Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Changing Authority In The Chinese Communist Party, Daniel Bruno Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines how authority in China has changed from personal, rooted in a leader’s connections, to institutional, rooted in a leader’s position or job. This paper examines two cases, that of Jiang Zemin and the Yang brothers and that of Wen Jiabao and the Wenchuan earthquake, to show how authority is shifted. The examination of these cases reveals that while personal authority routinely was more important than institutional authority leaders with personal authority have died out and not been replaced. Because of China’s recent history, there was no opportunity for new leaders to build up the personal authority of …

China's Strategic Choices Towards North Korea And Iran, Kang-Uk Jung

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study tests two hypotheses. First, China cooperates with the United States only when it is able to obtain material rewards. Second, without material incentives from the United States, China straddles between the United States on one hand and Iran and North Korea on the other. My findings show that neither Structural Realism, which holds anti-hegemonism alliance, nor Constructivism, which holds positive assimilation of the nuclear nonproliferation norm explains Chinese international behavior comprehensively. My balance of interest model explains Chinese foreign policy on the noncompliant states better. The cases cover the Sino-North Korean and Sino-Iranian diplomatic histories from 1990 to …

A Discursive Perspective On China's Global Politics Of Climate Change, 1992–2013, Yi-Tsui Tseng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates China’s recent shift in its climate change policy with a refined discourse approach. Methodologically, by adopting a neo-Gramscian notion of hegemony, a generative definition of discourse and an ontological pluralist position, the study constructs a theoretical framework named “discursive hegemony” that identifies the “social forces” for enabling social change and focuses on the role of discursive mechanisms via which the forces operate and produce effects.

The key empirical finding of this study was that it was a co-evolution of conditions that shaped the outcome as China’s climate policy shift. In examining the case, a before-after within-case comparison …