Based on a town government's meeting memos between March 2001 and October 2007, annual work reports, and my interviews with local officials, I show that China's township governments have strived to contain, rather than resolve, social discontent. The tendency toward containment lies in two fundamental features of China's political institutions and central government strategy. First, in order to optimize the function of the petition system as a source of information without losing control, the Hu Jintao administration (2002–2012) passed regulations protecting the rights of petitioners on the one hand, and simultaneously put pressure on local officials to discourage petitioning, on the other. Second, the technical, institutional, and political features of China's cadre evaluation system encouraged local officials to take a short-term perspective on challenges, avoiding penalties rather than actually solving problems.

In opposition to a free trade pact with China, Taiwan's Sunflower Movement erupted in spring 2014 and occupied the national legislature for twenty-four days. Drawing from the recent debates on the relation between social movements and the state, I elaborate a revised polity model that focuses on the effects of elite disunity, threat, and movement strategy. The Sunflower Movement originated from a tactical misstep by the ruling party that created an immediate sense of threat from proposed closer economic ties with China, thereby facilitating protest mobilization. Student protesters were able to seize the national legislature because of an internal split within the ruling party and support from the opposition party. However, the failure to further exploit these favorable opportunities exposed the movement to government repression. Fortunately for the movement, the disunity among elites helped the activists manage a dignified exit, which they could claim as a success.

This study examines the association between Internet use and protest politics in South Korea and Taiwan, using secondary data from the sixth wave (2010–14) of the World Values Survey. The data show that Internet use is positively associated with low-cost protest acts, like signing a petition. Internet use is also correlated with the willingness to consider higher-cost actions such as attending demonstrations and joining in boycotts. But it does not appear to consistently increase actual protests of this sort. Discussion is made to address comparable opportunity structures for protest politics in the two East Asian democracies, where the Internet is deeply integrated into the country's political landscape.

This article examines the impact of recent economic and political change on collective and individual labor rights in East Asia. Deploying a new index for measuring de jure and de facto labor rights, the article presents new comparative data on labor rights in the region. Democratization has produced stronger collective labor rights in much of the region, but labor laws in most countries still fall far short of international labor standards. East Asia's labor laws offer similar levels of protection for individual labor rights to the rest of the world when firing costs are taken into account, and low regional averages are primarily an effect of Singapore's extremely weak individual labor rights. Few countries have revised their labor laws in the direction of greater labor market flexibility. However, the distance between law and practice is wide, so improvements in laws are not necessarily reflected on the ground. Flexibility enters through the back door of ineffective labor law enforcement, which in turn has affected the organizing efforts of unions.

The 2014 Sunflower Movement succeeded in blocking Taiwan's Congress from ratifying the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA), a bill that proposed to liberalize trade with China. Since most of the participants in this movement were students and NGO members, they had limited economic and political resources to influence policy change, which makes their success in stopping a trade deal remarkable. Many attribute this important success to an elite alliance with politicians inside the government, fueled by a personal rivalry between political elites. However, I argue that changing public opinion is the more important force behind the creation of the alliance. With original data from interviews with political elites, their staff members, and activists in Taiwan, in addition to secondary information, I confirm public opinion to be the major reason for the political alliance. This case illustrates that in some circumstances, public opinion outweighs the importance of elite rivalry in influencing political elite decision-making, and it could represent a key mechanism of democratic policy-making.

What determines cross-national variations in the extent of anti-government protests in Asia? Anti-government protests have surged across Asia in recent years, with many contributing to consequential political change. However, systematic cross-national comparison of the determinants of protests in Asia is still largely missing. This article fills this important gap by quantitatively examining the explanatory power of the three main theories of contentious politics—grievance, resource mobilization, and political process theories—in the Asian context with new data on anti-government protests in all 25 Asian states from 1990 to 2016. The analysis finds that urbanization, information and communication technology, and regional demonstration effects are the strong catalysts of anti-government protests in Asia, while repressive state capacity particularly dampens protests. The findings offer important insights into the dynamics of the anti-government protests that have become increasingly salient in Asian politics.

Nationwide anti-Japanese demonstrations have erupted in China periodically in recent years. This study investigates what factors make university students more motivated to participate in anti-Japanese demonstrations. We collected original data on 1,458 university students in Beijing in June 2014, inquiring about both actual and possible future participation. We find that students are more willing to participate in future demonstrations (1) when they believe that anti-Japanese demonstrations benefit China's diplomacy (instrumentality), and (2) when they have prior demonstrators in their social networks (diffusion). However, when it comes to actual participation, only diffusion plays a significant role while instrumentality does not. While students claim that they are motivated by beliefs that demonstrations will matter for China's diplomacy, they actually turn out only when networks operate. In addition, membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does not affect prospective participation but deters actual participation. The CCP actually discourages participation in recent anti-Japanese demonstrations.