This article examines how legacies of bounded collectivism in Southwest China play out in the form of land rights sharing involving the current administrative village and its constituent villagers’ groups, as well as in the form of political differentiation between administrative village cadres and leaders of villagers’ groups. It also documents the ways in which land markets change as the two levels of village administration compete to develop rural land.

On July 3, 1945 the Japanese occupation government of the East Indies executed by sword the prominent Professor Achmad Mochtar. Until his arrest by the Kenpeitai in October 1944 he directed the Eijkman Institute in Jakarta, a prestigious Nobel Prize-winning medical research laboratory. Mochtar was not only an internationally known scientist physician, but he was also closely connected to powerful Indonesian nationalist elites. The complex swirl of violent military and political currents, together with the complex technical elements of the events impelling Mochtar's execution, composes what the scholar of Indonesian history Theodore Friend referred to as “the Mochtar affair”. The defining event of this affair was the murder of 900 conscripted Javanese laborers (called romusha, a Japanese word meaning unskilled laborer but adopted in Indonesian language to mean slave laborer) at a transit camp on the outskirts of Jakarta in August 1944. They all died of acute tetanus within three days of receiving vaccinations against typhus, cholera and dysentery.

On December 27, 2013, then-governor of Okinawa Nakaima Hirokazu approved a permit to reclaim land off the coast of Henoko in Nago City, Okinawa in order to build a U.S. Marine Corps airfield. Current Okinawa governor Onaga Takeshi won a landslide victory against Nakaima in November 2014 on a platform opposing the construction of a U.S. military facility on land reclaimed off the coast of Henoko. Shortly after his inauguration, Governor Onaga established a “Third Party (Experts) Commission,” consisting of six legal and scientific experts, for the purpose of reviewing the procedural grounds for former governor Nakaima's approval of the land reclamation. On July 16, 2015, the Commission published a more than 100-page report, concluding that Nakaima's approval of the land reclamation was legally flawed. (A summary of the report can be read here.) On October 13, 2015, Governor Onaga nullified the land reclamation permit based on the Commission's findings. Just a day later, the Okinawa Defense Bureau (the local branch of the Japanese Ministry of Defense) filed a complaint asking the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLITT) to overrule Onaga's nullification. The MLITT swiftly complied. Shortly after, the Japanese government sued Governor Onaga, seeking a verdict that would allow them to override his authority as governor and approve the land reclamation. As the central government is essentially appealing to itself, observers predict it will win an easy victory. Igarashi Takayoshi notes that legal precedents are also on the government's side, and that to prevent such an outcome, the platform for debate must be broadened beyond the confines of Japan's government offices and courtrooms to the stage of national and global public opinion. SA

Alongside even larger numbers of contingents drawn from France's colonial empire, including a large pool of workers sourced from China, successive contingents of “Indochinese” -Vietnamese in addition to Cambodians - were also pressed into both military and labor battalions in World War I battlefields. Besides explaining the battlefield experiences of the Indochinese battalions in the European war – a little studied area – this article seeks to expose the contradictions raised by France's patriotic appeal for “volunteers,” versus the domestic anti-colonial movement. On another level, the article examines the juncture between the worker-soldiers in France and the burgeoning socialist and communist underground in Paris, and back home in Vietnam, as best exemplified by the activities and writings of Ho Chi Minh in the run-up to his now-famous oration at the Versailles Conference.

On October 27, 2015 China hawks got what they had long demanded: a US Navy Freedom of Navigation operation (aka FONOP) within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef, one of China's manmade islands in the South China Sea.