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Notes -
My (admittedly superficial and possibly outdated) understanding is that liberalism has never been a significant ideological force in East Asia. Mainland China and North Korea are overtly single party states. Japan (LDP, ironically not particularly liberal nor democratic) and Singapore (PAP) are de facto single party states. South Korea and Taiwan each have two major parties at any given point, but their core disagreements are mainly on how to navigate dealing with their respective existential threats (for South Korea, whether to align closely with the US and Japan vs being more conciliatory towards North Korea; for Taiwan, whether to be more hardline vs conciliatory regarding the PRC), with economic and social policy disagreements having a much narrower Overton window than in Western countries.
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