Showing papers in "Critical Asian Studies in 2013"

A NATION IN FRAGMENTS: Patronage and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia

Abstract: Scholars of Indonesia are still searching for ways to characterize the ordering principles of the new post-Suharto politics In the 1950s and 1960s, Clifford Geertz's notion of aliran (stream) politics captured central features of Indonesian political life In the 1970s and 1980s, the state took center stage, with scholars seeing the New Order state as standing above society, depoliticizing and reordering it Since reform began in 1998, these analyses are clearly no longer adequate, but scholars have yet to find persuasive alternatives This article offers one attempt to diagnose the fundamentals of political organization in contemporary Indonesia It starts by emphasizing the organizational fragmentation that characterizes much contemporary political life It seeks the origins of this fragmentation in two sources: the ubiquity of patronage distribution as a means of cementing political affiliations and the broader neoliberal model of economic, social, and cultural life in which patronage distribution is

Beyond safe haven

Abstract: From providing the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter to facilitating travel for those seeking refuge, decentralized underground Christian networks in China have assisted countless undocumented North Korean migrants in situations both dire and desperate However, with no systems for transparency or accountability in place, and with conservative religious agendas structuring spaces of aid and advocacy, these networks also produce troubling paradigms of custodial confinement and discipline Drawing on field research in the United States, South Korea, and China, this article examines the way a Christian missionary safe house in China illustrates a political theology of custody through its employment of care and control as well as its attention to and detention of vulnerable populations The author shows that missionaries justify their custodial authority by stressing good intentions and a pastoral prerogative, but deny the unequal power relations that undergird the very structure of their mis

The global value chain

Abstract: The global value chain concept has become one of the most influential frameworks used in the study of globalization. The paradigm, however, is deficient in explicating the exploitative nature of global value chain governance. Based on a study of soccer ball production in China and Pakistan, this article analyzes global production from three perspectives: the role of the state in shaping the host countries' mode of production and legal framework, the issue of how surplus value is created and distributed, and the use of child labor or prison labor to remain competitive in the chain. The article shows, in the case of Pakistan, how a country using a lower-labor-costs strategy to retain a place in a global value chain allows its workers to be exploited and pauperizes its people.

Merchants, markets, and the state

Abstract: The end of the cold war witnessed the emergence of a commercial web sprawling from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China and extending into Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), Pakistan, and Russia. Running parallel to the state-managed exchange in hydrocarbons, raw materials, technology, and infrastructure, this new Eurasian trade had an informal component as everyday consumer items manufactured in China were imported into neighboring countries, bypassing formal regulatory mechanisms. This inter-Asian trade began as shuttle trading by itinerant merchants for local markets; by the mid 1990s, shuttle trading was overshadowed by largescale export for national markets in neighboring countries without losing its informal character. This informality extending across national boundaries defined the post–cold war commerce in innermost Asia; at the same time, it also signaled a return to pre-cold war trading structures. Moving away from the “retreat of ...

Vigilantism and violence in decentralized indonesia

Abstract: This article examines the variable powers, positions, and legitimacy of informal authorities in Lombok, Indonesia, most notably tuan guru (Muslim clerics) and their affiliate pamswakarsa (vigilante forces). It argues that recent accounts of tuan guru as peacemakers downplay the complex structural factors that enable outbreaks of ethno-religious violence in the first place. By analyzing successive permutations of disorder, traceable back to the colonial era, this article helps locate and give context to the current policing and political dilemmas surrounding vigilantism in Indonesia. It then demonstrates how, in the era of decentralization, local and provincial authorities endeavor to domesticate pamswakarsa groups and their charismatic leaders. Finally, this article concludes that renewed spiritual expansionism, such as the renovation of Hindu temple sanctuaries in Lombok, elicits extreme responses from tuan guru. These responses provide renewed impetus for vigilante violence, strain interisland relations...

Streets as suspect

Abstract: The Chinese Communist Party has been suspicious of people engaged in commercial activity on the streets ever since it took over the country in 1949, but the reasons for this have shifted in a paradoxical way over the decades In the years when Mao Zedong ruled the nation according to his understandings and beliefs about socialist values and for several years after his death the suspicion in the main concerned the capitalist practices that business entails—profit making, inequalities, price-consciousness, class differentiation Except for a few short intervals, doing non-state trade or providing private services was banned In the first few decades after 1980, marketing outside was treated more leniently, although paying fees and purchasing licenses were still required in order to avoid harassment, and peasant migrants faced challenges But once millions of people were laid off after 1995, the Party hoped to enable them to make a living, and also to prevent them from protesting, so it gave them special lee

The mirror of north korean human rights

Abstract: Turning on the logic of the spectacle, U.S.-based campaigns on North Korean human rights, in calling for intervention, have wielded two images aimed at outing North Korea's “hidden truths”? the image of the starving child circa the 1990s and the contemporary satellite image of what appear to be labor camps. Focusing on the use of online virtual geo-imagery programs like Google Earth in the human rights mapping of North Korea, this essay situates post-9/11 “liberation technology” within the framework of the unending Korean War, a war whose failed “liberation” of Korea from the global forces of communism haunts North Korean human rights critique today. By examining mid-century bomber photographs and contemporary human rights satellite images of North Korea, this essay inquires into the homology between technologies of militarized intelligence and war, on the one hand, and technologies of human rights that aim to expose North Korea, on the other. Both modes of apperception, this essay argues, strive ...

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia

Abstract: Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. xii + 356 pp. Boldly going where no one had gone before, Pankaj Mishra discuss...

THE GLOBAL VALUE CHAIN: Value for Whom? The Soccer Ball Industry in China and Pakistan

Abstract: The global value chain concept has become one of the most influential frameworks used in the study of globalization. The paradigm, however, is deficient in explicating the exploitative nature of global value chain governance. Based on a study of soccer ball production in China and Pakistan, this article analyzes global production from three perspectives: the role of the state in shaping the host countries' mode of production and legal framework, the issue of how surplus value is created and distributed, and the use of child labor or prison labor to remain competitive in the chain. The article shows, in the case of Pakistan, how a country using a lower-labor-costs strategy to retain a place in a global value chain allows its workers to be exploited and pauperizes its people.

Dilemmas of parliamentary communism

Abstract: In 2011, after thirty-four years in power, the Communist Party of IndiaMarxist–led Left Front in West Bengal was voted out of power. The Left Front was the world's longest running communist government to be elected to office. The Left Front governed a population larger than most European, African, and Latin American democracies. This essay examines the rise and decline of the parliamentary communist movement in Bengal. The authors argue that the prominence of the communist movement can be traced to a social imaginaire and a notion of “social citizenship” that the (undivided) communists developed through their participation in grassroots-level workers, peasants, and refugee movements, and equally crucially, through hegemonic interventions in “culture” since the 1940s. This social imaginaire became the basis of a “commonsensical idiom” in Bengal through the political practice of the communists, parliamentary and otherwise. The decline of the parliamentary communist influence started when their core constitu...

Historical legacies in rising powers

Abstract: This articles emanates from the observation that realms like theory and broad comparison have typically focused onWestern concerns and geography while actors such as China and Turkey have been relegated to the undervalued field of areas studies. Noting that this inhibits our ability to uncover important cross-regional comparisons, the author suggests that “former empires/rising powers” (FERPs) across (Eur)Asia are a promising unit of analysis. To make the case for the FERPs, the author embeds four cases—Turkey, Iran, Russia, and China—in a common problematique, showing that their encounter with Western hegemony/ modernity engendered three waves of confrontation vis-a-vis the legacies of empire. These confrontations entailed Eurocentric denial as well as Occidentalist reification of native pasts, both of which are being superseded by what the author calls “authenticist” histories empowered by the crystallization of multiple modernities. The author then develops a theoretical framework to capture how reinve...

“LIVING WITH POLLUTION”: Juggling Environmental and Social Risk in Vietnam's Craft Villages

Abstract: Vietnam's rural provinces are home to thousands of craft villages; communities engaged in small- and medium-scale manufacturing of a range of goods, from recycled paper products to processed food. Since the liberalization of the Vietnamese economy in 1986, craft villages have played a significant role in poverty reduction and livelihood diversification for rural households, and currently employ nearly one-third of Vietnam's rural labor force. However, the rapid expansion of craft manufacturing, combined with a lack of planning, has brought increased air, soil, and water pollution to craft villages and surrounding areas. Pollution levels are now so serious that they pose a major risk to local health and agriculture. This article examines why producers continue to expose themselves to environmental pollution and its associated health risks. Drawing on four case studies of craft villages in the Red River Delta region of northern Vietnam, the authors find that risk is a multidimensional phenomenon. Cr...

Qiaoxiang on the silk road

Abstract: The contemporary era of globalization poses challenges for reimagining Asian nations once associated with the ThirdWorld as spaces within the global capitalist world. The idea of the Global South incorporates these nations into a new post–cold war global imaginary, but does so in a way that recognizes the structural and social inequalities that continue to distinguish these nations from their more privileged counterparts in the Global North. The challenge of reimagining former ThirdWorld nations in the contemporary era of globalization is further complicated by the deepening of structural inequality within those nations. Growing class divides and uneven development in these nations have made it difficult to imagine Global South nations as homogenous entities. This article explores the complexities of imagining China in the era of globalization by examining a set of historical narratives: the Silk Road and qiaoxiang (sojourner villages), which emerged as strategies for situating China within new global ima...

Reframing north korean human rights

Abstract: Introducing the core concerns animating this two-part thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies (December 2013 and March 2014), this essay offers a historicized overview of the consolidation of contemporary human rights as the dominant lingua franca for social justice projects today. Highlighting what the rights framework renders legible as well as what it consigns to unintelligibility, this essay examines the antinomies of contemporary human rights as an ethico-political discourse that strives to reassert the dominance of the global North over the global South. Relentlessly presentist in its assignment of blame and politically harnessed to a regime-change agenda, the human rights framing of North Korea has enabled human rights advocates, typically “beneficiaries of past injustice,” to assume a moralizing, implicitly violent posture toward a “regime” commonsensically understood to be “evil.” Cordoning off North Korea's alleged crimes for discrete consideration while turning a willfully blind eye ...

The problem of sovereignty in an age of empire

Abstract: This article examines a confrontation at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 between the Tokugawa shogunate and the domain of Satsuma The confrontation was provoked by the latter, which used its control over the Ryukyu Islands, the services of a minor Franco-Belgian nobleman, and the opportunity of the international exhibition to demonstrate its independence from and equality to the shogunate The episode was incidental to the collapse of the Tokugawa state later that year, but is a useful microcosm through which to understand the relationship between domestic considerations and international relations in the constitution of the modern state Most accounts of modern Japan tend to be premised on the normative status of the latter, both as a natural container within which the early modern elements of the archipelago could be alchemized and as a soon-to-be sovereign actor on the international stage This article argues, however, that this assumption is problematic By the 1860s the order w

MAKING NARRATIVES OF REVOLUTION: Democratic Transition and the Language of Middle-Class Identity in the Philippines and South Korea, 1970s–1987

Abstract: This article presents a theoretical framework that explains how middle-class formation took place through periods of democratic transition in the Philippines and South Korea from the 1970s to 1987. The authors argue that the idea of an inherently “democratic” and even “revolutionary” middle class in the Philippines and South Korea is the product of political alliances, cultural differences, discursive adaptation, and narrative construction—all driven by the political context of the late Marcos (1965–1986) and Chun (1980–1987) regimes. The authors demonstrate this by a close reading of descriptors of the middle class in public discourse, showing how moderate groups and their leftist rivals refined class language over time.

Breaking through a double invisibility

Abstract: Desiring to “engender” the written history of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the movements it led or initiated, the author looks at the first generation of middle-class women who became communists in colonial Bengal in the period 1939 to 1948. Judging that much of the available printed and archival source material inadequately describes the role of women in the CPI, the author interviewed many of the surviving women CPI recruits and studied their printed memoirs. She examines in particular two organizations that were established in the late 1930s and early 1940s, namely, the Chhatri Sangha (Girl Students' Association) and the Mahila Atma Raksha Samity (Women's Self-Defense Association). The author contends that the recruiting and mobilizing strategies of the CPI—while focused primarily on class—also had important consequences for gender relations: many middle-class women found themselves transgressing the narrowly constructed norms of propriety and mixing with women of lower classes and working in...

Filiation, Continuous and Discontinuous: Two Recent Anthropological Approaches to North Korea

Abstract: Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung. North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. 232 pp. Sonia Ryang. Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry. Cambridge, Ma...

Messages from long tan, vietnam

Abstract: This article explores the changing ways in which Australians and Vietnamese remember and memorialize their involvement in the Vietnam War and how these processes intersect with notions of reconciliation and historical justice in postwar contexts. It uses the Battle of Long Tan of August 1966 as an entree into these considerations and questions whether heritage-making and memorialization processes can facilitate the achievement of reconciliation between parties formerly in conflict. Not surprisingly, the Australian and Vietnamese veterans of the battle and the two states, the Commonwealth of Australia and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, have different motivations for wanting to remember Long Tan. On the Australian side, a sense that reconciliation and atonement are needed is often reflected in official government and veterans' statements about the war and Australia–Vietnam relations, in the memorialization process at Long Tan and in the involvement of Australian veterans groups in local economic develop...

The Indian Ideology

Abstract: Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology. Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2012. 191 pp. Indian Ideology—deliberately titled in allusion to Karl Marx's writings on his own country—is Perry Anderson's m...

Encountering Asia: Narratives of Filipino Medical Workers on Caring for Other Asians

Abstract: This article explores the narratives of Filipino medical workers on their encounters with other Asians during their migrant journeys to Singapore. Migrants speak of their encounters with regional c...

Toward overcoming korea's division system through civic participation

Abstract: In this essay—an earlier version of which was delivered as a lecture at a session cosponsored by Critical Asian Studies and the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (ASCK) at the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego, California, on 23 March 2013—the author argues the need to go beyond the current state of perilous confrontation and volatility on the Korean Peninsula and examine how and why the current division of the peninsula into North and South has evolved into a “division system.” The author contends that “civic participation” (broadly defined to include business entrepreneurs, corporations, NGOs, and private citizens) is necessary to deal with the durable enormity of the division system. He calls this body of nonstate actors the “third party” (the first two parties being those of North and South Korea). Going beyond strictly Korean affairs, this third party, the author concludes, can play a crucial role in creating a larger framework of East Asian cooperation and so...

Misdiagnosis and misrepresentations

Abstract: The “right-to-health” framework asserts that everyone has the right to the “highest attainable standard of health.” In this article, the authors explore how the right-to-health framework can aid our understanding of the state of health in North Korea today. In recent reports, human rights organizations have accused the North Korean state of violating its people's right to health. Critical examination of these reports, however, reveals a myopic focus on the North Korean state and a limited consideration of the relevant political and historical context in which the right to health ofNorth Koreans may be violated. Furthermore, by selectively applying the right-to-health framework to the public health situation in North Korea, while ignoring other low-income countries with similar health problems, the human rights reports politicize humanitarian conditions and use public health problems to justify hostile policies toward North Korea. To help improve health and welfare in North Korea, the right-to-heal...

Maps of time, clocks of space

Abstract: When Asia was conceptualized as Europe's “other,” it was also cast as a temporally delimited concept: once capitalist modernity—assumed to operate evenly across the globe by conservatives, liberals, and the left—spread to eastern Eurasia, the differences between two unequal halves of the continent were expected to evaporate. The persistence of differences long after “Asia” was incorporated into the capitalist world-economy has led to a cartographic definition of the continent. Such definitions do not allow for historical processes that reshape relations between peoples, forging new links and severing old ones. This article traces the changing imaginaries of Asia historically. Since there are no indigenous conceptions of the continent, the author argues that the changing imaginaries of Asia are linked to wider geopolitical processes. When eastern Eurasia was subordinated to the drives of the capitalist world-economy, existing linkages were severed and territories were linked to, or through, colonial metrop...

Crimes of War

Abstract: Crimes of War Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013. 370 pp. Reviewed by David Hunt (University of Massachusetts, Boston) and Ma...

Geopolitics and new spatial imaginaries

Abstract: The three articles that follow in this CAS feature collection—those by Candela, Harrar, and Fisher Onar—were first written for a workshop entitled “Shifting Geopolitical Ecologies and New Spatial Imaginaries,” during the third Inter- Asian Connections conference in Hong Kong, in June 2012. The aim of the workshop was to identify and bring into discussion emerging mental, cultural, and political conceptions of spatial categories in Asia. Workshop organizers Caglar Keyder and Ravi Arvind Palat introduce the articles below and Palat provides background and context for the articles in his own article, “Maps of Time, Clocks of Space: Changing Imaginaries of Asia” (397–410).

Reflections on history's largest air war

Abstract: Foreword by Alfred W. McCoy to Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War, edited by Fred Branfman with essays and drawings by Laotian villagers. (2nd ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. xix+176 pp.). First published in 1972, Voices from the Plain of Jars was instrumental in exposing the massive secret U.S. bombing of Laos during the Vietnam War. In this expanded edition journalist and peace activist Fred Branfman brings the story forward in time, describing the hardships that Laotians faced after the war when they returned to find their farm fields littered with cluster munitions—explosives that continue to maim and kill today.

ASIA UNDER LATE CAPITALISM: A Refocus on Reality

Abstract: The hubris over the “rise of Asia” obscures the complexities, contradictions, and struggles that actually characterize the region. Given the economic tumult that has enveloped the West, it is not surprising that we find politicians, pundits, and market players enamored with Asia as a source of economic growth. However, this skewed reading of the region, which regularly dovetails neatly with self-interest and resurgent forms of nationalism, belies material realities. On this count, the region remains home to the majority of the world's poor, increasing levels of inequality and vulnerability (even within “the success stories”), social, political, and racial intolerance, and massive environmental degradation. Moreover, Asia's much-vaunted “charm” (often shorthand for the region's cultural, historical, and natural allure) has been seriously threatened by the accumulation at all costs of late capitalism. The author's photographic work over the past decade has attempted to grapple with and communicate some of t...

What does it mean to be a marxist

Abstract: The Hari Sharma Memorial Lecture series was instituted by the Dr. Hari Sharma Foundation for South Asian Advancement in memory of Hari Sharma, who left his estate to the Foundation when he passed away in 2010. The purpose of the series is to present scholars and writers who have made a significant contribution to the struggle for emancipation in South Asia. The first lecture in this series was presented by Jan Myrdal, one of the most prominent Swedish writers, a life-long Marxist, and for many years a friend of Hari Sharma. Myrdal wrote his first book on India, India Waits, after his visit to the “disturbed areas” of Andhra as a guest of C.P. Reddy in 1980. He visited Dandakaranya in 2010 at the invitation of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and wrote about his conversation with the leadership of the party in Red Star over India: Impressions, Reflections and Discussions When the Wretched of the Earth Are Rising (Kolkata, 2012). Following his speaking tour after the book's release in Kolkata, Myrdal w...