Kate Liao Zhou, Shelly Rigger and Lynn White III, Eds., Democratization in China, Korea and Southeast Asia?

Excerpt

This edited volume is very much the product of the scholarship of Lynn T. White III on the diversity of electoral changes in Asia, as it is the product of an academic conference held at Princeton University in March 2012, the chapter authors are all educated at Princeton, and the volume is dedicated to White by his students. Lynn White argues that socioeconomic pluralization in East Asia has empowered medium-sized networks, especially local power networks, and changed the interests of many individuals. Local power networks, however, are often hierarchical and non-democratic. Although the title of the book is Democratization in China, Korea and Southeast Asia, ten chapters out of fourteen deal with China, and the other four focus on Taiwan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and Thailand. Despite the concentration on China, Lynn White re-emphasizes his two usual themes; namely, that lively electoral democracies in Asia are radically different from each other, and that it is easy for democrats to belittle political reforms in authoritarian countries without fully considering that such reforms may be seriously proto-democratic. …