China's cattle trade before 1949 is effectively invisible to historians. With no geographic center, few dominant firms, and little government oversight, cattle trade left behind no clear archive of sources, leaving scholars to the mercy of conjecture and episodic evidence. Combining insights from business and social history, we focused our attention on trade intermediation as the key to understanding the operations of a diffuse trade system. In the absence of a top–down archive, we composited hundreds of local sources on intermediation in cattle trade and remotely interviewed 80 former brokers. These sources revealed large numbers of individuated trade routes, which we break into three types: persistent supply, specialized demand, and resource circulation. Each type of trade called for distinct forms of intermediation with relatively little overlap between specialized networks. This recreation of China's cattle trade reveals a sophisticated market for animal labor that calls into question the direct causal link between imperialist resource extraction and rural immiseration, and suggests the utility of applying tools and perspectives of social history to other sorts of decentered commercial systems.

This article studies Western (primarily Anglophone) representations of the Dan people (boat people) and the boat clusters on which they lived, relative to the mainland, in the island city of Guangzhou, focusing on 1842–1900. A change occurred over time, as the Dan went from being in close interaction with Westerners prior to the Opium Wars to being peripheral to Western interests and activities. This shift is evident in Western writings, and negative representations of the Dan came to dominate in the late nineteenth century. This mirrored changing sociospatial power relations between Westerners and the terrestrial Chinese, as Westerners increasingly gained access to the onshore city of Guangzhou itself, in part from the colonial island enclave of Shamian. Changing crosscultural interactions affected how the Chinese Others were perceived and ultimately how the Chinese whole was intertextually constructed in Western colonial discourse.

This article uses Mbembe's concept of necropolitics as an analytical category to examine the representations of necropower in Squid Game. In the global “organ economy,” organ sellers decide to supply, and brokers then mediate between them and buyers. In contrast, South Korean loan sharks commodify delinquent debtors' organs by forcing them to sign a body waiver as collateral. Recent South Korean dramas have thematized this distinctive systemization of the black economy. Borrowing Lowenstein's “allegorical moment” concept, this article aims to illuminate representations of fluid necropower through children's games as a hinge between reality and the imaginary that invites viewers to dialectically evaluate death problems. The contestations of money and humanity synthetically emerge as necropower constantly moves among different entities: VIPs, a frontman, players, game rules, and money. This article claims that viewers process numerous allegorical moments created by the iconography of necropower and synthetically realize necropolitics and corporeality in Squid Game. Organ extractions and trade in episode two in particular represent “morbid spectacle” and the culmination of mammonism. This article analyzes scenes of death, games, the technique of killing, and esthetics to connect historical examples of the necropolitics that Mbembe draws on and to discuss representations of the organ trade in this recent Korean drama.

Amidst the upheavals of the First World War, a considerable number of prisoners of war from the Ottoman Empire found themselves in Russia, resettled primarily in the central regions of the Russian Empire. The regions of Volga, Siberia, Ural, and Western Siberia played host to Ottoman prisoners, who were accommodated in camps and barracks across cities and rural areas. Over time, a noteworthy migration led some prisoners to the territory of modern Kazakhstan, with cities like Samara, Orenburg, and Omsk serving as pivotal points before further dispersion into the central regions of Kazakhstan. As a result, Ottoman citizens found themselves under suspicion and were dispersed akin to prisoners. The Semirechye Oblast (Zhetisu region) emerged as a focal point where both Ottoman subjects and prisoners of war were dispersed during this tumultuous period. This article investigates the political and social dynamics, as well as the fate, of Turkish prisoners of war and citizens within the Semirechye Oblast during the war. The analysis delves into the status of Ottoman Empire subjects who acquiesced to the authority of the Russian Empire, offering insights into the lives of prisoners of war in this specific region.

In Vietnam, for a long time, family is considered as being significant for economic, instrumental, social, emotional, and care support for older adults due to strong filial piety, high family values, low institutional coverage, and limited social services, given that the majority of older adults are living in family-based communities. Recently, due to increasing migration, nuclearization, and individualization in Vietnamese families, there is an increasing withdrawal of family caregivers from caregiving to their parents and there seems to be confusion and tension of roles and supports among family members. Meanwhile, Vietnam is observing changes in demographics and family structure, which is linked to an increase in the number of elders in need of care, drop in fertility rate, resulting in a shrinking supply of family caregivers. This article examines the economic dynamics of ageing with limited family ties by examining the formal care services and demographic changes in order to investigate raising social problems towards elder population. It also explores how older adults from varied living backgrounds in Vietnam restructure their lives in terms of acculturation, re-establishing kin networks, psychological well-being in contemporary Vietnam. It demonstrates how Vietnamese elders actively engage in unpaid work within family and community environments, such as housework and childcare, shaped by cultural norms of familialism and filial piety, with regional variations in the north emphasizing stronger familialism and economic motives, and the central coast showing more individualism and sentimental values.

This article demonstrates how the application of a broad and decontextualized distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” Muslims can undermine our assessment of an Islamic identity, security, and radicalization. It compares how this distinction has been used by the British colonial administrators (in Raffles, Crawfurd, Marsden, and Swettenham) in nineteenth-century Malaya and by Malaysia's Prime Ministers (Mahathir, Badawi, and Najib) in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. This comparison demonstrates that both groups, despite their very different backgrounds (Western non-Muslim and Muslim non-Western), introduced a similar distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” driven more by socio-political objectives than by religious ones. Furthermore, the article stresses the importance of considering the socio-political and contextual dimensions of Islamic identity before attempting to explain the process of radicalization and its implications for security. Such an approach discourages reference to broad categories such as “moderate,” “extremist,” “Islamism,” or “Salafism,” and allows for discussion of their contextual and socio-political connotations.

Given the historical nature of gender consciousness against the backdrop of the nation's social system transformations and the deficiencies related to physical and mental determinism commonly found in research on the performance of female gender roles, this study innovatively uses Butler's agency approach to examine gender consciousness. Women in China have experienced the female liberation movement of “equality between men and women” under the Chinese socialist regime as well as the movement of “women's return to the family” after the introduction of the market economy. The current study uses the agency approach to present the processes of post-1980s Chinese women when balancing their paid work, housework, and childcare roles and the contradictions therein as well as the ideologies they have adopted to resolve such contradictions. This study comprehensively examines the effect of conservative and non-conservative ideologies on the gender consciousness and behavior of women acting under their own agency. The findings, which are based on a comparison of the gender consciousness and behavior of various cohorts, yield the conclusion that post-1980s women expect non-conservative behavior in the future but choose conservative behaviors strategically. Such strategic behavioral choices deepen inner gender role-related conflicts.

The International Political Science Association (IPSA) is a unique case against the common perception that Beijing has the upper hand when the two regimes by the Taiwan Strait contest to join international (non-governmental) organisations. Beijing relentlessly pushes international organisations to acknowledge the One China principle; Taipei also relentlessly denies this principle while it seeks to join. In the 1980s, Chinese and Taiwanese political scientists, representing their own regimes, applied Track II diplomacy to compete over membership of this organisation. IPSA membership mattered to both regimes and their political scientists. After many years of Track II competition, The Chinese Association of Political Science in Taipei became a “collective” member without compromising on how to name itself in April 1989. As a result, Beijing's counterpart withdrew from the IPSA. This situation has now persisted for over thirty years. The IPSA case not only challenges the current understanding of Cross-Strait relations but also throws light on the theoretical understanding of Track II diplomacy.

This article demonstrates the ambivalent sentiments of Koreans toward China as represented by the ideological construction of Hanja (traditional Chinese characters) and Chinese Mandarin embodied in Korean media. Adopting discourse analysis to examine what is described by different language ideologies, this article investigates language discourses concerning Hanja and Mandarin, locating the former mainly within linguistic nationalism and the latter within linguistic instrumentalism. This article puts forth two suggestions. First, investigating linguistic nationalism in relation to the use of Hanja not only displays negative and antagonistic attitudes toward China and the use of Hanja as an embodiment of humiliating historical experiences but also shows ambiguity, fluidity, and vulnerability of Korean national identity. Second, in contrast to Hanja, Koreans' heated enthusiasm to learn Mandarin shows their affection for China as a global market and becomes intertwined with linguistic instrumentalism, embodying an articulation of neoliberalism by reproducing structures of inequality.