The mid-1950s saw the relationship between China and Indonesia evolve from one of mutual hostility to one of fraternity as a trend of détente emerged out of the Geneva (1954) and the Bandung (1955) conferences. This article explores why and how the two newly independent nations applied art diplomacy to reduce their ideological differences and facilitate their commercial and political rapprochements for the sake of Asian solidarity. Through contextualizing a series of art activities between the two nations, especially China’s reproduction of President Sukarno’s private collection of paintings and Chairman Mao Zedong’s gifts of Chinese ink paintings to President Sukarno, this article argues that interactions in the name of art exemplify how China shaped its modern profile as an independent and industrialized power. It will also show how China deviated from its diplomacy of ‘Leaning to One Side’, formulated in the late 1940s, towards the ‘Peaceful United Front’ of the mid-1950s. More broadly, art relations between China and Indonesia reflect intensive cultural exchanges between the newly independent, yet ideologically clashing, nations of the Third World in the postwar period and offer a multifaceted history of the Cold War beyond the binary paradigm of the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Mecca is often conceptualized as a destination for the ḥajj or a source of leverage for both western and Ottoman imperial states, and in the twentieth century, for Saudi national foreign policy and Islamist movements. While building on such transnational angles, this article views the city as a convergence point for diaspora populations, an intermediary site that has received and redirected the mobilities of sojourners, refugees, and exiles from different parts of Asia throughout the manifold turnovers of the twentieth century. The article focuses on a community of first- to third-generation settlers in the Hejaz who trace their other homes to different places in China proper. Using archival documents, travelogues, and ethnographic interviews, the article argues that the routes to Mecca, coupled with imaginaries of the city as a home place for Muslims worldwide, served as a rare constant orienting force that sustained two-directional mobilities of Chinese Muslim diasporas through the wars and revolutions of modern times.

This article traces the early stages of urban electrification in the French protectorate of Tonkin (in Vietnam’s north) from the late 1880s to the late 1920s. It focuses on Hanoi, where in 1895 the French entrepreneurs Hermenier and Planté secured a concession for lighting the streets of the soon-to-be capital of French Indochina. Before long, the city’s fast-paced development and the concomitant rise in demand for both public and private lighting necessitated contractual amendments and further capital investment in the upgrading of the power station and grid extensions. In 1902, Hermenier converted the business into a joint stock company named the Société Indochinoise d’Électricité with the aim of enabling further growth and geographical expansion. Contractual arrangements were frequently renegotiated and adjusted to new circumstances. However, electricity supplies kept lagging behind the fast pace of demand growth. During the post-First World War years of colonial economic expansion, power failures and blackouts became a routine occurrence and were a frequent target of press coverage. It was only in the late 1920s that electricity supplies improved and turned Hanoi into a city of lights. Although the majority of Vietnamese residents remained excluded from private electricity access throughout the colonial period, electric power quickly became a fact of everyday life for an emerging Vietnamese urban bourgeoisie and served as a marker of modern sophistication. Plans for an interconnected distribution network in the Tonkin delta subsequently also triggered hopes for an electrified future for the countryside.

This article draws attention to the provincial city of Allahabad at the turn of the century as the site of a prolific and multilingual print culture. While publishing trends in this city were shaped by the intertwined histories of political culture and cultural politics, specific journals responded to these forces in ways that remain unexamined. Taking the Indian Press—established in 1884 and arguably the city’s most important multilingual publishing house—and four prominent journals that it produced (Saraswatī, Prabāsī, The Modern Review, and Adīb) as case study, I analyse the entanglements between print culture and debates on the contentious issues of languages and identities in a divided public sphere. Based on an extensive analysis of several decades of publishing trends for Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, I argue that the continued thriving of many languages, or multilingualism, cannot be read simply as evidence for the proliferation of syncretism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a detailed reading of this complex field of cultural production, I show that while multilingual publishing thrived, cultural discourse led by middle-class and elite intellectuals was increasingly becoming homogeneous and insular, pushing a milieu of multilingual readers and publishers towards a narrow nationalist and majoritarian ideal. Thus, upon close analysis, multilingualism as a cultural value in the era of colonial modernity mirrored the fractures within the public sphere.

During the 1930s the Japanese Government General of Korea’s Society for the Compilation of Korean History commissioned facsimiles of some 21 rare historical sources to accompany the publication of the colossal History of Korea (Chōsenshi 朝鮮史), funnelling select xylographic, typographic, and chirographic products of the defunct Chosŏn dynasty’s book ecology through offset lithography and collotype, and on occasion movable type. This article investigates the Society for the Compilation of Korean History’s collection and classification of historical materials against the larger backdrop of colonial knowledge production, illuminates the different economic and editorial logics of the new printing technologies used to produce the facsimiles, and examines the products as one example of the significance of facsimiles in the field of history. It suggests that the interplay of traditional print media, dominated by woodblock prints, and the new photomechanical means of reproduction, allowed for the swift reproduction of the unfolded page image and the easy utilization of traditional-style binding, permitting the Society to create purposefully antiquated reproductions with a high degree of fidelity to the original. At the same time, the use of modern materials (paper, string, and covers) and certain features common to traditional Japanese book binding meant that the facsimiles were irrevocably hybrid. These facsimiles ended up in a wide range of research libraries, representing the Korean past to the scholarly community in the Japanese empire.

This article describes how Taiwanese farmers adopted irrigation pumps to enhance their livelihoods under the shifting relationship of sugar and rice production in late colonial Taiwan. I argue that farmers utilized commercial technologies to make a living and prosper within the established order of Japanese colonial rule. With allocated procurement districts granting exclusive purchasing rights over sugarcane, sugar companies maintained substantial influence over sugarcane cultivation. However, with the proliferation of Penglai rice and new agricultural implements, the situation of the farmers changed substantially. Serious problems in the sugar industry due to economic depression and the rising price of rice in the 1930s led farmers to shift from sugarcane to rice cultivation by introducing a variety of pumps. Those with the means installed new motor pumps, while others independently constructed wind pumps by combining newly introduced parts with older techniques. Despite a prohibition by the colonial government, farmers continued installing pumps until the government established a planned economy in preparation for war. Moreover, distribution of pump capacity through both sales and sharing shows that Taiwanese farmers sought to maintain an informal yet significant cohesion throughout the process of agricultural commercialization. By focusing on the social dynamics surrounding agricultural technologies, this article challenges simplistic portrayals of technology transfer from Japan to the colonies.

After the Second World War, the US government established a new oil order, forming close ties with three major oil companies—Standard Vacuum, Shell, and California-Texas—referred to as the ‘Three Sisters’ in Korea, which was newly liberated from Japanese colonialism. Even after the South Korean government was established, the US government and the Three Sisters worked to maintain the order. Using the carrot of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) funds, in 1949 the US government pressured the South Korean government into oil agreements that would facilitate the supply of petroleum products to the country. The 1949 oil agreements were completed after three rounds of negotiations. The process of signing the agreements was not limited to the import, storage, and sale of petroleum products in exchange for US aid to South Korea. It also sought to respond to the various interests of Koreans who wanted to create an independent economic structure in the midst of establishing a new government. This article explores the three rounds of negotiations for the 1949 oil agreements whereby the symbiotic relationship between the US government and the Three Sisters was realized in partnership with the interests of the South Korean government. Furthermore, it seeks to broaden the research on the history of Korean oil by promoting an understanding of how US oil policy affected Korea immediately after its liberation from Japanese colonial rule.

Using declassified colonial and British records in Hong Kong and London, as well as memoirs of former leftists and newspapers, this article explores the strategies the Hong Kong colonial government employed in a propaganda campaign to garner political support of the rural population in the New Territories, a porous land frontier during the Cold War. It also analyses the varying political orientations of migrant farmers, who often had received economic benefits from both the colonial government and the leftist organizations. This article reveals that the colonial government established the Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO), a state-owned enterprise, to first nationalize the vegetable wholesale market in the immediate post-war period, and subsequently used it to combat increasing political influence and anti-government activities of the communist-controlled Society of Plantations. Despite the improvement of the livelihood of immigrant farmers, the VMO Scheme failed to out-compete the Society economically, which was ultimately eliminated by draconian measures. Through studying the agrarian politics and economic contestations in Hong Kong’s rural area, this article provides a lens on how the Cold War was played out at a village level in East Asia.

A growing body of scholarship has examined the intertwining of ideological polarization and inter-ethnic tensions during the Cold War. In this context, increasing attention has been paid to the experiences of the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, and how they were affected by international and national-level developments. Less scrutiny has been given to the role of sub-national forces, despite the fact that patterns of ethnic conflict sometimes varied markedly between different parts of a single country. This article addresses this lacuna via the case study of West Java, Indonesia. The article analyses the relationship between the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese population and anti-Chinese agitation in the 1950s and 1960s. International and national forces encouraged closer relations between the PKI and some ethnic Chinese Indonesians through the 1950s. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s there were also recurrent episodes of anti-Chinese harassment, driven primarily by anti-communist groups. The strength of the anti-communist coalition within West Java helped make the province the epicentre of anti-Chinese agitation during crises in 1959–60 and 1963. Yet shifts in the configuration of military and political forces in the region meant anti-Chinese actions in West Java during the contentious period 1965–67 were less severe than in some other provinces. Overall the article highlights the need to consider the interaction of not only international and national processes but also sub-national regional dynamics when analysing the relationship between Cold War polarization and inter-ethnic conflict.

In the first half of the 1960s China witnessed an unprecedented florescence of theatrical works on Third World decolonization, which aimed to disseminate the ideology of Maoist internationalism and cultivate transnational and interracial solidarity among the Chinese public. Existing scholarship on Maoist internationalist theatre tends to understand the phenomenon as the domestication of Third World decolonization for China’s political ends. This article, by focusing on the heterogeneous processes of production, adaptation, and reception, illuminates the practical and epistemological challenges of representing an internationalist subject, the imperfect performance of foreign culture and history, and the porous process of meaning-making for Chinese performers and audiences. Using previously untapped historical materials, such as performance programmes, personal recollections, and newspapers, this article explores the staging of the Congo Crisis (1960–1965)—a widely mediated international event in Maoist China and a central conflict in the global Cold War—in the spoken drama War Drums on the Equator (1965), its many local variations, and a dance drama adaptation, The Raging Congo River (1965). By mediating and enacting ‘embodied and affective knowledge’ about Congo, these theatrical works made the political motif of internationalist solidarity into sonorous and kinaesthetic artefacts that engendered plural meanings to Chinese performers and audiences. This article further reveals flawed perceptions, processes of corrections, and the epistemological limitations in the performance of the Congo Crisis in Maoist China.

This paper studies the contradictions of peasant politics in Sri Lanka’s dry zone frontier in a highly militarized colonization scheme (‘System L’ of the Mahaweli Development Programme in Weli Oya in northern Sri Lanka). Through a detailed ethnographic study of the life histories of settlers who came in two waves to this scheme (1980s and post-2009), we show the workings of what we call the ‘lure of land’: first, as the (al)lure that attracts landless families to live out the mythical dream of becoming a paddy farmer; second, this lure of land is intimately tied to a nationalist territorial aspiration that transforms the settler into a patriotic colonizer of the land: due to its strategic location in the frontier zone between Sinhalese and Tamil inhabited territories, settlers became ‘home guards’ who live on and protect the frontier. But the lure of land is not without contradictions: Life in the frontier is dangerous (for the early settlers) and economically precarious (for the early and late settlers), because the state is unable to deliver the promise of land and water. Government officials deploy various tactics of repeatedly deferred promises and subtle threats to discourage settlers to abandon the colonization scheme despite the settlers’ precarious life conditions, disappointments, and frustrations. A ‘cunning state’ thereby betrays its own ‘frontiersmen’, while safeguarding its nationalist territorial agenda.

In recent decades, as part of the efforts of the Chinese government first to integrate and, more recently, to forcibly assimilate the Uyghur population into China’s mainstream culture and society, the Uyghur language has been marginalized and repressed to an unprecedented extent. The academic literature on Xinjiang’s language policy has repeatedly acknowledged that this repression is a major source of concern and discontent among many Uyghurs. However, to date, little has been written about the public response of Uyghurs to this policy and their open efforts to challenge it. In particular, with very few exceptions, little is known about the public response of Uyghur writers and artists. In this article I analyse a large corpus of Uyghur poems and songs that engaged openly with the Uyghur language crisis and were published and disseminated in the Uyghur public sphere between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. Unlike some studies that try to assess the condition of certain languages at a certain point in time through objective methodologies, these literary and artistic works provide an insider view on how the Uyghur cultural elite and many other Uyghurs experienced the repression and loss of their native language, and also, how they struggled against this repression. In the article I examine the diverse sentiments, perceptions, and discourses that these literary and artistic expressions communicate, and the different strategies that the Uyghurs used to struggle against the language policy and its consequences. I also explore what these works tell us about the development of Xinjiang’s language policy over time, the linguistic reality in the region, and the impact that the language policy has had on Uyghur society. Finally, the article also investigates the broad political meanings of these works and speculates on the link between them and the efforts of the Chinese government to further marginalize the Uyghur language.

The lack of electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the South Indian state of Kerala is often explained through the idea of Kerala ‘exceptionalism’, a broad term used to explain the unique historical, political, and developmental trajectory of the state. However, such explanations do not adequately address the systematic and concerted attempts by Hindu nationalist organizations to transform the cultural sphere of Kerala into a fertile ground for its future electoral politics. Through an ethnographic study of three Hindu nationalist organizations in the civil society sphere of Kodungallur, a multi-religious town in central Kerala, this article explores the politics and implications of their cultural interventions. The article argues that, peeved by an ‘absent Hindu atmosphere’ in Kerala, these organizations are trying to construct new forms of sociality and subjectivity and a grassroots public sphere embedded in Hindu nationalist ideology in Kodungallur. Often described by these organizations as ‘apolitical’ and ‘cultural’, these interventions are indeed a critique of the Kerala public sphere which is characterized by religious pluralism and secular sociality. Hence, the attempt to create a ‘Hindu atmosphere’ by these organizations is a deeply political endeavour aimed at creating an exclusivist Hindu hegemony in the cultural sphere, which they assume will pave the way for their electoral hegemony in Kerala in the long run.