China's cattle trade before 1949 is effectively invisible to historians. With no geographic center, few dominant firms, and little government oversight, cattle trade left behind no clear archive of sources, leaving scholars to the mercy of conjecture and episodic evidence. Combining insights from business and social history, we focused our attention on trade intermediation as the key to understanding the operations of a diffuse trade system. In the absence of a top–down archive, we composited hundreds of local sources on intermediation in cattle trade and remotely interviewed 80 former brokers. These sources revealed large numbers of individuated trade routes, which we break into three types: persistent supply, specialized demand, and resource circulation. Each type of trade called for distinct forms of intermediation with relatively little overlap between specialized networks. This recreation of China's cattle trade reveals a sophisticated market for animal labor that calls into question the direct causal link between imperialist resource extraction and rural immiseration, and suggests the utility of applying tools and perspectives of social history to other sorts of decentered commercial systems.

Within the prevailing historiographical tradition of modern India, critics see the Poona Pact as having “disenfranchised” Dalits, which they attribute to the fact that, due to the numerical superiority of caste Hindus, the implementation of joint electorates resulted in the consolidation of power within the Indian National Congress: the party that, critics allege, protected the interests of the caste Hindu community. Critics further argue that Dalit candidates who successfully ran for office under the Congress party’s banner, garnering support mostly from caste Hindu voters, failed to speak for the interests of the Dalit community effectively. This article examines the returns of the provincial assembly elections held in 1936–1937 and 1945–1946, as well as the functioning of the Congress ministries in the provinces of British India between 1937 and 1939 and 1946 and 1947 to challenge the criticisms mentioned above and to argue that the inclusion of reserved seats, primary elections, and cumulative voting mechanisms had a significant role in enhancing the potential of the Poona Pact to ensure genuine descriptive representation of Dalits. The article also finds that the affiliation of Dalit legislators with the Congress party had a beneficial impact on their substantive representation in the provincial legislatures where the Congress formed ministries because Dalit interests and the ideological and programmatic dynamics of the Congress party were congruent. In this context, Gandhi, a member of the caste Hindu community, played the role of a “critical actor” who encouraged the Congress party to undertake measures to advance the interests of the Dalit community. Moreover, a powerful and autonomous anti-untouchability movement led by the Harijan Sevak Sangh played a crucial role in enhancing the institutional capabilities of the Congress governments, enabling them to effectively address the concerns and challenges faced by the Dalit community, which further bolstered the substantive representation of Dalits.

This article studies Western (primarily Anglophone) representations of the Dan people (boat people) and the boat clusters on which they lived, relative to the mainland, in the island city of Guangzhou, focusing on 1842–1900. A change occurred over time, as the Dan went from being in close interaction with Westerners prior to the Opium Wars to being peripheral to Western interests and activities. This shift is evident in Western writings, and negative representations of the Dan came to dominate in the late nineteenth century. This mirrored changing sociospatial power relations between Westerners and the terrestrial Chinese, as Westerners increasingly gained access to the onshore city of Guangzhou itself, in part from the colonial island enclave of Shamian. Changing crosscultural interactions affected how the Chinese Others were perceived and ultimately how the Chinese whole was intertextually constructed in Western colonial discourse.

The assassination of the dictator Park Chung Hee by his intelligence chief Kim Chae-gyu was a momentous events in South Korean history, which garnered two feature-length filmic depictions released fifteen years apart in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The President's Last Bang, released in 2005, was an irreverent black comedy in which all those involved that fateful evening were villains in their own right. The Man Standing Next, from 2020, took a much different tack. Kim gained a righteousness and revolutionary motivation that had been absent in the portrayal in the earlier film, in which Kim's intentions remained open to interpretation. This article analyzes the changes in Kim's depiction in the context of shifting respective political contexts, particularly the impeachment of Park's daughter Park Geun-hye in 2016, and the shadow cast by the legacies of authoritarianism, the specter of which seemed to loom over Korea again during the younger Park's administration. Consequently, the outpouring of public fervor in the ensuing candlelight vigils reaffirmed societal support for democracy and consequently elevated Kim Chae-gyu, Park's bane, to the role of champion of Korean democracy when it seemed under threat once again.

This article uses Mbembe's concept of necropolitics as an analytical category to examine the representations of necropower in Squid Game. In the global “organ economy,” organ sellers decide to supply, and brokers then mediate between them and buyers. In contrast, South Korean loan sharks commodify delinquent debtors' organs by forcing them to sign a body waiver as collateral. Recent South Korean dramas have thematized this distinctive systemization of the black economy. Borrowing Lowenstein's “allegorical moment” concept, this article aims to illuminate representations of fluid necropower through children's games as a hinge between reality and the imaginary that invites viewers to dialectically evaluate death problems. The contestations of money and humanity synthetically emerge as necropower constantly moves among different entities: VIPs, a frontman, players, game rules, and money. This article claims that viewers process numerous allegorical moments created by the iconography of necropower and synthetically realize necropolitics and corporeality in Squid Game. Organ extractions and trade in episode two in particular represent “morbid spectacle” and the culmination of mammonism. This article analyzes scenes of death, games, the technique of killing, and esthetics to connect historical examples of the necropolitics that Mbembe draws on and to discuss representations of the organ trade in this recent Korean drama.

China's rise has been discussed in various ways, but only recently has scholarship started to examine it in relation to overseas Chinese, as politicians and commentators outside China, as well as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself and some scholars on “smart power” have come to realize their importance as political messengers of China. This paper analyses interview results with second-generation Chinese immigrants in Australia in tertiary education to examine how they are “telling the China story”. The results reveal this cohort's complex attitudes towards China's rise. On the one hand, they are proud of China's rise, especially in economic terms, and their socio-cultural attachment to it. On the other, they critically evaluate political and social issues in China, and are aware of their marginal position in Chinese society. These findings argue against the oversimplistic approach that regards Chinese immigrants as a homogenous group acting as political messengers of the CCP.

This article aims to reexamine the relationship between the artist Lee Ufan and nationalist art history through his idea of “ambivalent otherness,” which he defined as both “suffering” and “power.” Traditional art history is established upon a nationalist framework that emphasizes the artists' nationality, leading to the marginalization of national others at the border. As a zainichi Korean, Lee has undergone the “suffering” of being excluded by the art world and art historiography. However, he transformed it into his source of “power” to challenge art historiography based on nationality. This study analyzes the art criticism of “Japanese Contemporary Art History” written by Minemura Toshiaki and Chiba Shigeo in the 1970s and 1980s and highlights the ruptures that the artist's in-between identity wrought on nationalist art history. This shows how both the Mono-ha movement and the artist were marginalized in the construction of “Japanese Contemporary Art History.” Furthermore, this study scrutinizes how Lee attempted to rewrite art history using Mono-ha art theory and a perspective committed to “overcoming coloniality” from the postcolonial in-between position, by reinterpreting Lee's article on Chosŏn minhwa, written amidst an aesthetic controversy across the border between Japan and Korea.

Amidst the upheavals of the First World War, a considerable number of prisoners of war from the Ottoman Empire found themselves in Russia, resettled primarily in the central regions of the Russian Empire. The regions of Volga, Siberia, Ural, and Western Siberia played host to Ottoman prisoners, who were accommodated in camps and barracks across cities and rural areas. Over time, a noteworthy migration led some prisoners to the territory of modern Kazakhstan, with cities like Samara, Orenburg, and Omsk serving as pivotal points before further dispersion into the central regions of Kazakhstan. As a result, Ottoman citizens found themselves under suspicion and were dispersed akin to prisoners. The Semirechye Oblast (Zhetisu region) emerged as a focal point where both Ottoman subjects and prisoners of war were dispersed during this tumultuous period. This article investigates the political and social dynamics, as well as the fate, of Turkish prisoners of war and citizens within the Semirechye Oblast during the war. The analysis delves into the status of Ottoman Empire subjects who acquiesced to the authority of the Russian Empire, offering insights into the lives of prisoners of war in this specific region.

In Vietnam, for a long time, family is considered as being significant for economic, instrumental, social, emotional, and care support for older adults due to strong filial piety, high family values, low institutional coverage, and limited social services, given that the majority of older adults are living in family-based communities. Recently, due to increasing migration, nuclearization, and individualization in Vietnamese families, there is an increasing withdrawal of family caregivers from caregiving to their parents and there seems to be confusion and tension of roles and supports among family members. Meanwhile, Vietnam is observing changes in demographics and family structure, which is linked to an increase in the number of elders in need of care, drop in fertility rate, resulting in a shrinking supply of family caregivers. This article examines the economic dynamics of ageing with limited family ties by examining the formal care services and demographic changes in order to investigate raising social problems towards elder population. It also explores how older adults from varied living backgrounds in Vietnam restructure their lives in terms of acculturation, re-establishing kin networks, psychological well-being in contemporary Vietnam. It demonstrates how Vietnamese elders actively engage in unpaid work within family and community environments, such as housework and childcare, shaped by cultural norms of familialism and filial piety, with regional variations in the north emphasizing stronger familialism and economic motives, and the central coast showing more individualism and sentimental values.

Why do oil-dependent developing countries exhibit divergent responses to oil crises? This study employs a comparative case study approach and utilizes a ‘most similar system design’ to examine the varying state responses to the 1973 oil shock in Turkey and South Korea. While the former refrained from implementing radical short-term adjustment policies and reforms, the latter adopted proactive measures to mitigate the worsening impact of escalating oil prices. This research contends that the existing literature, which emphasizes distinctions in industrialization strategies and fiscal policies among developing nations, offers an incomplete explanation for the divergent reactions of states to external price shocks. Instead, the study proposes a sociological perspective, focusing on the influence of varying degrees of state autonomy and the characteristics of bureaucratic systems on the decision-making processes of states. The key finding suggests that while pre-crisis economic policies and industrialization strategies may limit the array of policy tools available to counteract the adverse effects of an oil crisis, the extent of state autonomy and the organization of the bureaucracy – whether adhering to Weberian or non-Weberian principles – impact the efficacy of these policy tools and the determination of decision-makers to act in the best interests of the long-term public good.

This article leverages Watsuji Tetsurō's idea of aidagara – “inter-relationships” – to better appreciate the interpenetration of space and relationships in Japanese foreign policy narratives. I set Watsuji's philosophical framework against Japanese foreign policy narratives referring to various spaces as a case study to emphasizing the interplay of space and relationships in Japanese diplomatic efforts. On the one hand, we see the Japanese government invoking East Asia, the Asia-Pacific, and the Indo-Pacific as spatial descriptors to conceptualize the political dynamics surrounding them. On the other hand, Japan's relations with its interlocutors reify fluid geographical boundaries as spaces relevant for Japan's foreign relations. Thus, Watsuji helps us to rethink international politics as an aidagara in which the space produces political relationships, while political relationships themselves reproduce, or even redefine, space.

This article demonstrates how the application of a broad and decontextualized distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” Muslims can undermine our assessment of an Islamic identity, security, and radicalization. It compares how this distinction has been used by the British colonial administrators (in Raffles, Crawfurd, Marsden, and Swettenham) in nineteenth-century Malaya and by Malaysia's Prime Ministers (Mahathir, Badawi, and Najib) in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. This comparison demonstrates that both groups, despite their very different backgrounds (Western non-Muslim and Muslim non-Western), introduced a similar distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” driven more by socio-political objectives than by religious ones. Furthermore, the article stresses the importance of considering the socio-political and contextual dimensions of Islamic identity before attempting to explain the process of radicalization and its implications for security. Such an approach discourages reference to broad categories such as “moderate,” “extremist,” “Islamism,” or “Salafism,” and allows for discussion of their contextual and socio-political connotations.

Given the historical nature of gender consciousness against the backdrop of the nation's social system transformations and the deficiencies related to physical and mental determinism commonly found in research on the performance of female gender roles, this study innovatively uses Butler's agency approach to examine gender consciousness. Women in China have experienced the female liberation movement of “equality between men and women” under the Chinese socialist regime as well as the movement of “women's return to the family” after the introduction of the market economy. The current study uses the agency approach to present the processes of post-1980s Chinese women when balancing their paid work, housework, and childcare roles and the contradictions therein as well as the ideologies they have adopted to resolve such contradictions. This study comprehensively examines the effect of conservative and non-conservative ideologies on the gender consciousness and behavior of women acting under their own agency. The findings, which are based on a comparison of the gender consciousness and behavior of various cohorts, yield the conclusion that post-1980s women expect non-conservative behavior in the future but choose conservative behaviors strategically. Such strategic behavioral choices deepen inner gender role-related conflicts.

Modern Chinese diplomatic histories rarely discuss the marriages of diplomats, leaving the impression that women made little impact on their husbands' careers. The extraordinary performance of Oei Hui-lan (1889–1992), wife of celebrated diplomat Wellington Koo (1888–1985), challenges this view. Hui-lan's contributions to diplomacy call our attention to the role played by Chinese diplomatic wives: as reception hostesses and embassy managers, they cultivated social relationships to facilitate diplomatic exchange. Hui-lan's story reminds us that to study modern diplomatic history solely through the lens of professionalization and institutionalization – while forgoing perspectives of gender and family – is insufficient to explain China's success in this period. Hui-lan's Peranakan family background in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) equipped her with the financial assets and cosmopolitan upbringing to shine as a diplomatic wife. And yet, though she benefited from her overseas origins, Hui-lan had an uneasy relationship to her Chinese identity. Concealing the tension in her two autobiographies, Hui-lan later reconstructed her past, emphasizing her patriotism and ethnic Chineseness to befit her established position. Thus, her case also shows how the complicated process of identity rebuilding and selective adaptation played out for elite overseas Chinese women through their engagement with modern China.

This article investigates the impact of male migration on left-behind women in nineteenth-century Chongqing, focusing on the intersection among gender, migration, and religion. It analyze the unintended consequences of failed male migration, in which the husband's failure to send regular remittances was prone to cause tremendous anxiety and financial difficulties for his wife. In the absence of strong male-centered kinship organizations, Chongqingese women exploited unorthodox options to support themselves. Buddhist monasticism proved appealing because it provided both a stable source of livelihood and an inclusive all-female space. However, female renunciation was controversial because it challenged state-sponsored patriarchal values. Returned husbands enlisted the state's help in revoking their wives' religious decisions. Paradoxically, for vulnerable women like concubines, nunhood proved an attractive option because it helped them obtain migration-triggered divorces on favorable terms. They strategically synergized the bodily practice of monastic celibacy with the discourse of female chastity to assure their estranged spouses of lifelong commitments to non-remarriage. By doing so, these women succeeded in receiving generous financial compensation. This study highlights how the combination of religion and translocality enabled women to renegotiate their positionality within the patriarchy.

The International Political Science Association (IPSA) is a unique case against the common perception that Beijing has the upper hand when the two regimes by the Taiwan Strait contest to join international (non-governmental) organisations. Beijing relentlessly pushes international organisations to acknowledge the One China principle; Taipei also relentlessly denies this principle while it seeks to join. In the 1980s, Chinese and Taiwanese political scientists, representing their own regimes, applied Track II diplomacy to compete over membership of this organisation. IPSA membership mattered to both regimes and their political scientists. After many years of Track II competition, The Chinese Association of Political Science in Taipei became a “collective” member without compromising on how to name itself in April 1989. As a result, Beijing's counterpart withdrew from the IPSA. This situation has now persisted for over thirty years. The IPSA case not only challenges the current understanding of Cross-Strait relations but also throws light on the theoretical understanding of Track II diplomacy.

This article demonstrates the ambivalent sentiments of Koreans toward China as represented by the ideological construction of Hanja (traditional Chinese characters) and Chinese Mandarin embodied in Korean media. Adopting discourse analysis to examine what is described by different language ideologies, this article investigates language discourses concerning Hanja and Mandarin, locating the former mainly within linguistic nationalism and the latter within linguistic instrumentalism. This article puts forth two suggestions. First, investigating linguistic nationalism in relation to the use of Hanja not only displays negative and antagonistic attitudes toward China and the use of Hanja as an embodiment of humiliating historical experiences but also shows ambiguity, fluidity, and vulnerability of Korean national identity. Second, in contrast to Hanja, Koreans' heated enthusiasm to learn Mandarin shows their affection for China as a global market and becomes intertwined with linguistic instrumentalism, embodying an articulation of neoliberalism by reproducing structures of inequality.

This article argues that South Koreans' anti-Japanism in the post-liberation period can be regarded as an ideological construction, which was inevitably required to reshape their national identity, rather than as a reasonable and serious critical consideration of colonial Japan. Anti-Japanism functions as an identification framework in an era when Koreans needed to develop a new discourse which reflects the rapid politico-socio-cultural changes of that period. Under military control of the United States and the Soviet Union, Koreans made Japan the other in a number of ways in order to unite their nation state and national identity, relying specifically on racial difference and hierarchy. First, Korean intellectuals, who once cooperated with colonial Japan in the political sphere or in their ordinary lives, explicitly revealed their anti-Japanese sentiments in their writings right after liberation. Second, after liberation, anti-Japanism emerged from a process that Koreans would exploit, after demarcating the moral difference between themselves and the remaining Japanese migrants, to exclude the Japanese from their community. Finally, anti-Japanism in the post-liberation period can be detected in Koreans' tenacious attitude, as they tacitly restricted the articulation of filial or cultural hybridity with the Japanese people in order to reconfigure their national identity.