This article traces the intellectual evolution of Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948), a contemporary Chinese poet, novelist, essayist, archaeologist, and ethnographer, from Mao-era radicalism to Islamic internationalism. Allegedly the inventor of the term “Red Guard” in the context of the Cultural Revolution, he has remained an unapologetic defender of Mao and of the “Red Guard spirit” since the 1960s. In 1987, meanwhile, Zhang converted to an impoverished and ascetic sect of Chinese Islam, the Jahriyya, and since the 2000s he has become one of China's most prominent spokesmen for global Islam. This article explores how Zhang has reconciled his zeal for Cultural Revolution Maoism, on the one hand, with Pan-Islamist positions on the other. Although Zhang's stance suffers from undoubted contradictions and inconsistencies, his career and beliefs illuminate the complexities of the legacy of Mao's and the Cultural Revolutions, of Chinese intellectual dissidence, and of the contemporary trajectories of Chinese internationalism and global Islam.

Since its inception three years ago, Xi Jinping's anticorruption campaign has targeted some of China's biggest political and military figures and implicated tens of thousands of cadres. This article argues that the current campaign can be distinguished from the many others over the past thirty years not on account of its extensiveness, but rather in its systematic coupling with two other key moves: administrative reform and disciplinary regulation. Together, these three initiatives aim not only to clean up the malfeasance, graft, and bribery pervasive in Chinese political life today, but also to change the political culture. We demonstrate that the current leadership is forcing a shift in political norms and behaviors, and changing the shared assumptions and practices that inform the political dealings of the society, from the approval of permits to the promotion of judges.

In a scene in the genre-bending documentary film The Act of Killing (2012), a journalist, Soaduon Siregar, claims to have a sudden insight while standing in a film studio. Having just watched two executioners reenact their deeds of 1965–66 before a camera, he realizes why he had never known that they had garroted hundreds of detainees when he was working with them in the same building. His old friends had been so “smooth” (he used the English word) that he had not noticed them running a human abattoir upstairs. One of the executioners standing in the studio with crude makeup plastered on his face, Adi Zulkardy, is incredulous and insists Siregar must have known since even the neighbors heard the screams of the victims: “It was an open secret (rahasia umum).” When the director of the film, Joshua Oppenheimer, interjects, noting that Siregar's longtime boss at the local newspaper had already admitted to being an interrogator who decided which detainees were to die, Siregar becomes only more adamant in denying any knowledge of the killing.

This essay takes issue with the idea that the trade in remittance letters (qiaopi 侨批) was a modern form of “transnational capitalism” that relied on trust in a system of impersonal rules rather than “a distinctive form of ‘Chinese capitalism’” dependent on cultural or familial affinities, and that qiaopi traders used instrumental economic practices to transnationalize their businesses. The essay aims to identify alternatives to modern capitalism that are, at the same time, robustly cosmopolitan, and for which modernity is multiple rather than modular. Ethnicity and identity matter greatly in diasporic Chinese business culture, as sources of entrepreneurial resilience and creativity, especially in the early stages of diaspora formation. Far from forming an obstacle to economic growth and technological innovation, business familism, social networks, and their associated cultural values can be shown, at least in some periods and contexts, to have assisted economic development in Chinese societies at home and abroad, by enabling social mobility, furthering family interests, building partnerships, facilitating contracts, and promoting other practices proper to a modern market economy.

From our present-day vantage point, the founding era of South Asian studies at Chicago looks like an age of unalloyed conceptual and political innocence. Area identities were given, disciplinary formations were unquestioned, the purposes of scholarship were self-evident, and the future was roseate. Half a century later, common sense on all these questions has vanished, and where we go from here is an entirely open question, requiring open and sustained discussion.

Stalinists legitimized their methods by saying “you can't make omelets without breaking eggs.” Others might ask, “you broke lots of eggs, but where are the omelets?” These three biographies of Deng Xiaoping are only the most recent of biographies of epoch-making Chinese leaders that assess the ratio of broken eggs to finished omelets. Reading them together with the body of reviews provokes questions about how biography as a genre can usefully address historical analysis and moral judgment. How much could a single leader transform China? Did Deng merely inherit institutions and decisive policies from earlier leaders or is China today somehow “Deng's China”? What can we learn about the problems from reviewers and critics?

Bridging Tibetan, Chinese, and South Asian studies, this article examines the 1960 Tibetan Muslim Incident, when nearly one thousand Tibetan Muslims declared themselves to be Indian citizens by virtue of their Kashmiri ancestry and petitioned the Chinese government to be allowed to emigrate to India. The paradox of the 1960 Tibetan Muslim Incident is that it occurred after a decade of careful Sino-Indian diplomacy, a diplomacy emerging out of each nation's shared struggle for independence and liberation from an anti-imperialist past. By locating the event in the broader ideological movements of postcolonial Asia, the article focuses on a set of aspirations, motivations, and spaces by which China, India, and the Tibetan Muslims sought to define their actions outside of standard nationalistic, ideological, and military narratives of the period.

On May 20, 2014, the Royal Army imposed martial law on Thailand, with the declared purpose of restoring peace to the people. Allegedly, the military intervened to put an end to seven months of political turmoil that had begun when the PDRC—the English acronym for the Thai People's Committee for Absolute Democracy with the King as Head of State—occupied key street intersections and government offices in Bangkok. The conservative mobilization had demanded the deposition of elected Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and the complete dismissal of “the Thaksin system”—a network that had dominated electoral politics in the previous thirteen years, in the PDRC's view through corruption and vote-buying. To fight this injustice, the PDRC had called for deep constitutional reforms before the next elections could be held.

This introduction discusses how to think about the U.S. military presence as an understudied force of globalization both theoretically and historically. In an effort to bring together three articles written by a sociologist, an anthropologist, and a historian, it engages theoretically with issues of unequal power relations, feelings of ambivalence, and postcolonial agency. It also provides summaries of three case studies on South Korea, Okinawa, and mainland Japan to show both intentional and unintentional cultural consequences of the long-term U.S. military presence in these societies.

This article is an against-the-grain reading of the highly publicized failure of the 2004 India Shining campaign. Aimed at the Indian publics, this mega-publicity spectacle sought to communicate the success of neoliberal reforms in transforming India from a developing nation to a lucrative emerging market in the global economy. Rather than uplift the mood of the nation, the campaign brought to the surface the underlying acrimony and exclusion experienced by a vast majority of the population. I argue that the discourse of India Shining's failure misreads the electoral defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party as the failure of the neoliberal project of economic reforms. In fact, the India Shining images helped popularize the reforms at an unprecedented mass scale that until then had largely been limited to elite policy debates and reform packages. Instead, the discontent accrued by those excluded from the good times seemingly ushered in by the reforms, and not the reforms per se. The India Shining controversy also allows us to witness a new form of investor-citizenship shaped around the language and logic of loss and profits. The very edifice of failure makes apparent the shift to a capitalist dream world and the withering away of the old order in post-reform India.

Labor scholars have highlighted the predicament of “precarization” besetting the working class everywhere in the twenty-first century. Beneath the “proletariat” now stands the “precariat,” for whom exploitation seems like a privilege compared to constant exclusion from the labor market. Amidst worldwide employment informalization and decimation of workers’ collective capacity, media reports and academic writings on Chinese workers in the past several years have singularly sustained a curious discourse of worker empowerment. Strikes in some foreign-invested factories have inspired claims of rising working-class power. Finding little empirical support for the empowerment thesis, this article spotlights the Chinese peculiarity of the global phenomenon of precarization and the dynamics of recent strikes, suggesting the need for Chinese labor studies to rebalance its prevailing voluntarism and optimism with more attention to institutional and political-economic conditions.

Amitav Ghosh, perhaps Asia's most prominent living author, moves among many genres and across vast territories. His fiction—The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Glass Place (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and The Ibis trilogy—takes us from Calcutta where he was born in 1956 to the Arabian Sea, Paris, London, and back again to the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and beyond. His nonfiction—In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma (1998), and Countdown (1999)—rests on a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford. He went to Alexandria, Egypt, for his dissertation research. His science fiction, The Calcutta Chromosome, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997. His essays—published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times and collected in The Iman and the Indian (2002)—address major issues such as fundamentalism. Indeed, most of his work addresses big questions, exploring the nature of communal violence, the traces of love and longing across generations, manifold religious manifestations, and the systematic pain of colonial oppression. The deep and abiding theme of many works is anthropogenic environmental damage, now boldly and directly addressed in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). Married to accomplished fellow author Deborah Baker, whose work traces the Asian peregrinations of Allen Ginsberg, the literary milieu of Laura Riding, and the complexity of Islamic conversion, Ghosh has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Queens College, and Delhi University. He has won more prizes and honorary doctorates, and been a fellow at more famous institutions and a distinguished visitor in more far-flung places, than you can shake a stick at. He even has two homes: Brooklyn and Goa. In short, Ghosh's profile makes you wonder if there might not be more than one of him.

“Great State” has gone missing from the vocabulary of state formations in Asia. Though widely used across Inner and East Asia over the past millennium, the term means nothing to most scholars today. It is not flagged, rarely noted, and never theorized. Recent thinking about inter-polity relations in Inner and East Asia has led me to regard the Great State as a distinctive type of political formation that should have a place in our conceptual toolkit if we scholars of Asia are to participate in writing the global history of empire. Given its near ubiquity, the virtual absence of a discourse on the Great State, ancient or modern, Asian or otherwise, may be more than just a curiosity, and it is worth wondering why.

After the U.S. victory in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, devastated Okinawans lived off of U.S. military rations, including unfamiliar foods such as pork luncheon meat and corned beef hash. Okinawans incorporated these and other U.S.-made goods into daily life as “Amerikamun,” literally meaning “American products,” but loaded with postwar Okinawan perceptions of America, its military, and the social contexts of the goods themselves. Connotations have shifted over the postwar period, at times suggesting Okinawan appropriation of American power through consumption of “luxurious” (jōtō) U.S. goods, but throughout the postwar period reminding Okinawans of American domination during the occupation and the unwelcome aspects of continuous U.S. military basing. “American Village,” which is a hybrid, American-style shopping mall and resort, is a concretization of this ambivalence, as multiple generations of Okinawans now have the opportunity to inscribe and reinscribe the meaning of Amerikamun on their landscape.

This article examines different patterns of “cosmopolitan capitalism” in three paired localities in China and India: (1) Zhejiang/Gujarat, (2) Zhongguancun/Bangalore, and (3) Guangdong/Kerala. The paired cases illustrate the attentiveness of the local state to transnational society and present varied expressions of the local developmental impact of remittances and return migration. Analytically, this article departs from conventional usages of both state and society by focusing on the local state in combination with a less territorial conception of society. The rationale for this dual definitional stretch—both downwards (local state) and outwards (transnational society)—has an empirical basis. First, the local government represents the day-to-day point of contact with “the state” for most people. Second, limiting the scope of “society” to populations currently residing within national borders unnecessarily excludes temporary migrants and diasporic communities who continue to identify with a locality. Theoretically, this article extends Albert Hirschman's classic categorical troika of “exit, voice, and loyalty” to the literature on new transnationalism.

This article examines how a resource bonanza in Ordos Municipality, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in the 2000s translated into broad-based participation in informal lending networks and drove a remarkable, but short-lived, phase of urban expansion and private wealth accumulation. Local lending networks inflated enormous credit and property bubbles, which ultimately burst in 2011 with severe ramifications for Ordos's urban expansion and households' livelihoods. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ordos, the analysis advances the idea of “taking part” to explore the interconnected desires to participate in urban expansion and to seize for oneself a portion of the local bonanzas in natural resources, property, and finance. The socio-spatial impacts of the financialization of the everyday environment are discussed in relation to urban transformation, the production of a “ghost town,” and local authorities' opportunistic forms of deregulation. These were vital ingredients in Ordos's spectacular passage from boom to bust.