Many novels, poems, and academic works produced in the last decades of Qing China were characterized by a structure of North–South dichotomy. While existing studies have investigated the root of this narrative structure in Chinese traditions, this article tries to uncover Japan's lesser-known role in the revitalization of traditional discourses. It first discusses how Japanese intellectuals, such as Shiga Shigetaka and Naitō Konan, reconfigured Chinese discourses on the North–South dichotomy as theories to assert Japan's superiority over China. It goes on to examine how Liang Qichao appropriated Japanese theories to mobilize southern Chinese to participate in state politics. It then explores how Chinese revolutionary students in Japan exploited Japanese intellectuals’ and Liang's discourses to promote a cross-provincial consciousness by representing China as a river-based region writ large. Lastly, it reveals how the restructured discourses on the North–South dichotomy were manipulated by revolutionaries after they flowed back to China.

German journalist Jürgen Hinzpeter won the 2003 Song Kun-ho Press Award for his reporting of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. He was also the subject of documentaries and the 2017 hit movie A Taxi Driver, which credit him as the first journalist to expose the Kwangju Uprising to the world. In fact, Hinzpeter was one of many journalists who revealed what had happened at Kwangju. Since the production of the 2003 documentary Hinzpeter – the Blue-Eyed Witness to May 1980, interest in the many other foreign journalists who covered Kwangju has been elided, raising the question of why only Hinzpeter's contribution is remembered and celebrated. Using ideas about historical memory developed by Paul Cohen, I argue that a narrative about Hinzpeter's actions in Kwangju has emerged, which has little to do with who first broke the news of the Kwangju Uprising. The story of Hinzpeter's relationship with the South Korean democratization movement as well as the film he shot of the moment Kwangju citizens seized power and established an alternative government to military rule – have become important weapons for the activist generation in an ongoing struggle over the memorialization of the Kwangju Uprising.

This paper offers a first analysis of the philosophy of history developed by Jian Bozan (1898–1968), the author of China's earliest comprehensive exposition of historical materialism. Despite his central importance for the establishment of professional historical studies in PRC, the existing studies neglect Jian's original contribution to the development of Chinese Marxism and his pre-war works in general, focusing solely on his participation in the debate over the relation between history and theory in the 1960s. The paper seeks to fill this lacuna by providing a critical account of Jian Bozan's understanding of historical laws, progress, the stages of history, human freedom and the class struggle. Jian's synthesis of historicism and historical materialism, which at a time was seen as an alternative to the Maoist view of history, was officially condemned during the Cultural Revolution and led to his premature death. However, this paper demonstrates that, following the public rehabilitation of the thought of Jian Bozan in 1978, it was his system that had an important impact on the historiography in Dengist China. Furthermore, the paper argues that Jian's approach to historical materialism brought many novelties in relation to the preceding Sino-Marxist views of history.

In recent historical studies of modern East Asia, the issue of migration has received increased scholarly attention. This article traces recent historiographical and methodological trends by analyzing influential English-language works on modern East Asian migrations in the first half of the twentieth century. Modern East Asian migrations during this period present dynamic and heterogeneous features as results of modern social transformations, such as the development of global capitalism, national and global economic integration, the emergence of new transportation and communication technology, and the expansion and collapse of the Japanese empire. Accordingly, the historical works on modern East Asian migrations we examine display a variety of historiographical and theoretical approaches. Specifically, this article underscores important trends or comparable emphases in these studies, including the growing scholarly interest in transnational/regional border crossing movements, migrants’ subject formations in the new environments, and the methodological interest in the role of culture, political economy, and the environment. Thus this article offers a reflective overview of the ongoing development of migration studies centering on modern East Asia.

In the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Choseon court issued currency in the form of paper money and enacted a prohibition of the long-standing custom among the populace of using commodity currencies. Because commodity currencies were restricted by the value of the materials from which they were made, and because the amount in circulation was determined by what was produced by the populace, they did not conform to the financial concept of “royal prerogative” (ikkwon jaesang) – the state control of the production and distribution of resources. From the middle of the fifteenth century, however, there was a loosening of the prohibition against commodity currencies, a change of policy entailing the recognition of material currency as long as it conformed to certain standards. Thereafter, even transactions involving substandard materials gradually came to be tacitly recognized. During the sixteenth century, inferior cloth whose weave was only three-fifths of the standard became the general accepted level of quality for currency among the populace. Other transformations, such the tacit recognition of regional markets in times of poor harvest, and the alignment of periods of substitute payments of tribute and substitute military service, demonstrate that the rigid financial oversight of the early Choseon court, dependent as it was upon the collection of tribute in kind and military and other labour services, had to accede to the demands of the populace for sufficient liquidity.

This article argues that claims about the different economic trajectories of early modern Europe and late imperial China have incorrectly focused on the importance of formal contract enforcement mechanisms. As a first step toward more productive conversations about the history of economic development across world regions, this article provides a look at the factors in the development of the late imperial Chinese economy that led to the emergence of contract enforcement mechanisms not based on codified contract law. Several case studies from the Qing dynasty Chongqing archives are presented to illustrate how the mechanisms of contract enforcement operated.

Opinions vary in Japan on whether smoking is deviant today, but the behavior, once widely accepted, faces increasing regulation. Recent reforms, moving beyond reliance on nonsmokers' tolerance and smokers' etiquette, impose stricter and more detailed rules on smoking, along with penalties for noncompliance. As the Japanese government's promotional materials note, the reforms move “from manners to rules” (manā kara rūru e). The evolution of Japan's smoking regulations exemplifies a shift toward more legalistic modes of social control. Historically, Japanese governance relied on non-binding “soft law,” administrative guidance, and societal cooperation. Legalistic governance, in contrast, hinges on formal rules and proceduralized enforcement mechanisms. This article, drawing on twenty-eight interviews and qualitative analysis of policy deliberations, advocacy organization documents, court rulings, and Japanese news coverage, traces how societal actors contributed to this legalistic turn. Tobacco control advocates filed lawsuits, pursued voluntary changes through local activities, and provided information subsidies to policymakers while lobbying for local and national reforms. They thereby helped de-normalize smoking and render it regulatable. By uncovering bottom-up drivers of legalistic governance and the strategies through which societal actors influence regulatory style, this paper contributes to scholarship on governance, policy diffusion, and law and social change.

In the recent debates about Confucianism and its role in East Asian economic development, there has been little discussion about why East Asian societies embraced Confucian values in the first place. Here, “Confucian” refers particularly to the ideas of the Song dynasty Zhu Xi school (neo-Confucianism) which became associated in China with the shidafu scholar-bureaucrat class. Zhu Xi political philosophy was anchored in a centralized governing bureaucracy under the emperor, and differed markedly from political ideals underlying medieval feudal society in Europe, for example. Land-ownership was not a condition of shidafu status, and there is only a partial resemblance between the Chinese landowner and European feudal ruling strata. In Japan and Korea, notwithstanding the fact that neo-Confucianism was an imported philosophy and there arose discrepancies between its ideas and social reality, it sank deep roots into both societies. This paper looks at the conditions that allowed this to happen, and concludes that the spread of Confucian ideas depended on structural changes in Korea and Japan that were similar to those that had occurred in China. It is in the emergence of peasant society that we find the key to such changes. This, I contend, is a far more important watershed than the one that divides early-modern and modern.

This paper explores the nuances of the perceptions of Japan by Korea's reformist press of the late 1890s, chiefly by Tongnip sinmun (1896–1899, edited by So Chaep'il and Yun Ch'iho). The main finding of the paper is that, despite the Christian reformists' avowed allegiance to the USA as their ideal model of “civilization”, Japan was taken as a practical model – an example of how a fellow East Asian country, which was supposedly “30 years ago even more backward than Korea”, could succeed in “civilizing” itself. At the same time, reformists' nationalist reaction against domineering “colonial” behavior of the Japanese inside Korea often took the form of an appeal to “international” – read “American”/“European” – “standards of civilization”. The conclusion the study of some of the earliest forms of Korea's Westernizing nationalism leads us to is that the “Occidentalist” worldview of the early Christian nationalist reformers was a complex, multi-layered and often self-contradictory phenomenon, in which “oppressive” features are not easily distinguishable from “liberational” ones. Its key treatment – the prettified, essentialized picture of the “Occident”, believed to be the only “true”, “ideal” civilization – could work “oppressively” as it put Korea's traditional culture in the position of “barbarism” to be exorcized, while looking “emancipatory” when used as the yardstick for criticism of Japanese encroachment.

In the 1930s, the French Archaeological Delegation discovered a few fragments of Chinese lacquerwares at the Hellenistic town of Begram in Afghanistan. These lacquerware fragments, along with other artifacts from this site, have puzzled generations of scholars. Through a comparison of these fragments with lacquerwares discovered in China proper and beyond, this article offers a new chronology of the period from 74 BC to AD 23. This temporal frame corresponds to a time when the social life of Begram is vague in historical records, but it appears that the local aristocracy, for a period of about a hundred years, must have had some political and economic interactions with the late Western Han and Xin dynasties.

Inoue Susumu, Chūgoku shuppan bunkashi: shomotsu to chi no fūkei (A Cultural History of Chinese Publishing: Books and the Landscape of Knowledge). Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 2002.

Amid growing interest in studying China and India together, this special issue, “Methods in China-India Studies,” seeks to open a conversation on the relevance, approaches, and stakes of China-India research. Why should we pair China and India together, how can we best do so, and to what ends? In this introduction to the issue, the editors first discuss the rationales commonly evoked as justification for studying China and India together. The first section articulates shared intellectual commitments as lending a coherence to China-India studies, and as providing a common ground and point of departure for scholars across disciplinary boundaries. The second section outlines a history of the China-India pairing from the first century CE to the end of the twentieth century, with a focus on how a range of historical actors paired China and India under shifting political circumstances and with differing objectives. This section also offers an assessment of the methodological approaches recent scholarship has extended to studying each of these periods. As a whole, this introduction reflects on the unique challenges and opportunities of conducting China-India research, and outlines some of the contributions the China and India conceptual pairing can make to other fields of study.

The annexation of Tibet into the People's Republic of China in the 1950s led to an exodus of nearly 80,000 Tibetans along with the fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso. Since then, thousands of Tibetans have taken refuge in the neighboring countries. Many live as refugees in different parts of the world today. Although the Tibetan refugee community has emerged as a successful model for other displaced communities, the individual struggles of these refugees in foreign lands cannot be underestimated. Dhompa's book A Home in Tibet shines a light on this other side of their exilic existence by raising questions about identity, home, country, and memory. It outlines the hardships, confusion, and contestations that Tibetans face on a daily basis. After a short introduction to provide context, this article reports a conversation with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, which grippingly addresses these issues.

The current work is an exploration of the life and linguistic scholarship of the Crimean Tatar linguist Bekir Çobanzade. In it, I pay particular attention to the impact of the author's socio-political environment, especially the rise of Stalinism, on his works relating to the history and classification of the Turkic languages. I demonstrate how these circumstances compelled Çobanzade to perform an intellectual migration, from an indigenous Turkic ontology focused on the structural wholeness of the Turkic languages to a rigid application of Marxist-Leninist concepts of socially-determined linguistic classification. I do this with the help of monographs and journal articles published in Crimean Tatar, Ottoman Turkish, Azerbaijani and Russian, problematizing the multitude of his audiences and loyalties. As such, Çobanzade's story becomes a microcosm of the experience of a broader generation of Turkic writers and scholars. It was a generation that sought to take the greatest benefit from the monumental changes following World War I, and ended up being consumed by the totalitarian state that emerged in its wake. Çobanzade is one victim of many whose scholarly oeuvre can open a window to a heady and bygone period of experimentation and change.

The development of transit trade between China and Russia after the eighteenth century led to the growth of prosperous Chinatowns in Mongolia. These maimaicheng (lit. “trade towns”) along a Chinese merchant network that reached Siberia and Turkestan displayed distinctive urban spaces, where a multicultural mixture of people – Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan and Hui Moslem – created new architectural styles and produced unique streetscapes. Unlike urban formations before the eighteenth century, these new towns absorbed nomadic and religious elements into their residential and secular spaces. This did not however imply assimilation. The landscape of northern Chinese towns clearly shows how different cultures were able to preserve their original styles and simultaneously adapt themselves to coexist with others.