This article rethinks the history of Chinese script reforms and proposes a new genealogy for the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), invented in 1931 by Chinese and Russian revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. Situating script reforms within a global information age that emerged out of the nineteenth-century communications revolution, the article historicizes the CLA within a technologically and ideologically contrived Sino-Soviet space. In particular, it shows the intimate links between the CLA and the Unified New Turkic Alphabet (UNTA), which grew out of a latinization movement based in Baku, Azerbaijan. The primary purpose of the UNTA was to latinize the Arabic script of the Turkic people living in Soviet Central Asia, but it was immediately exported to the non-Turkic world as well in an effort to latinize languages across Eurasia and ignite revolutionary internationalism. This article investigates the forgotten figures involved in carrying the Latin alphabet from Baku to Shanghai and offers a new framework to scrutinize the history of language, scripts, and knowledge production across Eurasia.

This article analyzes the ways that Korean Chinese migrants are exploited aesthetically in their ancestral homeland by focusing on their mass-media refiguration. These return migrants, or the Chosŏnjok, have been received by their South Korean co-ethnics into what may be called a “hierarchical nationhood.” The strategies of temporal displacement, this article contends, are employed in South Korean cinema and television dramas in order to contain the uncanny cultural difference embodied by these ethnic returnees. As a result, a certain sense of belatedness is inscribed on the bodies of these migrants. If this temporal refiguration wards off the psychological discomfort of dealing with difference in the midst of sameness, it may be said at the same time to fetishize its object within an archaic constellation that South Koreans find endearing, yet disturbingly absent, from their highly consumerist contemporary society. In attempting to delineate the “nostalgia politics,” the article aims to shed light on the function of certain mass media representations, including Hongjin Na's movie The Yellow Sea, in the context of the socioeconomic realities of South Korea.

The purpose of this JAS roundtable is to reflect on the Cold War in Asia. Even to frame the issue in such terms is to confront the “formidable semantic contradiction that is inherent in the idea” of the Cold War (Kwon 2010, 7). For the very notion of the Cold War—as a “long peace” in which bipolar tensions did not lead to hot war—sits uneasily with the reality that in Asia bipolar tensions were imbricated in horrific conflicts that left millions of human casualties. On the other hand, to use the term “Cold War” simply as a label for a historical period, or “epoch” in Alfred McCoy's terms, is to invite imprecision. Moreover, even as a label for a historical period, the term still effaces the experience of much of the world, since the end date of the period is defined by the experience of Europe and the superpowers.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that under at least one of the so-called “warlords” or military rulers who governed China during the 1930's, there occurred political, social, and, above all, economic changes of the utmost importance. These changes took place in the northwestern province of Shansi, where, beginning in 1932, the warlord Yen Hsi-shan undertook to modernize the underdeveloped economy of his domain by carrying out a “provincial Ten-Year Plan of Economic Reconstruction,” or Shan-hsi sheng-cheng shih-nien chien-she chi-hua. I have chosen to call Yen's scheme for promoting economic growth in Shansi “China's First Five-Year Plan,” since in addition to being cut short by the Japanese occupation of Shansi only five years after its inception, it was inspired by the success of Russia's first five-year plan. Throughout the 1930's, Yen and his supporters repeatedly lavished praise on the Soviet Union for its spectacular accomplishments in the field of industrial development and advocated adopting Russian methods in order to achieve similar results in China. Notwithstanding his hatred of the Chinese Communists, who invaded Shansi in the winter of 1936, Yen continued to praise the Soviet economy throughout the 1930'5, holding it up as a model for China and for Shansi. “The Soviet Union accomplishes in one year what it takes other countries five years to achieve,” he remarked.

The kimono is often overlooked in the study of modern Japanese literature. Yet it plays a vital role in representing character, symbolizing critical aspects of the narrative, and illuminating historical and social contexts. Here I focus on Kimono (1965–68), an unfinished novel by Kōda Aya (1904–90) that depicts a girl's growing-up process through her experiences with kimono during the early twentieth century. While highlighting the protagonist's development, kimonos in this work also serve various other functions, particularly cogent during a time in which everyday knowledge of kimono was declining. I examine the novel from different perspectives, including the kimono culture of the 1950s–60s and the novel's revitalization during the 1990s–2000s, facilitated by Kōda's literary inheritor, daughter Aoki Tama (1929–). This essay presents a new view of Kōda and her novel while engaging with broader questions of material and cultural representation, and the role of objects in the interpretation of literary texts.

These three excellent documentaries have received both high honors from the film world and an appreciative welcome from Asia scholars eager to make use of them in the classroom. Students and non-China specialists seeing them for the first time generally praise them for “humanizing” life in rural China, for providing an “intimate” look at “real” Chinese people as they are but rarely glimpsed in the West. When students have first been primed with readings from William Hinton's two classic prose documentaries of life in Long Bow Village (Fanshen [1968] and Shenfan [1984]), the films may be especially rewarding. They put faces to a few familiar names and give us images—of donkeycarts rattling over the tired earth, of bundled babies in bare adobe courtyards—that validate the village Hinton's books have already brought to life in our minds. But for viewers who have not done any background reading on Long Bow's special history under Communist land-reform and collectivization policies or on the village's past complex patterns of religious conflict and gender politics, these films will stand on their own. They succeed well in their “intimate" and “humanizing” endeavor not because we already know something about Long Bow villagers and what they have been through but because the filmmakers have skillfully kept narration to a minimum, allowing village people themselves to do most of the communicating. In their words, their gestures, their laughter, and their eyes, we recognize again and again that familiar, perhaps uniquely human, emotion—ambivalence.