Political Science Commons^™

Anti-Trafficking Legislation In Sub-Saharan Africa: Analyzing The Role Of Coercion And Parental Responsibility, Ruby Andrew, Benjamin N. Lawrance

Annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Human Trafficking: 4th (2012)

This article discusses the effect of US and international support for local laws to combat child trafficking in sub-Saharan African states. The annual ranking of African anti-trafficking measures, produced by the US State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (OMCTP) in conjunction with the UN Office on Crime and Drugs, not only provides an important source of data but also creates a powerful incentive for African states to effect legislative change.

We argue that, although the US supports criminalization of traffickers and the OMCTP espouses laws to deter parental inducement to support trafficking activities, the implementation of …

Book Review: China And Orientalism, Fabio Lanza

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This slim, sharply-argued volume should be a mandatory reading for all of us who work on post-1949 China. China and Orientalism is a refreshing and often eye-opening analysis on how knowledge of the object called “China” has been constructed in the West since the end of Maoism. That knowledge, as Vukovich cogently demonstrates, is fundamentally flawed.

Writing as a “barbarian” outside the disciplinary gates— i.e. a self-declared non-sinologist (pp. xii-xiii) —Vukovich argues that, since the late 1970s, Western knowledge production about the PRC has been dominated and defined by a new form of Orientalism. But while for Edward Said the …

Celebrating Chunjie In Old Nanjing, Sarah Tynen

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

“You must be so homesick! Aren’t you going home to celebrate chunjie?” asked the Auntie who sells tofu on the back of a freight tricycle in the old city of Nanjing. Auntie rides down the narrow, winding alleys of Old Nanjing several times a day to emphatically announce her price of tofu at 500 grams for 1.5 yuan (that’s about a pound for 25 cents). Standing at my doorstep the week before chunjie, or the Spring Festival, also known as the Chinese New Year in the West, she told me to stock up. It was the last day of …

Rural Return: Xi Jinping’S Iowa Visit, Kate Merkel-Hess

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to the US took him across the country, from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles (where, sadly, despite spending some time with a sartorially-challenged David Beckham, he did not show off his soccer skills, as he did in the subsequent Irish leg of his trip).

But it wasn’t the visits to the coasts that dominated human interest stories on Xi Jinping’s trip, but the days in the middle, when he spent a little time in Iowa. Xi first visited Iowa in 1985, when he was an official in Hebei province, and this trip was a …

Book Review: Keeping The Nation’S House, Elizabeth Lacouture

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In 1940, China’s Nationalist Ministry of Education issued a decree from its wartime capital of Chongqing. At a time when Japan occupied China’s eastern seaboard and the Communists controlled the north, the Ministry called on educators and homemakers to “cultivate children’s happiness.” Doing more with less, teachers and mothers were supposed to make children believe that “even if the food is unsatisfactory, the clothes are inadequate, or the habitation is insufficient… it is still very good” (p. 1). In Keeping the Nation’s House, Helen Schneider explores how Chinese educators and the Chinese state transformed the seemingly frivolous and individualistic bourgeois …

Excerpt: Autumn In The Heavenly Kingdom, Stephen R. Platt

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A big new China book to hit shelves in recent weeks is Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, written by University of Massachusetts, Amherst historian Stephen Platt. Platt places the Taiping Rebellion in a global context, emphasizing its importance to American and European observers of the conflict, whose economic ties to China made them keenly interested in the country’s domestic situation. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom also offers new insights into how the Taiping Rebellion tied into Chinese internal politics, particularly the ways in which the Taiping rebels sought …

Book Review: Modern China’S Network Revolution, Brett Sheehan

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The title of Zhongping Chen’s new book has a double meaning. Modern China’s Network Revolution refers both to his claim for new, revolutionary forms of networking among lower-Yangzi Chinese elites at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries and to the revolutionary roles of those networks in elite mobilization, especially in the 1911 revolution which overthrew the Qing. As such, the book makes a meaningful contribution to debates on the nature of Chinese organizational practices, especially merchant organizational practices, and to debates about the nature of late-Qing elite mobilization and the relationship of those mobilized elites …

The First Asian Man: The Story Behind The Jeremy Lin Story, Yong Chen

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There are good reasons why Jeremy Lin deserves the extensive news coverage he has received recently: a Harvard grad playing in the NBA, he had an indispensible role in the Knicks’ 9-2 run before losing to Miami on February 23, averaging 23.9 points and 9.2 assists in 11 games. Yet the extraordinary “Linsanity” displayed by the mass media seems to suggest that what makes Lin’s story so notable is what it says about perceptions of Asian masculinity. In Lin, the media has finally found an Asian man.

Letter From Little Lhasa, Reshma Patil

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The runaway from a Tibetan village in Naba, China, led the way down the slippery dirt track to the doorstep of a restaurant with a Potala Palace bereft of tourists and soldiers painted on its blue walls. The Tibetan-speaking attendant at Chonor House politely declined to serve my first meal in McLeod Ganj. The kitchens were functioning only for hotel guests until the end of Losar. The three-day Tibetan New Year passed uncelebrated earlier this month in the Indian hill-town teeming with Tibetan exiles who give Dharamshala the moniker of Little Lhasa. The exiled Tibetan government is edged higher in …

Chinese Youth: A Quick Q And A With Mary Bergstrom, Jeffrey Wasserstrom

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Whenever I take a trip that includes stops in Shanghai and Beijing, two people I make sure to meet up with are Jeremy Friedlein and David Moser, the Academic Directors of the CET study abroad programs in those cities. I do this for several reasons. One is that CET has deep ties to China Beat, since the blog’s founding editor Kate Merkel-Hess and current editor Maura Cunningham are both alums. Another reason is that, for almost two years now, CET has been sponsoring a series of literary events at M on the Bund (in Shanghai) and now also Capital M …

“Unwavering Public Support” Not Quite So Easy To Find These Days, Duncan Hewitt

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

It was just like old times—in many of China’s major newspapers, a prominently displayed half-page story headlined: “Officials and citizens all across the country express unwavering support for central party leadership’s decision.” It followed hot on the heels of the previous day’s People’s Daily headline: “Resolutely support the party’s correct decision,” which appeared on many front pages. In the wake of the stunning news that Bo Xilai, one of China’s most prominent politicians, had been suspended from the ruling Politburo, and his wife arrested on suspicion of being involved in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, the Chinese Communist …

Book Review: The Gender Of Memory, Nicole Elizabeth Barnes

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Gail Hershatter and her Shaanxi-native research collaborator Gao Xiaoxian (of the Shaanxi Provincial Women’s Federation) spent ten years interviewing 72 women and a few men in rural Shaanxi province in northwest China. The Gender of Memory, Hershatter’s sole-authored product of this joint effort, fills a crucial gap in historiography of the 1950s, providing the first personal stories of land reform, the 1950 Marriage Law, collectivization, and the Great Leap Forward. Moreover, through incisive gender analysis, Hershatter illustrates how gender determined not only how Chinese women and men lived their lives, but also how they remember them. Whereas male interviewees …

A Q&A; With Janet Chen, Author Of Guilty Of Indigence, Jeff Wasserstrom

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Every society sees and treats its poorest members differently. The distinctive way that Victorian Britain dealt with poverty is a central theme in many novels by Charles Dickens, the prolific author whose books are getting even more attention as the bicentennial of his birth is being marked. For those more interested in India’s present than England’s past, the book of the moment on this theme seems to be Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, which is earning enthusiastic advance reviews and is due out soon (coincidentally or not on February 7, Dickens’ …

Book Review: Phoenix: The Life Of Norman Bethune, David Webster

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Millions of Chinese have memorized Mao Zedong’s 1939 lines “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” written soon after the Canadian surgeon’s death amidst the war against Japan. As a result, Bethune remains the best-known Canadian in China, still outstripping comedian Dashan (Mark Rowswell).

“Comrade Bethune’s spirit, his utter devotion to others without any thought of self, was shown in his great sense of responsibility in his work and his great warm-heartedness towards all comrades and the people,” Mao wrote, extolling Bethune’s “spirit of absolute selflessness.” If Bethune was pure selflessness and internationalist heroism after coming to China, it was only after …

Ai In Mumbai, Reshma Patil

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The Chinese artist offered a firm handshake and his business card. The Indian curator hesitated for a split second. They were, after all, standing in a men’s loo in Gwangju, South Korea. The curator returned to Mumbai, a financial powerhouse that several Chinese artists in the study group at Gwangju had never heard of. “What is Mumbai?” they asked him. The artist, who happened to know where Mumbai lies, returned to his studio in Beijing. He and the curator communicated via email for over a year. There were long silent gaps, until one day this year, the curator received a …

A Flourishing Profession: Reflections On A Career In Asian Studies, Charlotte Furth

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

At the March annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, held in Toronto, the association recognized Charlotte Furth with the AAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies. Furth is Professor Emerita of history at the University of Southern California and has written and edited five books, including A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960-1665 (UC Press, 1999). Below is an expanded version of remarks that Furth gave at the AAS award ceremony, in which she reflects on the changes to Asian Studies that have taken place since she entered the field in 1959, particularly regarding the …

The Importance Of Moral Construal: Moral Versus Non-Moral Construal Elicits Faster, More Extreme, Universal Evaluations Of The Same Actions, Jay J. Van Bavel, Dominic J. Packer, Ingrid J. Haas, William A. Cunningham

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Over the past decade, intuitionist models of morality have challenged the view that moral reasoning is the sole or even primary means by which moral judgments are made. Rather, intuitionist models posit that certain situations automatically elicit moral intuitions, which guide moral judgments. We present three experiments showing that evaluations are also susceptible to the influence of moral versus non-moral construal. We had participants make moral evaluations (rating whether actions were morally good or bad) or non-moral evaluations (rating whether actions were pragmatically or hedonically good or bad) of a wide variety of actions. As predicted, moral evaluations were faster, …

How Indeterminism Shapes Ecologists’ Contributions To Managing Socio-Ecological Systems, Sarah Michaels, Andrew Tyre

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

To make a difference in policy making about socio-ecological systems, ecologists must grasp when decision makers are amenable to acting on ecological expertise and when they are not. To enable them to do so we present a matrix for classifying a socio-ecological system by the extent of what we don’t know about its natural components and the social interactions that affects them. We use four examples, Midcontinent Mallards, Laysan Ducks, Pallid Sturgeon, and Rocky Mountain Grey Wolves to illustrate how the combination of natural and social source of indeterminism matters. Where social indeterminism is high, ecologists can expand the range …

Review Of Manitoba Politics And Government: Issues, Institutions, Traditions. Edited By Paul G. Thomas And Curtis Brown., Jim Mochoruk

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This collection of20 essays stems from a conference held at St. Johns College, University of Manitoba, in the fall of 2008, convened specifically to address what its organizers (now the book's editors) saw as the most glaring gaps in the coverage of "various aspects of Manitoba society, politics, government and contemporary policy issues." As with all such projects-especially when contributors come from several different fields-the contents are a bit uneven. Indeed, readers may feel somewhat whipsawed as they move from the smooth prose and deft touch of western Canada's leading historian, Gerry Friesen (who provides the first substantive chapter), to …

Review Of Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council And The Origins Of Native Activism. By Bradley G. Shreve. Foreword By Shirley Hill Witt, Bruce E. Johansen

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

While many histories of the "Red Power" movement trace its origins to the founding of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis during 1968 and the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay a year later, Bradley G. Shreve offers a compelling case that youth activism began during the 1950s, most notably in the Southwest. The Kiva Club (University of New Mexico), the Tribe of Many Feathers (Brigham Young University), and the Sequoyah Club of Oklahoma, among others, joined into the Regional Indian Youth Council in 1959 and the National Indian Youth Council in 1961. In contrast to AIM, which …

Disgust Sensitivity And The Neurophysiology Of Left-Right Political Orientations, Kevin B. Smith, Douglas R. Oxley, Matthew V. Hibbing, John R. Alford, John R. Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Disgust has been described as the most primitive and central of emotions. Thus, it is not surprising that it shapes behaviors in a variety of organisms and in a variety of contexts—including homo sapien politics. People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations. Given its primal nature and essential value in avoiding pathogens disgust likely has an effect even without registering in conscious beliefs. In this article, we demonstrate that individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images, such as of …

Being Blacklisted By China, And What Can Be Learned From It, James A. Milward

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Bloomberg, and more recently The Washington Post, have run stories about the visa problems of scholars who contributed to Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland, a volume edited by Frederick Starr and published by M.E. Sharpe in 2004. The Bloomberg piece was exhaustively reported; the reporters who wrote it, Dan Golden and Oliver Staley, conducted interviews with Chinese as well as western participants in the episode, and all in all did a good job with a complicated story. Inevitably, however, the Bloomberg piece creates some misconceptions, and these are as likely to be reinforced as cleared up in news reports that build …

Hellfire And Grey Drones: An Empirical Examination Of The Effectiveness Of Targeted Killings, Matthew A. Morehouse

Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the effectiveness of the United States’ targeted killing program. Specifically, do targeted killings work as an effective program for combating global terrorism? This thesis is divided into parts. The first section provides a brief introduction to targeted killings. The second part consists of an examination of targeted killings as an essentially contested concept, arguing that targeted killings can be defined in a manner consistent with the scientific enterprise. The third section contains a thorough review of the literature on targeted killings, demonstrating that there is a dearth of works investigating the actual effectiveness of targeted killings. The …

The Political Consequences Of Population Consolidation In Nebraska, Diane L. Duffin

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In recent decades, the migration that has long been characteristic of life in the Great Plains has meant the steady relocation of population from rural to metropolitan counties. While much has been written about the social and economic consequences of this migration, far less is known of its political consequences. In Nebraska, the least-populated counties experience the most severe out-migration, and are the most reliably Republican. To discern a relationship between population migration and political outcomes, this study analyzes the six open-seat races for United States senator that have occurred in Nebraska since 1976. An econometric model that explains Democratic …

Review Of Kansas Politics And Government: The Clash Of Political Cultures. By H. Edward Flentje And Joseph A. Aistrup., Burdett A. Loomis

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Prior to the publication of Kansas Politics and Government, there was no essential book on Kansas politics, policy-making, and institutions. Now there is. It's as simple as that. Anyone who wants to understand the Sunflower State's politics should start here. Most prosaically, this is one more in the Nebraska Press's ambitious series of single-state studies. But Ed Flentje and Joe Aistrup (disclaimer: I write a column for Kansas papers in rotation with them and two other political scientists) have done more than cover the breadth of the state's politics. In their emphasis on political cultures, they provide an effective way …

Review Of The Leadership Of George Bush: An Insider's View Of The Forty-First President. By Roman Popadiuk, Caroline Heldman

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The Leadership of George Bush is infused with a sentimentality exemplified by the book's opening statement describing the Bushes' emotional response to Bush 43's election to the presidency: "George Bush sat straight up, his back rigid but his chest heaving slightly as he sought to hold back tears. Barbara Bush sat quietly, unmovable, a glint of satisfaction and pride sparkling in her eyes." Despite the author's proximity and long-time affiliation, the book provides scant new information about Bush 41 's presidency, mostly because the author fails to connect it with larger literatures on presidential leadership and executive management. Instead, it …

The Politics Of Mate Choice, John R. Alford, Peter K. Hatemi, John Hibbing, Nicholas G. Martin, Lindon J. Eaves

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Recent research has found a surprising degree of homogeneity in the personal political communication network of individuals but this work has focused largely on the tendency to sort into likeminded social, workplace, and residential political contexts. We extend this line of research into one of the most fundamental and consequential of political interactions—that between sexual mates. Using data on thousands of spouse pairs in the United States, we investigate the degree of concordance among mates on a variety of traits. Our findings show that physical and personality traits display only weakly positive and frequently insignificant correlations across spouses. Conversely, political …

Personal And Political Reconciliation In Post-Genocide Rwanda, Ari Kohen, Michael Zanchelli, Levi Drake

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

The majority of scholarly research on Rwanda currently focuses on determining the causes of and participation in the genocide. In this paper, we explore a variety of questions that have come to the forefront in post-genocide Rwanda. In particular, we are concerned with the prospects for peace and justice in the aftermath of the gross abuses of human rights that occurred and, to that end, we consider the potential uses and limits of restorative justice initiatives in the process of healing and reconciliation in Rwanda. We argue that restorative justice initiatives have moved the country closer toward reconciliation than retributive …

Book Review: Fractured Rebellion, Amy O'Keefe

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Walder creates an orderly account of the events, discussions, and political currents that comprised the student movement in Beijing during the first two years of China’s Cultural Revolution. With meticulous attention to sequencing, he comprehends and brings meaning to a whirlwind of events often described as a vindictive political free-for-all, but which he shows, instead, to have been a structured series of rivalries.

Passport To The World: Chinese Students At The University Of Kentucky, Denise Ho, Jared Flanery

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

My Thursday afternoon flight from Shanghai to Chicago exhibited a curious phenomenon. United Airlines Flight 836, which went from China to Midwestern America on August 19, 2010, had the most homogenous set of passengers I had ever seen. They were all in their late teens and early twenties, Chinese youth dressed in the trendiest fashions and carrying the latest electronics. I was so impressed that I broke my rule about photographing people, popped up in my seat in the corner of economy class, and took their picture.

Whether United knew it or not, my flight was a modern school bus, …