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This article identifies the explanatory sources of Asians' perceptions about China's rise. The authors try to decipher the relative importance of individual-level explanatory variables such as socio-economic satisfaction, cognitive schema, and ideology and political values vis-à-vis that of the country-level structural variables such as geopolitical tension, economic interdependence and cultural identity. The empirical findings suggest that the growing perception that China has the most influence in Asia is more related to individual-level demographic variables which are associated with greater interest in political affairs, despite the fact that there is also some evidence that contextual factors related to economic interdependence also matter. A favorable perception of China's influence, on the other hand, is more associated with a less negative orientation on geopolitical and cultural factors, which both involve long-term historical memory and political feelings. Economic interdependence might engender adversarial feelings against China if the level of interdependence is high enough to cause economic vulnerability. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

Abstract: It is problematic to rely on indicators carrying the "D-word" for measuring democratic legitimacy. Popular conception of the "D-word" has been so much contaminated by competing public discourses and socializing mechanisms that the word "democracy" has lost much of its conceptual clarity and semantic consistency when it travels across borders. We introduce a more reliable tool to compare the cultural foundation for liberal democracy across countries, especially between democratic and non-democratic ones. A newly developed typological analysis, which is applied to two waves of Asian Barometer Survey, enables us to differentiate the substance of democratic legitimacy from its appearance.

This article assesses the relative importance of partisanship in explaining level of citizens' political engagement within a multivariate framework. In particular, we examine if the relative worth of partisan attachment in explaining civic engagement differs systematically between East Asian emerging democracies and established democracies. We find that partisanship in East Asia exerts just as much influence on citizens' engagement in politics as in established democracies. The global trend in which interest associations and social movements are becoming vigorous competitors to parties for the opportunity to represent and mobilize citizens in democratic process has also spread to East Asia.

Territorial disputes over the East and South China Sea have been an issue of growing policy concern in East Asia in recent years. These maritime territorial disputes, as the authors argue in this study, constitute a contextual factor undermining China's soft power in East Asia. More specifically, this study quantitatively demonstrates that all else equal, citizens are less likely to take a positive view of China's influence on their respective countries with maritime territorial disputes with China than in countries without such disputes with China. This key result suggests a clear international distributional implication of maritime territorial disputes overlooked in the existing literature on China's soft power. This study cautions against one-sided views on a China's soft power whether purely optimistic or skeptical, in contemporary political analyses. (J Contemp China / GIGA)