Looking beyond spectacular infrastructure projects as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), this article zooms in on small-scale cross-border traders in northern Laos and foregrounds their key role in enabling and sustaining the everyday workings of increasingly Chinese visions of land-linked connectivity. This study pays particular attention to the affective dimension of actively living with current and anticipating future Chinese infrastructures of physical connectivity. Playfully building on the notion of the ‘Chinese dream’, this article presents an ethnography of the emotional ambivalence of both positive and negative feelings towards Chinese visions and concrete projects of infrastructural development. This fine-grained micro-sociology of actually lived Chinese infrastructures complicates otherwise BRI-centric narratives of Chinese encroachment in Laos and the associated representation of Laos as a small and passive victim.

This article investigates memories of the Cold War era in Thailand, through online practices on Facebook pages administered by residents of a borderland province in the Northeast that was a key front line during the conflict. The possibilities for greater access to, and dissemination of, information afforded by digital media technologies have created a new environment for the production of shared knowledge about the past. However, on these pages, instead of converging plural memories, participatory online culture and the use of the language of memory have enabled the creation of distinct and separated memory spaces. This article calls attention in particular to what is silenced and absent in what people are sharing online. It argues that the deep-seated ethnic politics of the Cold War have an afterlife in Thai society—especially in the country's ‘margins’ where the conflict was most violent—that is reflected as much by what is not said as by what is said online.

During the Second World War, France recruited unskilled labourers, known as Lính thợ or ‘Worker-Soldiers’, from the Indochina Union (today's Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), mainly from the Tonkin (Northern) and Northern Annam regions. This article examines French policies towards Lính thợ from 1939 to the 1950s, which aimed to recruit the most cost-effective, healthiest, hardiest, skilled, and ‘compliant’ labour force. However, these policies had unintended consequences. They exacerbated existing conflicts within the Lính thợ community, and also led to their marginalisation and exclusion from French civil society. As a result, Lính thợ had to restructure their community and rethink their goals and strategies to claim their legitimate rights, especially after 1945. This article highlights the tensions and challenges faced by Lính thợ in France, and the complex relationship between colonial powers and migrant labourers imported from the colonies.

Until recently, scholars have generally neglected to examine the socialist inspirations of the Republic of Indonesia's most influential Islamic party, Masjumi (Partai Majelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia, 1943–60) during Indonesia's parliamentary democracy period (1950–59). Drawing on books published by Masjumi politicians as well as an Indonesian translation of the Syrian Islamic socialist Mustafa al-Siba'i's Islamic Socialism (1949), this article explores how two prominent Masjumi members, Zainal Abidin Ahmad and Isa Anshary, drew on socialist ideas in forming their political visions for Indonesia, as part of a broader ongoing debate in the wider Muslim world. In contrast to popular perceptions of Indonesian political Islam today, as well as Cold War-centric characterisations of Islamic political parties, this article shows how Muslim democrats in 1950s Indonesia emphasised socio-economic justice and compassion in their articulations of political Islam.

This article examines the month-long epidemic outbreak of Asian Flu in 1957 in the Colony of Singapore that occurred as part of the larger 1957–58 Asian Flu Pandemic. The notably short duration of this epidemic outbreak in Singapore relative to the prolonged Asian Flu experience in other countries poses significant socio-historical intrigue. In response, this article constructs a socio-historical narrative of Singapore's societal response to the event, focusing specifically on the reactions of the state and the colony residents. Studying the social narratives that emerged from official and popular discourses, this article argues that Singapore's societal response to the epidemic outbreak bifurcated drastically between the state and the public as a result of different and contradictory perceptions of public health and epidemic severity. Owing to extenuating circumstances, state interventions were, overall, reactive and insufficient, permitting the Asian Flu's rapid spread in the colony. The public, however, sought active control over their epidemic fates, as they were driven by a mixture of fear, greed, and civic duty to self-medicate, profiteer, and provide aid to one another. Consulting an eclectic range of hitherto underutilised primary sources, the article constructs a compelling socio-historical narrative that furthers understanding of Singapore's state-society relations.

In the long history of Chinese emigration, men left home to work abroad, leaving family members behind. While overseas, they sent money to their relatives along with remittance letters (qiaopi). Many qiaopi were formulaic documents prepared by professional letter writers, but those sent by Huang Kaiwu to his wife between 1903 and 1916 provide information on changing family values and gender norms in the years leading up to the Chinese Revolution and Republic. Huang was a textile merchant in the Philippines, a leader of the Chinese community in Manila, and a revolutionary who actively supported the 1911 Revolution. His wife lived with members of his family in his home village. His letters reveal tensions between tradition and change both on his part and on hers. Written at a time of momentous socio-political change and under the influence of Chinese nationalism, they provide insights into how modernist thinking played out in one Chinese migrant family and enrich academic understanding of the Chinese diaspora especially in the early twentieth century.

This Forum reflects the stimulating conversations we had as participants in a roundtable at the 2023 Boston meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. The discussion centred on the position of women (as both contributors and subjects) in competing visions of modernity in Southeast Asia. Our overall goals were to explore how women contributed to these visions and the extent to which their hopes were realised. In the process, numerous questions arose: What were women's experiences in these modernities? How were their roles influenced by class, ethnicity, religion, and age? And, finally, how do analyses of women-centred involvement inform broader understandings of social, cultural, economic, and political transformations in the region? The contributors reflect on their own trajectory in the study of women's history, the sources they have been able to leverage, the intersection between ‘modernity’ and nationalism, the related issue of women's position in postcolonial nation-states, and the question of how ideas of sexuality (in the family, society, politics) were changing. Throughout the Forum, we argue that the experience of women, and their (often but not necessarily agentic) contribution, is necessary to fully grasp the region's multiple entanglements with ‘modernity/ies’ in a variety of fields.