China's 2010 census revealed a population of 1.34 billion, 50 percent urban, 13.3 percent above age sixty, and with 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls. In this article, we discuss how gender imbalance, population aging, and their interaction with rapid urbanization have shaped China's reform era development and will strongly shape China's future. These intertwined demographic changes pose an unprecedented challenge to social and economic governance, contributing to and magnifying the effects of a slower rate of economic growth. We organize the analysis according to the proximate determinants of economic growth: first, labor input and its productivity; second, capital investment and savings; and finally, multi-factor productivity, including social stability and governance. We argue that the economic, political, and social context that turns labor and capital inputs into economic outputs is perhaps the most important and least understood arena in which demographic change will shape China's rise.

China's trade and financial surpluses, exchange rate, and currency reserves make headlines, daily, around the world. As such, it is more imperative than ever to understand the inner workings of currency policy in China. Yet the exercise of power and decision making in these areas has received surprisingly little attention in Chinese politics, political economy, and, arguably, economics.

During the mid-1870s, fearing the legal innovations of a “civilized” state, geisha and their employers recast Tokugawa-era practices of civic engagement and educational attainment in the language of enlightenment. Proprietors built schools intended to transform geisha into productive and moral mothers, and geisha donated to local educational institutions and suggested that their own studies would lead to self-sufficiency and freedom. These efforts associated geisha with the values of productivity and enlightenment, although similar strategies proved less successful for prostitutes. However, by the 1880s, both geisha and prostitutes were increasingly denied access to education and excluded from ideals of enlightened femininity that were predicated on marriage. This article considers how a group of unlikely actors deployed the Tokugawa past to become civilized, and in the process promoted ideas about the purpose of women's education that would later be expressed by an icon of Meiji modernity: the “good wife, wise mother.”

During the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45), China's leading cartoon artists formed patriotic associations aimed at repelling the Japanese military. Their stated propaganda goals were to boost morale among the troops and the civilian population by circulating artwork that would ignite the spirit of resistance among Chinese audiences. In keeping with the genre, racialized and sexualized imagery abounded. The artists created myriad disturbing visions of how militarized violence impacted men's and women's bodies differently. By analyzing the two major professional journals, National Salvation Cartoons and War of Resistance Cartoons, this article shows that depictions of sexual violence inflicted on Chinese women were integral to the artists' attempts to arouse the spirit of resistance. By comparing their depictions of different types of bodies (Chinese and Japanese, male and female, soldiers' and civilians') the article argues that the cartoonists believed that the depiction of sexually mutilated Chinese women would build resistance and spur patriotism while equivalent depictions of mutilated male soldiers would sap morale and hamper the war effort. The article concludes with a discussion about the dubious efficacy of propaganda that invokes a hypersexualized, masculine enemy other.

Taking the Yokohama Chinese community as an exemplary case, this article delves into linkages between Chinese diasporic identities and collaborationism during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Using published memoirs, Japanese government and police records, and local newspapers, it examines the wartime experiences of a community struggling to maintain both its Chinese identity and its position in local society. Japanese authorities did not categorically assimilate, intern, or deport this population. Instead, they enforced displays of support for collaborationist regimes in occupied China in order to manufacture what they termed “Sino-Japanese amity.” Public expressions by the Yokohama Chinese contributed to this narrative, but these Chinese were not merely puppets. They actively negotiated the meanings and practices of collaborationism to fulfill local needs. By examining their engagement with Chinese and Japanese national imperatives, this article reflects on the nature of Sino-Japanese friendship, hidden resistance, and local integration.

This essay casts light on the alternative but unrealized futures imagined through the Indian Muslim encounter with Japan in the inter-war period. Echoing other attempts to destabilize the empire-to-nation teleology of Indo-Pakistani independence, the essay uncovers a set of aspirations, actors, and spaces of comparison by which Indian Muslims sought an independent future for Muslim-ruled princely states such as Hyderabad. Through comparison with similar patterns in other Asian princely states, a case study of Urdu writings on Japan shows how East Asia became a place to imagine for Hyderabad a future that never came to fruition. By locating India in a trans-Islamic pattern of engaging Japan, the essay shows how, between the Russo-Japanese War and the Second World War, Japan provided newly globalized intellectuals with a template for empowering Muslim-ruled polities that either never came into existence or were subsumed by Asia's postcolonial nations.

While Hindu-Muslim violence in India has received a great deal of scholarly attention, Hindu-Christian violence has not. This article seeks to contribute to the analysis of Hindu-Christian violence, and to elucidate the curious alliance, in that violence, of largely upper-caste, anti-minority Hindu nationalists with lower-status groups, by analyzing both with reference to the varied processes of globalization. The article begins with a short review of the history of anti-Christian rhetoric in India, and then discusses and critiques a number of inadequately unicausal explanations of communal violence before arguing, with reference to the work of Mark Taylor, that only theories linking local and even individual social behaviors to larger, global processes like globalization can adequately honor the truly “webby” nature of the social world.

This article examines daily life in North Korea from the perspectives of recent North Korean defectors from a variety of social backgrounds. The following three questions are explored: how does the individual live from day to day; what tactics does one continuously evolve in order to survive; and, most importantly, what theoretical and methodological frameworks are available to explain the strategies for survival employed by the country's population? Employing the concept of “everyday politics,” this study argues that state-society interactions once constrained by a highly centralized regime, characterized by an emphasis on political and moral motivations, have yielded to more fragmented and autonomous systems strengthened by realization of individual self-interest. In the process, the state and society have reshaped patterns of interaction regarding information flow structures, rules of behavior, and motivations. That is, both the state and society seek coexistence, and the “market” spontaneously developed by the population functions as a shock absorber.