Asian Research

East Asia Beyond the History Wars

Confronting the Ghosts of Violence

By Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morris Low, Leonid Petrov, Timothy Y. Tsu

Series: Asia's Transformations

East Asia is now the world’s economic powerhouse, but ghosts of history continue to trouble relations between the key countries of the region, particularly between Japan, China and the two Koreas. Unhappy legacies of Japan’s military expansion in pre-war Asia prompt on-going calls for apologies,...

Published December 17th 2012 by Routledge

The Role of American NGOs in China's Modernization

Invited Influence

By Norton Wheeler

Series: Asia's Transformations

In the waning years of the Cold War, the United States and China began to cautiously engage in cultural, educational, and policy exchanges, which in turn strengthened new security and economic ties. These links have helped shape the most important bilateral relationship in the late-twentieth and...

Published September 30th 2012 by Routledge

State, Society and the Market in Contemporary Vietnam

Property, Power and Values

Edited by Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Mark Sidel

Series: Asia's Transformations

Lively debates around property, access to resources, legal rights, and the protection of livelihoods have unfolded in Vietnam since the economic reforms of 1986. Known as Doi Moi (changing to the new), these have gradually transformed the country from a socialist state to a society in which a...

Published August 22nd 2012 by Routledge

The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China

Red Fire

By Gene Cooper

Series: Asia's Transformations

During the early communist period of the 1950s, temple fairs in China were both suppressed and secularized. Temples were closed down by the secular regime and their activities classified as feudal superstition and this process only intensified during the Cultural Revolution when even the surviving...

Published August 12th 2012 by Routledge

Japan’s Outcaste Abolition

The Struggle for National Inclusion and the Making of the Modern State

By Noah Y. McCormack

Series: Asia's Transformations

The Tokugawa Shogunate, which governed Japan for two and a half centuries until the mid-1860s, classed people into hierarchically ranked status groups (mibun). The early Tokugawa rulers legally established these status groups through the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, adapting and...

Published July 19th 2012 by Routledge

Remaking China's Great Cities

Space and Culture in Urban Housing, Renewal, and Expansion

By Sam Liang

Series: Asia's Transformations

This book argues that the production of new urban spaces is a crucial means of state governance in contemporary urban China. The local officials reinforce their political and economic dominance by applying their visions of modernization and globalization to urban planning and regeneration. The...

To Be Published December 30th 2013 by Routledge

Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism

Spectacle, Politics and History

By Hong Kal

Series: Asia's Transformations

While most studies on Korean nationalism centre on textual analysis, Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism offers a different approach. It looks at expositions, museums and the urban built environment at particular moments in both colonial and postcolonial eras and analyses their discursive...

Published May 9th 2011 by Routledge

Learning Chinese, Turning Chinese

Challenges to Becoming Sinophone in a Globalised World

By Edward McDonald

Series: Asia's Transformations

In this book Edward McDonald takes a fresh look at issues of language in Chinese studies. He takes the viewpoint of the university student of Chinese with the ultimate goal of becoming 'sinophone': that is, developing a fluency and facility at operating in Chinese-language contexts comparable to...

Published February 7th 2011 by Routledge

State and Society in Modern Rangoon

By Donald M. Seekins

Series: Asia's Transformations

While most of Asia’s major cities are increasingly homogenized by rapid economic growth and cultural globalization, Rangoon, which is Burma’s former capital and largest city, still bears the imprint of a unique and often turbulent history. It is the site of the Shwedagon Pagoda, a focus of Buddhist...

Published August 3rd 2010 by Routledge

Minorities and Education in Multicultural Japan

An Interactive Perspective

Edited by Ryoko Tsuneyoshi, Kaori H. Okano, Sarane Boocock

Series: Asia's Transformations

This volume examines how Japan’s increasingly multicultural population has impacted on the lives of minority children and their peers at school, and how schools are responding to this trend in terms of providing minority children with opportunities and preparing them for the adult society. The...

Published July 28th 2010 by Routledge

Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities

Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics

Edited by Jing Bao Nie, Nanyan Guo, Mark Selden, Arthur Kleinman

Series: Asia's Transformations

Prior to and during the Second World War, the Japanese Army established programs of biological warfare throughout China and elsewhere. In these “factories of death,” including the now-infamous Unit 731, Japanese doctors and scientists conducted large numbers of vivisections and experiments on...

Published June 29th 2010 by Routledge

Mapping Modernity in Shanghai

Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners' City, 1853-98

By Samuel Y. Liang

Series: Asia's Transformations

This book argues that modernity first arrived in late nineteenth-century Shanghai via a new spatial configuration. This city’s colonial capitalist development ruptured the traditional configuration of self-contained households, towns, and natural landscapes in a continuous spread, producing a new...

Published June 1st 2010 by Routledge

Girl Reading Girl in Japan

Edited by Tomoko Aoyama, Barbara Hartley

Series: Asia's Transformations

Girl Reading Girl provides the first overview of the cultural significance of girls and reading in modern and contemporary Japan with emphasis on the processes involved when girls read about other girls. The collection examines the reading practices of real life girls from differing social...

Published October 15th 2009 by Routledge

Reclaiming Chinese Society

The New Social Activism

Edited by You-tien Hsing, Ching Kwan Lee

Series: Asia's Transformations

Reclaiming Chinese Society analyses the mechanisms, processes and actors producing a wide spectrum of social and cultural changes in reform China. Contrary to most literature that emphasizes economic and political processes at the expense of Chinese society, this volume argues for the centrality of...

Published September 28th 2009 by Routledge

Re-writing Culture in Taiwan

Edited by Fang-Long Shih, Stuart Thompson, Paul Tremlett

Series: Asia's Transformations

This inter-disciplinary volume of essays opens new points of departure for thinking about how Taiwan has been studied and represented in the past, for reflecting on the current state of ‘Taiwan Studies’, and for thinking about how Taiwan might be re-configured in the future. As the study of Taiwan...

Published November 4th 2008 by Routledge

The Making of Modern Korea

2nd Edition

By Adrian Buzo

Series: Asia's Transformations

This fully updated second edition of The Making of Modern Korea provides a thorough, balanced and engaging history of Korea from 1910 to the present day. The text is unique in placing emphasis on Korea’s regional and geographical context, through which Buzo analyzes the influence of bigger and more...

Published December 19th 2007 by Routledge

Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History

Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders

Edited by Sven Saaler, J. Victor Koschmann

Series: Asia's Transformations

Regionalism has played an increasingly important role in the changing international relations of East Asia in recent decades, with early signs of integration and growing regional cooperation. This in-depth volume analyzes various historical approaches to the construction of a regional order and a...

Published December 11th 2006 by Routledge

Singapore

The State and the Culture of Excess

By Souchou Yao

Series: Asia's Transformations

Taking ideas and frameworks from philosophy, psychology, political science, cultural studies and anthropology, this book tells the larger ‘truth’ about the Singapore state. This book argues that this strong hegemonic state achieves effective rule not just from repressive policies but also through a...

Published December 6th 2006 by Routledge

Korean Society

Civil Society, Democracy and the State, 2nd Edition

By Charles K. Armstrong

Edited by Charles K. Armstrong

Series: Asia's Transformations

While most analyses of Korean politics have looked to elites to explain political change, this new and revised edition of Korean Society examines the role of ordinary people in this dramatic transformation. Taking the innovative theme of 'civil society' - voluntary organizations outside the role of...

Published November 8th 2006 by Routledge

Working in China

Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation

Edited by Ching Kwan Lee

Series: Asia's Transformations

After a quarter of a century of market reform, China has become the workshop of the world and the leading growth engine of the global economy. Its immense labour force accounts for some twenty-nine per cent of the world's total labour pool but all too little is known about Chinese labour...

Published September 4th 2006 by Routledge

The Future of US-Korean Relations

The Imbalance of Power

Edited by John Feffer

Series: Asia's Transformations

US relations with North and South Korea have been characterized by profound asymmetries of power and perception which in recent years have led to increased tensions among the three countries. Bringing together twelve prominent experts on US-Korean and US-Pacific relations, this book explores the...

Published April 27th 2006 by Routledge