During the late 1930s and early 1940s Japanese researchers carried out a large and well-funded study of customary law in rural North China. The results of that research, published in the 1950s, have been one of the major sources for theories about prewar Chinese rural society. In the last twenty years Japanese and Chinese researchers have undertaken follow-up studies of the same villages. This review article introduces Chinese and Japanese follow-up studies on the kankō chōsa villages, the new materials and approaches they have used, and their contributions to on-going debates about Chinese rural society and social change.

Mainstream histories of the Cold War have tended to reduce the events surrounding Southeast Asian decolonization and nationalism to the universal notions of ideological confrontation, bipolarity, and the global division between a capitalist and communist camp. This obscures how multiple entities – the former colonial powers, different classes and ethnic groups, and local elites of different ideological and political persuasion – come into contention as they negotiate for a place in postcolonial society. Thus this article examines the case of Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s and argues that these forms of contention provincialize experiences with nationalism, communalism, and communism and by so doing disconnect them from the dominant narratives of the Cold War. I examine various texts by British colonial officials, communist and non-communist political figures, and university students that show how British attempts at managing a decolonizing entity were offset by the local intelligentsia's ambivalence in coming to terms with nationalism and communism.

The development of transit trade between China and Russia after the eighteenth century led to the growth of prosperous Chinatowns in Mongolia. These maimaicheng (lit. “trade towns”) along a Chinese merchant network that reached Siberia and Turkestan displayed distinctive urban spaces, where a multicultural mixture of people – Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan and Hui Moslem – created new architectural styles and produced unique streetscapes. Unlike urban formations before the eighteenth century, these new towns absorbed nomadic and religious elements into their residential and secular spaces. This did not however imply assimilation. The landscape of northern Chinese towns clearly shows how different cultures were able to preserve their original styles and simultaneously adapt themselves to coexist with others.

This article explores the interpretation of the Qurān presented by Mullā Sadrā (d. 1050AH/1640), a mystic philosopher of Ithnācasharī Shīca Islam in Iran. First, in his Keys to the Unknown (Mafātīh al-ghayb), we know the general mechanism of how reading the Qur'ān realizes spiritual perfection. Mullā Sadrā considers the Qurān as the source of spiritual wisdom with a multi-layered structure of meaning. Through concentration on Qur'ānic texts, a reader's soul will be open to a deeper layer of meaning with an awareness of a higher level of spiritual perfection. As a concrete example, we examine his commentary on the Chapter of Earthquake (Sūrat al-Zalzalah), which depicts the catastrophic events on the Last Day. In the literal meaning, or the surface layer of meaning, he intuits as a hidden deeper meaning the incessant re-creation and dynamic flux of existence towards perfection, which also explains different transformations of human beings in the hereafter. We find here another spirituality of Islam, which differs from that of the Islam built on the surface meanings of the Qur'ān.

Chinese conduct books for women were read throughout East Asia, but because Chinese was considered too difficult for women in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, vernacular editions often were prepared in order to make the message more accessible. In this article we present a bibliographic study of surviving conduct books for Vietnamese women, both in Chinese and in Vietnamese, and in manuscript and printed forms, and consider the production of such texts in the light of conduct literature for women produced in Korea and Japan. A particularly interesting case is Lesser learning for women, a hybrid book combining a Ming-dynasty didactic text in Chinese with other didactic materials in Vietnamese. For the most part, these various conduct books for women purvey unchanging moral certainties and restrictions for women, and as such were increasingly at odds with the changing world of colonial Vietnam in which educational opportunities for women were growing.

Beginning in 1260, the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan embarked on the creation of a Chinese-style bureaucracy to govern his realm more effectively. At the same time, the court began to promulgate a salary code for its officials. Though both processes were led in large part by Chinese scholar-officials, this group continually complained about the shortcomings of the salary code and its negative effects on the bureaucracy. By studying their writings on salaries and official government records, this article will demonstrate that the Chinese literati used their complaints about the salary code to level criticisms against flaws in the administration and to push for bureaucratic reform, and that the Yuan court was genuinely concerned about the salary problem and took measures to alleviate it. Yet the court never actually reformed, and this article will ultimately aim to show how the response to the issue of salaries reflected the Mongols’ desires to cling to the power and privilege that was afforded to them by a bureaucratic structure which preserved much of their traditional steppe institutions and values.

When the global material reality has already been reshaped and determined by western modernity, Gandhism and Maoism stand for attempts to discover a material world other than the existing one. I examine the ways in which the theory and practice of the body in Mao and Gandhi resonates with new materialisms' views of the body and matter as dynamic multitude and anti-dualistic open system. Gandhi and Mao share the concerns of new materialism in terms of seeing human bodies, environments, (in)organic matters and systems as configurations of multiple influences and dependencies. To put Maoism and Gandhism in the perspective of today's new materialism, the entanglement of human, nature and matter in their ideas also functions as a kind of agency in connection to other socio-political forces (instead of deploying ethics, as current new materialist ontologies have done) to enact changes. The ways in which the two formidable Asian thinkers grasp materials sound more like an abstraction, revealing that materialisms – either old or new – may be something other than what they define themselves as.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, China extended significant medical aid to international communities, aiming to combat the virus's spread and foster global solidarity. However, despite the appreciation expressed by recipient governments for China's assistance, the general public's perception of China did not significantly improve. This prompts the question: why did China's COVID-19 health diplomacy fail to resonate with foreign audiences? This article delves into the cases of Thailand and the Philippines to argue that public perceptions of countries providing aid can be heavily influenced by domestic political dynamics, particularly when incumbent governments already face legitimacy challenges prior to aid delivery. By scrutinizing the implementation of China's aid and the state-to-state relations between China and incumbent governments, political opposition forces can exploit any shortcomings or missteps, placing blame squarely on the incumbents. Given the existing distrust toward incumbent governments, the public is more inclined to accept messages propagated by opposition groups, thereby hindering any positive shift in perception toward China. This perspective complements existing research that predominantly focuses on the diplomatic strategies of donor countries, suggesting instead that the domestic politics of host countries play a pivotal role in shaping the effectiveness of foreign nations' efforts to cultivate favorable images among foreign audiences.

Post-independence national historical writings have often been seen as a product of nationalist advocacy and modern nation-state formation. Moving beyond this perspective, this article considers how political leaders took a direct role in promoting different kinds and forms of collective historical thoughts to strengthen their leadership. Specifically, the article explores an active engagement of independent Cambodia's leaders such as Prince Sihanouk, Lon Nol, and Pol Pot, who independently saw national historical understanding as one's own monopolized source of power. It also discusses how different historical accounts in the country were shaped by, and kept up with, other important factors such as Cold War confrontations and regional and global historiographical trends, including “Modernist” and “Marxist” approaches. Discussing these factors helps us understand more critically national historical accounts, which were closely intertwined with specific socioreligious and political circumstances such as political rule and legitimacy, widespread public anxieties, and geopolitical tensions. It also sheds light on the substantial impact of state-imposed historical interpretations on society. As informed by the Cambodian case, this impact can be seen in the implementation of state projects stirred by certain kinds of historical understanding which consequently transformed the living conditions of thousands of people.

This article focuses on a set of aesthetic debates that took place in China in the late 1950s. By exploring the main arguments presented by different thinkers, particularly the writings of Zhu Guanqian and Li Zehou, this article demonstrates how the aesthetics took part in the ideological formation of the new socialist state. From the debates, we observe the tensions between the complexity of the material-political and the reductionism of the state ideology. We also recognize why and how aesthetics could be such an important site of political contestation in this young socialist country, and how the interactions between human senses and the material world are essential to arts universally. The dominant materialist aesthetics presented in the debate was less a theory of things than a theory of the social. This historical materialist approach might be useful as a social critique; however, when handled dogmatically, it not only rejects the autonomy of things, but also disallows art works to reflect the complex human interactions with the material world beyond economic power relations. We can find more sophisticated analysis in Zhu's aesthetic theory, which tries to incorporate the interactions between the subjects and the objects into materialism.

This paper explores how Japanese officials and others conceptualized police power at particular junctures in imperial Japanese history (1868–1945). It does so by synthesizing prior scholarship on the Japanese police into a broader genealogy of the police idea in prewar Japan, beginning with the first translations and explanations of police in the Meiji period, the changing perceptions of the police in the 1910s, and the evolution from the “national police” idea in the 1920s to the “emperor's police” in the late 1930s. The essay proposes that the police idea in Japan (and elsewhere) can be read as a boundary concept in which the changing conceptions of police power demarcate the shifting relationship between state and society. Indeed, it is the elusiveness of this boundary that allows for police power – and by extension, state power – to function within society and transform in response to social conditions. Approached in this way, the essay argues that the different permutations of the police idea index the evolving modality of state power in prewar Japan, and thus allows us to reconsider some of the defining questions of imperial Japanese history.