The expeditions of foreign explorers and archaeologists along China's borderlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long been a lightning rod for debates over cultural sovereignty, imperialism, and nationalism. This study attempts to move beyond such cultural and moral glosses by placing the expeditions of Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin to the northwestern province of Xinjiang back into the domestic geopolitical context of the Nanjing Decade (1927–37). Newly available archival material demonstrates how the discourse of cultural sovereignty, far from sabotaging such expeditions, instead became the handmaiden of domestic geopolitical competitors who attempted to turn Stein and Hedin into exploitable resources for their own agendas. The logistical pragmatism revealed in these sources relegates principled nationalist intellectuals and their imperialist targets to the background, and shows how a new approach to a familiar topic can help paint a fuller portrait of some of the most contested episodes of transnational cultural interactions throughout Eurasia.

The study of islam in china has been strongly influenced by what Lila Abu-Lughod (1989:269) termed “zones of theory” in the general Western scholarship of Islam, in which studies of the Middle Eastern “core” have been privileged over Islam on the so-called periphery. Muslims in China, relegated to the distant margins of both Sinological and Islamic scholarship, have rarely received much academic attention. This summary attempts a brief overview of past scholarship on Islam in China and recent contributions to the field. It is concerned primarily with Islam among the people known as the “Hui,” as they are the “Muslim Chinese” proper, whereas the other nine Muslim nationalities identified by the Prc government do not speak Chinese as their native languages and belong more properly to Central Asian studies. The 1990 census revealed that there are a total of 17.6 million members of the ten mainly Muslim nationalities, with the Hui numbering 8.4 million. Like the U.S. census, religion is not a category on the Chinese census, so this figure includes some members of these nationalities who may not believe in or practice the Islamic religion, as well as excluding Han and other minority nationalities who might believe in Islam. Though some Muslims, especially Uygur, complain of underreporting of their populations, this is a fairly good initial estimate of the number of Muslims in China, indicating an increase of 1.2 million over the 1982 figure, a 13 percent increase (Gladney 1991:20).

This paper examines the transnational literary interactions in the early modern Sinographic sphere by examining the late Chosŏn writer Yi Tŏngmu's reading of an early Qing text, Liuxi Waizhuan, and its resonance in his compilation of Noeroe Nangnak Sŏ. Reconsidering the unmediated communicability of the Sinographic text, it demonstrates the ways in which Noeroe Nangnak Sŏ decoupled Liuxi Waizhuan from its local conditions of production and circulation and relocalized it to fit Chosŏn Korea's agenda of repositioning itself in the changing Sinocentric order after the downfall of the Ming. Between delocalizing and relocalizing the Sinographic text, the compilation of Noeroe Nangnak Sŏ participated in the constantly shifting meanings of loyalty to the fallen Ming, thereby diversifying the repertoire of the shared civilization in early modern East Asia.

The Harvard University–Korea Development Institute eight-volume study of Korean economic development from 1945 to 1975 represents what is probably the single most comprehensive attempt to document economic change in a developing society. Although the volumes concentrate on economics, important omissions are evident, most of them because of the dearth of contributions from noneconomic social scientists and the orientations of the sponsoring institutions. Donors may be strongly tempted to view Korea as a development model, but a variety of internal and external factors make this approach inappropriate.

China occupies an important place in the Islamic world, but Islam in China is perhaps one of the most neglected and unexplored subjects in both sinological and Islamic studies. While there is abundant literature on Islam in the Near East, India, the East Indies, and Africa, we know few authorities on the subject of Islam in China, e.g., d'Ollone, Thierssant, Broomhall, Bonin, Hartmann, etc. Even in such comprehensive works as the Encyclopaedia of religion and ethics, the Encyclopaedia of the social sciences, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, and R. Levy's Sociology of Islam, we find merely fragmentary descriptions regarding the subject.

This article provides a Muslim perspective on the eighteenth-century Qing conquest of Xinjiang. It explores the career of Emin Khwaja, a leader of the Muslim community of Turfan and the most prominent Muslim ally in the Qing conquest. I investigate how the notion of “protection” (ḥimāyat in Arabic), a key concept in the Central Asian Muslim understanding of religious and political patronage, informed Emin's decision to ally himself with the Qing. I argue that Emin understood his alliance with the “infidel” Manchu not as a collaboration in betrayal of Islam but as a positive policy to achieve security and prosperity of the Muslim community in the changing political and commercial environment of eighteenth-century Eurasia. Emin was able to build a local coalition of Muslim commercial interests for the support of the Qing, while promoting his standing within the regional political hierarchy of Muslim Central Asia.

A cursory examination of the Thai press reveals two things: A history of censorship, at times violently repressive, and sensational content centered on crime news. Reporters, editors, and publishers have been threatened, intimidated, and murdered in an effort to control the print media while front pages are filled with stories of violent crime and gory photographs. This paper explores both these forms of violence, censorship and crime news, to understand the relationship between the two. It argues that the prevalence of the latter—sensationalism—has resulted in part from the former, a historical process of increasingly murderous repression. So while the form and content of the print media in Thailand, as elsewhere, follow the financial imperatives of the market and reflect trends in current events, they do so within a framework of legal, professional, and informal relationships established over time with seemingly unrelated institutions, including the police.

The weakening of Japan's position in China following the Washington Conference led to the establishment of the Sino-Japanese Luda Company to run the Zichuan coal mines, operated by the Japanese army since 1915. The inability of the Chinese promoters to raise sufficient funds for the company, however, allowed the Japanese investors the major say in company policy. As a Sino-foreign company, Luda enjoyed special privileges which were zealously upheld by the Japanese consuls. Though these practices eroded Chinese sovereignty, they did not make the company a financial success. This failure resulted partly from the Japanese investors' greater concern with their country's long-term fuel supply than with Luda's short-term profits; but this paper also stresses both the ways in which the Chinese, in their attempts to reassert China's sovereignty, harrassed and restricted privileged foreign companies, and the overriding importance of locational and geological factors in determining a mining company's success.

Almost every destructive earthquake opens social and political fault lines as well as natural ones, and those of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011 are notable only for their local depth and global circulation. Seismicity is a geographically selective concern, but because radiation is involved in the present instance, the stake-holders in debates surrounding the earthquake are much more numerous and spread over a far wider map. In fact seismicity, as opposed to radiation, has receded in most contemporary discussions of the earthquake's aftermath, just as “Sanriku,” the area most damaged by the tsunami, has been displaced by “Fukushima” as shorthand for the event as a whole.

Since the late nineteenth century, Muslim movements for religious and social reform have underscored the value of making scripture accessible to a broad public. Scholars and activists alike have urged ordinary Muslim men and women to study and follow the Qur'ān and the hadīth (the reports of the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds), and to do so they have rendered these scriptural writings and commentaries on them into the vernaculars of Asia, Africa, and Europe. They have also framed a wide range of appeals—to study the sciences, to modernize society, to stage a revolution—in the language and format of scriptural commentary. Vernacular writings (and, more recently, audio and videocassettes) based on scripture provide the foundations of popular religious education (Shahrani 1991), figure prominently in political movements (Fischer 1980; Kepel 1985), and serve as guides for living for Muslims traveling outside their homelands (Kepel 1987). The modern period has seen an explosion in the range of languages, genres, and contexts in which Muslims have authoritatively deployed scripture.

The years from 1919 through 1921 represent a period of major change in the political views of Mao. At the outset, he was attracted to anarchism and liberalism. At the end, he was prepared to espouse Marxism-Leninism, not because he had encompassed its doctrines, but because he had been persuaded that it represented a technique for successful revolution. In these years, Mao began as a strong Han nationalist but later denounced Chinese “imperialism” and argued for a Hunan nation. A few months later, he was espousing internationalism. Underlying these changes was the alternate hope and despair that Mao felt for China as a nation. A deep-rooted Chineseness and a penchant for political activism characterized Mao throughout this and succeeding eras.

If Shanghai has the World Expo 2010, Delhi has the Commonwealth Games 2010.

The Ramayana, one of Hinduism's two preeminent epics, has been retold in diverse ways over the centuries, but one modern rendition is unique: Nārata-Rāmāyaṇam(?). Its author, C. Virudhachalam (1906–48), wrote in Tamil under the pen name Pudumaippittan, meaning “one who is mad about newness.” Nārata-Rāmāyaṇam(?) presents colonialism as a continuation of the Ramayana narrative, showing how an ancient South Asian narrative can serve as an imaginative framework for modern Indian writers. The text mounts an astute critique of the notion of perfect rule, Ram Raj, and suggests that such a utopian ideal fosters the veneration of a glorified past that never existed. The text's modernist literary ploys encourage scrutiny of culturally constructed concepts such as nationalism, consumerism, and narrative coherence. This unusual Ramayana reveals how narrative resources can be used to question both ancient and modern ideologies.

In general, readers, commentators, translators, and reviewers are bound to see shadows of themselves or of their own concerns in a poem. A poem is, in fact, a “patch” between desire and reality. Like a dream, a poem can be viewed as “reality encoded” (Skura 1981, 126). The issue is not what is actually on the page, what critic Harold Bloom calls the “manifest text” (Bloom 1987, 3). The poem is really what exists in that misty place between “writing” and “reading,” the “latent text,” the poem that lives in symbol or emblem. Though a poem certainly has a static life on a page, the actual events of reading, interpretation, and commentary are what give a poem a vital historical life. We are fortunate that over a millennium and a half of Sanskrit scholarship has yielded up to us actual records of historical moments of reading. And, since these recorded “moments” have become traditionally attached to various types of printed text, many of these commentaries have become as vital as the text itself. In some instances they have even superseded the text, as is true, I believe, in the case of Abhinavagupta's commentary on Ānandavardhana's Dhvanyāloka.

While this essay will speak primarily from a historian's perspective, I want first to acknowledge that the idea of “societies” has had a peculiarly interdisciplinary hold on scholarship, bridging the humanities and social sciences. For sociologists it is a disciplinary foundation, for anthropologists it is often an escape hatch from the problematic notion of “cultures,” and for historians it is an organizational scheme that has stealthily metamorphosed into an unconsidered worldview. While some disciplines, especially sociology, have invested more effort than others in critically examining the idea of societies, each has produced critiques that perhaps should have killed off “societies” altogether. And yet enormous numbers of new works continue to take “societies” as their objects of study (e.g., Thum 2014), with even transnational and global studies framed as the interaction of supposedly distinct societies.