This book brings together a range of studies that aim at illustrating the ideas, institutions, historical patterns, and contemporary relevance of the social-political system that existed in the main part of East Asia during the premodern era. This is most often known as the Confucian literati-bureaucratic state, the imperial Chinese bureaucratic state, or the Confucian-Legalist state, that was established and endured most notably in China, but also in several East Asian societies such as Korea, Vietnam, Japan. That state and sociopolitical system also greatly shaped state making in several...

This book explores how China's political system responds to crisis. A crisis is an episode whose impact cannot be controlled merely by astute on-the-ground incident management, particularly in cases involving widespread doubt about the legitimacy of established policy paradigms or the political order as a whole. Crisis can create “political windows” for advocacy groups challenging established policies in pluralist democracies. The political battle between competing definitions of an uncertain and ambiguous situation among the various actors provides them with crisis-induced opportunity...