In administrative districts throughout Taiwan, political factions resembling political machines compete for political offices and the attendant rewards of power, profit, and prestige. The forces that unite a faction and divide it from its opponent(s), however, vary from place to place. In many areas of mixed ethno-linguistic settlement—such as Taoyuan and Hsinchu counties—a Hokkien-based faction competes with a Hakka faction. In Kaohsiung Municipality, the urban destination of considerable rural outmigration, native-place associations form the core of the political factions. These ethnolinguistic and native-place lines of factional alignment and division offer no surprises. On what bases, however, do political factions align and divide in relatively homogeneous districts? This article, the result of eighteen months' field research in one such rural Taiwanese township, attempts to answer this question.

This article examines the emergence in colonial Korea of a command economy for forestry products following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). It does so, first, by tracing the policy mechanisms through which the colonial state commandeered forest products, especially timber, firewood, and charcoal. Second, through an analysis of the wartime promotion of a “low temperature lifestyle,” it offers a thumbnail sketch of the lived experiences and corporeal consequences of state-led efforts to rationalize fuel consumption. Considered together, these lines of analysis offer insight into not only the ecological implications of war on the Korean landscape, but also the bodily privations that defined everyday life under total war—what might be called the “slow violence” of caloric control.

During the seventeenth century, an alliance took shape between Japan's Tokugawa bakufu and the Zheng organization of southeastern China and Taiwan. The Zheng, especially under the half-Japanese Koxinga in the 1650s, were ideal partners because of their domination of maritime East Asian trade, privileged access to much-coveted Chinese goods, and commitment to Ming restoration against the Manchu Qing, a popular stance in Japan. The organization jointly administered the Chinese community at Nagasaki with the bakufu, and received aid in Japanese armaments and probably mercenaries. Starting in the 1660s, the alliance unraveled amid the depletion of silver to purchase Chinese goods, the rise of a robust domestic market in Japan, and the destruction of the Zheng by the Qing. This article portrays Japan's “isolation policy” (sakoku) as a dynamic process, from active involvement overseas to withdrawal, based upon rational assessments of the international climate and subject to contestation from local and foreign players.

The relationship between popular culture and East Asian identity is now an established field of enquiry, with the products of Japan's mass media industries—television series, pop stars, and manga—still providing much of the fuel for debate. This paper, however, moves away from the dominant notion of “culture as industry,” and explores animated personal responses to the fiction of Japanese writer Murakami Haruki in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan through art house cinema, popular fiction, and online creative communities. The vogue for Murakami has swept across the region in recent years, and for many of those inspired by his work, it is Murakami's role as a conduit to cosmopolitan cultural citizenship that is so alluring. Yet rather than crude imitation, the filmmakers, writers, and Internet fans analyzed here misappropriate the “Murakami mood” in different ways, and in the process, they reveal the diverse meanings that attach to cosmopolitanism across contemporary East Asia.

“I wish for you two boys and two girls,” the elderly man pronounced. He was addressing both myself and my fiancé as he reached out to shake our hands as we were leaving his traditional wooden house. He had told us earlier that he spends his days in this late chapter of his life enjoying his grandchildren and tending his vegetable plot. Now at the door ready to leave I hesitated, not wanting to extend my hand, but then I did so anyway. This grandfather was Nuon Chea, “Brother Number Two” of Cambodia's notorious Khmer Rouge regime, officially known as Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79). The year was 2002. My fiancé, a cameraman, was working with reporter and author Tom Fawthrop on a documentary about former Khmer Rouge leaders' evasion of justice and I had been invited to come along.

I should like to share with you some thoughts about modernity and modernization that are drawn from notes I took during a visit in October 1992 to Hachinohe in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan. I report from these notes mainly as a historian and partly as an amateur ethnographer without any special claim to “ethnographic authority.”

On that occasion, some one thousand citizens from the region gathered in Hachinohe to celebrate the 290th anniversary of the birth of Andō Shōeki (1703–62), the provocative eighteenth-century thinker and physician who practiced in this former castletown. I had been invited to give a lecture at a symposium on “Andō Shōeki and Today” and the “sympathetic relationship between community and nature” (Najita 1993).

This article is a preliminary exploration of the impact of the world depression of the early 1930s on the rural populations of Southeast Asia. The first section of the essay considers some of the statistical evidence relating to living standards and economic welfare in rural Southeast Asia during the depression. The second section examines a number of factors—the alleged coercive power of the colonial state to secure its tax revenues and of rural capitalists to enforce debt and rent payments during a period of severe deflation—which would have had a major direct influence on levels of peasant consumption in the region in that period. The final section considers three indirect indications of changes in economic welfare in Southeast Asia during the depression: Indian immigration and repatriation rates; the import level of cotton piece goods; and mortality rates. The author advances two principal arguments: the sharp deflation of the early 1930s brought varying degrees of economic distress in the major export-oriented rural districts of Southeast Asia; but that even in those districts more severely affected by the crisis the decline in peasant welfare was markedly more modest than has hitherto been widely accepted.

Nationalism is an emotionally colored concept in many respects, and this makes it quite difficult for an outside observer to attain an objective, rational understanding of it. When we deal with the nationalism of modern Europe, we can find a common background of Christian culture which transcends all the differences in nationality and national character among European countries. No doubt each variety of modern European nationalism is characterized by its own national tradition, national interest and national mission. There have also been severe competition and numerous conflicts among the national states of Europe, and whatever differences exist among European countries can be easily attributed to the uniqueness of national character and can be explained in terms of nationalism. But those differences are only relative and parts of the unified whole.

Fundamental changes occurred in chinese civilization between the fifth century B.C.E. and the second century C.E., roughly corresponding to the Warring States (which officially commences in 453 B.C.E.) and the Ch'in and Han empires (Han rule ends in 220 C.E.). The emergence and maturation of philosophical speculation and of new sociopolitical models have traditionally constituted the ground on which other elements of the contemporary civilization have been drawn. As a consequence, the nature of religious traditions during this period has been poorly understood and insufficiently studied; first, because the documentation preserved in received literature overwhelmingly reflects the politico-philosophical leanings of an elite social stratum and thus offers only a partial, biased view of the range of religious belief and practice; and second, because modern research on Warring States, Ch'in, and Han religion by and large relies on the viewpoints expressed in the received record. Whereas the study of Buddhism and, more recently, of religious Taoism and popular religion is thriving among an ever-growing number of scholars of the history of Chinese religion, the ancient period of Warring States, Ch'in, and Han is still dominated by scholars engaged in the study of the philosophical tradition. The idea that religious belief during the period was tempered by philosophical reason is a widely shared assumption.

It seems almost axiomatic to state that the 1970 elections in Pakistan produced a revolution through the ballot box. In the Punjab and East Pakistan, large victories—in terms of seats won—were given respectively to two political parties (the People's Party and the Awami League) which based their platforms on essentially secular issues and which were able to rout those groupings rooted largely in religiopolitical programs. In the other provinces of West Pakistan the picture was less clear. While in the Punjab traditional land-based elites were defeated, the People's Party win in the Sind appeared to be an amalgam of secular, economic issues with traditional strengths of the landed wadera class. In Baluchistan and the Frontier, both the results and the means by which they were attained were mixed.

North China in a.d. 546 was the scene of a contest between two men, de facto rulers of the fractions of Northern Wei which had held the entire area for over one hundred fifty years but had been split in the middle of the previous decade. One of the two men, Kao Huan,b headed the state called Eastern Wei, in Shansi and Honan, which became the dynasty of Northern Chʻi under his descendants. The other, Yü-wen Tʻai,e ruled Western Wei, in Shensi, later to become Northern Chou. The ensuing half-century witnessed the final victory of Northern Chou over Northern Chʻi, the usurpation of Northern Chou by the founder of the Sui dynasty, and Sui's destruction of the last of the Southern Dynasties to unify all of China and usher in the era of Tʻang.

There were mines and smelters located in all the provinces of Ch'ing China before the nineteenth century. Their sizes varied greatly, as did their role in the local as well as national economy. Government policy regarding these industries was not based on a uniform code, but rather reflected a body of principles that served as guidelines for coping with each individual situation as it arose. Indeed, reading the early Ch'ing documents on mining leaves one at first with the impression that the authorities were eternally debating over the question, “to mine or not to mine.” Upon closer examination it soon becomes clear, however, that “mining affairs” were far from being administered along haphazard lines. It is the intention of this paper to describe some of the basic factors that went into the making of government decisions regarding mineral enterprises. In doing this, it would be helpful to keep these questions in mind: how did the mineral industries fit into the general framework of an agrarian-based civil bureaucracy? In the application of policy, did the government invariably let its actions be determined by a priori conceptions, or did it base decisions on pragmatic grounds? What sort of relation was generally accepted as the norm between the government and the operators of the enterprises in the instances where government interest was manifest?

After the formal end of military rule in the late 1980s, a new type of voluntary association commonly called “citizens' organizations” emerged in Korean civil society. Pursuing progressive social change through legal and policy reforms, citizens' organizations became the voice of revived civil society in urban Korea and enjoyed public trust until the mid-2000s, when their influence began to wane. Using in-depth interviews and fieldwork data on the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), one of the most influential citizens' organizations, this paper examines how the specific social meanings of civil society informed the roles that the state and the market played in the rise and relative decline of the PSPD and how class and gender affected individual access to it. This focus on the interplay among culture, the state, and the market enables us to move beyond cultural relativism and liberal universalism concerning the theoretical and empirical debate on civil society.

The August Revolution of 1945 constituted the most important turning-point in recent Vietnamese history.It formally marked the end of French colonialism in Vietnam and the beginning of Vietnamese national independence. It also marked the end of the Confucianist-oriented monarchy and the beginning of a Communist-oriented democratic republic. Much debate has been focused on why the Communist-dominated Viet Minh Front succeeded in seizing political power in August 1945. Anti-Communist detractors have generally attributed the Viet Minh success to an historical accident, i.e., the Viet Minh happened to be on the scene as the Japanese surrendered to the Allies. The Vietnamese Communists themselves have narcisistically attributed their success to skillful leadership in organization and propaganda. Actually the August Revolution must be explained by both the “objective material conditions” of the Vietnamese society of the time and the “subjective” predisposition of the Viet Minh. In March 1945, the Japanese occupation forces had destroyed the French colonial regime in a lightning coup d'etat. The general political confusion following the coup aggravated a severe famine which then ravaged Vietnam. Of several Vietnamese political groups, the Viet Minh emerged as the only one capable of organizing the Vietnamese people through their existing “liberation Committees.” In August 1945, following the Japanese surrender, the Viet Minh quickly seized political power and has retained it since. Thus both historical fortuity and revolutionary leadership accounted for the Viet Minh success.

On December 4, 2016, Jatupat Boonpattararaksa, known by his nickname “Pai,” then a law student at Khon Kaen University in northeastern Thailand, was arrested and accused of violating Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, or defaming, insulting, or threatening the king, queen, heir-apparent, or regent. Two days prior, he had shared to Facebook a biography of the new king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, or Rama X, who became king following the death of his father, Bhumipol Adulyadej, Rama IX, on October 13, 2016. The BBC Thai biography was candid and highlighted Vajiralongkorn's string of wives, his four abandoned sons, and his conferral of a military rank on his pet dog, as well as his recent bike rides for charity (BBC Thai 2016). Over 2,600 people shared the BBC Thai link, but Pai was the only person to be arrested in December 2016 and the only person to be prosecuted to date (TLHR 2017a). The complaint that led to Pai's arrest was filed by Lieutenant Colonel Phitakphon Chusri, a Khon Kaen–based soldier who has followed him closely.

Focusing on the Chinese Communists' mobilizational efforts at the Anyuan coal mine in the early 1920s, the author argues for reconsidering a sometimes forgotten part of Chinese revolutionary history. At Anyuan, idealistic young Communist cadres led a highly successful nonviolent strike and launched a major educational program for workers, peasants, and their families. The result was a remarkable outpouring of popular support for the Communist revolutionary effort. Although the meaning of the “Anyuan revolutionary tradition” has been obscured and distorted over the years to serve a variety of personal, political, and pecuniary agendas, the author seeks to recover from its early history the possibility of alternative revolutionary paths, driven less by class struggle and cults of personality than by the quest for human dignity through grassroots organization.

This article examines the relationship between gender and Uyghur identity through the story of Nuzugum, the allegory of a Kashgar woman who kills an enemy outsider she is forced to marry rather than yield her chastity and bear his children. Tracing the story from its nineteenth-century roots to literary, artistic, and political incarnations in recent decades, the article argues that the story's prominence in the canon of Uyghur literature and its eponymous protagonist's place among Uyghur national heroes highlights the integral but overlooked role of gender in the construction of modern Uyghur identity. The resiliency of the story's gendered themes also underscores gender's importance in contemporary Uyghur political advocacy, especially advocacy about the transfer of Uyghur women to factories in China's coastal cities, an issue connected to the July 2009 protests and riots in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The history of British rule in the Indian Himalaya exemplifies the mutual enforcement of social identities and political cultures in modern South Asia. For the Khas ethnic majority of the Himachal Pradesh–Uttarakhand borderland, the colonial power's differentiation between “secular” and “religious” authorities engendered the division of substantially commensurable groups into “caste Hindu” and “tribal” societies. In demarcating borders along the “natural barrier” between the states, the British had severed a politically potent grassroots theocracy from its underlings, consolidated the fragmentation of the Shimla Hill States, and ultimately encouraged the development of a composite political cultures that complemented Khas traditions with Brahmanical creeds from the plains.

A commission sponsored by the meiji government and headed by Okakura Tenshin (Kakuzō), Kanō Tessai, and Ernest F. Fenollosa traveled to Nara Prefecture in 1884 to catalog the important artifacts in temples and shrines. Fenollosa's later description of an event of this trip, which is often presented to show how he with the assistance of Okakura “saved” Japanese art, brings out the major argument of my article: the role of fine art in the formulation of belief in the nation. Fenollosa describes his “discovery” of the Guze Kannon (Goddess of Mercy), a seventh-century gilt-wood sculpture, at the Hōryūji temple:

I had credentials from the central government which enabled me to requisition the opening of godowns and shrines. The central space of the octagonal Yumedono was occupied by a great closed shrine, which ascended like a pillar towards the apex. The priests of the Horiuji confessed that tradition ascribed the contents of the shrine to Corean work of the days of Suiko, but that it had not been opened for more than two hundred years.

In his trail-blazing book, Escape from Predicament, Thomas Metzger opens up new vistas on both Neo-Confucianism and modern Chinese thought. In this article I intend to engage not so much in a critique of his book as in a dialogue that he and I have carried on for a number of years.