East Asian Politics and
Economies
POLS 4353
Fall 2002
Instructor: Takayuki Sakamoto
Office: Carr Collins 201
Office Hours: TTh 1:50-3:30, or by appointment
Phone: 214-768-2521
E-mail: sakamoto@mail.smu.edu
(No class meeting on August 29. I’ll be at a conference in Boston.)
Objective
The general purpose of this course is to study the politics and political economies of four East Asian countries—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. The four countries are interesting cases to study for several reasons. They have achieved some of the most rapid economic growth rates in the world in the past decades, providing valuable cases with which to examine general conditions for economic growth. They are going or have gone through the process of democratization after World War II, giving insights into the nature and processes of democratization. The four countries are said to belong to a political-cultural group distinct from ours or Europe’s, which has led scholars to debate whether they can be understood in the same way we understand American or European politics and economies. We will dig into these issues to find out how we should understand their politics and economies and what they tell us about how we should explain human behavior and social outcomes in general. This course is not an intro East Asian culture class surveying some idiosyncratic aspects of these remote countries. We analyze their politics and political economies just as we study American or European nations.
This course has several other equally important goals. Among those are:
· to develop students’ research and presentation skills, which are required of anybody if they wish to put their critical and analytical thinking capabilities to practical use;
· to better prepare students to be able to meaningfully analyze other kinds (i.e., non-political) of human behavior and social phenomena as a result of human interaction in their future study in political science or other disciplines; and
· to increase students’ critical and analytical thinking skills so that whatever career students pursue in or after college, they can use those skills to advance their goals.
To be a critical thinker is not to be an unconditional, blind negator of every argument you hear. Critical thinking requires being open to new or different ideas, as well. A critical thinker helps an author or an analyst improve her analysis to ensure that her findings and conclusions—and ultimately all of our knowledge—are the best possible knowledge she could get at the time. You should always ask, “Does this argument make sense?,” “Is this logically coherent?,” “Is it supported by evidence?,” “Is the evidence collected and presented in an appropriate, legitimate way?” Importantly, a critical thinker needs to apply the same strict standards to her own work. We will keep these elements of critical thinking in mind throughout the course, particularly in class discussions and research paper projects.
Students will probably benefit more if they approach this course on East Asian politics not merely as an independent area of study, but as constituting part of the entire universe of human behavior and social phenomena we would like to understand in social science. Partly toward that end, we will seek to think about East Asian politics in comparative perspective as much as possible.
Course
Requirements
(1) Class performance (20%): Students are required to read all assigned texts and be prepared to make input in class discussion when coming to each class meeting. (I repeat: Do all assigned reading before coming to class!) This requirement is essential to this course, since the purpose of this course is to develop students’ critical thinking skills, not merely for them to passively absorb given information, and we use our readings as a basis on which to build our thoughts. Therefore, students must read assigned materials for a topic by the class meetings in which we are scheduled to deal with the topic. Your class participation affects not only your participation grade but also your grades in the research paper and exam, because the level of critical and analytical thinking fostered in class will naturally be reflected in the quality of your paper and exam answers. Empirical records make it abundantly clear that students who do readings and participate more achieve higher grades in their exams and papers. If the instructor judges that students are not doing the reading, he may seek to motivate them to read by imposing additional exams not originally scheduled at the beginning of the semester.
Also, all of us participating in this course will work together to help each other learn and think, so that everybody will get most out of this course. Class discussion is the primary means to achieve this collective goal and will be stressed in computing your overall grade. Your contribution to research project discussions (to be explained below and to be conducted in the second half of the semester) will particularly closely be monitored for your class performance grade.
Attendance will be monitored. Repeated unexcused absence may result in an F. I keep this provision for the sake of students, because students who miss class tend to fail in exams and papers most often, thereby ending up with an overall F, even if they do not fail due to a poor class participation grade.
Some or most of you may hesitate to speak up in class because of the fear of mistakes and embarrassment. Keep in mind: It is okay to make mistakes. We learn from mistakes. Our world would have very little progress if it were not for mistakes. And most of us feel nervous about speaking in public or making mistakes. So embarrass yourself or make a fool of yourself if you have to. (I do it all the time.) When you do, you will realize that making a fool of yourself is not that embarrassing after all, and that the world does not come to an end even if you foul up.
(2) Midterm exam (20%): The midterm exam (October 10) will assess your grasp of the subjects covered in the course and be based on the readings, lectures, and class discussions. Makeup exams will not be provided under normal circumstances.
(3) Research paper (30%): A research paper is due December 3 (by 2:30 PM). The topic of the paper will be announced in class. The paper must be typed, double-spaced, and securely stapled. Late papers will be marked down. The magnitude of the markdown may depend on the reason for the missed deadline. The works you draw from must be cited throughout the text of your paper and referenced at the end of the paper. Using others’ ideas or sentences (and even phrases) without citations constitutes plagiarism and will result in an automatic F.
The criteria to be used in evaluating the paper are (Read this most carefully!): (1) how well your research question is formulated and thought out, and how interesting and original it is; (2) how well designed your research is and how well it is executed; (3) how coherent and strong your logic is in formulating your hypotheses and making your arguments; (4) how well you collect evidence to test your hypotheses or to support your arguments and how cogent the evidence is; and (5) how you draw the conclusions of your research given the nature and strength of the evidence you provide (it means in part how well you use and interpret data).
Tips:
Re (1) & (4): Think hard before you decide on your research question and try to choose as “researchable” a question as possible. Try to find a question that is interesting to both you and potential readers (although judgment about what is interesting is partly subjective, it has an objective component, too). Your paper should not be a summary or recapitulation of other researchers’ existing works. Your reader will be interested in your own ideas, not somebody else’s.
Some students may ask, “We are not experts, just undergraduate students. How could our paper be original when we have to rely so much on previous scholars’ works?” Remember that a critical thinker does not just blindly accept what established scholars say. You always need to evaluate the theoretical and empirical validity of their explanations and arguments with your own analytical skills and abilities, no matter how authoritative those researchers are. Even if you were determined to entirely trust what a scholar says, what would you do if two scholars provide competing explanations? Would you accept the two different explanations together that contradict each other? In a different vein, how would you know that scholars agree on something after reading only several books? In principle, you should not be able to tell whether they all agree until you exhaust the entire literature. Besides, if we said, “We can’t be original, when there are already so many bright scholars who have studied the subject so thoroughly,” our world would see no progress. We build and improve on our predecessors’ works, and there is always room to make your own contribution;
Re (2): Before starting your research (or data collection), give sufficient thought to the questions of what kind of effective evidence you want to and can reasonably expect to find, how you can collect such cogent evidence, and how efficiently you can do so; and
Re (5): Try to demarcate what you can confidently say your findings show and what your study cannot explain or tell, or what it leaves out; that is, don’t overstate or understate your case.
(4) Research outline, progress report, and presentation (10%, pass or not pass): A research outline is due on October 10. The outline must contain a research question and a research design, including what is the question you need to answer, how you try to find the answer, and the kind of information (or data) you intend to collect. Since this is due in early October, students should start thinking about the research paper fairly early in the semester (around the 5th week). If you make fast progress beyond the formulation of the outline, you may also attach a progress report to the outline. The more concrete the outline or progress report is, the more helpful advice you will receive from class and the instructor. Do not wait to start drafting the outline until near the deadline because the deadline is the same day as your midterm exam.
Students will also present their research projects in class, and class will discuss them. The major purposes of this exercise are for the entire class to: help students think through their research; help them with specific difficulties they may encounter in actually executing their research (e.g., in formulating research ideas, collecting data, etc.); and help them make their research projects and papers as good as possible. In any discipline, scientific inquiry is an collective effort to arrive at the best possible knowledge. People around us usually notice things we are not aware of and have different ideas than we do. There is no reason not to try to benefit from our peers’ insight. The other goal of the presentation is to help students build the ability to get their ideas across (presentation skills).
In order to ensure each student will get sufficient feedbacks, students of this course will also form study groups to help with their research papers. The purpose is to increase students’ opportunities to receive feedbacks on their research projects and make their papers better. Each group is required to meet and discuss its members’ projects three times: (1) before drafting research questions and designs to help each other with their research outlines; (2) sometime during conducting their research to help each other with specific problems that may occur in carrying out their projects; and (3) to critique a very first rough draft sometime before the deadline for paper submission. Try to meet far in advance of each official or unofficial deadline. The groups are more than welcome to meet more than three times. When your group comes across a difficult problem its members cannot address, the group is encouraged to see the instructor.
In addition to peer review, the instructor will provide comments on students’ paper outline and progress report.
(5) Final Exam (20%): December 9. This exam will simply test how much and well you have read our reading materials and thought through our subjects throughout the semester.
If you have a problem in this course in any respect, please talk to me.
Suspected cases of academic dishonesty will be handled according to the university’s policy.
If you need academic accommodations for a disability, please contact Ms. Rebecca Marin, Coordinator, Services for Students with Disabilities (214-768-4563) to verify the disability and establish eligibility for accommodations. Then make appropriate arrangements with the instructor.
Required Texts
(1) Xiaoming Huang. Ed. 2001. The Political and Economic Transition in East Asia: Strong Market, Weakening State. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press (available for purchase at SMU Bookstore).
(2) Shively and Sodaro, McGraw-Hill Primis Course Packet Assembled for Introduction to East Asian Politics (PLSC 4353) (available for purchase at SMU Bookstore).
(3) Journal Articles. In addition to the above textbooks, we have academic journal articles every student is required to read. They are listed in the class schedule below and available on SMU online resources. Print out your own copy of each of those articles and read them religiously; there is no passing this course without reading them. (To find the articles: 1. Go to SMU Library Homepage; 2. Go to “SMU Online Resources”; 3. Go to “InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP” or “Academic Search Premier EBSCO,” as cited in this syllabus; and 4. search for the articles, using author, title, or journal title.
(4) Reserve Article. We also have one required journal article on reserve at SMU Library. They are listed in the class schedule below. Get hold of the materials and make your own copies.
Topics and
Schedule
Note: Our subject matters encompass many political and economic issues, and those issues are sometimes closely interrelated and overlap considerably. So although we have a designated topic for each week or class meeting, we will keep our topic schedule very flexible and keep ourselves willing to discuss any non-designated topic, when necessary. So don’t be surprised even if you sometimes find our class discussions not closely match the scheduled topics listed below. Also, we do not hesitate to go off track (schedule) to examine issues and subjects that are not mentioned in the schedule if they are important. We usually do not know whether something is important until we examine it. This class deems thinking and discussing important. So the pre-set schedule below may change from time to time, except for deadlines. When it changes, it will be announced in class.
Aug. 22 Introduction: Class Outline
Aug. 27 1.
Overview of East Asia: Background, Themes, and Issues
*Shively and Sodaro, pp. 2-115, 114-212.
Aug. 29 No Class Meeting
*Get as far ahead as possible in your reading.
Sept. 3, 5 2.
Political Institutions and Policy Making in Japan
*Shively and Sodaro, pp. 2-61, 213-238
*Bradley Richardson and Dennis Patterson, “Political Traditions and Political Change: The Significance of Postwar Japanese Politics for Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science (2001), Vol. 4 Issue 1 (Academic Search Premier EBSCO)
*Stephen J. Anderson, “The Policy Process and Social Policy in Japan,” PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 25, No. 1, (March, 1992), pp. 36-43 (Find this article on JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org).
*Karel van
Wolferen, “Japan's Non-Revolution,” Foreign Affairs Vol. 72 Issue 4
(Sep/Oct93) (Academic Search Premier EBSCO).
*Shively and Sodaro, pp. 62-142.
Sept. 17, 19 4.
Political Institutions and Policy Making in Taiwan
*John
Fuh-Sheng Hsieh, “East Asian Culture and Democratic Transition, with Special
Reference to the Case of Taiwan,” Journal of Asian & African
Studies, Vol. 35, Issue 1 (2000) (Academic Search Premier EBSCO).
*Michael Ying-mao Kau, “The Power Structure in Taiwan's Political Economy: Informal Politics in East Asia,” Asian Survey, v36 n3 (March 1996) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
*Cheng-Tian Kuo, “Taiwan's Distorted Democracy in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, v35 i1 (Feb 2000) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
*Steven J. Hood, “Political Change in Taiwan,” Asian Survey, v36 n5 (May 1996) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
*Bruce J. Dickson, “China's Democratization and the Taiwan Experience,” Asian Survey, v38 n4 (April 1998) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
*Huang, Chapter 6, 7.
Sept. 24, 26 5.
Political Institutions and Policy Making in China
*Shively and Sodaro, pp.144-212.
*Bruce J. Dickson, “China's Democratization and the Taiwan Experience,” Asian Survey, v38 n4 (April 1998) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
*Huang, Chapter 3, 4.
Oct. 1 6.
Democratization
*Joseph Wong, “Dynamic Democratization in Taiwan.” Journal of Contemporary China Vol. 10 Issue 27 (May2001) (Academic Search Premier EBSCO)
*Bruce J. Dickson, “China's Democratization and the Taiwan Experience,” Asian Survey, v38 n4 (April 1998) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
*Qingshan Tan, “Democratization and Bureaucratic Restructuring in Taiwan,” Studies In Comparative International Development, v35 i2 (Summer 2000) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
*Jei Guk Jeon, “The Political Economy of Crisis Management in the Third World: A Comparative study of South Korea and Taiwan (1970s),” Pacific Affairs, v67 n4 (Winter 1994) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
*Shively and Sodaro, pp. 2-212.
Oct. 3 7.
Political Institutions in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in Comparative
Perspective
*Cheng-Tian Kuo, “Taiwan's Distorted Democracy in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, v35 i1 (Feb 2000) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
Oct. 8 8.
Economic Policy Making, Economic Development, the Developmental
State I
*Bradley Richardson and Dennis Patterson, “Political Traditions and Political Change: The Significance of Postwar Japanese Politics for Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science (2001), Vol. 4 Issue 1 (Academic Search Premier EBSCO)
*David Zweig, “China’s Stalled ‘Fifth Wave: Reform Program of Zhu Rongji,” Asian Survey v41 i2 (March 2001) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
*Shively and Sodaro, pp. 2-212, 213-238.
*Huang, Chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Paper Outline Due
Oct. 17 8.
Economic Policy Making, Economic Development, the Developmental
State II
*Bradley Richardson and Dennis Patterson, “Political Traditions and Political Change: The Significance of Postwar Japanese Politics for Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science (2001), Vol. 4 Issue 1 (Academic Search Premier EBSCO)
*David Zweig, “China’s Stalled ‘Fifth Wave: Reform Program of Zhu Rongji,” Asian Survey v41 i2 (March 2001) (InfoTrack Expanded Academic ASAP).
*Shively and Sodaro, pp. 2-212.
Oct. 22 9.
Welfare States in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan
*Roger Goodman and Ito Peng, “The East Asian Welfare States: Peripatetic Learning, Adaptive Change, and Nation-Building,” in Gosta Esping-Andersen, ed., Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economics (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996), pp. 192-224 (on reserve at the SMU Library: Make your own copy)
*Stephen J. Anderson, “The Policy Process and Social Policy in Japan,” PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 25, No. 1, (March, 1992), pp. 36-43 (Find this article on JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org).
Oct. 24 Catch-Up and Review
Oct. 29 Research Paper Workshop
Dec. 3 Paper Due
Dec. 9 Final Exam