Chinese Political Science Review最新文献

Diversionary War Theory (DWT) posits that leaders engulfed in a domestic crisis will attempt to divert the attention of citizens by initiating an armed conflict against an external actor. War, under this logic, is a mechanism designed to distract, boost the leader's popularity, or relegate the responsibility for the crisis to an outside scapegoat. In this article, I apply a discursive variation of DWT to account for and describe the shift in Donald Trump's approach to China during the COVID-19 crisis. This analysis concludes the domestic political and economic difficulties Trump was grappling with during the 2020 presidential election motivated him to blame the Chinese government for the detrimental effects the pandemic had on the United States. Trump's strategic use of novel social media platforms was instrumental in his campaign to name, shame, and scapegoat China to divert attention from the domestic crisis as well as to boost his popularity.

Language is a clear indicator of political change. As China continues to rise and expand its influence in the South China Seas, threatened neighboring states will balance against it. One step in this process is the formulation of persuading language and concepts to accept the threat posed by China. This is demonstrated by the invention and use of the term Indo-Pacific, an area from the eastern part of Africa in the west to the United States in the east. This article traces the genealogy of the term Indo-Pacific as it relates to the securitization of this region given the rise of China. The article will first trace the genealogy of the term Indo-Pacific to then highlight the processes of securitization given changes in the structure of international relations.

The Global Justice Index is a multiyear research project based at Fudan Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences that assesses the contributions made by each country to achieving greater global justice. We have published results from 2010 to 2019 in Global Justice Index Report, Global Justice Index Report 2020, Global Justice Index Report 2021, and we are now presenting our fourth-year results for 2020 in Global Justice Index Report 2022, which is an updated version of previous years' reports. This year, we take into account changes to global justice influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The report consists of four sections: introduction, findings, main results, and conclusion. In the introduction, we discuss the development of the conceptual framework and evaluative principles to justify our selection of the dimensions and indicators for measurement. Next, in the findings section, we report the data, indicators, and our results for each country for each of the 10 issues we identify, and provide regional comparisons for Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Oceania. In the following section, we present the main results for the global justice indices, and report the ranking of each country's contribution to achieving greater global justice. In the final section, we discuss the applications and limitations of the index and potential further research trajectories.

Since its launch in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) quickly has become the cornerstone of foreign policy for the People's Republic of China (PRC) under Xi Jinping's leadership to project China's new-found economic influence through networks of infrastructure, trade, and investment deals. Considerable scholarship about the BRI has focused on China's motivations, domestic politics, strategic culture, policy instruments, and the perceptions, effects, and implications across various countries and regions. While competing IR paradigms and levels of analysis have been applied to analyze the BRI and its impact, little research has examined the complex causal mechanisms of the BRI in a comprehensively visualized and rigorous way. How, for example, does the BRI look in the context of power transition theory? Is this time-honored theory, which focuses on the dynamics of capabilities, able to explain the characteristics of BRI, notably its impact upon policies and outcomes at the regional and international levels? Through the prism of systemism, this paper seeks to answer such questions. The systemist approach, which emphasizes the graphic portrayal of cause and effect, is well suited to the task of comparing and evaluating theoretical arguments about developments such as the BRI. A visualization of power transition theory is used to obtain insights about the likely direction of China's BRI in terms of the USA and China as leading states and rivals faced with the challenge of managing conflict short of war in East Asia.

The mitigation of climate change is one of the most serious issues in global public governance. To address the climate crisis, Chinese government has proposed a clear target of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. Regional efforts are expected to play a key role in delivering China's pledge to peak CO₂ emissions before 2030. However, the emission reduction tournament would result in rapid increases in emission transfers among provinces in China. If the current trend of provincial economic development and associated emission transfer mode remains unchanged, we forecast that 24 progressive provinces in China would peak their CO₂ emissions before 2030, while 6 lagged provinces would peak later than 2030. However, if emission transfers were not existed, the nationwide carbon peaking time would be one year earlier and the corresponding carbon peaking level would be 13% lower. Furthermore, compared to the situation in 2012, the emission transfer mode in 2017 would lead to a higher carbon peaking level, indicating that the switch to the emission transfer mode from 2012 to 2017 had increased the difficulty of carbon peaking in China. We suggest that the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities should be applied when decomposing the national carbon peaking targets into provinces, and China must avoid a tournament among local governments on carbon peaking.

The article examines to what extent China and Japan compete in infrastructure investment in Southeast Asia. At the state level, China pursues more geo-economic goals whereas Japan seeks more mercantilist objectives, which mitigates their competition to a substantial extent. At the institutional level, the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Japan-led Asian Development Bank (ADB) compete for potentially valuable infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia from the supply-side perspective. It is necessary and sensible for the AIIB to cooperate with other multilateral development banks (MDBs), including the ADB. That the AIIB keeps a low profile, other MDBs accommodate the AIIB's preference, and the non-condition principle catalyses the cooperation between the AIIB and other MDBs. Therefore, there is no need to be alarmed by the competition in infrastructure investment in Southeast Asia between China and Japan because there are still possibilities for China-led AIIB and Japan-led ADB to cooperate at the institutional level.

States always function as rational actors as protecting the national interests of a state depends on the choices it makes in the international context. Hence, choices and preferences are central to the study of both public policy and international relations. Policies are driven and influenced by the attention and behaviors of the actors which ultimately create a path to failure or success. In the Bay of Bengal Initiatives for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), India, in the absence of Pakistan, can enjoy a friendly environment and establish its goal of geopolitical and economic dominance in South Asia and Southeast Asia, while countering China's continuous upsurge. On the other hand, in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), constant intervention from Pakistan means that India shifts its attention to use its full potential elsewhere. This article is based on secondary sources and illustrates how the interests of a major actor (India) can shape the paths of two similar regional organizations (SAARC and BIMSTEC), despite these organizations sharing characteristics such as the same member states, the same socio-economic situation, and the same vision.