Abstract
The views of ordinary East Asians concerning individual rights to stage protests were investigated in the context of historical and political events in the region. A total of 321 participants from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan (average age = 30 years old) were through snowball and convenience sampling. Both deductive analyses and grounded theory approaches were used to code their responses to the Personal and Institutional Rights to Aggression and Peace Survey (PAIRTAPS; Malley-Morrison, Daskalopoulos, & You, International Psychology Reporter 10:19–20, 2006). A majority of respondents affirmed the right of individuals to protest; the most common justifications confirming this right focused on human rights, socially sanctioned rights, general agreement with the rights, and nonviolence. Most respondents also indicated a willingness to support protestors in response to a hypothetical vignette. The most common themes in responses rejecting the right to protest were pseudo-moral reasoning, distortion of the consequences of protestor action, and denial of personal responsibility. Our findings also showed intraregional group differences by gender and military experience in views concerning individual rights to stage protests. Findings were discussed in their historical and political contexts as well as in relation to Bandura’s (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71:364–74, 1996, Personality and Social Psychology Review 3:193–209, 1999) theory of moral disengagement.
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- 1.
There are many debates around the world concerning which countries or regions should be regarded as belonging to East Asia. For example, the UN subregion of Eastern Asia contains the entirety of the People’s Republic of China (including Hong Kong, Macao, and five autonomous regions such as the Tibetans in Tibet, the Zhuangs in Guangxi, the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, the Huis in Ningxia), Taiwan (officially known as the Republic of China), Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and Mongolia. This chapter accepts the UN’s definition but excludes the five autonomous regions of China, from which no participants were recruited.
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Kim, H.MS., Schauer, M., Mendlein, A., Murata, A., Murata, M., Jones-Rooy, A. (2013). Perspectives on Protest in East Asia. In: Malley-Morrison, K., Mercurio, A., Twose, G. (eds) International Handbook of Peace and Reconciliation. Peace Psychology Book Series, vol 7. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5933-0_20
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