however was a tradition already well established in the organization of East Asian polities. Popular mass movements and elite-led institutional reforms at the time saw this rather as a problem and wanted to change the power structure and authority relations in opposite directions. They focused more on strengthening the power and influenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Anglicized Words Originated from East Asian Languages
• 1 A Theory of Political Change
• 2 The Confucian Authority Structure
• 3 Claiming Political Authority
• 4 State Builds Nation
• 5 Changing of the Guards
• 6 State-led Industrialization
• 7 Shifts in Authority Structure
• 8 Shaping of National Political Culture
• 9 The Logic of Political Order
• Index