Vietnam has tried to maintain a delicate balance between the United States and China by pursuing a hedging strategy. In a shifting strategic environment marked by structural uncertainty caused by the rise of China, weaker Southeast Asian states like Vietnam are projecting a non-alignment posture. However, this rational behavior is not the product of systemic factors alone but also certain domestic political dynamics. We argue that regime legitimation – how the Vietnam Communist Party seeks to generate and sustain internal and external legitimacy – weighs heavily on Vietnam's strategy toward US–China competition. In particular, three legitimation strategies employed by the Vietnam Communist Party – performance-based legitimation, nationalism-based legitimation vis-à-vis China, and defensive legitimation vis-à-vis “hostile forces” – produce dynamics that ensure Hanoi does not get inadvertently pulled into the orbit of either Beijing or Washington. Theoretically, this article contributes to the literature on domestic determinants of foreign policy with a focus on regime legitimation. Empirically, we seek to supplement the discussion on the salience and relevance of domestic politics in informing Southeast Asian states' strategic calculation amid great-power competition.

Cross-cultural exchanges between India and China during the first millennium are often understood through a Buddhist lens; by investigating the impact of Indian Buddhist sources, be they literary, doctrinal, or artistic, to receiving Chinese communities. In these cultural transactions, instigated by traveling pilgrim-monks and enacted by imperial power players in China, India emerges as a remote, idealized, and perhaps “hollow” center. Imagined or real, the importance of images of India in medieval Chinese Buddhist landscape has been established beyond doubt. What seems to be missing in this unidirectional looking is the impact of these cultural communications in India. What were the Indian responses to Chinese Buddhists' demands and their physical presence? How was China imagined and translated in medieval India? This essay proposes to locate the activities of Chinese monks in India and the iconographies of China-inspired Indian Buddhist images within the larger historical context of shifting cultural and political geography of the medieval Buddhist world. By exploring different types of evidence from borderlands, vis-à-vis the monolithic concepts of China and India, the essay also complicates the China–India studies' comparative model.

This article examines available narratives and modes of representation concerning “civilization” and “savagery” in the early Meiji proto-colonial discursive sphere. It focuses on a major event in the 1874 Taiwan Expedition: Japan's capture and attempted assimilation of an orphaned aboriginal girl. Through an analysis of Japanese newspaper reports, woodblock prints, illustrated books, and commercial photography, this article argues that alongside the well-characterized “rhetoric of aboriginal savagery” that exaggerated the otherness of Taiwanese indigenes, there developed a synergistic “rhetoric of aboriginal civilization” that emphasized the indigenes' capacity for transformation. This mode of representation stressed not the aboriginals' alterity but rather their latent affinity to Japan. According the aboriginal a measure of temporality, the rhetoric of aboriginal civilization formed an indispensable counterpart to the rhetoric of aboriginal savagery: one that affirmed the campaign's “civilizing” component by demonstrating its viability.

As major Asian trading centres and former British colonies, Singapore and Hong Kong inevitably have parallel histories. Although their destinies diverged in the latter part of the twentieth century, comparisons between the two places are useful in developing an understanding of the historical circumstances of each city, and also in developing regional perspectives. The burden of the present article lies in three arguments. First, while the Japanese occupation is often seen as a climactic event in Asian history that destroyed the colonial world and set in motion the transition to independence, the economic policies that defined the post-war era were initiated by colonial regimes during the 1930s and continued by nationalist governments after 1945. Second, the political trajectories followed by Singapore and Hong Kong in the first post-war decades were largely determined by unanticipated developments relating to the cold war, and did not follow logically from the situation that existed in the 1930s, or even when the war ended in August 1945. Third, while both places were seen as colonial relics in post-war Southeast Asia and had to contend with nationalist policies that were incompatible with their social make-up and business practices, efforts to assimilate them within national states were unsuccessful, and they continued to flourish as global city states.

From 1989 onwards, the People's Republic of China's use of the Qiaoban, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau, has burgeoned notably in regard to attracting investment and loyalty from overseas Chinese outside mainland China. This article analyses the impact of the Qiaoban and the PRC influence upon “diasporic Chinese” living along the northern Thai border, particularly ethnic Chinese (e.g. Teochiu, Hakka, Hainanese) and Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang-KMT). It finds that, while the Qiaoban has largely succeeded in the engagement with the ethnic Chinese of northern Thailand, the active efforts of the PRC to engage the Nationalist Chinese have been notably unfruitful. However, the Qiaoban's efforts have caused increasing tension between different generations in Nationalist Chinese communities.

In the conduct of prewar Japanese foreign relations, political associations (seiji kessha) – we might also call them pressure groups – exerted considerable political influence, particularly on Japan's relations with China and other Asian nations. One of the best known of these political associations is the Kokuryūkai (the “Amur Society,” also known as the “Black Dragon Society”), which was founded in 1901 and, in 1946, was banned as an ultranationalist association by the American occupation authorities. The Kokuryūkai was also identified as the center of an expansionist conspiracy to steer Japan towards war with the Western powers.

In the absence of detailed studies of the Kokuryūkai, this article aims to clarify the organization's political views and activities and to demonstrate its influence on Japanese foreign relations and involvement in East Asia in the early twentieth century. Drawing on primary sources such as the association's publications and its leaders' memoranda and letters, I show that the Kokuryūkai engaged in intensive networking activities and the accumulation of social capital involving not only Japanese but also Chinese and Korean politicians and diplomats. Nevertheless, I conclude that the association's influence on the origins of the Asia-Pacific War should not be overstated, since its activities reached a climax in the late 1910s and effectively ended with the death of founder Uchida Ryōhei in 1937.

This paper examines how Islam in Japan tends to be tolerated as (foreign) “culture,” especially within the framework of tabunka kyōsei, multicultural coexistence, and cosmetic multiculturalism to circumvent religious apathy, phobia of religion, and prejudice against Islam. In doing so, this paper will: first provide a history of Muslim–Japanese relations and Muslim communities in Japan as well as an overview of the total estimate of the Muslim population in Japan as of 2018; historicize and denaturalize religious apathy, phobia of religion, and prejudice against Islam among the general Japanese public; analyze the rhetoric of tabunka kyōsei and its relation to cosmetic multiculturalism as well as its problematics; investigate the cases of local oppositions to the building projects of mosques and my observations made at events organized by Muslim groups; and conclude with a critical remark on the cosmetic multiculturalist understanding of “Islamic culture” and its approach to tabunka kyōsei.

This paper discusses the status of women in late medieval Japan through an examination of marriage and inheritance, in particular through the concept of ie (the household as a basic social unit). It casts a fresh view on the relationship between the ie and women, and in the process refutes the assumption of Takamure Itsue that the emergence of the ie prompted an oppressive form of marriage that deprived women of freedom, rights and a claim to property. Taking class distinctions into consideration, the paper reviews the legal, social and economic position of women. It shows that the ie was not an oppressor of women at its inception, but as time passed the independence of the ie was eroded from within and without, and in the process women were gradually excluded from positions of power. The paper also takes a close look at various patterns of marriage in different social classes and at inheritance. Even though primogeniture concentrated the ie property in the hands of the male heir, female inheritance continued well into the sixteenth century. The paper concludes that the position of women in modern Japan has its roots in the late medieval period, and criticizes Takamure for viewing the late medieval ie from a modern perspective.

The issue of women's property rights during the Song dynasty has been heatedly debated for over half a century. First in Japan, and then in China, Taiwan and the West, scholars have developed strikingly divergent views of the legal and social dimensions of Song women's claims to property and control over their remarriage as widows. This article discusses and assesses the different views, particularly those of Bettine Birge in her recent book-length analysis of the topic. In siding largely with earlier studies that stressed Song women's legally backed rights to property as daughters, wives and widows, Birge's work provides the most comprehensive and persuasive treatment of this debate in any language. In addition, she discusses the fate of Chinese widows, accustomed to remarrying under favourable terms in the Song, and then suffering during the Yuan serious restrictions on their options for remarriage as well as on their property rights. The turning point, according to this book, was the merger of Mongol government and neo-Confucian court interests in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, thereby depriving women of many powers they had acquired in the Song.

In Sri Lanka elephants are endangered and ivory carving, as an art, is dead. Sri Lanka was once famous for the number and quality of its elephants, whose tusks were carved and exported since ancient times. Although Sri Lanka became, successively, a pivotal outpost for the Portuguese, Dutch and English, details about the Ceylonese ivory trade appear in trade documents only rarely. And yet, if information is not to be found there, does that mean ivory trade did not occur? Trade documents, after all, do not tell the whole story. Smugglers, illegal traders, big game hunters and plantation owners all played a part in the disappearance of elephants and its corollary, the ivory trade. When archival evidence is viewed in combination with physical evidence and the anecdotes of visitors and residents, it becomes evident that ivory remained an integral part of trade and crafts in Ceylon well into the last century.

In the wake of the immolation of Roop Kanwar in Deorala, Rajasthan, in 1987, sati has re-emerged as a controversial political and social issue in modern India. Many of the terms of the contemporary debate on sati have their roots in the colonial period and are based on assumptions and ideas formulated during the British debate on sati in the early nineteenth century. These ideas were often as much the product of changing British society and its preoccupations as they were the encounter with India, however. This article explores the connotations of changing attitudes to suicide in influencing the nature of British responses to sati. By examining the relationship between attitudes to suicide and changing depictions of sati between 1500–1830, it seeks to undermine the suggestion of a constant western “morality” with regard to sati, depicting instead an encounter with the rite that was bi-directional and fluid with the dichotomy between “East” and “West” cross-cut by a myriad of other issues and concerns.

Noting the growing importance of online platforms, this paper discusses the rise and development of the platform economy in Korea, defining platforms as a business model and arguing that the platform economy requires financing, an environment for Internet use and users, services, and content. Many believe that the platform economy's development is a natural outcome of technical innovation. However, the platform economy was created by the interplay of government and corporate strategies under certain historical conditions. In Korea, the platform economy developed after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Presenting the IT industry and venture businesses as a solution to the crisis, the government helped finance venture companies through intensive investment and enhanced the strategy of building information and communication infrastructure. Platform companies suffered from the lack of content and services to provide; however, they quickly built web portal platforms with Korean specificities by copying and benchmarking personal computer communication services.

This article traces the process through which Alisher Navoi, a fifteenth-century Chagatai-Turkic poet from Herat, Afghanistan, became uzbekified and sovietized by Uzbek writers and scholars from the 1920s to the 1940s. It focuses on how shifting visions of nation-building affected Navoi's representation in Uzbek national historiography during the early Soviet period. The 1948 Soviet celebration of the 500th anniversary of Alisher Navoi's birth established the poet as a symbol of Uzbek “national-exceptionalism” that distinguished the Uzbek nation from other Central Asian nations. As a consequence Alisher Navoi's legacies that had regional significance were reduced to national heritage and the region's history was revised accordingly. The article, however, argues that the Soviet canonization of Alisher Navoi was not a rootless imposition of cultural history unfamiliar to the Uzbek people. Rather it was a realization of a nation-building project initiated by native Central Asian intellectuals called Jadids before the very creation of the Uzbek nation-state. Even though these intellectuals were persecuted during the 1930s Stalinist Terror, their ideas survived and were picked up by a new generation of Uzbek writers. This article also discusses how World War II provided an opportunity and justification for the Uzbek writers to rediscover their nation's pre-Revolutionary history and strengthened the Uzbek national ownership of Navoi legacies.

Studies that examine the effects of decentralisation for social change or stasis have placed necessary attention on its institutional dynamics: the ways social institutions have transformed as a result of new governance regimes, or alternatively, how the existing institutional context and attendant power relations determine its actualisation. The second facet of the structure/agency dialectic is often overlooked however, that is, the actors themselves. This article seeks to overcome this lacuna by exploring the effects of citizens' engagement in practices associated with decentralised governance for individuals' understandings of self, society, and their relationship with the state. A comparison of two villages in Telangana, India, and Central Lombok, Indonesia reveals how differences in the distribution of welfare benefits have implications for the potential of such interactions to be sites of creative self-formation. Differences such as the regularity and ability to demand entitlements, preferential versus equal access to resources, and the levels at which citizens engage with the state, may be crucial for processes of subjectification, and by extension, social transformation.

The only pre-1950 Chinese cities for which reliable demographic records exist are those in Taiwan. Analysis of two samples of the records from Taipei City produces surprising results. Urban women were far less likely to marry than rural women and consequently had markedly lower fertility. This was due to a greater demand for female labor in the city but not because employment outside of the home freed women to refuse marriages arranged by their parents. Parental authority was as strong in the city as in the country. The difference was that given the possibility of remunerative employment for their daughters many parents chose to keep them at home rather than giving them to another family in marriage.

This article studies Western (primarily Anglophone) representations of the Dan people (boat people) and the boat clusters on which they lived, relative to the mainland, in the island city of Guangzhou, focusing on 1842–1900. A change occurred over time, as the Dan went from being in close interaction with Westerners prior to the Opium Wars to being peripheral to Western interests and activities. This shift is evident in Western writings, and negative representations of the Dan came to dominate in the late nineteenth century. This mirrored changing sociospatial power relations between Westerners and the terrestrial Chinese, as Westerners increasingly gained access to the onshore city of Guangzhou itself, in part from the colonial island enclave of Shamian. Changing crosscultural interactions affected how the Chinese Others were perceived and ultimately how the Chinese whole was intertextually constructed in Western colonial discourse.

A frequently discussed theory about the nature and function of traditional Chinese law claims that, in traditional China, law was no more than a model, with little practical applicability. This theory seems to be still dominant.

On a different occasion in the past, I presented some doubts about this theory of law as a “model”, based on impressions I received from reading through a body of judgments from Qing dynasty lawsuits.

In medieval Japan the household became the basic social unit among all classes. In the process, a division of roles also came about: the household head and husband represented the ie to the outside world, while the wife was in charge of its running. The wife's role was highly regarded in the medieval period, but its details have yet to be fully examined. This paper attempts to shed light on how medieval women lived by studying the role of wives and their integral place in ie management. To do this, it is also necessary to examine the relationship between the father's wife and the son's wife, in other words, the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. I will look at women from various classes, to the extent the documentation allows, utilizing the diaries of the court nobility, literary works and other documentary, graphic and material evidence.

The International Journal of Asian Studies has published four seminal articles by Japanese scholars of the history of Chinese law (2004–2007). In this issue and the next, an eminent French scholar will analyse and review the articles, adding his perspective to the questions already raised. Part One looks mainly at Shigeo Nakamura's article “Was Traditional Chinese Law a Mere ‘Model’?” and at Osamu Takamizawa's article “Legal Troubles and their Resolution in China: The Interaction of shuolizhe and Xinfuzhe.” The remaining articles, by Hiroaki Terada and Susumu Fuma, will be treated in the next issue.