Democratization in Confucian East Asia: Citizen Politics in China ...

Between these two ends are the unstable or pseudo democracies of the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Malaysia. Measured by stricter standards, of the 17 total polities in this region, only four qualify as democracies, amounting to less than one in four.¹ Against this backdrop, one might ask, will East Asia see more countries become democratic? Will the existing democracies become better democracies?

This book looks at how economic growth and social modernization in East Asia have resulted in a growing prodemocratic public and how these increasingly prodemocratic citizens prepare solid foundations for democracy while demanding more democratic institutions. I focus this study on East Asia’s six Confucian societies: Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore. These societies provide an excellent group for examining the relationships between economic development, value changes, and democratic politics. Several conditions make the study of these societies a near optimal and natural experiment. First, these societies share a common Confucian cultural heritage. This provides an almost ideal pool of cases for comparative political cultural studies: these societies’ similar heritage in the Confucian belief system enables us to insulate variables that may have caused value differences. Second, at the end of World War II these countries shared similar economic development levels, with the exception of Japan. And third, since then, speedy economic development has occurred in each of these societies, but at very different times. The different time points at which economic developments took off in different societies enable us to examine whether economic development does lead to changes in a society’s value system.