Understanding East Asian Political Systems: Origins, Characteristics, and Changes

perspective of either political economy or political culture, which leaves the study of East Asian political systems highly underdeveloped. This paper seeks a political explanation of the emergence, characteristics, changes and future prospects of East Asian political regimes. They reveal the common nature of unipolar power in each of three forms-the one-party regime, one-man rule, and the oligarchical unipolar system. The unipolar nature of the regime’s originated in the political elites’ sense of crisis about the survival of the nation in foreign-penetrated and bifurcated East Asian societies. East Asian political regimes gradually change into looser forms of authoritarianism or into plural democracy, due to the evaporation of revolutionary zeal and/or the growth of civil