Abstract: This article analyzes the activities of Southeast Asian civil society organizations (CSOs) with regard to citizens’ online freedom of expression (digital rights) against the backdrop of China’s increasing digital investments in the region through its Digital Silk Road (DSR) concept. CSO behavior relating to citizens’ digital rights contributes to the on-the-ground, agency-driven perspective among countries that are targets of Chinese digital infrastructure investments. This perspective is underrepresented in the literature surrounding China’s contemporary global rise. Focusing specifically on Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines—three countries that rank as “high” recipients of Beijing’s media influence (one form of digital technology influence)—this article sheds light on two phenomena. First, the Southeast Asian CSO landscape currently focuses on pressing issues threatening freedom of expression in national and regional spaces, such as national government surveillance, misinformation campaigns, and internet shutdowns, more so than the “digital Chinese threat.” Second, although pushback against the threats to Southeast Asians’ digital rights often has connections to China’s digital technologies, the reality that digital repression techniques are organized and executed by Southeast Asian governmental regimes (and not by Chinese actors) generates contradictions that run counter to the democratic ideals espoused by these countries and align more closely with the Chinese states’ views relating to information organization and control.

Abstract: By introducing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an international infrastructure investment strategy, China attracted a lot of attention. China's approach to state capitalism has opened a window of opportunity for other infrastructure investment strategies. In response, the world's largest and liberally minded economies, such as the United States of America, Japan, and the European Union, have focused on connectivity and embarked on similar strategies. In this article, I conduct a comparative analysis of infrastructure investment strategies. I analyze key tenets of the BRI and international responses through the prism of principles, priorities, funding, financing, governance, and implementation. The comparison of strategies highlights more commonalities than differences, and I identify several instances in which liberal economies act in contradiction to their variety of capitalism. The results suggest that China has opened a window of opportunity for proactive infrastructure investment strategies, and major economies have responded in kind. With overlapping emphases in similar geographic regions, these strategies lead to competition. Consequently, recipient countries profit from an advantageous negotiating position when seeking to attract foreign direct investment in infrastructure projects.

The purpose of this article is to explore what explains radicalization of migrant communities and their families in their home country. Contemporary scholarship on radicalization has identified a broad range of explanatory variables, such as poverty, discrimination and/or lack of social mobility, that have the capacity to push individuals toward violence and radical beliefs. Yet, there is still a significant gap in current literature over the question why entire ethnic or national migrant groups are more represented in radical groups than others despite similar experiences. Using the case of Tajik migrants in Russia this article posits that the legacy of collective grievances and cyclical, systemic injustices, rather than a specific or personal experience of discrimination or mistreatment, are more accurate in explaining radicalization. The article pays specific attention to the role of religious or social remittances and, given a shared set of experiences, the susceptibility of the migrant's own family in the home country to the same radical ideology-despite their never leaving their country's borders. The findings suggest that the home country context, the collective account of society, is a more substantial predictor of radicalization than reception alone.

Scholars have found that election interference by a foreign power can increase political partisanship in a targeted state and can be an effective tool for throwing weight behind a candidate. We know less about how domestic political actors respond to election interference and how this affects the intervener's strategies over time. Since Taiwan held its first direct presidential election in 1996, China has used numerous tactics to influence Taiwan's elections. Taiwan's political parties have adapted to China's interference, with targeted candidates campaigning on election interference, and non-targeted candidates seeking to play a mediating role with Beijing. In response, China's tactics have shifted: the broad threats of earlier elections have been replaced with narrowly targeted efforts to mobilize Beijing-friendly segments of Taiwan's population.

China has undertaken a major shift in its position on mercury as an environmental problem over the last decade and a half. It ratified the Minamata Convention (MC) in 2016 and by doing so has committed to implement the treaty objectives. This article asks: how do we explain China's will and ability to implement its MC obligations?

Despite growing concerns about the impacts of climate change, Japanese public financial institutions continued to build on long-standing partnerships in Southeast Asia through the expansion of thermal power generation. Recent Japanese investments include coal-fired power plants in Indonesia and Vietnam and natural gas supply chains in Indonesia and Bangladesh. Japan was one of the last developed countries globally to champion coal development that, even if highly efficient, comes at a cost to the environment. Overseas energy investment is at the nexus of two significant challenges of this century: the threat of climate change and great power competition. Japan, regionally proximate to China and burdened with a shrinking economy and limited energy supplies, shapes its regional foreign policy to enhance energy security, expand overseas market share, and uphold a rules-based international order. This paper discusses these primary drivers of Japan’s policy approach and highlights examples of Japan’s overseas energy investment strategies starting to shift to maintain a competitive edge as public opinion and market forces react to the increased risk perception of climate change.

This article explores the correlation between media effects and political trust, as well as the moderating factor in the equation. Specifically, the authors measured political trust within two categories: institutional trust and system trust. Analyses were based on two waves of surveys conducted among Internet users (2014: N = 2,970; 2017: N = 2,379) in China. Results indicated that (1) exposure to official media was positively correlated with political trust, whereas exposure to individual media and overseas media were negatively correlated with political trust, and exposure to commercial media was a nonsignificant factor; (2) correlation was higher for institutional trust than system trust; and (3) political values were a significant moderating factor. Implications are discussed.

To secure an oil and gas supply, China has built several types of energy infrastructure near its borders and developed energy cooperation with regional partners based on this infrastructure. However, not all energy cooperation projects develop at an equal pace or are equally successful. This study employs the neofunctionalist spillover hypothesis—one of several key discourses applied to explaining European integration—to account for the difference in regional cooperation between two China-driven energy megaprojects in Asia: the China–Central Asia Pipelines and the China–Southeast Asia Pipelines. After investigation into the so-called spillover hypothesis, including “functional spillover,” “political spill-over,” and “cultivated spillover,” the more successful of the two projects was also found to be more significant in terms of its spillover effect. Thus, this article finds that regional cooperation in the Chinese context also supports the spill-over hypothesis, which has conventionally been regarded as a Europe-based discourse.