No country in Southeast Asia is as close to China as Cambodia is at present. Under Hun Sen's leadership, Cambodia has actively participated in the Belt and Road Initiative and repeatedly blocked ASEAN's statements on the South China Sea (SCS). How can we better understand Cambodia's embrace of China? We argue that Hun Sen chose to embrace China due to the convergence of challenges posed by Cambodia's domestic opposition forces and international democratic pressures. The more severe the domestic political challenges, the more Hun Sen and his ruling party need China's support. Since Hun Sen remains the most powerful figure in Cambodia despite his recent resignation as prime minister, whether Cambodia's dependence on China can be altered depends on the ability of the West to modify its approach and attitude toward Hun Sen, his successor, and their domestic opponents. Nevertheless, regardless of how the future unfolds, domestic politics is likely to play an important role in Cambodia's foreign alignments in the foreseeable future.

This paper investigates how Hui scholars imagined the membership of their community during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as sharing communal religious duties, such as Islamic education and funeral rites, which were correctively imposed by an Islamic doctrine on all Muslims. The analysis is mainly based on two texts. One is an inscriptive text drafted in Arabic and Persian by Ma Minglong in A.H. 1079 (1668–1669) and inscribed by his son in 1673 in Wuchang, Hubei province. The other is Tianfang dianli (Commentary on Rites of Islam), written in Chinese by Liu Zhi (d. after 1724) based on Arabic and Persian Islamic books. The analysis shows that these Hui scholars have flexibly demarcated their communities from those whom they regarded as “other” Muslims, depending on various situations. Additionally, this paper illuminates how Hui scholars’ various and flexible delineations of “us” facilitated their negotiations for advantageous positions toward Muslim rivals, as well as non-Muslims who suspected their orthodoxy. This relativizes the argument that Hui scholars understood themselves as being simultaneously Chinese and Muslim when they situated themselves vis-à-vis Chinese literati—an argument that has been often repeated in the study of Hui Muslims.

Opinions vary in Japan on whether smoking is deviant today, but the behavior, once widely accepted, faces increasing regulation. Recent reforms, moving beyond reliance on nonsmokers' tolerance and smokers' etiquette, impose stricter and more detailed rules on smoking, along with penalties for noncompliance. As the Japanese government's promotional materials note, the reforms move “from manners to rules” (manā kara rūru e). The evolution of Japan's smoking regulations exemplifies a shift toward more legalistic modes of social control. Historically, Japanese governance relied on non-binding “soft law,” administrative guidance, and societal cooperation. Legalistic governance, in contrast, hinges on formal rules and proceduralized enforcement mechanisms. This article, drawing on twenty-eight interviews and qualitative analysis of policy deliberations, advocacy organization documents, court rulings, and Japanese news coverage, traces how societal actors contributed to this legalistic turn. Tobacco control advocates filed lawsuits, pursued voluntary changes through local activities, and provided information subsidies to policymakers while lobbying for local and national reforms. They thereby helped de-normalize smoking and render it regulatable. By uncovering bottom-up drivers of legalistic governance and the strategies through which societal actors influence regulatory style, this paper contributes to scholarship on governance, policy diffusion, and law and social change.

This article begins with a folk idea, or stereotype, attached to the Hui Muslim minority in China: that of being violent. The analysis focuses on how ideas of ethnicity are contextualized in folk or popular narratives about violence. Specifically, cases presented in this article are narratives where different aspects of violence feature either positively or negatively: as a collective ethnic mark of being unreasonable, as martial spirit, as fighting prowess and so forth. This article argues that differently contextualized ideas of being violent or narratives about violent events enable Hui and non-Hui to not only establish ethnic turfs, but also to co-exist and merge ethnic boundaries, rendering ethnic borders open to redrawing and straddling.

The history of the accommodation of Najm al-Dīn Dāya's Persian work, Mirṣād al-ʿibād, in China sheds light on an array of social and intellectual forces that redrew and straddled earlier boundaries and definitions of Chinese Islam between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This essay focuses on three main effects that the introduction of Mirṣād al-ʿibād had on the historical trajectory of early modern Chinese Islamic scholarship. It begins by pointing to the ways in which the introduction of the Mirṣād contributed to the reshaping of the Chinese Islamic canon by giving Persian Ṣūfī theology a central place and the heated debate that the process entailed. It then examines the methodological dilemmas surrounding the appropriate methods with which to investigate and scrutinize this difficult text, and the variety of reading practices and methods of translation that scholars have applied to do so. Finally, the essay examines the diverse readings and interpretations that the Chinese translations of this text have generated.

Japan is often said to have one of the lowest rape rates in the world, and Japanese police claim to solve 97 percent of rape cases. But in reality, only 5–10 percent of rape victims report it to police, and police record half or less of reported cases while prosecutors charge about one-third of recorded cases. The result of this process of caseload attrition is that for every 1,000 rapes in Japan, only 10–20 result in a criminal conviction – and fewer than half of convicted rapists are incarcerated. Similar patterns characterize Japan's criminal justice response to other sex crimes. This article shows that impunity for sex offenders is extremely common in Japan, and it argues that patriarchal social and legal norms help explain this pattern.