The rise of China is a major feature of global politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and one that raises the question of how a rising China and global politics will adapt to each other. This study argues that historical cases are also useful in addressing this question. Four cases are compared: two during the reign of Emperor Xianfeng and another two under the rule of Emperor Guangxu. Emperor Xianfeng's view of China was that it possessed a unique culture that should be separated from alien forces, which he intuitively conceived as different, whereas Emperor Guangxu accepted exchanges with the West as a civilization and was willing to learn from them as a cultural resource. Despite this difference in their political perspectives, both emperors similarly faced constraints to their power in implementing their policies. Two cases are selected for each emperor to demonstrate how they acted differently from a cultural orientation of estrangement and exchange on one hand as well as a position of strength and weakness on the other. This comparative study provides insights into how China in the twenty-first century adapts to its expanding influence.

This article traces the process through which Alisher Navoi, a fifteenth-century Chagatai-Turkic poet from Herat, Afghanistan, became uzbekified and sovietized by Uzbek writers and scholars from the 1920s to the 1940s. It focuses on how shifting visions of nation-building affected Navoi's representation in Uzbek national historiography during the early Soviet period. The 1948 Soviet celebration of the 500th anniversary of Alisher Navoi's birth established the poet as a symbol of Uzbek “national-exceptionalism” that distinguished the Uzbek nation from other Central Asian nations. As a consequence Alisher Navoi's legacies that had regional significance were reduced to national heritage and the region's history was revised accordingly. The article, however, argues that the Soviet canonization of Alisher Navoi was not a rootless imposition of cultural history unfamiliar to the Uzbek people. Rather it was a realization of a nation-building project initiated by native Central Asian intellectuals called Jadids before the very creation of the Uzbek nation-state. Even though these intellectuals were persecuted during the 1930s Stalinist Terror, their ideas survived and were picked up by a new generation of Uzbek writers. This article also discusses how World War II provided an opportunity and justification for the Uzbek writers to rediscover their nation's pre-Revolutionary history and strengthened the Uzbek national ownership of Navoi legacies.

This study focuses on the mechanisms of contract enforcement and dispute resolution in the trade of timber in Shanghai from the 1880s to the 1930s. It shows that merchant guilds, chambers of commerce, and the court system constituted complementary institutions of contract enforcement. Timber trade guilds relied on reputation mechanisms and information sharing to maintain intra-group solidarity and monitor outside trading partners. Horizontal communications among timber guilds in different localities further enhanced their capability to respond promptly to cross-regional cases. When disputes escalated beyond the scope of a single merchant guild, chambers of commerce (after 1904) and the court system became involved. Vertical communications among these organizations strengthened the continuity from informal norms of business practices to guild regulations, and thence to adjudications in court. Whereas the typical story, drawn from European history, was one of transition toward more formal institutions, this case study shows that formal and informal institutions could complement each other and that they existed along a continuum rather than in separated spheres. The convergence of the expected outcomes as a result of resorting to different platforms of dispute resolution reinforced the consistency and credibility of the cost of defaulting.

This article analyzes the political context of industrialization in Tokugawa Japan through an analysis of merchandising policies for porcelains. With a comparison of the regions where the major sites of porcelain production were located, the study examines the processes by which arrangements for porcelain distribution were organized in the domains of Saga and Owari, and the district of Mino. The analysis shows contrasting types of arrangements in terms of the objectives and major agents who were responsible for making these policies and regulations. These policies and arrangements reflected the relationships between political authorities and those who were engaged in porcelain production and distribution in each region. The relationships varied significantly from each other, ranging from direct control by the regional authority, to relatively equal bargaining power, to extensive merchant autonomy. Comparative analysis of power relations illustrates the various ways of organizing resources that shaped the regional diversities and dynamics of industrialization in Japan. The relationships strongly influenced the ways in which resources, access, and opportunities for creating and accumulating resources for porcelain production and distribution were organized. An analysis of the merchandising policies for porcelains demonstrates the impacts that the relationships between the political authorities and those who were engaged in the production and distribution of porcelains had on industrialization in nineteenth-century Tokugawa Japan.

In recent historical studies of modern East Asia, the issue of migration has received increased scholarly attention. This article traces recent historiographical and methodological trends by analyzing influential English-language works on modern East Asian migrations in the first half of the twentieth century. Modern East Asian migrations during this period present dynamic and heterogeneous features as results of modern social transformations, such as the development of global capitalism, national and global economic integration, the emergence of new transportation and communication technology, and the expansion and collapse of the Japanese empire. Accordingly, the historical works on modern East Asian migrations we examine display a variety of historiographical and theoretical approaches. Specifically, this article underscores important trends or comparable emphases in these studies, including the growing scholarly interest in transnational/regional border crossing movements, migrants’ subject formations in the new environments, and the methodological interest in the role of culture, political economy, and the environment. Thus this article offers a reflective overview of the ongoing development of migration studies centering on modern East Asia.

Although the Second Sino-Japanese War (the “War”) ended many decades ago, hostilities between China and Japan are still raw in the memory of many Chinese people, even though most of them did not directly experience the War. In particular, the Great Bombing of Chongqing—the indiscriminate, sustained bombing of the Nationalist provisional capital by Japanese warplanes from 1938 to 1943—has been retrieved from the archives as a significant event. Subsumed under the narrative of the Great Bombing, Chongqing's Great Tunnel Disaster (the “Disaster”), following a prolonged Japanese air raid on June 5, 1941, resulted in some of Nationalist China's heaviest civilian casualties. This article discusses the Disaster in detail, suggesting that at the time, it was viewed more as a human-induced “stampede” than as a Japanese “war atrocity” when the Chinese public took to the press and condemned the Nationalist government for its inability to prevent, manage, and mitigate the Disaster's effects. Chinese civilians were attempting to renew and revise a traditional social contract of disaster, according to which the state was responsible for providing adequate relief to victims, by accusing the Nationalist government of callousness, incompetence, and negligence.

“Japan has everything except hope.” This is a phrase that has become current to explain the social climate of contemporary Japan, such as the problems of bullying in schools and workplaces, the high suicide rate, people who have withdrawn from society, ethnic discrimination, and so on. These are not accidental problems, but historically and socially structured ones that have surfaced as expressions of the modern forms of individualism. They are not isolated phenomena found only in Japan, but may be seen as aspects of a broader crisis of global modernity. How can we transform this desperate, self-destructing social situation and find a sustainable future? This line of questioning is one of the crucial problems in this critically important book by Prasenjit Duara.

Zhang Mengshi died in late 2014 at the age of ninety-two, shortly after his autobiography was published. He was born into a life of privilege because his father Zhang Jinghui was a close confidant of the Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin. Mengshi was a boy in Harbin in the 1930s when Russian influences dominated the city, then when his father became prime minister of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in 1935 he lived with his family in Hsinking, the new capital. He studied in Japan in the early 1940s as war in the Pacific intensified. His father upheld the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, while Mengshi secretly worked with the Communist underground to undermine the occupation. When Soviet troops arrived in 1945 to take over from the defeated Japanese, Mengshi was also arrested and sent to Siberia, though he was willing to help the Russian Communists. In 1950 he returned to the new People's Republic of China, to work with the captured Chinese and Japanese from former Manchukuo, including his own father and former emperor Puyi, teaching them about the crimes they had committed. In this article Mengshi's fascinating autobiography is summarized and commented on.