In the early 1980s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Japan joined the international refugee regime. This timing similarity is puzzling due to the stark differences between the PRC as a communist and authoritarian state versus Japan as a prime example of capitalist development and democratization. Moreover, although both signed the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Refugee Protocol without major reservations, neither of them has fully implemented these treaties. Discussions regarding the PRC’s and Japan’s engagement with the international refugee regime tend to start with the beginning of the Indochina refugee crisis in 1975. However, this article shows that the early decades of their interaction with the international refugee regime are of crucial importance for a full understanding of the timing and form of accession to the international refugee regime. Although the Southeast Asian refugee crisis played an important role as a trigger, it was the changing character of the international refugee regime and the transformations of state identity in both countries that set the ground for the signing of the refugee-related conventions.

During an evening's conversation in September of 1989 in Hyderabad, two educated men: onea retired professor of economics, the other a civil servant whose avocation was lexicography, entered into a spirited and lengthy debate over the proper way of translating ‘fundamentalist’ into Urdu. The lexicographer argued that ‘bunyād-parast (lit: one who loves the basics)’ was the most accurate as it conveyed not only the English meaning, but also the reality of what a fundamentalist Muslim believed. In opposition, the economist held that ‘mullah-yī (lit: like a mullah)’ was culturally more correct. The ‘foundation’ implied by bunyad was not specifically religious. It could apply to the fundamentals of anything: grammar, for example. In addition, he argued that what fundamentalists really did was to dress, act and talk like mullahs. In a sense, both were correct, because each was struggling over the transfer of a notion alien to traditional Islam into the vocabulary of a living language through which Muslims interact.

Borderlands and bordering processes are central to politics and the governance of people, goods, and territories, not only as markers of territorial-administrative control but also as practices that shape the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, mobility/immobility, and relations of power and authority. This special issue focuses on Myanmar, where political governance is deeply entangled with ethnicity, territory, borders, and bordering processes. We attempt to untangle these relationships by adopting an approach that combines consideration of how borderlands are governed with recognition of the ways in which borders, borderlands, and border populations shape governance and administration. We define this approach as ‘border governance’, by which we mean governance in, of, and through borderlands. In this introduction, we explore the meaning and significance of border governance as it relates to Myanmar, its ethnic border states, and their relations to other nations bordering the country. In doing so, we engage with and develop scholarly debates in three primary areas: (i) Borders, territoriality, and bordering processes; (ii) Plural governance and everyday bordering; (iii) Peacebuilding and the borders of transition. The articles in this special issue were written prior to the military coup of February 2021. Nevertheless, the central arguments presented here remain relevant, as does our conclusion: to achieve lasting peace in Myanmar, the borderlands must be at the centre.

In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a ‘slave society’. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifies The Pariah Problem with a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the ‘religionization’ of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of a public that excluded the Dalit to inquire further about the gendered nature of that public and the private realm it simultaneously generated. Zoe Sherinian calls attention to Viswanath's characterization of missionary opposition to social equality for Dalits and examines missionary and Dalit discourses that stand apart from those that Viswanath studied. Joel Lee extends some of Viswanath's claims about the Madras presidency by showing strong parallels to social practices in colonial North India. Finally, Viswanath's own response addresses the assessments of her colleagues.

One of the epic national narratives of modernization and development in China is the story of Beidahuang (‘Great Northern Wilderness’) in the country’s northeast. The term ‘Beidahuang’ refers originally to state-sponsored campaigns, starting in the 1950s, that involved the enlistment of tens of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers, educated youth, and Communist Party cadres. Their task was to transform the vast northeast ‘wasteland’ into productive farmland that would feed the nation while securing the nation’s borders with Russia. This article examines the significance of Beidahuang as a feature of the environmental discourse in China’s northeast borderlands, focusing on the first decade of the twenty-first century when the Chinese state was establishing more systematic measures for addressing environmental concerns. In the context of the northeast borderland, the massive deforestation that resulted from the socialist campaigns to transform ‘wasteland’ into productive farmland has left a controversial legacy for regional elites grappling with the Party leadership’s turn towards environmental conservation as an emerging political priority. This article suggests that the ongoing importance of the ‘Great Northern Wilderness’ in the Chinese cultural imagination has shaped the ways in which regional elites frame environmental issues in relation to economic development, nationalism, and border relations with Russia.

Through an engagement with the histories of Muslim pasts, presences, and absences in the locality of Jangpura-Bhogal in the Indian capital city of Delhi, this article examines the constitutive relationship between displacements and city-making. It addresses Jangpura-Bhogal's post-colonial history (1947–present) through instances of the erasure of Muslim property, spaces, and histories, and the reoccupations, replacements, and redefinition of spaces, properties, and memories that they constituted. The article shows how protracted material displacements of Muslim property and spaces have contributed to the erasure of a Muslim historical presence from Jangpura-Bhogal. By tracing the afterlives of these material displacements, it tracks how narrative discourses draw on these Muslim absences and the sense of an abstract ‘diverse space’ to produce new sets of exclusions and practices of Othering in the present. The discussion focuses on the processual/everyday, ‘below the radar’, and, at times, invisible displacements, more than sudden eruptions of violence or overt ideological projects aimed at a deliberate Muslim erasure. Thus, Delhi's post-colonial history is not only about the well-rehearsed story of migrations and arrivals but equally about departures and displacements that have produced the neighbourhood and the city as particular kinds of majoritarian places and spaces. Current acts of Muslim displacement, that is, the Delhi ‘riots’ of February 2020 are enabled not only through visible and violent histories of Muslim marginalization, but also by longer histories of non-overt erasures, displacements, and replacements.

This article tells the intertwined tales of two historical routes that testify to the extensive geographical distance and profound political connections between Tibet and China throughout the modern era. In much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Sichuan Route operated as the transportation artery upon which the Qing empire depended to maintain authority in Kham and Tibet. It was also the site of a rite of passage for frontier functionaries and a meeting ground between imperial agents and the indigenous population. Despite its destruction after the implosion of the Qing in 1911, the histories and memories of the Sichuan Route continued to influence decision-makers in both China and Tibet in the following decades. The Maritime Route, which emerged in the late nineteenth century with the proliferation of steam transportation in Asia, revolutionized the way in which Tibet connected to China and the rest of the world. It also competed with the Sichuan Route and encouraged the Qing to reconfigure its presence in its non-Chinese territories in the southwest. After the empire fell, political tensions continued to evolve around the Maritime Route, which functioned simultaneously as the reluctant choice of Chinese emissaries and a strategic tool that the Lhasa government wielded to curtail China's influence. Through an exploration of the Sichuan Route and the Maritime Route on the levels of experience and representation, this article sketches the two routes’ troubled interconnections with each other and with every twist and turn in Sino-Tibetan relations from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Patterns of opium production and distribution shifted immensely over the course of the twentieth century, with output falling by three-quarters, almost nine-tenths of which now takes place in Afghanistan. Supporters of drug prohibition trumpet the success of this long-term decline and hail the withdrawal of the four largest opium producers—India, China, Iran, and the Ottoman empire—from the non-medical market, but this seemingly linear trend conceals numerous deviations of historic significance. Among the most notable and little known is Turkey's prolonged resistance to international restrictions on the narcotics trade and the efforts of state and non-state networks to substitute Turkish opium for the diminishing supply of once-dominant Indian exports to a still opium-hungry China in the first half of the twentieth century. This article uses neglected League of Nations and Turkish government sources alongside international newspapers and diplomatic reports to demonstrate the extent of connections forged by state and non-state actors between Turkey and East Asia, expanding on recent research on trans-Asian connections in commerce and political thought.

Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region’s rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.

Exploring the rise and fall of government compradors, this article highlights Sino-British collusion in the corruption and extortion cases of the Hong Kong colonial government in the 1840s and the 1850s. A number of compradors worked for the Hong Kong colonial government throughout the nineteenth century, acting as a key communication channel between Chinese residents and colonial officials in the formative years of the colony. Various institutions of the colonial government, for instance the Colonial Treasury, Post Office, and British military, employed compradors. Colonial officials also personally employed compradors, who supported their principals’ work in the government. However, a symbiotic relationship between corrupt colonial officials and compradors had become a public problem by the mid-1850s. The colonial government responded to this by diversifying its Chinese staff rather than depending on monopolistic compradors, and also launched a scheme to nurture and employ British personnel who could act as intermediaries between the British and Chinese communities. At the same time, different kinds of Chinese intermediary elites emerged in Hong Kong from the 1860s onwards, and government compradors’ monopolistic authority in mediating between colonial officials and the Chinese public gradually declined. The volatile government comprador system highlights a key phase in the history of the evolution of the comprador system in Hong Kong.

In April of 1980 I was received by the Henan Province History Research Institute of the Henan Province Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to begin the first systematic oral political history project on peasant revolution in modern China. The focus of this project is on the problems of livelihood faced by the peasants of Lin county and several other counties in the pre-Liberation period, roughly 1911–49. In May I began an investigation of the history of rural Lin county and the village of Yao Cun, Lin county, Henan. In this essay I will sketch the general social and political history of Yao village in Republican years, and then draw from my preliminary field research to explain the relationship between land rent, the impoverishment of peasant smallholders, and political power in pre-Liberation China in one North China village. This relationship has received minimal emphasis in the literature on peasantry and change in pre-1949 China. One of the many reasons for this has been the tendency of past scholarship to stress the critically important role of the ‘middle peasant village’ in the Chinese revolution. The evidence from Yao cun offers a slight qualification of this middle peasant thesis.

An outstanding feature of the far-reaching plans for development which China has been earnestly promoting under the general rubric of the ‘four modernizations’ is the post-Mao leadership's determined effort to revive and thoroughly institutionalize a meaningful and formal legal system. There is an obvious and sharp distinction between the policies towards law pursued during the period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s and the more recent attempts to fashion a pivotal role for law in Chinese society. Throughout much of the course of socialist rule China's leaders have been concerned not with promoting effective legal institutions but, rather, with the direct insertion of extrinsic political norms and values into the law. During the Cultural Revolution many important legal structures ceased to function. In contrast, in the years since 1978 an important aspect of the rigorous political reaction to the uncertainty and conflict of the Cultural Revolution has been unequivocal support for the establishment of a sound legal system. The leadership now believes that systematic and regulated law-making, public awareness of the law, and proper application of the rules should be integral elements in the administration of justice in the PRC. The hope is that this approach will prevent the recurrence of arbitrary political rule, curb reliance on ‘connections’ or guanxi in bureaucratic conduct, promote economic growth and generally encourage the development of a more predictable and orderly social life.

In the hundred years before 1857, the last vestiges of the crumbling Mughal power in India slowly vanished. When forceful resistance to the British was no longer expedient or possible, the Muslims, who had been the rulers, withdrew into a purposive cultural isolation. Under the leadership of the—‘ulama’ (religious teachers), contacts with the British and Hindus were discouraged and the introduction of new cultural elements into Muslim life was severely eschewed. The result was that while the British were introducing a new administrative system, a new language and a new technology into India, and the Hindus, finally released from Muslim rule, were rapidly adopting the British offerings, the Muslims chose not to participate in the professional, governmental or educational life of the country.

At the beginning, a warning is due: this is a study of a false trail to real events. Between the years 1883–86, a mixed community sprang up on a side stream of the river Albazikha, a right tributary of the upper Amur. The discovery of gold, in a Chinese territory previously unfamiliar to any but the local Evenki tribes, had brought about a stampede of fortune seekers. Since Russia's annexation of the Amur District by the Aigun treaty of 1858, and its acquisition of the Maritime District by the treaty of Peking in 1860, the Amur and the Ussuri had marked the eastern borderline between the two empires, and the left banks of both rivers were by now dotted with Cossack settlements. Russians thus made up the bulk of the arrivals to the newly discovered deposits of placer gold, opposite the Cossack station Ignashino. However, estimates at different points in time spoke of up to ten percent of Chinese gold-seekers, while persistent reports mentioned the presence among the miners of the representatives of many other nationalities, from Siberian and Chinese native peoples to European and American adventurers. It must have been the Russians who gave the name Zheltuga to the stream along which gold was extracted. The name derived from a tributary of the Shilka river in the Nerchinsk mining area in Eastern Siberia, where gold had been discovered as early as 1860 (and where, in the territory of modern Chita District, the small river Zheltuga still flows today). Soon after its foundation, the rapidly growing gold camp became widely known in the Russian Far East as ‘the Amur California’. It was the need to describe the phenomenon in terms more familiar to readers in European Russia, but also the temptation to project on the miners' assembly such political aspirations that it did not possess, which led later writers to create the fanciful label of a ‘Zheltuga republic’.

How could relative underdevelopment pose a constraint to the harnessing of technological change and increased output productivity due to technological developments? In this paper one possible chain of causation in the understanding of this question is suggested. It is argued that fragmentation of markets and the absence of industrial deepening, both factors characteristic of developing country markets, could constitute important barriers to the adoption of firm strategies that promote technological efficiency in producer goods sectors. The fragmentation of markets (due to poor infrastructure) prevents specialization and thus impedes technological learning through this route. The lack of industrial deepening implies that a large proportion of demand for intermediate producer goods emerges from households in the economy rather than firms.

This article interrogates the urbanization of Puri at the time of the cholera epidemic in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the epidemic the colonial state took serious steps to reorder the urban landscape of the pilgrim town in general and Puri in particular. However, in Puri the narrative of infrastructural development is slightly complicated by the presence of the temple of Jagannath which acted as an alternative public body. Thus, on every occasion the colonial state had to negotiate with the temple in order to facilitate urban governance in Puri. As a result, I argue, Puri's urban landscape could only develop through interaction and negotiation between the temple and the state.

‘Toleration’ is a notoriously slippery concept, and yet, as recent scholarship on the historical roots of Indian secularism has implied, it was a guiderail for East India Company decision-making in Bengal in the late eighteenth century. What, then, was the outcome when Europeans encountered what they were quick to regard as South Asian patterns of ‘toleration’? This article argues, first, that a medley of competing policy visions emerged from this interaction and, second, that where these visions overlapped was in perceiving political gain to ensue from facilitating existing South Asian devotional practices. A corollary consequence of this still-emergent policy framework was that most East India Company personnel were loath to intervene in any way but a reactive one when conflicts between devotees of Durga on parade and observers of the Shia Muslim holy day ashura escalated into reprisals and street violence in Calcutta in September 1789.