Honors Projects

Showing 1 - 4 of 4 Items

Miniature of Motives Underlying China’s Foreign Aid Allocation
Motives Underlying China’s Foreign Aid Allocation
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      Date: 2021-01-01

      Creator: Cecilia Markmann

      Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community



        The Body Negotiating Unprecedented Movement

        Date: 2024-01-01

        Creator: Mei Bock

        Access: Open access

        A collection of poems exploring threads including the Lower East Side, immigration, stray animals, art, and Chinese-American identity.


        Digital Authoritarianism in China and Russia: A Comparative Study

        Date: 2020-01-01

        Creator: Laura H.C. Howells

        Access: Open access

        Digital authoritarianism is on the rise around the world and threatens the data privacy and rights of both domestic and international Internet users. However, scholarship on digital authoritarianism remains limited in scope and case study selection. This study contributes a new, more comprehensive analytical framework for the study of Internet governance and applies it to the case studies of China and Russia. Special attention is paid to the still understudied Russian Internet governance model. After thorough literature review and novel data collection and analysis, this paper identifies relative centralization of network infrastructure and the extent and pace of change in governance as the most notable differences between the two models. These points of divergence may be explained by two theories; the varieties of authoritarianism hypothesis posits that different political systems face persistent and unique constraints to governance of the digital realm. The development trajectory theory argues that each country’s technological development path foreshadows the systems’ capacity for and extent of governance. This study is among the first to distinguish between Internet governance strategies of authoritarian regimes.


        From “a Journey for Peace” to the “Butchers of Beijing”: How Presidents have Used Rhetoric about China to Win the Two-Level Game

        Date: 2021-01-01

        Creator: Juliet Halvorson-Taylor

        Access: Open access

        This thesis is an exploration of how American presidents have used rhetoric for strategic ends in the US-China relationship. Whenever a president speaks, he is speaking to multiple audiences at the same time, yet he also must balance a number of important considerations. I used Robert Putnam’s “Two-Level Game Theory” as a framework for understanding the conditions surrounding a moment of significance in US-China relations in order to decipher a president’s rhetorical choices. The project is divided into five main parts. First, I used the UCSB American Presidency Project to identify broad trends in rhetoric towards China across presidencies. I found that every president has spoken more about China than his predecessor since the 1980s and that presidents are increasingly using negative rhetoric when talking about China. Then, I conducted three case studies, within the Putnam framework, on important points in three presidencies: Truman’s decision to withdraw aid from the KMT, Nixon’s visit to China, and Clinton’s reversal on the issue of MFN status for China. Lastly, I concluded that when “win-sets” on both sides (in these examples: on both the American and Chinese sides) are either large or small, a president should speak about China more frequently. I also looked at Trump’s presidency and the beginnings of Biden’s in order to see how these trends are playing out currently.