Jonathan Sullivan – författare

In January 2016, Taiwan’s former authoritarian ruler, the KMT, the Nationalist Party of China, lost control of both the presidency and the legislature. Having led the democratization process in Taiwan during the 1980s, it maintained a winning coalition among big business, the public sector, green-collar workers and local factions. Until now.A New Era in Democratic Taiwan identifies past, present and future trajectories in party politics and state-society relations in Taiwan. Providing a comprehensive examination of public opinion data, it sheds light on significant changes in the composition of political attitudes among the electorate. Through theoretical and empirical analyses, this book also demonstrates the emergence of a ‘new’ Taiwanese identity during the transition to democracy and shows how a diffusion of interests in society has led to an opening for niche political organizations. The result, it argues, is a long-term challenge to the ruling parties. As the first book to evaluate Taiwan’s domestic and international circumstances after Tsai’s election in 2016, this book will be useful for students and scholars of Taiwan Studies and cross-Strait relations, as well as Asian politics more generally.

Football, Business and State Power in Contemporary China investigates the evolving relationship between private enterprise and Party/state authority in the Xi Jinping era, through the lens of the Chinese football industry.In the mid-2010s football emerged as a policy priority of the central leadership, catalysing an unprecedented boom in private investment largely channelled through collaboration with local governments. Conceptualising private-state interactions as strategic social exchange shaped by asymmetric resource dependence, this book shows how firms used football investment to gain access to government-controlled resources. Drawing on interviews with 200 stakeholders, the authors trace the sector’s rise and fall, driven by top-down ambition, opaque transactions and improvised regulation. After three decades of aspiring to professionalization and privatization, the Covid-19 pandemic exposed structural vulnerabilities in Chinese football, prompting the widespread re-entry of State-Owned Enterprises as emergency backstops. The book situates these developments within China’s political economy, where private firms, despite their outsized contribution to growth, remain embedded in a system of political oversight and strategic compliance. It highlights the role of local governments as key vectors for policy implementation as they navigate fiscal constraints and central political directives through exchanges with the private sector. Using the case of professional football, the authors illuminate how macro- and micro-level political ambition and contingent exchanges shape governance and business in contemporary China, offering insights relevant to industries beyond football.This book will be useful for researchers, students and academics interested in political economy, business studies, political science, and the sociology of sport.

In January 2016, Taiwan’s former authoritarian ruler, the KMT, the Nationalist Party of China, lost control of both the presidency and the legislature. Having led the democratization process in Taiwan during the 1980s, it maintained a winning coalition among big business, the public sector, green-collar workers and local factions. Until now.A New Era in Democratic Taiwan identifies past, present and future trajectories in party politics and state-society relations in Taiwan. Providing a comprehensive examination of public opinion data, it sheds light on significant changes in the composition of political attitudes among the electorate. Through theoretical and empirical analyses, this book also demonstrates the emergence of a ‘new’ Taiwanese identity during the transition to democracy and shows how a diffusion of interests in society has led to an opening for niche political organizations. The result, it argues, is a long-term challenge to the ruling parties. As the first book to evaluate Taiwan’s domestic and international circumstances after Tsai’s election in 2016, this book will be useful for students and scholars of Taiwan Studies and cross-Strait relations, as well as Asian politics more generally.

The story of China–Africa relations is one of the most important geopolitical and geoeconomic developments of the past two decades. This book uses the interaction between China and African countries in football to critically examine how engagement through football reproduces unequal outcomes but also positive developments on both sides. A multidisciplinary cast of China and Africa scholars demonstrate how political, economic, social and cultural issues play out through football, illuminating the motivations, processes and consequences of the evolving relationship between China and African countries. From nation states, corporations, institutions, clubs, players and fans, this book shows how the global game runs through Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Algeria, Egypt, Beijing, Guangzhou and the Chinese Northeast, with its ramifications for geopolitics, South–South relations, international sports governance, diplomacy, soft power, international media, labor migration and transnational fandoms.

As a top 20 global economy and tech powerhouse, a liberal democracy on the frontline of autocratic pressure and a pivotal component in the free and open Indo-Pacific, the future security of Taiwan has enormous ramifications for today’s global order.Jonathan Sullivan and Lev Nachman consider Taiwan’s complex and multi-layered history and the many dimensions it holds in international politics. They show that an appreciation of its critical role in geopolitics is more than just the crude dichotomies of “democracy vs authoritarianism” or “independence vs unification”. Its history and future are intimately tied to wider questions of decolonialism, national identity, economic interdependence, multiculturalism and modern values – all set against an ever-present security threat.