After more than thirty years of economic reforms, China appears to have settled into a form of state capitalism that is likely to endure as long as the Communist Party retains power. This essay provides a critical overview of some of the key features and contradictions that characterize this particular form of capitalism and reviews some recent influential critiques of this system. Many observers have viewed the resurgence of the state-controlled economy as a shift away from policies more hospitable to both indigenous entrepreneurs and foreign capital in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the author's own research with entrepreneurs in China, however, this essay argues for the importance of moving beyond the dichotomy of the controlling state and the free market.

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.

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.

This essay examines how Japanese Esperantism developed after the Russo-Japanese War in a manner that departed from the global Esperanto movement. Esperantists viewed Esperanto as a language that amplified the diversity of and symbolized equality between cultures. Esperanto was studied and discussed by elites and nonelites alike in noninstitutional spaces such as in rural homes and coffee shops, often at night, when institutions privileged by state and financial power had closed. By looking at these hidden space-times outside the realms of state guidance, we become privy to an imagination and practice of peace and world order that operated outside the institutions of the nation-state. The history of this movement offers us a rare window into a popular concept of world order in Asia.

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.

Through investigating the construction of one of Japan's largest infrastructure projects during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), this article examines the formation of a technocratic regime of colonial development expertise that was an important pillar of Japanese imperial rule and continued to have powerful effects throughout postwar Asia. It analyzes how a particular form of technical expertise and the wider discourse of “Scientific Japan” as the modernizer of Asia were legitimated and naturalized, as well as how they operated as a system of colonial power. Japan and other East Asian regimes after the war continued to invoke forms of technocratic expertise with origins in the colonial era as part of their state-led development programs, often with adverse effects on their populations. Thus this article concludes that there is a continuing need to critique, historicize, and denaturalize such regimes of expertise invoked by networks of bureaucrats, businessmen, engineers, and experts.

Malaysia's plans to become a transnational hub for Islamic finance represent an effort to mobilize religion to create new global networks for the circulation of capital. This article first contextualizes such efforts within the broader contours of Malaysia's political history, addressing the classification of ethnicity and religion by both the colonial and postcolonial states. The article describes how Islamic finance is defined by practitioners in Malaysia and explains the key features they invoke to distinguish it from what they call “conventional finance”. Finally, it identifies the steps undertaken by the state to make the country a global center of Islamic finance. As the recent financial crises have shaken confidence in North Atlantic financial systems, Malaysia is geographically and culturally well-positioned between two emergent economic regions currently at the forefront of global economic growth.

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.

This article introduces the 1952–56 hiropon crisis, Japan's sole major domestic experience with illegal drugs, and the world's first methamphetamine “epidemic.” In the early postwar years, hiropon addiction came to symbolize the dependent, traumatized state of a defeated Japan. This ideological significance made the eradication of hiropon a leading public issue, mobilizing the Japanese government, medical establishment, and social actors such as educators, parents, neighborhood associations, the media, and others. The process of eliminating methamphetamine restored public confidence and agency, and created a new identity for Japan as a cosmopolitan, independent nation. Unlike drugs in other contexts, hiropon was not embedded in the postwar political economy or culture, making possible its swift suppression. However, resolution of the methamphetamine crisis also sowed the seeds of its recrudescence in the 1970s. The ongoing “second stimulants epidemic,” reflecting consumption patterns typical of developed nations, has proven resistant to solution.

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.

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 paper focuses on the majority population in the People's Republic of China—the Han—and their various collective identities. The Han play a pivotal role in consolidating the Chinese territory and the multiethnic Chinese nation. Therefore, the governments in the twentieth century have invested substantial efforts in promoting a unitary Han identity. In spite of that, powerful local identities related to native place, occupation, and family histories persist. This essay traces these identities and analyzes their intertwinement. Further, it discusses the question of ethnicity of both the Han and local identity categories, and concludes that while Han enact ethnicity in their relations to other minzu, local identity categories are more social than ethnic. It further posits that moments of confrontation, “degree” of ethnicity, scales of categorization, and relationality of identities are notions that should be given particular attention in the studies of ethnicity in China and elsewhere.

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.

Using an unusual case of a democratic and militant shipbuilding union in 1960s South Korea as a window on society, this article explores the politics and ethos of the first decade of Park Chung Hee's rule. Pronounced public support for the union in the region, dense links between the unionists and local progressives, and the surprisingly optimistic and positive expectations of the military government that shipyard workers exhibited in this period all call our attention to the still quite fluid and open terrain of politics before the full-blown authoritarianism of the 1970s. These dynamic aspects of the 1960s, when both elites and non-elites engaged major postcolonial questions of democracy, development, and unification, are mostly hidden from view today, overwhelmed by the power of the dominant minju discourse that became hegemonic in the democracy movement during the 1980s and 1990s. Excavating the forgotten alliance between an important union and the progressives surrounding it thus opens a space for alternative understandings of South Korean development and democratization.

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.

Sites, here the eighth-century Buddhist shrine Borobudur and other remains of the Hindu-Buddhist past located in colonial (predominantly Islamic) Java, are in this article our analytical tool to provide insight into the local and transnational dimensions of heritage politics and processes of in- and exclusion in Asia and Europe around 1900. Because we recognize these “sites” as centers of multiple historical, political, and moral spaces that transgress state boundaries, we take this concept beyond the nation-state-centered lieu de mémoire. By exploring how site-related objects traveled from temple ruins in Java to places elsewhere in the world (here: Siam, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain) and back to Java, we show the transformation of heritage engagements around 1900 at multiple locations, and we make clear why, despite professionalizing state-centered heritage politics, state control was limited. We argue that the mechanisms of exchange and reciprocal interdependence, as theorized by Marcel Mauss, are crucial to understand the moral and economic engagements that define the problem of heritage, at local and transnational levels.