Asian Journal of Law and Society最新文献

{"title":"Trust, Democracy, and Hygiene Theatre: Taiwan’s Evasion of the Pandemic","authors":"R. B. Leflar","doi":"10.1017/als.2022.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.19","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Taiwan’s record of preventing infections and deaths from COVID-19 outshines that of almost every other nation, far outstripping the performance of the US, all European countries, and almost all Asian countries. Yet Taiwan is the nation closest to Wuhan, font of the pandemic. Equally importantly, Taiwan’s public health achievement has occurred without the government dictates such as business and residential lockdowns that have aroused controversy and caused economic and psychological distress around the globe. This essay relates the story of Taiwan’s actions during the crucial early months of 2020 and explores the factors—historical, geographical, legal, institutional, strategic, and cultural—accounting for Taiwan’s remarkable success. Prominent among those factors are the legal and institutional infrastructure of preparedness that Taiwan constructed following its unhappy experience with the 2003 SARS outbreak, and the prompt and decisive measures taken upon discovery of the Wuhan outbreak on 31 December 2019. A dialogue between the judiciary and the legislative and executive branches of government following the SARS episode enabled the infrastructure of preparedness to be created through a process consonant with democratic government, respecting principles of individual liberty and fairness. Risk communication techniques were skilfully employed to build public trust in expert advice about measures for infection prevention. Persuasion, not compulsion, was the norm. Cultural factors including customary acceptance of mask-wearing and authoritative advice, and perhaps a high level of risk-aversity, also played an important part. Taiwan’s pandemic control policies have drawn criticism of government overreach. Some recommendations, such as for outdoor masking, bear little rational relation to infection prevention and are best characterized as mere “hygiene theatre.” Nevertheless, early-2020 government measures received a high level of public approval. Taiwan’s successful response to the pandemic illustrates the nation’s nature: a disciplined democracy.","PeriodicalId":54015,"journal":{"name":"Asian Journal of Law and Society","volume":"10 1","pages":"46 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46624920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Internationalization as a Leap of Faith: Arbitration Reforms in China and the Challenges of Implementation","authors":"Kainan Huang","doi":"10.1017/als.2022.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.23","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Recent years have witnessed an increasing trend in Chinese arbitration reform that emulates international norms and practices. This article examines some of these key reform measures and major challenges to their implementation. It explores in both legal and practical terms why most of these reform techniques may remain largely ineffective, showing that engaging in international norms and standards in China can be highly challenging due to their potential illegality, the general lack of institutional capacity to sustain them, and the conflicts of local ideas about the purposes of arbitration. It is thus doubtful whether commitment to satisfying the formal requirements prescribed by the legal reforms would often prevail. When it does, it is questionable whether this form of commitment would become prevalent and how it could proceed in a sustainable and coherent manner from a practical perspective.","PeriodicalId":54015,"journal":{"name":"Asian Journal of Law and Society","volume":"10 1","pages":"241 - 271"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43168067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Comparative Study of Socio-Legal Scenarios in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Focusing on Asian Responses","authors":"Kunihiko Yoshida","doi":"10.1017/als.2022.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.20","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article first distinguishes three governance scenarios that have been enacted in the COVID-19 pandemic, including identification and control; herd immunity without policy adjustments; and periodic lockdowns and hasty opening. In suggesting how different governments’ strategies were taxonomized into these categories, the paper examines major socio-legal challenges, including variations in social structures and government responsibilities; differences in public health cultures and legal policy options available to governments; unequal distribution of health and social welfare benefits; and public concerns of government overreach in relation to privacy of the infected and the preservation of individual liberty and freedom. Finally, the paper offers critical recommendations in the interest of ensuring a robust social-legal framework for providing adequate medical care to the infected; improving public health for vulnerable groups; ensuring that less privileged countries have access to vaccines; and designing post-disaster reconstruction by seeking global health objectives, rather than state-centric national justice.","PeriodicalId":54015,"journal":{"name":"Asian Journal of Law and Society","volume":"10 1","pages":"57 - 69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49512480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Independent Directors and Team Production in Japanese Corporate Governance","authors":"Andrew Johnston, K. Miyamoto","doi":"10.1017/als.2022.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.22","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Independent directors (IDs) in listed Japanese companies have gradually increased with the transplant of the Western model of the monitoring board. In practice, however, IDs act more like the mediating hierarch in team production theory than the agent of the shareholders, albeit with a number of differences from Blair and Stout’s seminal model. Japanese IDs mediate formally and informally, resolving vertical disputes between groups of executives as they contest control of the company. Given the norm of lifetime employment, such vertical disputes are common in Japanese companies and are economically significant, since failure to resolve them can result in destruction of firm-specific human capital. The article explores the scope for mediating hierarchy in Japanese law and corporate governance practice, then develops three case-studies which highlight the role played by IDs. Their practice is shaped by and supports social norms that emphasize the importance of continuity in team production.","PeriodicalId":54015,"journal":{"name":"Asian Journal of Law and Society","volume":"10 1","pages":"272 - 305"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42594391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vaccine Policy Failure: Explaining Thailand’s Unsuccessful Containment of COVID-19 in the Third Wave","authors":"Piya Pangsapa","doi":"10.1017/als.2022.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.17","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In January 2020, Thailand became the first country outside of China to report a coronavirus infection. In July 2020, Thailand was the number one ranked country (out of 184 countries) for its effective handling of COVID-19. In December 2020, the country was hit by a second wave and the government was once again able to contain the new outbreak. In late March 2021, however, a third wave broke out and as of 1 April 2021, Thailand had seen 2,022,117 new cases and a death toll during the third wave of 20,211. The Thai government has not only been unable to contain the virus this time around, but has also failed in its procurement, allocation, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines for its 70 million people. This article will look at the government’s mismanagement of the pandemic in the third wave and how the government is dealing with the current crisis.","PeriodicalId":54015,"journal":{"name":"Asian Journal of Law and Society","volume":"10 1","pages":"11 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43819313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The COVID-19 crisis, Herd Immunity, and “Vaccine Apartheid” in the Age of Anthropocene","authors":"Hiroshi Fukurai, Robin Gabriel, Xiaochen Liang","doi":"10.1017/als.2022.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.16","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The coronavirus pandemic has led to millions of deaths around the world. In many countries, it has also exposed long-standing inequities and injustices in health care, income distribution, labour market practice, and social protection for the poor, women, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized segments of the population. The disproportionate casualties among vulnerable populations have also exposed predatory corporate practices, such as the refusal to share vaccine patents with low-income countries (LIC) in the Global South. World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that this “vaccine apartheid” could lead to the further spread of more dangerous forms of virus variants, and that global solidarity and collaboration may be the only viable approach to current and future pandemics.1 Scientists have long warned that the continued destruction of the environment and ecological diversity would lead to future waves of cross-species (zoonotic) viral pandemics, due to the elimination of “natural borders” that once existed between human and non-human species. In the last several decades alone, humanity has suffered from five major zoonotic pandemics: AIDS, SARS, MARS, Ebola, and COVID-19.2 This Special Issue focuses on a select group of Asian countries in order to critically examine the impact of socio-legal inequities in state-centric policies upon domestic populations, including indigenous peoples, and to explore the possibility of international collaborative strategies for controlling the spread of deadly viruses and their variants in the coming years and decades, in Asia and beyond.","PeriodicalId":54015,"journal":{"name":"Asian Journal of Law and Society","volume":"10 1","pages":"1 - 10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43576840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Coloniality and Necropolitics in the Age of COVID-19: The Question of Palestine","authors":"Robin Gabriel","doi":"10.1017/als.2022.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.18","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article interrogates the necropolitical logics of the Israeli settler-state apparatus towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines these logics and practices through the prism of coloniality, which conceptualizes manifestations of colonialism (whether material, epistemic, or ontological) as a diffuse set of practices, opening up the conversation to discuss the ways in which international organizations, other states, and the Palestinian Authority continue to inflict the colonial harm through the employment of particular policies. Centring coloniality as an analytic allows a more global perspective and widens the discussion to include the ways in which Palestinians practise decoloniality, building and imagining “otherwise” worlds. This article maps the ways in which the devastation of the pandemic is not a product of the pandemic itself, but larger legacies of material, epistemic, and ontological colonial intervention.","PeriodicalId":54015,"journal":{"name":"Asian Journal of Law and Society","volume":"10 1","pages":"28 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44953614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Venture capital law in China","authors":"Alexander F. H. Loke","doi":"10.1017/als.2021.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2021.42","url":null,"abstract":"neutral as mediator and arbitrator, and the enforcement of the mediated settlement agreements from MDR). This book, wonderfully written, may need updates with the ratification and implementation of the Singapore Convention on Mediation in the future. Its comparison could be more precise by focusing on MDR in commercial disputes in Asia and the wider world. It is not entirely clear for readers how MDR in family and labour cases discussed in some chapters of this book is related to the global trend of increasing MDR in transnational commercial disputes.","PeriodicalId":54015,"journal":{"name":"Asian Journal of Law and Society","volume":"10 1","pages":"341 - 342"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47143524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Discussion: Winner, 2020 Distinguished Book Award, Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA), Anna High, Non-Governmental Orphan Relief in China: Law, Policy, and Practice (Routledge, 2019): Introduction by Hiroshi Fukurai","authors":"Hiroshi Fukurai","doi":"10.1017/als.2022.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.13","url":null,"abstract":"Furthermore, in 2020, China, India, and South Korea became the top three countries in the world that made arrangements for international adoption of their orphans and vulnerable children. 1 Since the beginning of this millennium, the \"geopolitical” analysis of the rise in the number of orphans and other vulnerable children began to receive increased international attention from socio-legal scholars, state policy-makers, human rights organizations, and international agencies around the globe. [...]agencies included the UN and other international groups, including UNICEF, the Defense for Children International (DCI), Save the Children, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), among many others. 2 The increase in vulnerable children spiked when the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. 6 Many orphaned children were adopted by Chinese families without knowledge of their ancestral connections to their parents, siblings, and families in Japan, despite the China–Japan collaborative efforts to address this human rights issues for many decades following the war. 7 The governmental policy on reproductive restriction due to China's one-child policy has also affected unwanted pregnancies and infant femicides for many decades. 8 In addition, the lack of public and private resources and inabilities of families to deal with disabled children and those with significant handicaps have led to their abandonment and calamitous situations. While this reproductive policy might not have been imposed on other ethnic minorities, such as Muslims in Xinjiang and Tibetan autonomous regions, the lack of resources for orphans and other vulnerable children has also been reported elsewhere, including those areas faced with illegal adoption and child abandonment, among others. 9 There has been a rapid economic ascension of the Chinese economy, during which, according to the World Bank (WB) report, more than 850 million Chinese people have moved out of destitute poverty.","PeriodicalId":54015,"journal":{"name":"Asian Journal of Law and Society","volume":"9 1","pages":"519 - 522"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42106329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Discussion: Response to Comments by Anna High","authors":"Anna High","doi":"10.1017/als.2022.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.15","url":null,"abstract":"As I suspect is the case for many, as an academic juggling the demands of teaching, research, and family in these “new normal” times, the weeks of the academic calendar seem to be slipping away a little more rapidly as compared to pre-pandemic life. As such, it does not seem so long ago that I was finalizing the manuscript, reading the proofs, and sending this book (Orphan Relief in China) out into the world. And yet my son Fred, who is the same age as this book (kindly timing his arrival for soon after completion of the manuscript), is now a boisterous two-and-a-half-year-old. In that time, it has been humbling to see Orphan Relief in China well received by peers around the world, and it is humbling all over again—and perhaps even quite self-indulgent, given the aforementioned time pressures—to have this opportunity to engage again with the material and reflect on my research journey. I am immensely grateful to Liang Xiaochen,1 Xu Zheng, and Shahla Ali for taking the time to write these thoughtful comments, and to Hiroshi Fukurai, immediate past-president of the Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA), for his support in and co-ordination of this book discussion. Taking the same approach as previous years’ discussants, my intention in this short response to the commentary is not to summarize the key points of my research—that would be superfluous, as the commentators have done a wonderful job at introducing the scope and approach of the book. In the interests of space, I will not respond individually to each point raised in each commentary. Instead, I would like to use this opportunity to respond to and elaborate on three themes highlighted by the commentators.","PeriodicalId":54015,"journal":{"name":"Asian Journal of Law and Society","volume":"9 1","pages":"526 - 530"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41879412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}