On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. local time, an earthquake with an epicenter 130 kilometers east of Sendai off the Pacific coast of northern Japan shook the Tohoku region more violently than any tremor in a thousand years. The quake was approximately 9.0 in magnitude, and it in turn triggered a set of tsunami hurtling across the Pacific Ocean, striking first the coast of Tohoku with waves of unprecedented height and strength, along a coastline stretching roughly 400 kilometers. In Fukushima, 180 kilometers west-southwest of the epicenter, 15-meter waves roared over seawalls supposedly protecting a nuclear reactor built just a few meters from the ocean's edge, starting a chain of events that resulted in an explosion the following day that began the release of radioactive materials (which continues still), sparking high anxiety if not palpable panic in Tokyo, the center of which is 240 kilometers to the south-southwest of the Fukushima nuclear complex.

The year 2012 was fascinating for domestic politics and international relations in Northeast Asia. Perhaps most notably, every country in the region experienced a change of leadership. China, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan all saw new leaders begin their tenure. In addition, regional relations took a turn for the worse, with numerous countries engaging in territorial and maritime disputes, disagreeing over interpretations of their shared histories.

China's 2010 census revealed a population of 1.34 billion, 50 percent urban, 13.3 percent above age sixty, and with 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls. In this article, we discuss how gender imbalance, population aging, and their interaction with rapid urbanization have shaped China's reform era development and will strongly shape China's future. These intertwined demographic changes pose an unprecedented challenge to social and economic governance, contributing to and magnifying the effects of a slower rate of economic growth. We organize the analysis according to the proximate determinants of economic growth: first, labor input and its productivity; second, capital investment and savings; and finally, multi-factor productivity, including social stability and governance. We argue that the economic, political, and social context that turns labor and capital inputs into economic outputs is perhaps the most important and least understood arena in which demographic change will shape China's rise.

Popular music is a dynamic portal through which to gain a greater understanding of a vast array of social phenomena within Asia. In particular, the power of pop to actively shape conceptions of self and inform the ways in which we interact with others at the individual, communal, and even national and transnational levels has taken center stage, but understanding just how these identities are formed through the performance of popular music is quite complex in the current global moment. Through comparison of recent scholarship covering diverse types of popular music throughout Asia, this article explores how identity formation is informed by an increasingly nuanced understanding of globalization. Moving from a most intimate sense to broad transnational and inter-ethnic contexts, it not only expands the concept of identity in Asia, but also reveals how the study of popular music in general can illuminate other social issues important to Asianists.

In 2003 a monument was erected at the site of the 2002 Islamist militant attacks in Kuta, Bali. Government and other official discourses, including the design brief, represent the monument as an integrated and culturally harmonious public testimony to the victims. However, the monument is also a discordant association of ideas, meanings, and political claims. While originally designed to subdue insecurity, the Bali bombings monument, in fact, constitutes a site of powerful “language wars” around its rendering of memory and its presence in Bali's integration into the globalizing economy of pleasure. This paper examines the ways in which the monument is being articulated and “consumed” as a social and cultural marker for the island's tourism geography. The paper pays particular attention to the increasing diversity of Bali's visitors and the ways in which a precarious “cosmopolization” of the Kuta-Legian area is being experienced and expressed at the monument site.

China's trade and financial surpluses, exchange rate, and currency reserves make headlines, daily, around the world. As such, it is more imperative than ever to understand the inner workings of currency policy in China. Yet the exercise of power and decision making in these areas has received surprisingly little attention in Chinese politics, political economy, and, arguably, economics.

In 1993, Cambodian history turned a very significant corner with the promulgation of a new liberal constitution aimed at moving the country forward from its turbulent past. Many challenges remained, however; one of which was how to deal with the most horrific crimes of the “despicable Pol Pot” regime (1975–79)—as Cambodians called it—during which the radical pursuit of utopian revolutionary ideas cost roughly two million Cambodians their lives. Searching for mechanisms to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes is seldom simple, as this essay, an assessment of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal twenty years on from the founding of the new Cambodian state and thirty-four years after the fall of the Pol Pot regime, attests. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, whose formal name is the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), was established in 2006, providing the first hope that Khmer Rouge leaders would finally be brought to justice and held to account for their hideous crimes.

In the first decade of the present century, Peter Hessler published three acclaimed works on China, mostly (although not exclusively) dealing with the present period. Many of the parts of the second and third volumes, in particular, initially appeared as articles in the New Yorker and National Geographic, where the deftness of Hessler's writing and his superb skills as a storyteller attracted attention well beyond the academic world. Hessler's books have also been widely and generously praised—and used in class—by teachers of contemporary China. Yet, to my knowledge, no China specialist has yet attempted a comprehensive assessment of their contribution to the deepening of American understanding of the complexities of Chinese life today. Such an assessment is the modest aim of this essay.

During the mid-1870s, fearing the legal innovations of a “civilized” state, geisha and their employers recast Tokugawa-era practices of civic engagement and educational attainment in the language of enlightenment. Proprietors built schools intended to transform geisha into productive and moral mothers, and geisha donated to local educational institutions and suggested that their own studies would lead to self-sufficiency and freedom. These efforts associated geisha with the values of productivity and enlightenment, although similar strategies proved less successful for prostitutes. However, by the 1880s, both geisha and prostitutes were increasingly denied access to education and excluded from ideals of enlightened femininity that were predicated on marriage. This article considers how a group of unlikely actors deployed the Tokugawa past to become civilized, and in the process promoted ideas about the purpose of women's education that would later be expressed by an icon of Meiji modernity: the “good wife, wise mother.”

We study the propensity for protest in the context of individuals’ alternative choices in urban China. Depending on the number and quality of social ties (or guanxi in Chinese), individuals may resort to one of two alternatives: to engineer life-changing events through personal connections or to join others in labor protest. We call one “adaptation” and the other “voice.” As our working hypothesis, we first expect them to be mutually exclusive. That is, adaptation through guanxi networks may help diffuse the will to protest, as those who enjoy better guanxi networks would advance their class status through such networks. With data from a national survey, our analysis rejects this working hypothesis. Those who are better connected are not only more likely to adapt but also more inclined to voice, and the effect of social ties on protest is significantly smaller for those who are connected to people with power. The implications are twofold. First, our data not only confirm the well-known effect of social connections on protest, but also specify the effects caused by high-class versus low-class connections. Second, in a comparative vein, the individual decision making on adaptation and/or voice offers a glimpse into the intertwining domains of social space in contemporary China.

“I wish for you two boys and two girls,” the elderly man pronounced. He was addressing both myself and my fiancé as he reached out to shake our hands as we were leaving his traditional wooden house. He had told us earlier that he spends his days in this late chapter of his life enjoying his grandchildren and tending his vegetable plot. Now at the door ready to leave I hesitated, not wanting to extend my hand, but then I did so anyway. This grandfather was Nuon Chea, “Brother Number Two” of Cambodia's notorious Khmer Rouge regime, officially known as Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79). The year was 2002. My fiancé, a cameraman, was working with reporter and author Tom Fawthrop on a documentary about former Khmer Rouge leaders' evasion of justice and I had been invited to come along.

The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself.

This article investigates Chinese warlord authority in the east of the Kham Tibetan region between 1911 and 1949. The colonial government established by the Qing Empire in Kham during the five years before the end of dynastic rule relied on central government funding. With the fragmentation of the Chinese state in the Republican period, Chinese regimes in Kham were forced to raise more revenue locally and reduce expenditure. Responding to these challenges shaped the nature of Chinese authority in Kham. The late Qing colonial government had paid Tibetans who provided livestock and labor for transport as part of the 'u-lag corvée. Republican-era governors lacked the resources to do the same. They struggled to develop other ways of controlling the corvée, and attempted to create alternative state transport organizations. Changes in the sources of county government revenue also had important effects on Chinese officials' approach to what they considered to be “wasteland.”

During the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45), China's leading cartoon artists formed patriotic associations aimed at repelling the Japanese military. Their stated propaganda goals were to boost morale among the troops and the civilian population by circulating artwork that would ignite the spirit of resistance among Chinese audiences. In keeping with the genre, racialized and sexualized imagery abounded. The artists created myriad disturbing visions of how militarized violence impacted men's and women's bodies differently. By analyzing the two major professional journals, National Salvation Cartoons and War of Resistance Cartoons, this article shows that depictions of sexual violence inflicted on Chinese women were integral to the artists' attempts to arouse the spirit of resistance. By comparing their depictions of different types of bodies (Chinese and Japanese, male and female, soldiers' and civilians') the article argues that the cartoonists believed that the depiction of sexually mutilated Chinese women would build resistance and spur patriotism while equivalent depictions of mutilated male soldiers would sap morale and hamper the war effort. The article concludes with a discussion about the dubious efficacy of propaganda that invokes a hypersexualized, masculine enemy other.

In early 2013, India's then comptroller and auditor general (CAG), Vinod Rai, while delivering a speech at Harvard University's Kennedy School, wondered whether his office should be confined to being “mere accountants.” That this question could be raised in a public forum, and that too outside India, spoke to the transformation in recent times of Rai's stature and the office that he held. The winds of change were reflected in the Indian Supreme Court's rejection in 2013 of a public interest litigation challenging the authority of the auditor general, who is a constitutional authority, to conduct performance audits of the government. Significantly, the Court ruled, the “CAG is not a munim [accountant] to go into the balance-sheets. The CAG is a constitutional authority entitled to review and conduct performance audit on revenue allocations . . . and examine matters relating to the economy and how the government uses its resources.”

Although China's Tibetans profoundly mistrust the ideologies of the party-state, associating them with illegitimate practices of domination, protest and revolt are rare and effectively suppressed. This might be seen as quasi-colonial domination, the state securing subjection through the performance of paramount power, demonstrated by its suppression of the 2008 protests, or it could be attributed to a form of indirect rule, by which local officials engage with local leaders to generate hegemonic consent. While both dynamics are present on the Tibetan plateau, ethnographic fieldwork among the Tibetan populations of Qinghai and Gansu Provinces reveals that consent is primarily generated by local officials who negotiate a form of local order with religious and tribal leaders. Ignoring the ideological demands of their superiors, they engage constructively with the expectations of the Tibetans about how order should be maintained and, in doing so, subvert the state's ideal of uniform and unitary sovereignty.