In July 1939, Wang I-lü, a recent high school graduate, was reported to have fallen down a staircase while wearing high heels. The accident triggered heated public debates in Shanghai. Some condemned high heels as dangerous and decadent; others defended them, while Wang’s classmates denied Wang had ever worn them. Amid these conflicting voices, this article treats the death of Wang I-lü not as a question of forensic fact but as a historically situated event, one that maps the cultural trajectory of the high heel in modern China. Wang I-lü’s accident is indeed not an isolated incident: high-heeled women were frequently depicted falling down. The falling-down girl phenomenon encapsulates, as argued, a mixture of male affects, including fears of modernity, voyeuristic fascination, nationalist concerns, and the urge to control the female body. Meanwhile, women also held ambivalent attitudes toward high heels, though in different ways. They either regarded the high heel as a sign of vanity or employed it to negotiate visibility and identity. The high heel thus constitutes not only an object of foot fetishism, one that fuses Freudian male desire with Foucauldian biopolitical control, but also a thing utilized by women for imagining and enacting varied forms of womanhood, forms that were not necessarily resistant to men nor entirely emancipatory or conservative but rather responded to women’s own diverse circumstances.

This article sheds light on the understudied significance of Islam, Communism, and global politics in defining what constituted an acceptable “religion” (shūkyō 宗教) in wartime Japan. An analysis of the Japanese Imperial Diet’s debates on the place of Islam in the Religious Organizations Law of 1939, which defined state-sanctioned religious organizations, reveals that Muslim attention from around the world, international politics, the global spread of Communism, and the relatively short history of Islam in Japan, affected politicians’ decision not to mention Islam as a religious organization in the law. While previous literature on the Religious Organizations Law has not adequately addressed the significance of international and non-Euro-American transnational influences, this article argues that lawmakers viewed the power of transnational Muslim and Communist networks as crucial when defining both officially acceptable “religion” and the Shrine (jinja 神社), or Shrine Shinto, as the national core to be protected under this law. The debates surrounding Islam offer fertile ground for examining the significance of global affairs in determining acceptable forms of “religion” in Japan, as well as the broader implications of what Japanese state officials called “religion” and “thought” (shisō 思想) in wartime Japanese and world politics.

Ku Hung-Ming 辜鴻銘 (pinyin: Gu Hongming, 1857–1928) was the first Chinese translator who translated Confucian classics into English, breaking the long-time monopoly of translation of Confucian classics by Western missionaries. He also translated Western poems into Chinese and elaborated on his thought on translation in his writings. However, Ku is peripheralized in contemporary Chinese historiography of translation. This article investigates this striking phenomenon, arguing that Ku’s peripheralization is due to Chinese translation historiographers’ subscription to the dual meta-narratives of individual enlightenment and national salvation, their colonial mentality, and the impact of the century-long trivialization of Ku in China. This article throws into relief the intricate relationship between translation historiography and its socio-political context, calling for attention to this under researched area of translation studies. It also sheds important light on contemporary Chinese intellectual landscape, calling for a decolonized understanding of Chinese culture.

This article examines the evolving category of yellow music in the People’s Republic of China from the Maoist era to the early reform period, with a focus on the reception and regulation of Teresa Teng’s music. It argues that yellow music was not a static or CCP-invented concept, but one that expanded and contracted in response to shifting political climates and ideological campaigns. Drawing on archival documents, official newspapers, and autobiographical accounts, this article explores how the label “yellow” was applied to a wide range of musical styles and examines how this shaped public musical consumption. Instead of framing yellow music listening as an explicit form of resistance, this article highlights how such practices reflected unmet emotional and esthetic needs. The entry and eventual state appropriation of Teng’s music illustrate both the cultural consequences of the Cold War and the CCP’s adaptable approach to cultural governance. Teng’s widespread popularity helped revive suppressed traditions of individual emotion and love in music, and her gradual rehabilitation reveals a negotiated space between official ideology and popular demand. Ultimately, this article sheds light on the dynamic interplay between state control, listener agency, and global influence in socialist and post-socialist China.

This paper investigates the intersection of the Japanese gramophone industry and Chinese folk storytelling performances during the Second Sino-Japanese War, centering on a 1941 recording project conducted in Japanese-occupied Chōsen. While the project aimed to promote East Asian cultural synthesis in line with Japan’s expansionist agenda, it also captured marginalized local subgenres that had been overlooked even by Chinese companies. The article explores the political motivations behind the project, shaped by the shifting propaganda objectives of the Japanese colonial authorities and their complex interactions with private gramophone companies, Chinese performers, and local audiences. Moving beyond the conventional colonial narrative focused on Japan’s formal colonies, it instead examines Japan’s engagement with the would-be colonized Huabei Plain through a bottom-up lens. The paper argues that cultural production under Japanese imperial expansion was marked by contingency and disorganization, especially in regions not yet formally colonized. Ultimately, this reveals the fractures within Japan’s colonial vision – a result chaotically shaped by the inconsistencies of imperial cultural policy, the disadvantaged position of private gramophone companies under wartime constraints, the ambiguous collaboration of Chinese performers, and the resilience of local cultural connoisseurship.

The relationship between Nepal and China during the 1910s to 1940s remains an underexplored topic. This article revisits this thirty-year period by examining Chinese knowledge production on Nepal as an early instance of inter-Asia engagement. First, it demonstrates how epistemological barriers – shaped by coloniality and asymmetrical worldviews – severely hindered direct Chinese understanding of Nepal, despite sustained intellectual efforts. It then interrogates the in-betweenness of this disconnection, arguing that these mediated engagements were not merely failures of direct contact. Instead, the article contends that the liminal, hybrid, and shifting nature of these mediated encounters enabled forms of subjectivity transference and affective affiliation that were productive in sustaining inter-Asian referencing. To support this claim, the article examines the writings of various Chinese political critics, officials, and diplomats on Nepal. Despite their limitations, these intellectual engagements are ultimately seen as productive. First, they expose the liminal, shifting, and dynamic nature of knowledge production, in contrast to the fixed forms associated with colonial epistemologies. Second, they enable forms of subjectivity transference that foster affective affiliations. They also offer renewed possibilities for understanding inter-Asian referencing as a methodological strategy for rethinking inter-Asian relationalities.

Few village-born social movements have influenced international relations as much as the campaign against Myitsone Dam in Burma (Myanmar). This village-born resistance led in 2011 to the suspension of a major Burmese and Chinese infrastructure project. This suspension became a symbol of democratization in Burma and a much-discussed setback of Chinese development-investment abroad. However, research literature on the Myitsone Dam has tended to conflate the local rural resistance with the broader ethnic Kachin and Burmese anti-dam movements. In contrast, this study focuses specifically on the local villages directly affected by the project, exploring their diverse stories and responses to the mega-project. Combining diverse published sources with ethnographic fieldwork and interviews done since 2010, it tells a story of displacement, resistance, social divisions, and complex relations with outsiders. This is a two-part article series. Another article – Part 1 – explores the Myitsone Dam’s rural story from its earliest days until the mega-project’s fall. This article – Part 2 – examines what has occurred after the mega-project’s suspension. It explores local village experiences after most residents had been resettled into relocation villages, from 2010 until now. This story begins with a bomb attack against the project and traces the village struggles until a post-coup gold mining boom.

Few village-born social movements have influenced international relations as much as the campaign against Myitsone Dam in Burma (Myanmar). This village-born resistance led in 2011 to the suspension of a major Burmese and Chinese infrastructure project. This suspension became a symbol of democratization in Burma and a much-discussed setback of Chinese development-investment abroad. However, research literature on the Myitsone Dam has tended to conflate the local rural resistance with the broader ethnic Kachin and Burmese anti-dam movements. In contrast, this study focuses specifically on the local villages directly affected by the project, exploring their diverse stories and responses to the mega-project. Combining diverse published sources with ethnographic fieldwork and interviews done since 2010, it tells a story of repression, resistance, social divisions, and complex relations with outsiders. This is a two-part article series. This article here – Part 1 – examines what occurred before the mega-project’s suspension. It tells the Myitsone Dam’s rural story from its earliest days until the mega-project’s fall: from 2002 to 2011. This story begins with the unexpected arrival of Japanese visitors and traces the village struggles up to the project’s dramatic downfall.

This article attempts to map some of Vietnam’s national identities that were constructed in the early twentieth century (1900s-1930s). Instead of treating Vietnamese national identity either as a monolithic entity or as too fragmented to be considered a useful concept, it shows that at least three interactive and overlapping national identities emerged, each with its own political significance and state institutionalisation. To map them, this article re-traces several key nationalists in the early twentieth century. It situates each of their national imaginations within interconnected global relations, namely, Civilisational relations of hierarchy, cultural relations of equality, and radical relations of exploitation and oppression. This analytical approach to mapping national identity offers a framework that may prove valuable for cross-national comparative studies.

The founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often interpreted as a top-down transmission of Bolshevik ideology. This article challenges that view by asking: how did individuals with divergent ideological backgrounds – anarchists, socialists, and Bolsheviks – coalesce into a centralized political organization? Rather than emphasizing ideological convergence, it foregrounds the role of interpersonal networks and organizational capacity in early party-building. Focusing on the activist network around the Zhejiang Provincial First Normal School in Hangzhou (Hangzhou First Normal School, HFNS), the article reveals how provincial actors with prior organizing experience helped translate competing doctrines into coordinated revolutionary practice. HFNS-affiliated figures brought anarchist-socialist traditions to Shanghai, played key roles in the Weekly Review editorial board, and built ties with both Chinese and Russian Marxists. Drawing on archival materials from police records, newspapers, and personal writings, the article reconstructs HFNS’s cross-regional impact and strategic contributions to the early CCP organization. It argues that the CCP’s foundation was less a product of ideological clarity than of social trust and regional mobilization. By centering the HFNS network, the article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to provincialize CCP origins and foreground the hybrid, contested nature of revolutionary subjectivity in modern China.

This study considers why public abattoirs of the Republican era failed to function effectively and were unpopular with contemporaneous Chinese people. In the early twentieth century, Chinese officials began to rely on biomedical parameters to define safe food, a critical step in the modernization of social control strategies. Tianjin was among the first Chinese cities to launch government-run slaughterhouses that combined safety inspection with monopolized animal slaughtering. However, how such slaughterhouses operated has received little academic attention. The municipal authorities introduced a series of laws covering slaughterhouses’ construction and operations to ensure meat safety. However, Tianjin’s public slaughterhouses failed to uphold their new duties toward public health and even became menaces to urban sanitation. City officials lacked the ethics of modern public servants, and the slaughterhouses provided them new opportunities for rent-seeking practices. The collection of slaughter tax superseded meat safety inspection as the municipality’s primary concern, which undermined the effectiveness of food hygiene regulation. Therefore, city residents regarded the public slaughterhouses as predatory tax collectors. Taking Tianjin as an example, this article demonstrates the gap between the modernization of governmental agencies modeled on Western countries and the persistence of traditional, exploitive governing practices in Republican China.

Hallyu has expanded significantly through digital platforms since the 2010s. While Netflix has played a crucial role in distributing Korean content worldwide, its platform-driven strategies typically favour commercially optimised and formulaic narratives. This article examines an alternative dynamic through the 2021 Netflix docuseries My Love: Six Stories of True Love, which builds upon South Korean director Moyoung Jin’s earlier independent documentary My Love, Don’t Cross That River. Produced with local teams across six countries under Jin’s executive oversight, the series preserves an aesthetic and political sensibility rooted in Korea’s minjung documentary tradition. Its sustained focus on marginalised elderly couples and the intimate relationship between camera and subject represents a significant departure from Netflix’s standard original docuseries, which often centre on scandalous crimes, sensational narratives, or planetary issues such as climate crisis. The article investigates how culturally specific narratives can achieve global resonance without diminishing local contexts. The analysis traces the culturally sensitive translation of a local independent documentary to a transnational Netflix series, arguing that such cross-cultural initiatives signal a multidirectional and inclusive reimagining of Hallyu that challenges its predominantly market-driven circulation patterns.

This article reconstructs the mining practices and social activities of Chinese migrants in Maliwun, a tin-rich Burmese village on the Siam-Burma border between the 1840s and 1890s. Despite its natural resources and repeated mining attempts by various stakeholders, Maliwun could not materialise its potential and was slow in tin production and community development throughout this period. By focusing on the internal dynamics among its Chinese miners, especially around the rivalling Chinese “secret societies,” this article situates the frontier mining settlement within a larger regional network of the Southeast Asian Chinese and traces its Chinese community’s evolving relationships with fellow countrymen along the southern Siamese and northern Malayan coastlines. It argues that grassroots organisations played a crucial role in the early formation of this frontier Chinese migrant community, which was sitting at the intersection of political, labour, resource, gender, and ethnic frontiers and exhibited key features of fluid boundaries and transnational networks. Yet, these impacts should not be overstated, individually or collectively. The slow development of Maliwun calls for a careful reassessment of the limitation of roles played by porous borders, hybrid interactions, and transnational networks at a historic frontier.

Since the mid-2010s, conflicts at UNESCO over the interpretation of Japanese colonial rule and wartime actions in the first half of the twentieth century in Japan, South Korea, and China have been fierce. Contested nominations include the Meiji Industrial Revolution Sites for the World Heritage List (Japan), the Documents of Nanjing Massacre for the Memory of the World (MoW) Register (China), and two still pending applications on the Documents on the Comfort Women (South Korean and Japanese NGOs). This paper examines the recent “heritage war” negotiations at UNESCO as they unfolded in a changing political, economic, and security environment. Linking World Heritage and MoW nominations together for a holistic analysis, this paper clarifies the interests of State actors and of various non-State actors, such as NGOs, experts, and the UNESCO secretariat. We discuss the prospects for these contested nominations and recommend further involvement of non-State actors to ensure more constructive and inclusive heritage interpretation to enable a more comprehensive understanding of history.

Conflict among missionary societies and missioners in Asia and Africa has been a defining feature in the history of missionary work. In 1879/80, German missionary Ernst Faber and three others were expelled from the Rhenish Missionary Society (RMG) due to a leadership dispute over the Canton Central missionary school. This conflict involved RMG inspectors, missionaries and institutional power distribution, differences in dogmatic Lutheran and liberal confession, knowledge perceptions and missionary methods within the colonial context. The expulsion of Faber had a lasting impact on RMG’s missionary course in China. However, there is a research gap concerning the causes and consequences of this conflict. Guided by the theoretical framework of entangled history, this study employs a historical material qualitative research method, drawing on the source An die General-Versammlung der Rheinisch-Westfaelischen Missions-Gesellschaft to analyze the reciprocal competition among the parties involved. It aims to examine this historical event as a microcosm of the entanglement between missionary, church and colonial histories.

This article critically analyzes new cultural production in relation to reality shows to determine not only the major forces behind this new trend but also the future directions of Hallyu production. After discussing the recent surge of reality programs as a major part of broadcasting Hallyu, it uses Jinny’s Kitchen as a case study to discuss the ways in which reality shows develop (g)localization. It analyzes how Jinny’s Kitchen advances (g)localization in the process of production for global OTT platforms. Finally, it maps out whether Korea has become a new global force in utilizing (g)localization strategies to create a new form of cultural production by analyzing the form of relationships between global and local forces in the digital platform era.

This study re-examines the fiscal collapse of late-Qing China by analyzing how the imperial household’s financial practices destabilized the dynasty’s governance equilibrium. Focusing on the post-1853 period, it argues that the Taiping Rebellion’s devastation of salt tax networks and customary revenue streams triggered a systemic rupture in the Qing’s dual patrimonial-bureaucratic fiscal structure. Deprived of traditional income, the Imperial Household Department abandoned its century-old fiscal segregation from the Board of Revenue, initiating coercive fund transfers in 1857 that persisted until 1908. These transfers eroded bureaucratic control over public expenditures while enabling unchecked imperial extraction through semi-privatized channels. Contrary to previous scholarship emphasizing provincial-central tensions, this study highlights how the imperial household’s ultra-bureaucratic prerogatives subverted fiscal discipline, replacing quota-based budgeting with ad hoc requisitions. The resulting institutional dysfunction – marked by path-dependent rent-seeking and stifled fiscal innovation – exacerbated the regime’s inability to reconcile patrimonial demands with bureaucratic rationalization. By exposing the collapse of the Qing’s historic governance dialectic, this study reframes the dynasty’s fiscal disintegration as a crisis of autocratic institutional design rather than mere resource scarcity, offering new insights into late-imperial state failure.

The oeuvre of the philosopher Leo Strauss (d.1973) pivots on the audacious thesis that political esoterism – the protective covering of truth through an exoteric shell – has been central to Islamic intellectual life. Strauss’s work focusses on philosophy, but this article argues that it can be productively extended – while not applied integrally - to Sufism, Islam’s similarly contested, primary esoteric tradition. It investigates the Straussian thesis in a Sufi discussion on valāyat, “spiritual authority” or “Friendship with God,” which idea is central both to Shiite Sufism and Shiism generally. The discussion concerns the Valāyat-nāme, an Iranian treatise of the early twentieth century by the Neᶜmatollāhī master Solṭānᶜalīshāh (d.1909), revealing the dilemmas that Shiite Sufis have faced in simultaneously retaining identity and acceptance to the juristically dominated canon. Four sub-topics are elaborated to assess the validity of Straussian analysis in rendering the treatise and its author: persecution as a context for esoterism; esoterism as a veil for dangerous knowledge; the drive for epistemic subordination; and the political nature of religious knowledge. It is proposed that rather than as “between the lines” dissimulation, as per Strauss, the Neᶜmatollāhīs’ political esoterism ought to be read more subtly as accommodation “along the lines” of Shiite orthodoxy.

Political discourse is a persuasive device used to gain public support, and official counterterrorism narratives are no exception. Drawing on theoretical convergence between Critical Terrorism Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in their understanding of discourse as a persuasive tool, this research aims to demonstrate the utility of discourse analysis in deciphering the political ideology sustaining official counterterrorism rhetoric. Through quantitative diachronic observation of key terms (terrorism, separatism, and extremism) and the systematic codification of Xinjiang White Papers (2003–2019), this research applies van Leeuwen’s (2008) model of social practice analysis, participant representation, and legitimation categories to reveal the specific rhetoric tools ultimately aimed at securing the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) political legitimacy. This article builds on CDA theory by linking discourse and political practice, reflecting on the pragmatic consequences of implicit power structures within official counterterrorism discourse, involving in this case the CPC and ethnoreligious groups in Xinjiang.

The European Union and China have a relationship that is characterized by strong economic interdependence. But since Xi Jinping’s ascent to power, the gap in power and interests between the EU and China has widened, and cooperation has become more difficult. As a result, the EU’s China policy has shifted towards a more structural realist perspective, strategy, and policy. The EU’s realist turn will be analysed in two major areas of the EU–China relationship: security and defense with a focus on Taiwan, and trade. The EU has increased support for Taiwan and for maintaining the status quo in the Taiwan Strait by bandwagoning with the United States. In external trade, the EU is strengthening its own economic security and is balancing against China through diversifying its trade relations in the Indo-Pacific region.