APP'S BOOKS OF THE WEEK of April 27, 2026

📚Books of the Week📖

The Broken China Dream: 

How Reform Revived Totalitarianism

By Minxin Pei, Professor of Government, 

Claremont McKenna College

PURCHASE BOOK 12/2/2025

When China embarked on its transformative journey of modernization in 1979, many believed the country’s turn toward capitalism would put its totalitarian past to rest and mark the birth of a democratic, open society. Instead, China reverted to a neo-totalitarian state, one backed by one of the fastest-growing, most formidable economies on earth. Pei explains why the reforms of the post-Mao era have been reversed on nearly every front.

Goliath's Curse: The History and Future 

of Societal Collapse

By Luke Kemp, Research Associate, Centre for the 

Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge

PURCHASE BOOK 9/23/2025

Kemp traces the emergence of “Goliaths”: large societies built on a collection of fragile hierarchies that collapse time after time across the world. Drawing on historical databases and the latest discoveries in archaeology and anthropology, he uncovers that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient. In our modern, global Goliath, a collapse is likely to be long-lasting and more dire than ever before. Collapse may be invisible until after it has occurred and has often had a more positive outcome for the general population than for the 1%.

Israel on Trial: Examining the History, 

the Evidence, and the Law

By Roy K. Altman, U.S. District Judge for 

the Southern District of Florida

PURCHASE BOOK 4/28/2026

Judge Altman applies courtroom-tested standards—burden of proof, corroboration, chain of custody— to examine claims of colonialism, apartheid, and genocide with dispassionate precision. In an era shaped by viral slogans and curated outrage, Judge Altman offers a disciplined method for discerning truth from propaganda and what it means to demand proof.

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Books selected on the APP website are not a sign of endorsement. 

They are simply new and interesting.

2024: The Making of an Epoch in Japan

An opposition emerges

By Takuya Nishimura, Senior Fellow, Former Editorial Writer for The Hokkaido Shimbun
The views expressed by the author are his own and are not associated with The Hokkaido Shimbun
You can find his blog, J Update here.
December 16, 2024. Special to Asia Policy Point
 
The year 2024 will be remembered as a time of major transition in Japanese politics. An epoch-making event was the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) loss of its majority in the House of Representatives, which resulted in a hung parliament. It is likely that politics in Japan has entered an era in which the LDP can no longer enjoy unilateral dominance, and no policy decision can be made without the support of other parties.
 
Since December 2012, when it retook leadership of the Diet from the Democratic Party of Japan, the LDP has maintained its leadership with the help of a coalition partner, Komeito. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expanded the political base of the LDP by focusing on the growth-oriented economic policy known as Abenomics. Abe also introduced the tactic of early snap elections before opposition parties are ready for them.
 
After Abe stepped down in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the LDP’s decline became apparent. Abenomics proved unable to raise the real wages of workers. Revelations about the Abe faction’s unlawful management of political funds led to a miserable defeat in the general election of the Lower House in October 2024. The assassination of Abe in 2022 and political confusion afterward marked the end of LDP-dominant politics.
 
Kishida tried to leave Abe-politics behind. He relied on his liberal principles and his Kochi-kai faction. He failed, however, to control the conservative colleagues of Abe. Ishiba, an outspoken opponent of Abe, is promoting moderate politics and listening to voices from the opposition parties. This stance became possible from the decline of conservative power in the LDP caused by the slush fund scandal and the party losing its majority in the Lower House.
 
One event that symbolized the coming of a new political era in 2024 was the revision of a budget bill, for the first time since 1996, in the extraordinary session of the Diet in December. The budget bill, coupled with the threat of a non-confidence resolution, is recognized as the most important issue, and the leading parties and the oppositions may be sharply at odds over it. The leading party would not easily accept amendments to a budget bill once it has been submitted to the Diet.
 
In the case of this year’s supplemental budget bill, the opposition leader, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ), criticized the bill for including unnecessary spending and lacking sufficient financial support for reconstruction in the Noto Peninsula following last January’s earthquake. The Ishiba Cabinet resubmitted the bill with a reduction in the total budget from 13.9 trillion yen to 12.5 trillion yen.
 
Nevertheless, the CDPJ did not vote for the revised budget bill in the Plenary Session in an effort to establish itself as the principal opposition party. Two other opposition parties, the Democratic Party for the People (DPP) and Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin-no Kai) joined with the LDP to pass the bill.
 
The LDP considers the DPP the opposition power most open to its appeals for legislative action. The DPP principal concern is tax policy, including expansion of the tax credit. The LDP and Komeito found support among members of the DPP to raise the threshold for imposing income tax from 1.03 million yen in annual income to 1.78 million yen beginning in FY 2026. Gaining the support of one or more opposition parties for each piece of legislation will become the new mission for the minority government of the LDP and Komeito.
 
Although the LDP managed to maintain its control of the government by replacing Fumio Kishida with Ishiba, the approval rating for the Ishiba Cabinet in the polls has not risen. In the polls of major newspapers in December, the approval rating for the Ishiba Cabinet was 36 percent in Asahi Shimbun, 30 percent in Mainichi Shimbun and 39 percent in Yomiuri Shimbun. These percentages represent a significant decline from October, when the Ishiba administration took power, by ten to sixteen percentage points.
 
On political reform, the LDP has yet to meet the expectations of the Japanese public.    Seventy-three percent of those polled in Asahi and 86 percent in Yomiuri disapproved of Ishiba’s handling of changes to political fundraising and expenditure. Ishiba wants to add greater transparency to the Political Funds Control Act before the end of this year, but he seems to have no viable strategy for accumulating the necessary majority of votes.
 
As to another reform topic, the future of the policy activities fund, the LDP agreed with the CDPJ on abolishing it. Although the LDP wanted to reserve some exceptions of disclosure for spending in diplomatic activities, it finally withdrew its proposal after receiving consistent resistance from the opposition parties.
 
The leading parties and the opposition also reached a deal in which they would conclude on the abolition of political contributions by companies and organizations by March 2025. This means that they could not settle the most controversial issue in political reform by the end of the year.
 
This kind of struggle over legislation will be the order of the day in the Diet for the next year. In the ordinary session of the Diet, expected to be convoked in January, the debate among the parties over the FY 2025 budget will be contentious. It is too early to say whether the Ishiba Cabinet will survive to the election of the Upper House next summer.

Defending Political Contributions in the Diet

Maybe not a winning strategy

By Takuya Nishimura, Senior Fellow, Former Editorial Writer for The Hokkaido Shimbun
The views expressed by the author are his own and are not associated with The Hokkaido Shimbun
You can find his blog, J Update here.
December 9, 2024. Special to Asia Policy Point

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba spent the first week of December in the Diet defending his proposed policies. The main issue was greater visibility into political fundraising. Although the opposition parties urge the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to prohibit donations from companies and organizations, the LDP remains reluctant to do so. These donations are critical income for the LDP and other parties. The Democratic Party for the People (DPP), which has crucial votes in the House of Representatives, is siding with the leading coalition.
 
Both Houses of the Diet usually hold a question session for party leaders in the Plenary Sittings a few days after a prime minister’s policy speech. The session typically takes three days. Questions in the Lower House are asked on the first day and in the afternoon of the second day. Those in the Upper House are scheduled in the morning of the second day and the whole of the third day. The prime minister and other cabinet ministers may face questions from their own party leaders as well as from the opposition parties. The question session is in the form of one question and one answer without any follow-up.
 
The question session in the Plenary Sittings is followed by detailed discussions of the policies in the Committees for the Budget in both the Lower House and the Upper House. Each budget committee held a one-day meeting for questions by party leaders in this extraordinary session of the Diet. Other policy experts make detailed questions in the following meetings until the supplementary budget pass the committee. The opposition parties focus their attention on the budget committee discussions because they can go deeply into the weeds on the policies of leading parties. The budget committee discussions are not limited to the one-question-and-one-answer restriction.
 
Given his minority government, Ishiba had to protect his administration from broad reforms backed by the opposition parties. In the budget committee session of the House of Representatives, the head of Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ), Yoshihiko Noda, proposed a prohibition of political donations from companies and organizations.
 
In response, Ishiba wisely eschewed the dismissive attitude to the opposition parties that Shinzo Abe had adopted. Instead, Ishiba employed a legal argument. Ishiba contended that Article 21 of the Constitution of Japan, which guarantees freedom of expression, did not allow the Diet to prohibit such contributions.
 
“A company expresses its opinion through donation,” Ishiba told Noda. For Ishiba, a donation from a company to a political party, including a purchase of fundraising party tickets, is an act of expression. Freedom of expression is ordinarily guaranteed to protect the people from oppression by the government. Limits on political donations by companies or organizations are, to Ishiba, governmental oppression of business.
 
The opposition also argued that there was an agreement several years ago to prohibit company and organization donations. A former LDP president, Yohei Kono, recalled that his decision in 1994 to review donations from companies and organizations five years later in 1999 was an agreement to end such contributions within five years. Ishiba said the LDP had never made that kind of promise.
 
Ishiba insisted that disclosure of company and organization contributions was preferable to their abolition. Obviously, disclosure in general is important. The debate is not, however, a comparison of disclosure and abolition. The LDP will defer legislative action on contributions to next year, rejecting a request from the opposition parties to conclude work on political reform in the current extraordinary session. 
 
The LDP shared a draft of a revised Political Funds Control Act with the opposition parties. The statute would terminate the policy activity fund, prohibit the distribution of funds from the party to its members unless the use of the funds is disclosed, and establish a third-party organization to monitor political funds.
 
The CDPJ and some opposition parties submitted their own bill to amend the Political Funds Control Act to (among other things) bar company and organization contributions. The DPP did not, however, join in. Instead, the DPP agreed to co-sponsor a reform bill with Komeito, which would not contain a similar amendment. The LDP is supposed to collaborate with Komeito and DPP on their bill, as the LDP did on tax reform.
 
Ishiba continues to promote disclosure requirements in place of a prohibition. He has proposed that the Upper House lawmakers involved in the kickback scandal testify before the political ethics council if they wish to be official candidates in the election next summer. Most of the members were willing to do so. But Ishiba’s proposal would not require full disclosures, nor would it require testimony under oath. 
 
Japanese voters are beginning to understand that Ishiba’s concept of political reform is limited. While he is willing to accept minor limits on political fundraising and expenditures, such as the policy activities fund, he is not courageous enough to support fundamental reforms such as the abolition of contributions from companies and organizations.