In Contesting Inequalities, Siyuan Yin traces the historical and structural forces surrounding the plight of migrant workers, especially women workers, and examines the relationship between media and different forms of collective action in China. Moving beyond considerations of short-term strikes, she analyzes how mediated practices have been incorporated as both means and ends in labor activism.
Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for US troops to arrive, which started almost three years of US military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades.
For over two decades, Chinese leaders have sought to rebalance their economy away from dependence on investment and exports and towards growth based on domestic consumption. In that context, few developments could have been more propitious than the explosive growth in internet commerce. While the benefits for consumers are obvious, digital marketplaces also allowed small manufacturers to proffer their wares nationwide. These “Taobao Villages” promise to alleviate China’s stubborn rural-urban inequality in the bargain. Lizhi Liu’s new book From Click to Boom explains the origins and effects of China’s vast e-commerce sector, while shedding light on its heretofore ambiguous relationship with the authorities.
In one story in Shusaku Endo’s Portraits of a Mother, the narrator lies in a hospital bed after a serious operation with the vague impression that his mother is holding his hand. He wakes to the realization that this was a dream and that the “gray shadow” of his mother is nothing more than a recurrent spectre that still visits him two decades after her death. Though at first content, he soon feels resentment for the bonds that continue to bind him to her. As far as the narrator can recall, there was never a time outside of his dreams when this austere woman had shown him such affection.
Ankara-born Chris Aslan spent seven years living in Khiva, an old Silk Road town in what is now Uzbekistan, where he founded a silk carpet workshop. Expelled in 2005 during a purge of foreign NGOs, he then spent three years in Khorog, a town on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. Told by the authorities that perhaps he’d better leave there as well, he had a spell in Kyrgyzstan. In each place, Aslan clearly intends to “help”, whether by attempting to provide livelihoods at a time of chronic unemployment in Uzbekistan, help yak herders commercialise their animals’ down (competitive with cashmere, it seems) or to establish a school for carving walnut wood.
A dynamic and interactionist multiplex order existed in the classical eastern Indian Ocean corresponding with modern Southeast Asia (~1st—15th centuries CE). This regional order was not the product of superior Chinese imperial/material power, or some essentialist version of the tributary system. Nor did Indic ideas spread “naturally” into an ideational vacuum in Southeast Asia. This order was in fact an outcome of Southeast Asia’s active agency in fostering connectivity with Chinese and Indian polities, and the consequent material and ideational interactions that ensued. The multiplex order in the eastern Indian Ocean was a highly robust and resilient order that lasted for centuries even in the absence of a grand design. It did not depend exclusively on any single polity, not even imperial China.
With no real uniting theme, Unusual Fragments is more of a miscellany than a collection. The authors were born over a span of 78 years. Three of the stories are by women who grew up during the Pacific War—Taeko Kono (1926-2015), Takako Takahashi (1932-2013), and Tomoko Yoshida (1934-). Another is by a woman, Nobuko Takagi (1978-), who was a member of Japan’s “Lost Generation”—Japanese who graduated high school after Japan’s bubble economy popped in 1989. The only male author, Taruho Inagaki (1900-1977), died before Takagi was even born.
Did you know Hong Kong used to be a hub for pirates? That factoid has long been part of the popular history for Hong Kong—and for Southern China broadly. For centuries, Chinese pirates raided merchants and coastal communities up and down the Chinese coast, taking advantage of weak imperial rule and safe havens like what’s now present-day Vietnam.
A pregnant woman meets a long-lost acquaintance only to have him mysteriously slip through the streets, never to be seen again; a shop owner buys an expensive mannequin yet grows haunted by its look of painted anguish; and a group of teenage boys grow infatuated with a girl-next-door before reality rudely pierces their bubble.
Had the eminent physicist Ernest Rutherford actually once said that “all science is either physics or stamp collecting”, he might have botany in mind, a discipline the very basis of which is collecting and labelling plants according to strict taxonomies. In her (perhaps aptly entitled) new book, Unmaking Botany, Kathleen C Gutierrez sets about describing not just the history of botany in the Philippines but how the practice of it intersected with the imperial projects of Spain and the United States.
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