“Myanmar is telling Asia ‘we are coming back!’ This is the time. Watch out! We are coming back. After the SEA Games, we will host ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations]. Big things are happening in our country.” “Kyaw,” an amiable rig coordinator in his early thirties, was relaxing on the ground drinking beer with his wife, passing the time prior to Myanmar's opening men's football match of the 2013 Southeast Asian or SEA Games. Fifteen days later—after a glorious opening ceremony, a slew of gold medals, and a celebratory closing ceremony—his assessment seemed prescient. The government newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, boasted: “With the honor of hosting the Games that returned to the country after a 44-year long wait, Myanmar successfully hosted the biggest regional sporting event.” Thailand's Nation concurred: “The country failed to overhaul Thailand as overall winners, but its symbolic triumph as host was far more important.” “Myanmar has basked in its host status and a rare moment in the international limelight after years in isolation under military rule,” declared Agence France-Presse in a widely syndicated article. “Some local and international observers thought Myanmar could not host the SEA Games. They were wrong,” boasted triumphant presidential spokesman U Ye Htut.

Let me begin with a conversation I had with the late David Wyatt of Cornell University, a prominent historian of Thailand and the 1993 president of the AAS, at one of the AAS meetings in Boston. I asked Professor Wyatt, what was the question about Thai history he got most often from Thai colleagues? His answer was:

1. 1) Was the execution of the king in 1782 by the founder of the current dynasty legitimate? If not, why did he do it?

2. 2) Was the death of another king in 1946 an accident, a suicide, or an assassination, and if it was the last one, who did it?

Ai Weiwei is famous for crossing boundaries, especially the boundary between art and politics. To appreciate the often contradictory nature of Ai's work, this essay employs multiple narratives: “Ai the Heroic Warrior” who criticizes the Chinese government; “Ai the Court Jester” who plays with the Chinese state and Western media; and “Ai the Middleman” who acts as a broker between China and the West, between young and old people, and between civil society and the state in the PRC. The essay concludes that a fourth narrative can bring together these three stories in a multicoded understanding of Ai's work: “Ai the Citizen Intellectual” who sometimes works with the state, and at other times against it—but always for the good of China. By comparing Ai's work with that of other public intellectuals and placing it in the context of debates about civil society, the conclusion argues that “citizen intellectual” also tells us about a broader movement of activists and public intellectuals who are creating a new form of political space in postsocialist China.

William Callahan's conceptualization of Ai Weiwei as a “citizen intellectual” is the latest in a long-standing cottage industry seeking to make sense of and define China's intellectuals. Frederic Wakeman Jr. in 1972 offered “a typology of intellectual species” for Chinese thinkers and writers in late imperial China: statesman, administrator, ethical idealist, aesthete, and emirite or recluse (Wakeman 1972, 35). Hao Zhidong applies a Weberian lens on twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals to identify nested categories of: professional, cultural, and (smallest of all) critical intellectuals (Hao 2003, 393). Tani Barlow traces the identity of China's thinkers and writers from “intellectual class” in 1905 to “enlightened scholars” in the 1920s to “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) ever since. Barlow identifies a tension between the social power of these knowledge specialists and their dangerous dance with the state in which they succumbed under both Nationalist and Communist regimes to a service role to power, a “category of the state” (Barlow 1991, 216). Merle Goldman has focused on critical intellectuals under the Chinese Communist Party, what most people think of as critics and dissidents. Carol Hamrin and I sought to go beyond Goldman's focus on dissidents to study “establishment intellectuals” by looking at “the motives and means for collaboration, as well as the sources of tension and conflict between leading intellectuals and the top Communist Party leadership” (Hamrin and Cheek 1986, 3). “Establishment intellectual” proved a useful category for opening up our understanding of intellectual participation at the elite level under Mao and during the 1980s. The 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and the June 4th massacre and crackdown changed everything. Merle Goldman usefully picked up on these changes by identifying the rise of “disestablished intellectuals” in the post-Tiananmen period, particularly intellectuals who had been active in the reformist administration of the CCP in the 1980s associated with disgraced General Secretary Hu Yaobang (Goldman 2007, 15ff, 86ff). These fallen establishment intellectuals populated the academic posts, publishing ventures, and new business opportunities that exploded after Deng Xiaoping's famous certification of economic reform in his 1992 “Southern Tour.”

Editor's Note: The essay that follows is based on a conference paper by Dilip K. Basu that has long circulated informally, in the process exercising an unusually high degree of influence for an unpublished commentary. Most notably, some ideas embedded in it have been spread via literary scholar Lydia Liu's engagement with and quoting of the paper in The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Liu 2006), a provocative and much-cited book that calls for a radical rethinking of some of the standard terms and concepts used in the past to refer to the Qing Empire's ties to and conflicts with other political and territorial units. Those familiar with Liu's work will find here an essay that complements some arguments in her book; those who have not read it will be introduced to those ideas for the first time. Beyond this, though, all readers will find a discussion of various ideas and events—visions of China's place in the world, how the story of the Opium War is thought about in different settings, the history of Sinology—shaped by personal as well as scholarly concerns.

The essay's ties to the author's life and associations, which come into play more as the essay proceeds, make it a good fit with the goals of our recently introduced and still evolving “Reflections” genre. In addition, since it revisits critically ideas about China associated with the work of John K. Fairbank, it can be placed well beside some of the essays published in the “Legacies” series launched by Kenneth George, in his time as editor of the journal. And regular attendees of the Association for Asian Studies annual meetings may notice that much that follows resonates with the keynote address by Amitav Ghosh, one of those familiar with Basu's essay in draft form, when that conference was held in Toronto in 2012. The pages that follow are tightly focused on China, but Basu's discussion of “xenology” (a term for the ways that cultures think about those deemed “others,” which has, of course, the same root as the more familiar term “xenophobia”) clearly has implications for widely varied times and places, just as the handling of Fairbank's distinctive role in Chinese studies may bring to mind parallels to the influence that other prominent Western academics from the last century once shaped and via their legacies can continue to shape academic work on other parts of Asia. While focused tightly on China, in other words, it has much to offer readers whose primary interest is not in that country.

In the nineteenth century, the Mekong, Red, and Chao Phraya river deltas in Southeast Asia underwent a massive expansion in agricultural settlement and engineering (Dao and Molle 2000). Contending with crocodiles and herds of wild elephants in addition to more prosaic insect and bird pests (Terwiel 1989), settlers struggled successfully to make these deltas highly productive centers of rice and other agriculture. Such struggles, which were until very recently confidently labeled as “Man's Conquest of Nature,” used to be seen as representing Progress with a capital P. Historically, few men or women had doubts about the real struggle involved in making a living from Nature. In a lecture given in 1877, William Morris explained that “the race of man must either labour or perish. Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of some sort or degree” (W. Morris 2008, 1). Human evolution could thus be summarized as a story in which “Man struggled with nature, and he is conquering it gradually through his intelligence, inventiveness, and skill” (Sigerist 1936, 597). Progress was the process by which Man Makes Himself, to cite the title of Gordon Childe's influential 1936 book on archaeology. By the nineteenth century, the problem for socialists such as Morris was that “the fruits of our victory over Nature [have] been stolen from us” (W. Morris 2008, 10); the basic necessity of “conquering” Nature was not disputed.

In his Jungian-inspired utopianism, Joseph Campbell (1988, 32) once declared that the famous “Blue Marble” shot of earth from space (see figure 1) could potentially become a symbol of a new mythology that celebrated our common humanity. Of course, much as Jung and other universalizing theorists have been laid to rest over the last quarter-century by poststructural, postmodern, and postcolonial thought, so too apparently has any new mythology of our common humanity (much less its actualization). Nevertheless, one can certainly wonder whether Campbell would not have interpreted the Anthropocene as the perfect myth for forging a new vision of our shared humanity.

In Bangalore, late in the summer of 2014, I listened to many animated conversations. There were political debates: the right-wing Hindu nationalist party had, earlier that summer, won national as well as state elections, evoking disparate reactions across society, sowing dissension even among the technological elite. There were technological arguments: should Bangalore continue to be an outsourcing haven for software services, or did India need a new model of development? Technology itself no longer seemed to unite people and offer exciting futures, as it had a decade ago. In Basavanagudi, a neighborhood named after twelfth-century social reformer Basavanna, part of the South Bangalore constituency where Tom Friedman's friend Nandan Nilekani had just lost the local election to the Hindu nationalist BJP candidate, I noticed a growing buzz around a social media campaign for a new documentary on climate change. Facebook, Twitter, and chats excitedly shared news of the upcoming global release of a film seeking to unite the globe in a social movement to stop climate change. Software engineers and social justice activists might, it seemed, be able to come together on this topic, if not any other.

The term “Anthropocene,” coined in the 1980s by the ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer and popularized at the turn of the twenty-first century by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, has been used increasingly in the past decade to highlight human activity as a geological force and to underscore the rapidly escalating impacts of human behaviors on the planet—sufficient, many have argued, to launch a new geological age. While geologists and environmentalists continue to debate the validity of Anthropocene as a formal designation, climate change; mass extinctions of plant and animal species; and widespread pollution of sky, sea, and land make clear the extent to which humans have shaped global ecologies. An understanding of Asia—home to more than half the world's population, an increasingly significant contributor to global carbon dioxide emissions, the site of the Third Pole, and an area acutely vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels—is vital to an understanding of the physical, chemical, biological, and cultural processes that comprise the Anthropocene.

It is remarkable how few commentators or analysts raised the alarm before the great financial crash of 2008. One who did was a journalist for the Financial Times called Gillian Tett. It may be germane to the understanding of why Gillian Tett perceived dangers in the reckless behavior of bankers that her colleagues did not, that she was educated not as an economist, but as a social anthropologist. In the course of earning her PhD in social anthropology, Tett spent a year milking goats in Tajikistan, an experience she insists helped her to understand the behavior of the bankers and other financial actors, and to predict the crisis, to widespread derision and hostility from bankers and treasury officials, two years before it happened.

For the authors of these papers, as is true for many of us, there is a special urgency associated with the acceleration of environmental degradation and its negative impact on individual human lives to which we bear witness in Asia and elsewhere. While truly “natural” disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis are strikingly devastating, it is the destruction of environments from anthropogenic sources that are often the most frustrating. That is, we believe that because human beings caused the problems, we should be able to fix them, and, indeed, as humanists it is axiomatic that we are committed to improving the human condition. Over the past few decades, however, there has been a growing awareness that human interaction with the natural environment may be creating a world, for the most part, unfit for human habitation. It is out of this awareness that the term “Anthropocene” has emerged, describing that epoch during which human activity has reached such a level of intensity that it has had a discernable impact on the earth itself. Thus, as these writers suggest, it is imperative for us as regional specialists to engage in conversations across disciplines and geographic areas that provide opportunities to increase our understanding of the Anthropocene in Asia in all of its local and global dimensions.

This essay investigates the conditions of portrait photography in Taiwan during Japanese colonization. After a brief introduction to the theoretical issues concerning the indexical nature of the photograph, I consider the Japanese colonial photographic industry and its products (portraits) in three contexts: the state of photographic technology in the world at that time, the ideological machinery of colonization in Taiwan, and the wider phenomenon of colonial mimicry. In this consideration, I offer a diachronic analysis of photo albums and commercial directories that contain formal portraits of politically and economically influential (almost exclusively) men. Bringing these considerations together suggests an aspect of the colonial ideological machinery that has been underrepresented in other studies: the colonial portrait as a mask in several forms.

In this article, I juxtapose the ways the “father of modern Sinhala drama,” John De Silva, and the Sinhala language reformer, Munidasa Cumaratunga, utilized music for different nationalist projects. First, I explore how De Silva created musicals that articulated Arya-Sinhala nationalism to support the Buddhist Revival. Second, I investigate how Cumaratunga, who spearheaded the Hela-Sinhala movement, asserted that genuine Sinhala song should be rid of North Indian influence but full of lyrics composed in “pure” Sinhala. The purpose of this comparison is to critique Partha Chatterjee's notion of the inner domain. Chatterjee focused on Bengali cultural nationalism and its complex relation to Western hegemony. He considered Bengal, the metropolis of the British Raj, to be representative of colonized nations. This article reveals that elsewhere in South Asia—Sri Lanka—one cultural movement sought to define the nation not in relation to the West but in opposition to North India.

Much productive scholarship across Asia has considered the links between religious resurgence and authoritarian governance. However, limitations persist in conceptualizations of state authority, which I examine in the literature on Southeast Asia. Noteworthy are the assumptions that central institutions are definitive of authoritarian states, and divides between study of the sacred and secular. I propose the notion of “ritual governance” to address these conceptual issues and illustrate this with an ethnographic case study from a major development project in Laos, the Nam Theun 2 hydropower scheme. I show how Lao government officials working with ethnic minority villagers used a baci ritual and village meeting to combine a persuasive sense of unity with coercive use of hierarchy. Significantly, the baci and other Buddhist rituals were suppressed by the early socialist state, but regained prominence with ideological shifts from socialism to modern developmentalism. This case study demonstrates the contemporary significance of state-sponsored ritual for development in Laos as well as the need for more nuanced conceptions of the state in discussions of religiosity and authoritarianism across Asia.