Showing papers in "The Journal of Asian Studies in 2009"

Contemporary Chinese Youth and the State

Abstract: Having put a very successful Olympics in the rearview mirror, China entered 2009 with a set of new challenges, brought on in part by the worldwide economic crisis and the resulting demands to ensure necessary employment levels and in part by the familiar issue of maintaining social stability. While the hope, presumably, was to move reasonably smoothly from the Olympics of August 2008 to the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in October 2009, the Chinese media has instead become proactive in alerting local officials and the general public that China is entering “a peak period for mass incidents” (quntixing shijian, 群体性事件), with further warnings that a single national-level event, handled poorly, could “resonate” (gongzhen, 共振) into a threat to overall social stability and a serious political crisis.

“Disarming Violence”: Development, Democracy, and Security on the Borders of India

Abstract: This article offers a critical analysis of the growing emphasis on security in South Asia through an ethnographic study of Operation Sadbhavna, an Indian military initiative that was launched in 2001 after the Kargil War between India and Pakistan. It demonstrates how a renewed emphasis placed on security requirements through the adoption of the development paradigm and discourses of peace building and human security further legitimizes the military's role in governance and civil society in postcolonial democratic states such as India. The data for this article derive from the project's application in the Ladakh region of the disputed Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The ways in which the official objectives of the project were interpreted and incorporated into the political, cultural, and economic aspirations of communities in Ladakh reveal both the coercive and ambiguous nature of democracy and state power in South Asia today.

Wink on Pink: Interpreting Japanese Cute as It Grabs the Global Headlines

Abstract: stand two young women in various shades of pink from head to toe: shocking pink hair adorned with multiple pink barrettes, fuzzy pink kitten earmuffs, pink baby doll dresses, mismatched pink knee-high socks, and pink laced shoes. Around one woman's neck hangs that icon of cute: Sanrio Company's flagship character since 1974, Hello Kitty. Among the barrettes in the other woman's hair is, again, Kitty. Standing at the entrance to Harajuku?the commercial mecca of street youth culture in Japan?they pose, leaning into each other, hands clenched, kitten-paw-style, at their cheeks. In the insouciant style of these Tokyo women, the look is not passively sweet, but assertively in-your-face kawaii (cute). This is cute with a wink, gesturing to the cameras that await them. The women pose for multiple gazes, knowing that what they donned that morning might be seen thousands of miles away, captured by foreign and Japanese photogra phers and posted on Web sites or eventually published in magazines and glossy coffee table books. The interaction between viewer and viewed defines and reifies the spectacle of kawaii, or what I call "Japanese cute." Nestled within the interaction, tucked among the frills of this Tokyo "cute overload" rests that mouthless icon of Japanese girl culture, Hello Kitty. Another gaze upon Japanese cute and, specifically, Hello Kitty comes from multiple news wire sources in August 2007. The headline declares, "To Punish Thai Police, a Hello Kitty Armband." Reported widely from the Associated Press to CNN International to Al Jazeera, the story revolves around a new strat egy devised by Bangkok police to discipline not the general public, but their own male patrol force. Any delinquent officer would be shamed into compliance by being forced to wear a bright pink Hello Kitty armband. Hello Kitty?that ulti mate symbol of cute femininity in Asia and elsewhere?presumably provided a sufficient threat to the police officers' masculinity. As of the news item's

Strategic Hypocrisy: The British Imperial Scripting of Tibet's Geopolitical Identity

Abstract: The protests in and around Tibet in 2008 show that Tibet's status within China remains unsettled. The West is not an outsider to the Tibet question, which is defined primarily in terms of the debate over the status of Tibet vis-a-vis China. Tibet's modern geopolitical identity has been scripted by British imperialism. The changing dynamics of British imperial interests in India affected the emergence of Tibet as a (non)modern geopolitical entity. The most significant aspect of the British imperialist policy practiced in the first half of the twentieth century was the formula of “Chinese suzerainty/Tibetan autonomy.” This strategic hypocrisy, while nurturing an ambiguity in Tibet's status, culminated in the victory of a Western idea of sovereignty. It was China, not Tibet, that found the sovereignty talk most useful. The paper emphasizes the world-constructing role of contesting representations and challenges the divide between the political and the cultural, the imperial and the imaginative.

Inconspicuous Consumption: Sake, Beer, and the Birth of the Consumer in Japan

Abstract: The growth of consumption and the emergence of the consumer have become major fields of study in the history of Europe and North America but have been largely neglected by historians of Japan, especially economic ones. This paper argues that, in Japan as elsewhere, the “birth of the consumer” predated the onset of industrialization—hence was not simply a function of the opening of the country to Western modernity—and that the growth of consumption, of “indigenous” as well as “foreign” goods, went on to represent an integral part of the process of economic development. This argument is illustrated by a case study of growth and change in the “ordinary consumption” of food and drink, and in particular of sake, a “traditional” product that emerged as a major consumer good, and of beer, the “foreign” product that was to become, alongside sake, one of the necessities of modern Japanese life.

State, Sovereignty, and the People: A Comparison of the “Rule of Law” in China and India

Abstract: This paper uses the concept of the “rule of law” to compare Qing China and British India. Rather than using the rule of law instrumentally, the paper embeds it in the histories of state power and sovereignty in China and India. Three themes, all framed by the rule of law and the rule of man as oppositional yet paradoxically intertwined notions, organize the paper's comparisons: the role of a discourse of law in simultaneously legitimizing and constraining the political authority of the state; the role of law and legal procedures in shaping and defining society; and the role of law in defining an economic and social order based on contract, property, and rights. A fourth section considers the implications of these findings for the historical trajectories of China and India in the twentieth century. Taking law as an instrument of power and an imagined realm that nonetheless also transcended power and operated outside its ambit, the paper seeks to broaden the history of the “rule of law” beyond Euro-America.

Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun

Abstract: The fraught encounters between biological sciences and religions such as Buddhism have raised philosophical issues for many. This essay will focus on one of them: Can form ground the truth of life? The author suggests that, along with the introduction of evolutionary biology from Europe, literary realism in China has emerged as a technology of biomimesis, among other such technologies, to grapple with the problem of “life as form.” Focusing on Lu Xun's early interest in Ernst Haeckel and science fiction, especially his translation of “Technique for Creating Humans” and his narrative fiction “Prayers for Blessing,” which drew extensively on a Buddhist avadāna, the essay seeks to throw some new light on the familiar as well as unfamiliar sources relating to Lu Xun's life and works and to develop a new understanding of how the debates on science and metaphysics have developed in modern China.

Interests, Wireless Technology, and Institutional Change: From Government Monopoly to Regulated Competition in Indian Telecommunications

Abstract: This paper explores the causes behind the institutional change that promoted regulated private-sector competition in India's booming telecommunications sector. This change occurred incrementally by resolving conflicts of interest driven by the twin engines of fiscal crisis and technological change in cellular telephony. The Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Finance pushed for the change, whereas the Department of Telecommunications resisted it. As private participation succeeded, the relationship between the private sector and government financial organizations made a significant impact on parts of the government that favored change. Cellular technology offered the private sector with a first-mover's advantage because it had gambled on it when government-owned corporations had ignored its commercial potential. Evolutionary change occurred through a process of institutional layering that involved establishing new institutions along the edges of old ones and allowing them to grow differentially. The pace of institutional change accelerated in times of financial crises when the mismatch between policy intention and institutions led to a withdrawal of private investment.

After the War: A New Patriotism in Sri Lanka?

Abstract: On May 19, 2009, the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, dressed in his traditional white sarong and shirt, solemnly addressed Parliament: “The writ of the state now runs across every inch of our territory … we have completely defeated terrorism.” The same day, photographs of the corpse of the ruthless rebel leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran adorned all of the local newspapers. With his death, the secessionist war was over—this endless war that had pitted the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) against the security forces of the government of Sri Lanka since 1983. It had sunk deep into the psyche of the people of all communities, and its terrible violence had elicited much international attention and reprimand. President Rajapaksa then addressed his citizens in the Tamil language, promising reconciliation and embracing the Tamil-speaking people in his program of recovery for the ravaged North. A “northern spring” would soon come. On the streets of Colombo, there was a feeling of trepidation, while celebrations, some spontaneous and others orchestrated by sycophantic politicians, peppered the capital. The day had been given as a special holiday for the war-weary people to celebrate by eating kiribath (milk rice) and launching (peaceful) rockets, as fireworks are commonly called. People waved the Lion Flag and compared the president to the famous second-century bce Sinhalese hero Dutugemunu, another son of the Ruhuna (Southern Sri Lanka) who succeeded in conquering Anuradhapura from the Tamil king Elara, whom he famously slew with a dart. King Dutugemunu has long been a folk hero in Sri Lanka for uniting the country under a single rule.

Reconciliation and Revitalization: The Resurgence of Tradition in Postconflict Tobelo, North Maluku, Eastern Indonesia

Abstract: This article looks at sfforts to revitalize "tradition" (in Indonesian, adat) among the Tobelo people in the eastern Indonesian province of North Maluku in the aftermath of the ethnic and religious violence that swept the region in 1999-2001. It examines how some groups in Tobelo society are attempting to revive previously marginalized adat practices as a way to facilitate reconciliation between Muslim and Christian communities. Those involved in these efforts believe that a revitalization of adat will shift people's focus of identity from their religion—the focus of the recent conflict—to their ethnicity. They hope this shift in focus will transcend religious differences. The paper explores these attempts to articulate Tobelo tradition and Tobelo identity in order to prevent future violence. It also discusses the rationales and historical justifications for seeing adat as a mechanism for reconcilication and conflict prevention.

Thai Politics as Reality TV

Abstract: Early in the morning of August 26, 2008, a large group of stick-wielding, black-shirted masked men forced their way into the studios of Bangkok's NBT television station, briefly detaining a number of staff. Once inside, they flung open the main doors, allowing several hundred more yellow-shirted protestors from the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) inside. Other PAD supporters occupied the grounds of the station. NBT, the channel of the government's Public Relations Department (PRD) formerly known as Channel 11, was held by the PAD for around twelve hours. During this time, rogue engineers tried unsuccessfully to channel their illegal—but wildly popular—ASTV television signal through the NBT network. Defeated by the technical challenges, the protestors gave up their occupation of NBT, returning to Government House, the office of the Thai prime minister. That same afternoon, PAD supporters had climbed the fence of Government House and occupied the compound surrounding the Italianate Khu Fa building.

Hot Potatoes: Chinese Complaint Systems from Early Times to the Late Qing (1898)

Abstract: This essay is a first attempt at examining the origins and development of Chinese complaint systems before 1900, so as to understand the nature and character of this institution in historical perspective. The essay argues that the Chinese complaint system originated as an informal system in the pre-Han period and developed gradually from the late Han to the Sui. The Tang first institutionalized such a system and distinguished three major forms of complaints: direct, jumping, and gradual appeals. Subsequent states generally followed the Tang model but also made significant changes. Chinese rulers, deeply influenced by the Confucian concept of minben (people as the foundation of the state) and by notions of heaven-human interaction (tianren ganying), tended to accept illegal appeals no matter how annoying they were for fear that any grievance might prompt heavenly punishments, while complainants regarded their appeals as a natural right no matter how useless they were. In this way, the complaint system become a hot potato for rulers that was too hot to hold but too valuable to drop.

Rewriting Collaboration: China, Japan, and the Self in the Diaries of Bai Jianwu

Abstract: This essay considers the meanings of Sino-Japanese collaboration before the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) through the personal diary of one collab orator, Bai Jianwu (1886-1937). Rather than debate the veracity of the diary narrative, the author considers the diary as a "political performance"?as an assembly of formulaic elements borrowed from contemporary discourse, histori cal example, and generic conventions that was designed to locate collaboration within a range of conceivable responses to China's predicament. While the emer ging narratives of national resistance typically portrayed collaboration as an unthinkable transgression, the collaboration narrative of the diary, shifting and often ambivalent, illuminates the terms on which Bai was prepared to argue that collaboration with the Japanese was an acceptable choice, and the place that he allowed collaboration in the story of his life.

Early Twentieth-Century Intra-East Asian Literary Contact Nebulae: Censored Japanese Literature in Chinese and Korean

Abstract: 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-a-vis metropolitan imperial and cultural authority.

Testing Concepts about Print, Newspapers, and Politics: Kerala, India, 1800–2009

Abstract: This essay attempts to bring greater subtlety to our understanding of the role that print and newspapers play in the shaping of modern society. The essay begins by focusing on the centrality that Jurgen Habermas and Benedict Anderson give to print and newspapers and examines the applicability of their ideas to Kerala, India's most newspaper-consuming state, over the past 200 years. The essay suggests that by conceptualizing print and newspaper development in three stages, we arrive at a more accurate understanding of the impact of print consumption on societies and their politics.

Venturing into "Barbarous" Regions: Transborder Trade among Migrant Yunnanese between Thailand and Burma, 1960s-1980s

Abstract: This essay examines the cross-border trade among the migrant Yunnanese between Burma and Thailand during the era of the Burmese socialist regime. It was a period when the Burmese government implemented a nationalized economic system and strictly forbade free movement and private trade. Taking a transborder perspective, the essay looks beyond government institutions and probes the mercantile agency of the migrant Yunnanese traders, which contrib uted to the formation of their socioeconomic mechanisms. The findings suggest that the economic practices of the Yunnanese traders in effect constituted a transnational popular realm that formed an informal oppositional power against the Thai and Burmese national bureaucracies on the one hand, and incorporated varied state agencies on the other hand.

India and China: Governance Issues and Development

Abstract: The world's two most populous countries each made international headlines in 2008, thanks to the Sichuan earthquake and Beijing Olympics, the Mumbai terror attacks, and reports of how the global financial crisis affected the Chinese and Indian economies. However, China and India were also seen in 2008 as making up, together, one of the ongoing development stories of the twenty-first century―and there are good reasons to think this trend will continue throughout 2009. Thanks to years of strikingly high growth rates for India and even higher ones for China, comparisons of the two countries have proliferated. This has resulted in a slew of books and articles, often aimed at investors, that worry over or enthuse about the way the "dragon" and the "elephant" have been upending or bringing new energy into the global economic order. Scholars immersed in the study of Asia often find these publications lacking in depth, but there is no question that economic shifts in the two countries and surging interest in their current trajectories are important. With this in mind, we decided this would be a useful time to revisit a familiar governance issue that has long been associated with joint diseussions of China and India: the relationship between democracy and development. We invited economist Pranab Bardhan, author of a forthcoming book on the political economy of India and China titled Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay, to reflect on the subject, concentrating in particular on issues of governance― a topic he has explored in plenary and keynote addresses given everywhere from Montreal to Manchester, Beijing to Bogota, Canberra to Calcutta.

Everyday Life as Critique in Late Colonial Korea: Kim Namch'ŏn's Literary Experiments, 1934–43

Abstract: Perhaps the most renowned leftist writer of late colonial Korea, Kim Namch'ŏn left a complex body of work that has so far defied an encompassing interpretation. On the one hand, in his theoretical writings, Kim consistently advocated realism as his aesthetic principle. On the other hand, within his fictional writings, Kim also displayed an antithetical interest in the fragmentary scenes of modern life, which he often depicted through experimental techniques of a modernist aesthetic sensibility. In this essay, an attempt is made to provide a unified account of Kim's works. Special attention is given to Kim's early theorization of the everyday as a proper literary space for a materialist critique of society. This focus on everyday life, it is argued, enabled Kim to critique both the teleological outlook of dogmatic socialism and the utopian vision of pan-Asianism, but it did not shelter him from a fascination with the daily spectacles of urban modernity.

Getting over the Walls of Discourse: "Character Fetishization" in Chinese Studies

Abstract: Debates on the nature of the Chinese writing system, particularly whether Chinese characters may or may not legitimately be called “ideographs,” continue to bedevil Chinese studies This paper considers examples of what are referred to as “discourses of character fetishization,” whereby an inordinate status is discursively created for Chinese characters in the interpretation of Chinese language, thought, and culture The author endeavors to analyze and critique the presuppositions and implications of such discourses, with the aim of defusing the passions that have been aroused by this issue, and showing the way toward a more comprehensive and grounded understanding of the nature of Chinese characters, both as a writing system and in relation to Chinese culture and thought

“Idols” in the Temple: Icons and the Cult of Confucius

Abstract: Until 1530, sculptural images of Confucius and varying numbers of disciples and later followers received semiannual sacrifices in state-supported temples all over China. The icons' visual features were greatly influenced by the posthumous titles and ranks that emperors conferred on Confucius and his followers, the same as for deities in the Daoist and Buddhist pantheons. This convergence led to visual conflation and aroused objections from Neo-Confucian ritualists, culminating in the ritual reform of 1530, which replaced images with inscribed tablets and Confucius's kingly title with the designation Ultimate Sage and First Teacher. However, the ban on icons did not apply to the primordial temple of Confucius in Qufu, Shandong. Post-1530 gazetteers publicized the distinction by reproducing a line drawing of this temple's sculptural icon, and persistent replications of this image helped to popularize his cult. The same period saw a proliferation of non-godlike representations of Confucius, including his portrayal as a teacher, whose iconographic origins can be traced to a painted portrait handed down through generations of his descendants. In recent years, variations of this teacher image have become the basis for new sculptural representations, first in Taiwan, then in Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora, and finally on the mainland. Now installed at sites around the world, statues of Confucius have become a contested symbol of Chinese civilization.

Base Cultures: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Occupied Japan

Abstract: This article examines how the bodies of Japanese women became a key site of political and cultural contestation during the Allied occupation. The sale of sex, once legally recognized and regulated, became a conspicuous symbol of postwar chaos. Ostracizing sex workers who catered to servicemen provided a means to display an abiding nationalism without directly confronting the occupiers. But these women were also indispensable in the economy of military base cities. Journalists and social critics sought to discern or impose order by devising elaborate taxonomies, cartographies, health regimes, and moral codes. Sex workers were active participants in this process, but their personal testimonies show how their lives defied categorization. When the Diet finally intervened with the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law, it was merely the culmination of a long process involving every segment of Japanese society.

Saved by the Saint: Refusing and Reversing Partition in Muslim North India

Abstract: Although Punjab experienced serious violence during the 1947 partition, no one died in Malerkotla. This peace at partition is central to the collective identity of the town, founded in 1454 by a Sufi saint. Focusing on the power of the saint, his tomb shrine, and his multireligious cult, this study demonstrates how Malerkotla's idealized reputation is produced and perpetuated. Through ritual exchanges and oral and written accounts, residents and pilgrims integrate the partition experience into the history of the saint and his town, so that this moment comes to symbolize Malerkotla's pacific civic identity.

The Chimera of Privacy: Reading Self-Discipline in Japanese Diaries from the Second World War (1937-1945)

Abstract: This article has two main goals for its examination of wartime diaries: (1) to argue against the idea that a diary’s reliability is directly related to the degree of privacy that its author enjoyed, and (2) to suggest an alternate use for these texts by scholars—namely, the construction of the author’s concept of self through acts of “self-discipline.” The article briefly outlines military diary writing and reportage in modern Japan, showing how “fact” and “truth” came to be understood in diaries. Through an examination of published and manuscript diaries, the article addresses theoretical premises such as “intended audience, ”“ private language,” and the nature of “privacy” itself. Finally, the article provides an alternative reading of diaries: The texts represent the author’s attempt to construct a compelling and coherent subject position. Because diarists are involved in the construction of their identities, the article suggests that scholars use diaries to move beyond examinations of subjectivity solely reliant on disciplinary institutions.