The year 2012 was fascinating for domestic politics and international relations in Northeast Asia. Perhaps most notably, every country in the region experienced a change of leadership. China, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan all saw new leaders begin their tenure. In addition, regional relations took a turn for the worse, with numerous countries engaging in territorial and maritime disputes, disagreeing over interpretations of their shared histories.

In the first decade of the present century, Peter Hessler published three acclaimed works on China, mostly (although not exclusively) dealing with the present period. Many of the parts of the second and third volumes, in particular, initially appeared as articles in the New Yorker and National Geographic, where the deftness of Hessler's writing and his superb skills as a storyteller attracted attention well beyond the academic world. Hessler's books have also been widely and generously praised—and used in class—by teachers of contemporary China. Yet, to my knowledge, no China specialist has yet attempted a comprehensive assessment of their contribution to the deepening of American understanding of the complexities of Chinese life today. Such an assessment is the modest aim of this essay.

The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself.

This article investigates Chinese warlord authority in the east of the Kham Tibetan region between 1911 and 1949. The colonial government established by the Qing Empire in Kham during the five years before the end of dynastic rule relied on central government funding. With the fragmentation of the Chinese state in the Republican period, Chinese regimes in Kham were forced to raise more revenue locally and reduce expenditure. Responding to these challenges shaped the nature of Chinese authority in Kham. The late Qing colonial government had paid Tibetans who provided livestock and labor for transport as part of the 'u-lag corvée. Republican-era governors lacked the resources to do the same. They struggled to develop other ways of controlling the corvée, and attempted to create alternative state transport organizations. Changes in the sources of county government revenue also had important effects on Chinese officials' approach to what they considered to be “wasteland.”

A few months after the fourteenth Dalai Lama stated at the Kalachakra Initiation Ceremony in India in January 2006 that Tibetans should cease wearing clothing lined with endangered animal skins, Tibetans across the Tibetan Plateau destroyed millions of yuan worth of otter, leopard, tiger, and other pelts. Outsiders' interpretations of these events have flattened out the complexity of participants' motivations, which included not only religious and national loyalty, but also concerns about inequality wrought by capitalist development, framed through a lens of modern Chinese history. This paper traces heated debates among Tibetans about the burnings, including their implications for Tibetans' global reputation, the survival of Tibetan culture, and the possibility of a moral economy in an era of deepening commodification. It also explores the embodied, visual, and performative elements of the burnings through participants' videos. The role of local filmmaking efforts in spreading the burnings makes the accompanying videos especially relevant.

Ming (1368–1644) subjects of all classes, theoretically without a voice in the selection of bureaucratic personnel and setting of government policy in their hometowns, exploited the dynamic tensions within the orthodox Mandate of Heaven ideology to claim a legitimate political voice through one ubiquitous yet understudied local institution, the pre-mortem shrine. Meant to express gratitude to good magistrates and prefects moving on to other positions, the shrines were suspect as flattering an official in hopes of return favors. To forestall accusations of such corrupt gentry networking, steles for living shrines included or invented the voices of local commoners. Whether this meant that commoners living under the reality of autocracy and class oppression could actually affect personnel and policy or not, erecting such steles as permanent features in the landscape did legitimate commoners’ political participation within the same discourse that justified imperial rule and the dominance of educated men.

This essay argues that to understand twentieth-century Khmer-Vietnamese ethnic antagonism, the contest for the lower Mekong Delta (in today's Vietnam) since the mid-eighteenth century has been key. It argues, however, that while this pre-1945 background can explain antagonism, it cannot sufficiently explain the violence between Khmer and Vietnamese that occurred after 1945. For that, the First Indochina War (1945–54) and decolonization marked a turning point. This period saw the creation of a dynamic of violence between Khmer and Vietnamese that hardened ethnic antagonisms, shaped the character of the war, and affected arguments over sovereignty. This dynamic of violence also contributed, in the long run, to a common Cambodian antagonism to the Vietnamese, including that of the Khmer Rouge.

One promising traditional industry slated for revival in late colonial India was carpet weaving. Characterized by low technology, high product value, and strong demand, carpets appealed for obvious economic reasons, while simultaneously evoking India's luxurious artisanal past. In western India, carpet weaving was centered in jails where convicts produced high-quality rugs using historic designs in prison factories that served as laboratories for redefining penal labor and traditional design under the eyes of the colonial state. For, even as they were poised at the center of new exchange networks of design ideas, jail factories also claimed practical economic goals: to earn money for jails, train convicts in new skills and habits, and build India's productive potential in a time of economic malaise. As such, they provide an ideal site for examining the economic context for the emerging design industry, and for limitations of colonial visions of the Indian economy.

The 2002 pogrom in the Indian state of Gujarat, and especially in its largest city, Ahmedabad, left about 1,000 Muslims dead in the city, another 1,000 dead in the state, and about 140,000 homeless, some of them still living in relief camps today. The killing, one of the worst in India since partition in 1947, drew responses of horror from across India and the world. Although the assault on Muslims followed an apparent (all the facts will never be known) assault on Hindu pilgrims travelling through the railway station at Godhra, in eastern Gujarat, in which fifty-nine Hindus burned to death, most observers have argued that the response was not commensurate with the attack, and, of course, it targeted not the criminals who may have set the fire, but a community of Muslims 100 miles away.

There are approximately five million Muslims in Thailand (7 percent of the total population), with about 1.8 million in the southernmost provinces bordering on Malaysia. A considerable literature in history, anthropology, political science, international relations, and religious studies has been produced since January 4, 2004, when a violent Muslim insurgency dramatically erupted in the area. At that time over 100 Muslim insurgents raided an arms depot of the Fourth Army Engineers in Narathiwat Province. On January 22, in south Thailand, two Muslim young men on a motorcycle used a long knife to slit the throat of a sixty-four-year-old Buddhist monk, killing him. The monk had just returned from his early morning round of tham bun (alms-collecting extending merit to Buddhist families).