Michael Loewe has repeatedly and as recently as 2021 looked at how Confucius appears in Han sources and has drawn attention to his lack of prominence, at least to the degree one might expect. Here, a preliminary assessment of the sources of opposition to Buddhism in one key sixth-century c.e. collection of polemics further demonstrates that adherence to mingjiao 名教 (Teaching of a Good Name) or to lijiao 禮教 (teaching on ritual) appears there as the main identifiers of opponents; rujiao, the term often later translated as “Confucianism,” is mentioned but once. While the commitment to values such as filial piety promoted by opponents of Buddhism is clear; their institutional coherence and self-awareness as a group does not seem to have been at all on a par with that of the Buddhist community. That situation did not start to shift until the Tang dynasty.

Why do oil-dependent developing countries exhibit divergent responses to oil crises? This study employs a comparative case study approach and utilizes a ‘most similar system design’ to examine the varying state responses to the 1973 oil shock in Turkey and South Korea. While the former refrained from implementing radical short-term adjustment policies and reforms, the latter adopted proactive measures to mitigate the worsening impact of escalating oil prices. This research contends that the existing literature, which emphasizes distinctions in industrialization strategies and fiscal policies among developing nations, offers an incomplete explanation for the divergent reactions of states to external price shocks. Instead, the study proposes a sociological perspective, focusing on the influence of varying degrees of state autonomy and the characteristics of bureaucratic systems on the decision-making processes of states. The key finding suggests that while pre-crisis economic policies and industrialization strategies may limit the array of policy tools available to counteract the adverse effects of an oil crisis, the extent of state autonomy and the organization of the bureaucracy – whether adhering to Weberian or non-Weberian principles – impact the efficacy of these policy tools and the determination of decision-makers to act in the best interests of the long-term public good.

This article leverages Watsuji Tetsurō's idea of aidagara – “inter-relationships” – to better appreciate the interpenetration of space and relationships in Japanese foreign policy narratives. I set Watsuji's philosophical framework against Japanese foreign policy narratives referring to various spaces as a case study to emphasizing the interplay of space and relationships in Japanese diplomatic efforts. On the one hand, we see the Japanese government invoking East Asia, the Asia-Pacific, and the Indo-Pacific as spatial descriptors to conceptualize the political dynamics surrounding them. On the other hand, Japan's relations with its interlocutors reify fluid geographical boundaries as spaces relevant for Japan's foreign relations. Thus, Watsuji helps us to rethink international politics as an aidagara in which the space produces political relationships, while political relationships themselves reproduce, or even redefine, space.

This essay takes a close look at Maura Dykstra's monograph Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine (Harvard Asia Center, 2022). It analyzes the book's multitude of problems, such as its flawed conception, numerous factual blunders, failure to engage existing scholarship, problematic choice of primary sources, and dubious citation practices. Most significantly, this essay aims to provide ample evidence to demonstrate how the book systematically misrepresents the majority of its primary sources to support an untenable thesis. It argues that the book's central claims are ungrounded in evidence.

We explored the nexus between the quality of human capital, productivity-enhancing factors, and the quality of institutions in nine Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries using canonical correlation and principal component analysis of country-level data for 2007–2017 from the World Bank, World Economic Forum, and Penn World Tables databases. We found that an unequal development of human capital in the ASEAN countries is clearly linked to their heterogeneous institutional conditions and that the quality of human capital drives technology absorption and innovation. The four transition economies in the region—Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar—are facing particularly difficult challenges in developing institutional environments that stimulate human capital development to reach higher levels of knowledge intensity of their economies and achieve the resulting competitive advantages.

A review published in this journal claims that my first academic monograph, Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), fails to meet “basic academic standards” (George Zhijian Qiao, “Was There an Administrative Revolution? Review Essay on Maura Dykstra, Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State,” Journal of Chinese History (2023), doi:10.1017/jch.2023.19). The reviewer makes this remarkable claim not by demonstrating any egregious or particularly damning fault, but rather with an argument of preponderance, claiming that the book contains “hundreds of errors” (2). The review also contains several dubious and disturbing arguments about what constitutes good history. The flaws of those larger methodological and historiographical assertions are serious and compelling enough that they must be treated at length, separately. In this, my initial response to the review, I will constrain myself to rebutting the reviewer's false claims that the book is full of errors and that I have committed academic malfeasance.

The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) attracted more than passing interest in the pages of El Renacimiento in the Philippines and Bintang Hindia in the Dutch East Indies. Both publications featured pieces with editorializing tones that indulged in a significant degree of delight at the spectacle of Russian defeats and humiliations at the hands of the Japanese. This article engages in a close reading of this coverage to insert these instances of colonial schadenfreude into the broader trajectories of shaping communities of readers and nationalist awakenings in both colonies. Filipino nationalists in El Renacimiento dropped clear clues likening Russian aggression against Japan, an archipelagic Asian nation like the Philippines, to that which Filipinos experienced under the Americans, thus engaging in a symbolic displacement of that international event into their own historical present. Mocking Russians was part of a nationalist reading of the war that allowed for delight in the spectacle of White humiliation and the prospects of Japanese aid in anti-colonial struggle. The way the Russo-Japanese War was commented on by Bintang Hindia less than ten years before the ‘national awakening’ period was remarkably similar to the reporting in El Renacimiento. This isomorphism between two different historical contexts allows us to examine the role that mockery of Europeans played in forming a community of readers, nationalism, and the gradual undermining of the ideas of White supremacy on which colonialism was predicated.

Cai Yong 蔡邕 (132–192) was one of the most erudite scholars of the Eastern Han. A major project of his was the so-called “Stone Classics of the Xiping era” (Xiping Shijing 熹平石經) project first commissioned by Emperor Ling in 175 c.e., for which Cai Yong wrote the texts of the court-sanctioned Classics in his own calligraphy. For the text of one of these Classics, the Odes (Shi 詩), he is known to have used the so-called Lu 魯 version, which was the dominant interpretative line for the Odes classic in his time. However, the question of whether Cai Yong's literary writings also evince a preference for the Lu reading of the Odes has not yet received much scholarly consideration. In my study, the Qincao 琴操, a collection of anecdotes and song texts relating to pieces played to the accompaniment of the zither qin, a work that may also be assigned to Cai Yong but has also mostly been neglected so far, will be analyzed in relation to the Lu interpretive line, as will the “Qingyi fu” 青衣賦 (Rhapsody on a Grisette), one of Cai Yong's rhapsodies.

The incumbent-led subversion of democracy represents the most prevalent form of democratic backsliding in recent decades. A central puzzle in this mode of backsliding is why these incumbents enjoy popular support despite their actions against democracy. We address this puzzle using the case of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Although some Philippine analysts have speculated that his popularity was inflated due to social desirability bias (SDB) among survey respondents, there has been limited empirical examination. Our pre-registered list experiment surveys conducted in February/March 2021 detected SBD-induced overreporting at about 39 percentage points in face-to-face surveys and 28 percentage points in online surveys. We also found that the poor Mindanaoans, and those who believed their neighbors supported Duterte, were more likely to respond according to SDB. These possibly counter-intuitive results should be interpreted with caution because the survey was conducted during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, and the findings cannot necessarily be extrapolated to the other period of his presidency. Nevertheless, this study suggests that preference falsification could be an alternative explanation for the puzzle of popular incumbents in democratic backsliding.

Theories about state-led Islamisation tend to attribute the phenomenon to domestic dynamics, such as political competition, institutional co-optation, and changing social norms. When exogenous factors are considered, they usually refer to imported ideologies. Moreover, Islamisation is often depicted as a firm rejection of the West. This article seeks to complicate those explanations. Using insights from the ontological security literature in International Relations, I argue that Malaysia's state-led Islamisation cannot be understood comprehensively without looking at macro-historical factors, particularly Malaysia's postcoloniality and its elites’ perception of the global order. Instead of being a manifestation of anti-West sentiments, I argue that the initial receptivity towards Islamisation by Malaysia's largely secular ethnonationalist elites constitutes a quest for recognition within an international order within which the Muslim identity is racialised and stigmatised. This is most obvious in Mahathir Mohamad's ideas on Islam, in that his calling for a developmentalist Islam has as its (imagined) respondent the stigmatising ‘West’. I argue that the forms of Islamisation undertaken during the Mahathir administration reflected this drive to catch up with the West while simultaneously securing recognition for Islam; and that such a leitmotif persisted even into the post-September 11, post-Barisan Nasional world.

Is political polarization in Indonesia here to stay? For years, scholarly consensus on partisanship in Indonesia viewed weak partisan identity, collusive party behavior, and the predominance of personality as features of a system that would prevent the emergence of deep polarization. In the wake of religious and ethnic mobilizations during three contentious elections, the question of whether polarization has come to Indonesia is increasingly salient. Where previous studies have focused on elite polarization, we focus on whether polarization has a mass base. Using an original, nationally representative survey of 1,520 Indonesian adults shortly before the 2019 election, we tested whether political preferences in Indonesia reflected any of four underlying sets of resentment—religious, anti-Chinese, anti-Java, or regional. We found links of varying strength between each of these resentments and political preferences. Analyzing the sources of resentments, we find evidence that different resentments may travel through different channels: religious resentment through organizational membership, anti-Chinese resentment through exposure to social media, regional resentment through awareness of regional resource disparities, and resentment of Java through having experienced the old politics of Java—Outer Islands conflict. These links between political affiliation and resentment suggest that polarization is here to stay, so long as politicians make use of real, underlying resentments.

Between 1975 and 1979 the genocidal regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) in Cambodia targeted minorities including the Cham Muslim population. To hold the regime to account for its crimes against the Cambodian people, the Cambodian government in 2001 formed the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Using transcripts of testimonies and judgements from the ECCC, this article examines Gender-Based Violence (GBV) among the Cham Muslim population. The study shows that Alexander Hinton's arguments to explain GBV using cultural frameworks are insufficient in this case. Indeed, Nicole Rafter has proven it is important to take into account the broader genocidal context to the violence. This article argues that ECCC documentation proves that GBV cannot be explained by cultural contexts alone and instead needs to be understood as a means to destroy the Cham and Cham culture.

The dominant role of the authoritarian state in Chinese volunteerism has been noted but little examined in the scholarly literature. This study illuminates the ways in which the Chinese state controls and administers volunteerism and volunteering through a detailed analysis of the governance of volunteering in Beijing. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and archival research, we analyse how Beijing administers volunteering and its structures through the work of its administrative authority for managing volunteering in regulation and public policy, management structure, resources, internal operations, monitoring and evaluation. We argue that Beijing has built a comprehensive apparatus to manage and control volunteering through a Party- and state-controlled, multi-layered and centralized management structure. However, this state corporatist structure carries within it the seeds for over-formal controls and conflicts between official, professional service providers and the increasing number of volunteers throughout Chinese society.

The tazkira, a long-established genre of life-history writing in South Asian literature, was increasingly used over the course of the twentieth century to document the lives and achievements of ‘ulamā (‘learned men’, or scholars of religion). This article explores a foundational work within this genre: ‘Ashīq Ilahī Mīrutī's Tazkira't al-Rashīd (first published in 1908–1910), a life-history of the Dēōbandī scholar and Sūfī shāykh Rashīd Ahmad Gangōhī. It argues that such life-histories of ‘ulamā were written not merely as historical records but as ‘lessons’ to their readers. This article illustrates how the tazkira appropriated Gangōhī's life and teachings to provide an indispensable repository of Dēōbandī understanding on issues such as tarīqah (the Sūfī path), sharī‘ah (religious law), pīrī-murīdī (the master-disciple relationship), religious and social conduct, and relations with the state. The article thus makes a case for understanding the tazkira as an important vehicle for informing and shaping the religious behaviour of a Muslim public, which was employed ultimately by both the Dēōbandī and other Islamic revivalist movements.

This original analysis of the World Values Survey waves of 2007, 2012 and 2018 reveals important relationships among political trust and satisfaction, happiness, views of corruption, local elections and activism from the last half of the Hu Jintao administration through the first five years of Xi Jinping's rule. These data shed new light on the deeper dynamics underlying the high and growing levels of trust in government documented in other studies. Among this report's more novel findings, we find increased trust in government coincides with decreased local electoral participation, suggesting that participation in local elections is not key to perceptions of regime legitimacy. Views of corruption and a sense of personal efficacy through non-institutionalized forms of political participation such as peaceful demonstrations appear more relevant. Thus, constraints on people's ability to engage in peaceful demonstrations are likely to negatively impact views of regime legitimacy. In addition, the report uncovers demographic variations in these dynamics, indicating that regime legitimacy is more precarious among citizens at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy and among younger Chinese. Overall, these findings complicate existing explanations of regime legitimacy centring on economic performance, nationalism, responsiveness/adaptiveness and efforts to combat corruption.

This article identifies and examines Persian-language culinary manuals that were produced in South Asia between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. In doing so, it centres three empirical loci: the definition of food as it was conceptualised during the period under study; the impetus for the textualisation and standardisation of culinary knowledge; and core principles that undergird the cuisine of the Mughal elite. Engaging with these themes, the article privileges the intersection between the discourses on body, food, and ethical self-fashioning as the key site of analysis.

This article describes how Taiwanese farmers adopted irrigation pumps to enhance their livelihoods under the shifting relationship of sugar and rice production in late colonial Taiwan. I argue that farmers utilized commercial technologies to make a living and prosper within the established order of Japanese colonial rule. With allocated procurement districts granting exclusive purchasing rights over sugarcane, sugar companies maintained substantial influence over sugarcane cultivation. However, with the proliferation of Penglai rice and new agricultural implements, the situation of the farmers changed substantially. Serious problems in the sugar industry due to economic depression and the rising price of rice in the 1930s led farmers to shift from sugarcane to rice cultivation by introducing a variety of pumps. Those with the means installed new motor pumps, while others independently constructed wind pumps by combining newly introduced parts with older techniques. Despite a prohibition by the colonial government, farmers continued installing pumps until the government established a planned economy in preparation for war. Moreover, distribution of pump capacity through both sales and sharing shows that Taiwanese farmers sought to maintain an informal yet significant cohesion throughout the process of agricultural commercialization. By focusing on the social dynamics surrounding agricultural technologies, this article challenges simplistic portrayals of technology transfer from Japan to the colonies.

After the Second World War, the US government established a new oil order, forming close ties with three major oil companies—Standard Vacuum, Shell, and California-Texas—referred to as the ‘Three Sisters’ in Korea, which was newly liberated from Japanese colonialism. Even after the South Korean government was established, the US government and the Three Sisters worked to maintain the order. Using the carrot of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) funds, in 1949 the US government pressured the South Korean government into oil agreements that would facilitate the supply of petroleum products to the country. The 1949 oil agreements were completed after three rounds of negotiations. The process of signing the agreements was not limited to the import, storage, and sale of petroleum products in exchange for US aid to South Korea. It also sought to respond to the various interests of Koreans who wanted to create an independent economic structure in the midst of establishing a new government. This article explores the three rounds of negotiations for the 1949 oil agreements whereby the symbiotic relationship between the US government and the Three Sisters was realized in partnership with the interests of the South Korean government. Furthermore, it seeks to broaden the research on the history of Korean oil by promoting an understanding of how US oil policy affected Korea immediately after its liberation from Japanese colonial rule.