Asian Studies

Craig Mark’s The Abe Restoration is a masterful survey of the Japanese economy and politics since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s second coming in 2012. Mark’s focus on the Abe record in the overall context of postwar Japanese development and the changing nature of the system since the momentous changes of the 1990s give the reader a breathtaking view of the seismic shifts in America’s key Asian ally. The notion of a political restoration on par with the Meiji Restoration that opened Japan in the late nineteenth century is apt, and is a useful way to reconceptualize Japan as it shifts to a new security paradigm for the early twenty-first century. Readers will take away a much better sense of direction for a country that may once again truly become the Land of the Rising Sun.

Social anthropologist Takezawa’s account of what occurred in the coastal villages of Iwate Prefecture following the disastrous events of March 11, 2011, is built on personal experience as a disaster relief volunteer, professional expertise as an ethnologist, and extensive involvement in citizen-led redevelopment efforts. The result is a personalized analysis that produces insights of value to anyone interested in the “ethnography of disaster.” The book covers the 18-month period following the earthquake and tsunami. Its three chapters focus on individual accounts of escape from the tsunami, on relief efforts to care for the thousands of displaced survivors, and on the reconstruction planning process at the local village level. Takezawa’s approach combines on-the-ground experiences (both his own and those of other individuals directly affected) with insights derived from the larger historical and anthropological context. Although many of his recommendations for future disaster planning efforts apply specifically to Japan, most are worth consideration by anyone involved in similar work anywhere in the world. In particular, Takezawa (National Museum of Ethnology, Japan) highlights the value of local social cohesion undergirding successful relief and reconstruction efforts and the role of administrative failings at both the national and local level in hampering those efforts. Summing Up: Recommended.

It is conventional to view the Qing dynasty’s attempt to reform the Chinese military at the turn of the last century as a failure. Nicolas Schillinger demonstrates that this limited view misses a much more far-reaching legacy. New values such as martial masculinity, self-sacrifice for the nation, and patriotism were linked with new ways of dressing, moving, training, and caring for the body. The result was nothing less than a total transformation of men, gender, social hierarchy, and national identity which was absolutely central to China’s modernization. Schillinger’s creative and thorough examination of a wide range of historical sources enables him to portray the history of the construction of a new image of man—an image that still has relevance in today’s China.

In the 1950s, more than rustication was a systematic migration of a rural resettlement from across China to what is modern Qinghai province. Historian Rohlf examines a western region that remains a frontier project in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands; indeed, in the 1950s, two waves of migration also triggered an ethnic tension—both intra-Hui and intra-Han—that collectivized the system while mediating the foundation for socialist control. In sending more than 100,000 Chinese to Qinghai (Kokonor in Mongolian), the new central state solidified an enormous state-building project to lift Qinghai from backwardness to exploit the region’s natural resources while indoctrinating a generation of youth in the industrial initiative.... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty.

This is the second volume of McMahon’s meticulous work on the history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. (The first was Women Shall Not Rule, 2013). Avoiding the stereotype of imperial wives as victims in royal polygamy, the author focuses on these celestial women’s active participation in palace life after the dethronement of Empress Wu in the Tang dynasty. Although restrictions on women’s participation in politics became severe, McMahon argues that later dynasties still included strong, active women who counseled emperors, ghostwrote for them, and oversaw succession when they died. Dowager Empress Cixi, the last great monarch before Republican China, was an example. Following the dynastic chronology, the book offers detailed accounts from various sources, such as legend, anecdotes, official histories, and miscellanea. It also provides comparative perspectives from monogamous European kings and royal women in Byzantium, Mongol and Timurid Central Asia, and Mughal India. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. General collections; upper-division undergraduates and above.

This volume by Min Ye is focused on relations between China and South Korea and offers not simply a comprehensive and insightful analysis of this very important relationship but also how the changing dynamics of this relationship affects the international relations of Northeast Asia overall and what the changing dynamics of this relationship are likely to bring as this new century continues to unfold. It is a welcome addition to the literature on the international relations of Northeast Asia and offers a solid and thoughtful analysis of a relationship that is often reduced to its connection to the behavior of North Korea. As a result, it is required reading for scholars interested in Asian Security and the development of the region’s economy as well as for scholars interested in alliances and international relations in general.

A convincing and state-of-the-art narrative of the growing importance of the China’s rise in global politics and economics, plus seeking  securing energy resources, and its relations with the Arab Gulf States, who are energy rich. Because of its expanding economy, Beijing’s relations with the Arab States has become more intensive and important for the Middle East in particular and the broader world.  This book explores China’s growing involvement in the region, while also describing new opportunities for Arab Gulf States to pursue new political and business opportunities.  This book will be essential reading to all those involved in international politics and economics, global energy trade, and Middle East- China relations.

China's Cyber Warfare: The Evolution of Strategic Doctrine establishes a common vocabulary for engaging the ever-changing field of cyber warfare studies. By breaking down and delineating the subject matter into its core elements, clearly contextualized within an historical framework, Jason Fritz has provided a valuable framework for anyone trying to understand the multifaceted role of cyber warfare within China's broader strategic doctrine.

Prof. B. M. Jain offers us a compelling framework to contextualize China’s latest diplomatic efforts to engage neighboring South Asian nations. Surveying the Chinese geopolitical, sociocultural and economic involvement across South Asia, he argues convincingly that strategic encounter between China and India is bound to make a decisive impact on the fast-changing landscape of regional security. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the complexities of Sino-Indian relations.

This valuable contribution offers a most thorough, sharp and systematic assessment of civil society action beyond the nation-state, and does so with a unique deep comparative study of regional institutions in Asia.

This is the most comprehensive and convincing study on the integration of traditional culture into Chinese politics. The author demonstrates her thorough understanding of Confucianism and solid training in Western social scientific methodology. It is a seamless weaving between the East and the West, between affection and rationality, and between formal and informal politics.

Creating Japan’s Ground Self-Defence Force, 1945-2015: A Sword Well Made is unique in the way it captures all of the major and minor players who took part in shattering and reforging the Sacred Sword that is Japan’s Ground Self Defense Force and puts all of that information into an all encompassing format…. This book has value for those who wish for more than just a Japanese perspective on the reconstruction of Japan after World War II and during the Cold War. The book is also valuable in the picture it paints of how difficult it truly is to create/recreate an army and all of the cultural and social nuances that are required to help its integration into society. This can be helpful to those wishing to gain further insights of the struggles undergone by during the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which needed to completely rebuild their armies.

Tansen Sen is unquestionably the world’s leading historian of Sino-Indian connections. In this pioneering work, he situates his formidable knowledge within the framework of world history, revealing how central the relationship has been for both Asia and the wider world.

This illuminating study—which is one of few works published in English from a native point of view—offers new insights into understanding Javanese concepts of aesthetics, and is a profound contribution to the fields of cultural studies, philosophy, political science, architecture, and urban design.

Moved emotionally and intellectually by thousands of unmarked mass graves from the Cambodian genocide, James Tyner brilliantly exposes the silences in how and where the Khmer Rouge is remembered officially while arguing that this violent past holds an unreconciled place within the lives and landscapes of the present. His theorization of “post-violence” will inform and inspire human rights scholarship and activism well beyond Southeast Asia.

This is the finest book I know on the intricate politics and social situation of Korean separated families. Relying ably on a mix of historical and ethnographic methods, and drawing on perspectives ranging from psychoanalytic treatments of mourning to ritual theory, Kim moves from the origins of family separation before and during the Korean War and the political classifications it entailed to various attempts to reunite such families across the North-South divide. The book culminates with an on-the-spot examination of the series of reunions that began in the year 2000, at a moment of hope for broader inter-Korean rapprochement, which Kim persuasively argues was also a crucial event in the reckoning of national kinship. In turns critical, analytically innovative, and moving, Kim’s work deserves to be read by every student of the modern Koreas.

Bongrae Seok takes the neglected virtue of shame--so common in the Confucian tradition and yet commonly undervalued and even denigrated in Western moral psychology--and argues convincingly for a new appreciation of it.  In a wide-ranging and yet nuanced argument, Seok methodically engages the literature of evolutionary psychology, Ancient Greek moral theory, current experimental and clinical psychology, current philosophical moral psychology, and most importantly, early Confucian theories of ethics and self-cultivation.  His conclusion is that shame is a rich, multi-dimensional ethical emotion that deserves more attention from philosophers and psychologists.  One begins to wonder from his analysis if shame may be a necessary component of any complete system of moral competence.  In his ability to deftly handle a diversity of sources with insight and acumen, Seok has few peers.

[T]his book is a fine achievement, and does indeed succeed in laying to rest some of the myths that have persisted around the story of Judge Pal.

Churchman provides a careful, compelling, and much-needed account of an oft-neglected region in both Chinese history and recent Vietnamese nationalist history. Churchman criticizes in passing the uneven and negligible treatment of the bronze drum culture in recent Vietnamese historical writing, which undervalues the drum's plain designs for promoting national pride. She mainly challenges the prevailing Sinocentric view in Chinese historiography that the region was politically peripheral and insignificant to the Chinese empires, and that their peoples were uncivilized and nameless ‘southwestern barbarians.’ Instead, Churchman skillfully and justifiably makes the region the center of its own history. Recognizing the difficulty in writing a history for peoples without their own written records, Churchman turns to archaeology and material culture for corroborating evidence, and she detects and exposes political biases and linguistic as well as literary confusions in the Chinese sources. As a result, she convincingly rejects the portrayal of a homogeneous, passive, and eventually Sinicized people subject to the imperial Chinese states and recovers the agency of these bronze drum casting people, who conducted active, strategic, and at times powerful negotiations in their constant political and military dealings with and alongside the Chinese empires in the north.

Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

The Politics and Philosophy of Chinese Power: The Timeless and the Timely is essential reading if one seeks to understand the forces transforming the 21st Century. It is another erudite exploration and evaluation by R. James Ferguson and Rosita Dellios of the qualities that have allowed Chinese civilization to shape a world order that many can still only address in outmoded stereotypes. The reader is left with a profound sense of a Confucian-Daoist tradition of thought culture. It is one which influences Chinese priorities in the human and natural world in unfamiliar ways, addressing global challenges. Chinese evolving strategic resources give it an essential role in multilateral governance.

This book provides a fascinating illustration of how history has been used and abused in attempts to frame national consciousness. Through the nuanced study of a wide spectrum of primary sources and secondary scholarship in many languages, Professor Xu reveals ubiquitous slippages from scholarly inquiry to political ideology. Although she trains her focus on the Korean case, her findings are paradigmatic. The importance of this book therefore goes far beyond the field of Northeast Asian historiography: it deserves the attention of a broad readership of historians and social scientists.

Rethinking Japan argues that the changes taking place in Japan in the second half of the twenty-first century are of ‘seminal importance.’ The authors’ sustained analysis of the emergence and consolidation of the right wing in Japan confirms this assessment. The book sets its rise in the context of the Liberal Democratic Party's fall from power at the hands of the opposition and the party's return to government in the wake of its defeat at the polls. This study is particularly impressive in offering concrete details and a convincing explanation for the policies of the current Shinzo Abe administration. The authors are to be congratulated for producing a work that should find a place on the bookshelves of all those with an interest in Japanese politics.

Competing territorial claims, combined with Chinese expansion and militarization of the South China Sea, make this one of the most potentially dangerous areas of the world. Nalanda Roy provides a thoughtful overview of the strategic significance of the region, its historical and current disputes, the complex international legal and institutional environment, and possible avenues to minimize the threat of violent conflict.

This volume by Wonjae Hwang helps us understand South Korea’s postwar rise from nearly complete international isolation to a position of international influence by focusing on two of the factors that were important in this transition, globalization and South Korea’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy. It is required reading not just for scholars interested in the international rise of South Korea but for anyone who is interested in understanding how such processes as globalization and democratization can be embraced in a way that will assist leaders to advance their nation’s international status.

Readers hungry for insights into Korea’s cultural history over the last six centuries need look no farther than this comprehensive survey of traditional Korean philosophy. In these pages they will meet such giants as Toegye, Yulgok and Dasan and will discover that Korean philosophy was both practical and theoretical, reflecting a moral psychology shaped by ethical concerns.

Wang (Shenzhen Univ.) describes how elite Chinese journalists recently created a professional paradigm that blends social activism with investigative reporting. Wang suggests the formation of an investigative and advocacy journalistic model is a unique adaptation to contemporary governmental controls, social norms, and journalistic practices in China. Wang explains that leading Chinese journalists are increasingly focused on fostering democratic reforms in China and sometimes help organize social reform movements.... [T]he text is well researched with helpful chapter footnotes, a bibliography, and an index. The book’s thesis contrasts with the portrayal of Chinese journalism in some recent books, such as Doug Young's The Party Line: How the Media Dictates Public Opinion in Modern China (Wiley, 2013). Recommended for collections in international journalism as well as contemporary Chinese culture. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals.

Liew Kai Khiun is one of the most promising among the younger generation of scholars who are based in Asia and researching on Inter-Asia cultural studies. This book is a testament to some of his best analytical insights to date.

With extensive qualitative and quantitative data collected in China, this book develops an informational theory to account for the coexistence of China’s resilient authoritarianism and its high decentralization.... Methodologically, Chen substantiates her points by detailed cases, in-depth interviews and statistical analysis of petitions.... Students, researchers, and teachers who are interested in the Chinese petition system would gain insights from this book.