East Asia

About: East Asia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 17591 publications have been published within this topic receiving 274073 citations. The topic is also known as: Eastern Asia.

Climatic regime shift and decadal anomalous events in China

Abstract: Climatic time series from historical documents and instrumental records from China showed temporal and regional patterns in the last two to three centuries, including two multidecadal oscillations at quasi-20-year and quasi-70-year timescales revealed by signal analysis from wavelet transform. Climatic anomalous events on the decadal timescale were identified based on the two oscillations when their positive (or negative) phases coincide with each other to amplify amplitude. The coldest event occurred in the decade of 1965–1975 in eastern China, while the periods of 1920–1930, 1940–1950, and 1988–2000 appeared to be warmer in most parts of China. For the precipitation series in northern China, the dry anomalous event was found in the late 1920s, while the wet anomalous event occurred in the 1950s. A severe drought in 1927–1929 in northern China coincided with the anomalous warm and dry decade, caused large-scale famine in nine provinces over northern China. Climatic anomalous events with a warm-dry or cold-wet association in the physical climate system would potentially cause severe negative impacts on natural ecosystem in the key vulnerable region over northern China. The spatial pattern of summer rainfall anomalies in the eastern China monsoon region showed an opposite variations in phase between the Yellow River Valley (North China) and the mid-low Yangtze River Valley as well as accompanied the shift of the northernmost monsoon boundary. Climatic regime shifts for different time points in the last 200 years were identified. In North China, transitions from dry to wet periods occurred around 1800, 1875, and 1940 while the transitions from wet to dry periods appeared around 1840, 1910, and the late 1970s. The reversal transition in these time points can also be found in the lower Yangtze River. Climatic regime shifts in China were linked to the interaction of mid- and low latitude atmospheric circulations (the westerly flow and the monsoon flow) when they cross the Tibetan Plateau in East Asia.

Southern East Asian origin and coexpansion of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Beijing family with Han Chinese

Abstract: The Beijing family is the most successful genotype of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and responsible for more than a quarter of the global tuberculosis epidemic As the predominant genotype in East Asia, the Beijing family has been emerging in various areas of the world and is often associated with disease outbreaks and antibiotic resistance Revealing the origin and historical dissemination of this strain family is important for understanding its current global success Here we characterized the global diversity of this family based on whole-genome sequences of 358 Beijing strains We show that the Beijing strains endemic in East Asia are genetically diverse, whereas the globally emerging strains mostly belong to a more homogenous subtype known as "modern" Beijing Phylogeographic and coalescent analyses indicate that the Beijing family most likely emerged around 30,000 y ago in southern East Asia, and accompanied the early colonization by modern humans in this area By combining the genomic data and genotyping result of 1,793 strains from across China, we found the "modern" Beijing sublineage experienced massive expansions in northern China during the Neolithic era and subsequently spread to other regions following the migration of Han Chinese Our results support a parallel evolution of the Beijing family and modern humans in East Asia The dominance of the "modern" Beijing sublineage in East Asia and its recent global emergence are most likely driven by its hypervirulence, which might reflect adaption to increased human population densities linked to the agricultural transition in northern China

Ethnic diversity and statistics in East Asia: ‘foreign brides’ surveys in Taiwan and South Korea

Abstract: East Asian nations have become increasingly diverse in their ethnic composition since the 1990s. A large proportion of recent immigrants consists of women from China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, who migrated following their marriage to male citizens from South Korea and Taiwan. To study this new group of foreign residents, the governments of both Taiwan and South Korea have conducted national surveys since 2000. This paper conducts a content analysis of the questions of these surveys to elaborate a criticism of the ethnic statistics produced from them. These surveys provide relevant information on this group of new residents, but they also have the potential to reinforce existing negative stereotypes due to prior assumptions that shaped the content of questionnaires. The analysis reveals that the production of statistics on migrants is influenced by three ideologies: assimilation, patriarchy and nationalism.

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance: The Diplomacy of Two Island Empires, 1894-1907

Abstract: In this book Professor Nish deals with one of the most important aspects of far eastern politics in the critical period between 1894 and 1907. His object is to demonstrate how Britain and Japan, at first separately and later jointly, reacted to Russian encroachments in China and east Asia; he is concerned also with the policies of the other European powers and of the U.S., to whose hostility towards the Anglo-Japanese alliance after 1905 Britain showed herself increasingly sensitive. First published in 1966, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.