The anxieties of the 1950s intensified as the Cold War heated up. JFK ’s election promised a New Frontier, and then his assassination extinguished that flame. On the one hand, the civil rights, Chicano (El Movimiento), women’s, student democracy, labor union, environmental, and public interest movements of the 1960s promoted a robust government response in which Congress passed hundreds of new laws to address the concerns raised by the movements. LBJ’s Great Society also included an array of social program that addressed the extraordinary level of poverty in the country. On the other hand, the Vietnam War significantly dampened the hopes for a Great Society as tensions arose between those for and against our continued presence in Vietnam, weakened trust in government. The political movements added to this lack of trust when they supported legal procedures to make sure that government did its job. As faith in government receded, and the reaction to the extraordinary expansion of government intensified, the table was set for a new allegiance to a market economy.

This chapter conceptualises the Confucian legal tradition as a historically extended and legally embodied Confucian argument. The Confucian legal tradition has three features. First, it is jurisprudentially founded on a set of Confucian concepts and principles justifying the importance of good men. Second, the Confucian argument is embodied in structural institutions and legal codes in premodern and modern East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam). Third, legally embodied Confucian concepts and principles are historically extended for thousands of years from formation, consolidation, and transnationalisation to modernisation.

The South Korean economy began to grow rapidly in the 1960s, enabling it to converge with the advanced countries in per capita product. It did so as the leadership change enhanced state capacity. The government intervened pervasively in the economy, making sure that firms receiving the favors used them properly. The size of the government itself was small, but the macroeconomic policy was inflationary. The resultant inflation affected the way financial policy, the most important policy at the time, worked. The export promotion policy degenerated as the government employed non-price measures while the price incentives fell in spite of the 1964 exchange rate reform because of inflation, whereas the reform helped to check import growth. Nonetheless, exports grew rapidly, providing important dynamism for the economy. South Korea coped with the emerging balance of payments problem by normalizing its diplomatic relationship with Japan and sending troops to Vietnam.

Chapter 3 examines Chinese coercion in the South China Sea. My previous work examines the overall trends of Chinese coercion in the South China Sea. I find that China used coercion in the 1990s because of the high need to establish a reputation for resolve and low economic cost. China used militarized coercion because the US withdrawal from the Subic Bay in Southeast Asia and the focus on Europe reduced China’s geopolitical backlash cost of using coercion. China then refrained from coercion from 2000 to 2006 because of the high economic cost and low need to establish a reputation for resolve. It began to use coercion again after 2007, but because of the increasing geopolitical backlash cost since the post-2000 period, Chinese coercion remains nonmilitarized, which includes economic sanctions and gray-zone coercion. This chapter also examines three case studies – the cross-national comparison of China’s coercion against the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia, the Sino-Philippine Mischief Reef incident in 1995, and the Sino-Philippine Scarborough Shoal incident in 2012. These case studies demonstrate that the mechanisms of the cost-balancing theory are present in them.

The twentieth century witnessed the rise of nationalism associated with decolonization throughout Asia and Africa. Indochina inspired nationalist movements around the world as communist-led movements there scored major victories against French colonialism and American intervention. The phenomenon was complex not only because Indochinese nationalisms were entangled with communism, but also because of their apparently ancient roots.

This chapter aims to explore the origins and nature of nationalisms in Indochina. It examines the processes that gave birth to national consciousness among the people in the Indochinese peninsula. Indochina, a modern name for this region born out of French imperial conquests, consisted of diverse communities of different religions, cultures, and histories. These communities had existed and interacted with each other for centuries prior to their contact with European powers.

This chapter assesses the effects of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War on the Cold War consensus and compares the Nixon and Carter administrations realist and liberal policy appproaches.

This chapter will provide the clarification of the origin, nature, and identify forms of political patronage in Vietnam. First, the authors present the origin of patronage in the context of Vietnamese culture and history; emphasizing the element of feudalism, Confucianism and culture-villageoise. After that, the authors analyze patronage appointments in contemporary Vietnamese politics, in light of its specific institutional dynamics. Finally, the chapter provides various typical case studies for the classification of patronage according to the models of Peters (2021).

When Lyndon Johnson took the United States into large-scale war in Vietnam in 1965, he did so despite deep misgivings on the part of numerous close associates, including his vice president and senior Senate Democrats, as well as key allied governments. Johnson himself frequently expressed doubts about the prospects in the struggle, even with the commitment of major US combat troops and heavy air power. Yet he took the plunge, despite the fact that some part of him suspected – correctly – that the war would ultimately be his undoing. Why he did so is harder to explain than is often suggested, but it’s not inexplicable. At each step, escalation represented the path of least political resistance for him. Thus although Johnson may have been a doubting warrior, he was also a determined one, from his first day in office to his last. He stayed the course even as domestic opposition grew in 1967 and 1968, and even as his principal subordinate on the war, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, grew disillusioned. In January 1969, Johnson left Washington, a man broken by a war he didn’t want but felt compelled to wage.

This chapter examines the ways in which Lyndon Johnson attempted to build on and expand the liberal tradition in twentieth-century American politics. As he did so from the perch of the Oval Office, Johnson ran directly into the structural limitations and debilitating political fears of liberalism that were at work right at this high point for Johnson’s career: the racial accord that Northern Democrats had entered into with Southerners in the 1930s, and the fears about appearing weak on national security. In the end, the political vulnerabilities and limitations of this tradition would overwhelm him, leaving him to announce that he would not run for reelection in October 1964 and defining his legacy over the failed war in Vietnam. While it is important to understand how Johnson’s own agency led to his downfall, it is equally relevant to understand how the nature of American liberalism trapped Johnson into these positions. The president was caught in the basic contradictions of the agenda that he inherited and championed. The same tradition that strengthened his resolve to grow the government to tackle new areas of domestic life also pushed him toward the decisions that drowned his legacy for decades to come. This is not just the story of Lyndon Johnson – it’s the story of American liberalism in the twentieth century.

President Lyndon B. Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stand out as remarkable co-architects of the movement for racial progress and just democracy that marked the decade of the 1960s. Individually, each put an indelible stamp of the civil rights and Great Society eras. Together, for a time, they formed perhaps the most formidable political tandem between a president and social justice movement leader in American history. Yet their relationship was also a fraught one,  filled with creative tension, political conflicts, and personal disappointments. This chapter delves into the arc of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr.’s relationship to tease out the extraordinary ways they were able to galvanize America toward some of the most remarkable achievements of the nation’s Second Reconstruction; yet, by the end of the public political careers, they grew increasingly distant, combative, and disappointed in the other. Ultimately, the chapter argues that, despite their political differences, their evolving relationship helped to fundamentally transform postwar American democracy even as it framed the limits of the political liberalism within which such change could occur.