The full-scale Protestant missionary assault made possible by the provisions of the Treaty of Tientsin, which allowed missionaries access to all parts of the interior of China and provided them with the protection of local authorities, both created new problems and intensified old ones existing as a result of unwelcome foreign presence in the land. The difficulties were of such nature as to plague even those nations which had considerable experience and had enjoyed substantial success in colonial affairs. It is the purpose of this paper to examine one incident involving missionary operation in order to illustrate through it the practical burdens which such enterprises could impose upon British and Chinese diplomacy. It is the conviction of this writer that such episodes, although not in themselves crucial, were influential in the shaping of diplomacy.

What these four quite different books broadly share is a focus on the role of the state in Myanmar society. Current scholarship describes the authoritarian state in Myanmar, which has been controlled by the army since 1962, as either dominantly present or neglectfully absent. Censorship and the repression of autonomous spaces in society, on the one hand, and the failure of the state to enforce efficient health and environmental policies, on the other, are keywords in these works that illustrate the double-faced appearance of the state's existence and role in society.

Taking the Yokohama Chinese community as an exemplary case, this article delves into linkages between Chinese diasporic identities and collaborationism during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Using published memoirs, Japanese government and police records, and local newspapers, it examines the wartime experiences of a community struggling to maintain both its Chinese identity and its position in local society. Japanese authorities did not categorically assimilate, intern, or deport this population. Instead, they enforced displays of support for collaborationist regimes in occupied China in order to manufacture what they termed “Sino-Japanese amity.” Public expressions by the Yokohama Chinese contributed to this narrative, but these Chinese were not merely puppets. They actively negotiated the meanings and practices of collaborationism to fulfill local needs. By examining their engagement with Chinese and Japanese national imperatives, this article reflects on the nature of Sino-Japanese friendship, hidden resistance, and local integration.

Perhaps the first thing to note about a forum on the subject of 1919 in Asia is how awkwardly the spatial frame of “Asia” maps onto the international history of that moment. To be sure, the postwar international conjuncture, which I have elsewhere called the “Wilsonian Moment,” had a revolutionary impact across Asia, perhaps more so than in any other world region outside of Europe. As the three preceding essays in this forum note, that year was a waypoint, and sometimes a launching pad, for a rush of novel or renewed revolutionary discourses, connections, and mobilizations in China, India, and Korea, as it was in other parts of Asia and of the world. These were all propelled by the accumulated material and ideological transformations of the years of war, transformation that imbued the moment with revolutionary potential and gave contemporaries a sense that the international order, its power structures and its norms of legitimacy, were uniquely malleable, amenable to concerted action. Indeed, 1919 was a moment in which the very idea of “Asia”—its spaces, the identities they attached to, and the solidarities that ran across and beyond it—was reimagined in ways that at once stitched it together and rent it apart.

Sweeping and remoulding Europe in the 19th Century, nationalism has swept on in equally revolutionary guise to remould Asia in the 20th, and is now penetrating Africa. In the study of its impact and development almost every aspect of human society is involved, positively or negatively, and at least every social science discipline has its part to contribute to the analysis of an exceedingly complex whole. In the Asia of today and of the recent past we have a whole series of new nations coining forward to assert their claims in the world. A laboratory has been made available in which we can observe and analyze the growth of nationalism, catch it in its earliest stages and trace it through to its maturity, as well as at least noting in passing the countervailing forces of the past and present. The raw material, vibrant with a new and dynamic life, is there for our taking, and it would be tragic if we were to let it slip through our fingers without gathering it and subjecting it to the closest possible investigation.

This article explores how new modes of writing and reading that developed in epistolary culture brought about intellectual, social, and political changes in Chosŏn society. From the sixteenth century onwards, the diverse uses of letters transformed the lifestyle and the mode of political participation of Confucian intellectuals. Letters became the main reading materials for neo-Confucian studies and self-cultivation as well as a medium for political action, especially for rural scholars, who innovated various epistolary genres to raise their political voices. New epistolary practices facilitated their collective activism, the spread of radical opinions, and the mobilization of new political groups. Toward the end of the dynasty, even nonelites emulated these practices for their activism. In this period, “spiral letters” developed in both vernacular Korean and literary Chinese letters. These new letter forms, used by both male elites and women, reflected and subverted the existing gender dynamics and power relations associated with the norms of reading and writing. The rise and fall of spiral letters demonstrate the mutual influence between the written culture and sociopolitical changes. The versatility and resourcefulness of epistolary practices characterized Chosŏn letter writers' fashionable choice of a radical lifestyle, which geared their social life to yield actual political power.

Since the end of World War II, Southeast Asian economies have grown at widely diverging rates. Consistent and relatively rapid growth has occurred only in the Philippines; in that country rehabilitation from World War II was completed relatively early and the economy has gone on to provide gains in per capita real income, though at a falling rate. In Thailand and Malaya, rehabilitation and growth have occurred, but progress has been unsteady. In Burma, Indonesia, and the Indo-Chinese countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Viet Nam progress has taken die form primarily of restoring prewar levels of per capita production; it is unlikely that gains above prewar levels have been achieved.

As part of this year's anniversary of the October 6, 1976, massacre at Thammasat University, an outdoor exhibit of photographs of the violence and the three preceding years of student and other social movements was displayed upon the very soccer field in the center of campus where students were beaten, shot, lynched, and murdered forty years prior. Several of the photographs were printed on large sheets of acrylic and positioned such that the images of the buildings in the photographs were aligned with the actual buildings, which remain largely unchanged. The most striking of these was a photograph of hundreds of students stripped to the waist who were lying face down on the soccer field prior to being arrested and taken away. At the edge of the image was the top of the university's iconic dome building, which lined up with the existing building. The organizers explained that their intention was “to reflect a perspective on the past through the eyes of people in the present in order to show the cruelty of humans to one another.” The proximity generated by the image was underlined by the fact that the fortieth anniversary of the massacre and coup in 1976 that led to twelve years of dictatorship was taking place under yet another dictatorship, that of a military junta calling itself the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), which seized power on May 22, 2014, in the twelfth coup since the end of the absolute monarchy on June 24, 1932. Suchada Chakphisut, founding editor of Sarakadee magazine and Thai Civil Rights and Investigative Journalism, who was a first-year Thammasat student during the massacre, began her autobiographical account of the day, written for the anniversary this year, by writing: “We meet every year when 6 October comes around, and with it an inexplicable sadness always takes hold of my psyche. It has grown even more devastating since the 22 May 2014 coup, in which we must face the news of the arrest and detention of activists and those who oppose dictatorship.” This was not a commemoration after dictatorship such as those of the same era held in Argentina or Chile during recent years of democratization, but memories of dictatorship in situ.

This article examines how Chinese national values are imparted to and through the recent phenomenon of ceremonial volunteers or etiquette volunteers (liyi zhiyuan). These volunteers are all young college women who serve at major national events by greeting guests, ushering, and holding ceremonial ribbons. They are supposed to embody Confucian ritual values and the practices of propriety that define China as a nation of civilization through their roles as ceremonial hostesses. This feminine symbol of national tradition and cultural virtues is realized through a heavy emphasis on discipline, physical training, compliance to authority, and collectivism expressed through the ways the performances are staged and mass mediated. This article argues that the ceremonial volunteer represents a new state effort to engineer a model woman citizen by combining the Confucian discourse on etiquette, the communist party-state discourse on militarization and strong womanhood, the communist sport tradition of body training, and the latest initiatives on volunteering. The result is the making of gendered national subjects, marking new values of class, femininity, and nationalism. This article contributes to the understanding of emergent values about gender, class, volunteering, and the important roles they play in the process of citizen making in today's China.

Catastrophic Asia began as an experimental initiative of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Culminating in a spring 2014 symposium where three of the four papers presented here and earlier versions of the two commentaries were delivered, the project sought to bring together a diversity of perspectives on Asian experiences of and vulnerability to disasters. We sought to collect an unlikely group of scholars whose work is not typically discussed in a single forum. They included natural and physical scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and scholars of literature. The project sought to discover what common epistemological ground might be found when such diverse approaches are brought to bear on catastrophic events, as well as the risks of catastrophe, in a particular area of the world.

The military victories of the Northern Expedition (1926–28) ended nearly two decades of political fragmentation and ushered in a new era of centralized government in China. A key concern of the Nationalist government, based in Nanjing, was bringing the haphazard array of private schools that had emerged since the republic's founding in 1911 in line with the Nationalists’ political agenda. The Nationalist leadership also hoped to use their educational reforms to bring the frontier regions, many of which were only tenuously allied with Nanjing, more formally under their control. Thus, the new regime set out to achieve the twin goals of regulating private schools and cultivating ties among the frontier region's population. These two goals became entangled in an unexpected manner at the private Muslim Chengda Teachers School. Although the Nationalists banned private teachers schools in 1933, they deliberately exempted Chengda from such regulations to further their frontier agenda. Later, when the central government's frontier political calculations changed, the Nationalists rescinded such protection and forced Chengda to abide by the original regulations.

On July 7, 1937 a handful of Chinese and Japanese soldiers exchanged rifle-fire in the vicinity of the Marco Polo Bridge about thirty miles from Peking. This, minor fracas precipitated a sequence of events that soon propelled Japan into full-scale hostilities on the mainland—a war that was significantly to influence the course of Japanese-American negotiation in the fateful months leading up to the Pacific War. Many historians have portrayed the China incident as the consequence of a conspiracy by the Japanese military and as a repetition of a pattern of aggression identical with that of the Mukden Incident of 1931. With this approach, the Sino-Japanese war presents little apparent difficulty to our ascertaining why the fighting at the Marco-Polo Bridge occasioned a major war. The culprit is the Japanese military.

In 1910, a group or army officers led by Tanaka Giichi founded die Imperial Military Reserve Association in order to integrate Japanese society around military values. The founders, mostly proteges of Yamagata Aritomo, die chief Meiji period spokesman for unity to increase national wealdi and power, established die organization in 1910 because the already existing unity was under attack. Labor organizations and the influx of morally degenerate and subversive Western ideas caused Tanaka to fear army-civilian alienation and national divisiveness. Thus, to achieve integration, the reserve association disseminated the “soldier's ethos,” military ideals, such as obedience, frugality, bravery, cooperation, social stratification, anti-individualism, and diligence, all unified by a belief in a divine emperor, established branches in every community, 14,000 in all, and carried out activities which reinforced both the values and local social structure. The three million volunteer members, half of whom had no military experience, achieved their leaders' goals by performing public services and patriotic activities. They demonstrated to local residents die ethos in action and benefitted the community as well. By the 1930's, bodi die organization and die members had become the backbone of rural Japan.

A major shortcoming in much Western writing about recent events in Indo-China is that the inhabitants of the region are seen as objects of policy rather than as subjects of history. Focusing in this, way leaves out much of the picture and demeans the inhabitants of Indo-China who are largely responsible, after all, for defeating France and the United States. A number of the books reviewed here take a sympathetic insider's view of U.S. intervention in the region and try to approach the war objectively but still have an American focus. One book is a systematic attack on U.S. behavior in Cambodia since 1970. Finally a recently published collection of documents will be indispensable to students of the war, partly because it pays close attention to Vietnamese as well as American decisions.

This article analyzes interactions among the early twentieth-century Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds. The author first develops a general conceptualization of intra–East Asian literary contact nebulae. These were the ambiguous spaces, both physical and creative, where imperial Japanese, semicolonial Chinese, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers interacted with one another and transculturated (i.e., discussed, translated, and intertextualized) one another's writings. Among the most intriguing literary contact nebulae are Chinese and Korean transculturations of censored Japanese literature. The second half of the article explores two key examples of this phenomenon: colonial Korean translation and intertextualization of the Japanese writer Nakano Shigeharu's poem “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” (Shinagawa Station in the Rain, February 1929) and wartime Chinese translation and intertextualization of the Japanese writer Ishikawa Tatsuzō's novella “Ikiteiru heitai” (Living Soldiers, March 1938). These transculturations embody multifaceted amalgams of (semi)colonial literary collaboration, acquiescence, and resistance vis-à-vis metropolitan imperial and cultural authority.