Noting the growing importance of online platforms, this paper discusses the rise and development of the platform economy in Korea, defining platforms as a business model and arguing that the platform economy requires financing, an environment for Internet use and users, services, and content. Many believe that the platform economy's development is a natural outcome of technical innovation. However, the platform economy was created by the interplay of government and corporate strategies under certain historical conditions. In Korea, the platform economy developed after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Presenting the IT industry and venture businesses as a solution to the crisis, the government helped finance venture companies through intensive investment and enhanced the strategy of building information and communication infrastructure. Platform companies suffered from the lack of content and services to provide; however, they quickly built web portal platforms with Korean specificities by copying and benchmarking personal computer communication services.

This paper argues that the interwar Japanese Marxists Miki Kiyoshi and more contemporary Hiromatsu Wataru each moved towards developing this perspective beyond simple distinctions between idealism, which is confined to concepts, and materialism, conceived as presupposing that ideas are determined by matter. Japanese Marxism was in a unique place to affect such a synthesis because of the existence of Kyoto School philosophy, with whom both Miki and Hiromatsu were associated. The proponents of the Kyoto School combined Eastern and Western philosophical perspectives, which had the aim of criticizing modernity. Miki Kiyoshi and other members of the Kyoto School eventually supported Japan's wartime effort, which delegitimized their concerns about modernity during the postwar. However, in postwar Japan, Hiromatsu developed a creative reading of Marx's materialism and in the 1994 surprised everyone by advocating a pan-Asianist critique of modernity. Hiromatsu suggested that despite problems that Miki and the Kyoto School represented, one had to grasp the rational kernel, which could save Marxism from slipping into an equally dangerous modernization theory. This task remains for us today when the dystopia of globalized capitalism seems to have become a reality that threatens the survival of our planet.

This article focuses on a set of aesthetic debates that took place in China in the late 1950s. By exploring the main arguments presented by different thinkers, particularly the writings of Zhu Guanqian and Li Zehou, this article demonstrates how the aesthetics took part in the ideological formation of the new socialist state. From the debates, we observe the tensions between the complexity of the material-political and the reductionism of the state ideology. We also recognize why and how aesthetics could be such an important site of political contestation in this young socialist country, and how the interactions between human senses and the material world are essential to arts universally. The dominant materialist aesthetics presented in the debate was less a theory of things than a theory of the social. This historical materialist approach might be useful as a social critique; however, when handled dogmatically, it not only rejects the autonomy of things, but also disallows art works to reflect the complex human interactions with the material world beyond economic power relations. We can find more sophisticated analysis in Zhu's aesthetic theory, which tries to incorporate the interactions between the subjects and the objects into materialism.

Amid growing interest in studying China and India together, this special issue, “Methods in China-India Studies,” seeks to open a conversation on the relevance, approaches, and stakes of China-India research. Why should we pair China and India together, how can we best do so, and to what ends? In this introduction to the issue, the editors first discuss the rationales commonly evoked as justification for studying China and India together. The first section articulates shared intellectual commitments as lending a coherence to China-India studies, and as providing a common ground and point of departure for scholars across disciplinary boundaries. The second section outlines a history of the China-India pairing from the first century CE to the end of the twentieth century, with a focus on how a range of historical actors paired China and India under shifting political circumstances and with differing objectives. This section also offers an assessment of the methodological approaches recent scholarship has extended to studying each of these periods. As a whole, this introduction reflects on the unique challenges and opportunities of conducting China-India research, and outlines some of the contributions the China and India conceptual pairing can make to other fields of study.

This paper examines the political and cultural context of the popular 2010 revival of the light comedy theatre production Sanullim in North Korea. The play, originally written and performed in 1961, portrays the spirit of revolutionary optimism as the characters resolve an unhostile conflict and unite to expand socialist production to contribute to overcoming the (real-life) political and economic crisis of the Chollima era. The 2010 revival of this propaganda responded to similar political and economic crisis, and was designed to instil confidence that the present crisis would be overcome as successfully as in the first Chollima era, provided that people could conjure the same revolutionary optimism. This paper examines why this particular play was revived over others from the Kim Il-sung era, and its particular potential to serve as effective propaganda during the transition from military-first to party-first policy in the Kim Jong-un era, in reference to parallels between 1961 and 2010. The play immerses the audience in the dramatic situations through verisimilitude to the lives of the audience, though the emotional excess of the characters is often exaggerated. Such laughter ignited by dramatic irony contributed to creating a heightened ideological thought of the audience who would spontaneously (re-)internalise the communist human character. The revival of the play was the most appropriate choice according to the object of justification of the succession of power from Kim Jung-il to Kim Jung-un.

War and peace are the two incompatible notions. War and compassion are not: war often calls for human compassion to save not only friends but also enemies. As the technology of war has advanced since the nineteenth century, the targets of compassion in the form of philanthropy, social work, and humanitarianism have also expanded to include soldiers, civilians, and children. In this article, I explore the link between war and compassion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by focusing on the plight of Japanese war orphans in Japan and Chinese war orphans in China. These sixty-seven Chinese war orphans were brought to Japan in 1939 by a member of the Japanese Imperial army stationed in occupied China. The founders of orphanages in Japan argued that war incited their compassion to save the young victims of war. Yet they were also forced to work under the watchful eyes of the State. How did Japan's power structures, which created misery in both Japan and China, change over time? How did the Japanese social structures, which tried to help alleviate misery among children, change? My goal is to relate these questions to each other for further understanding the link between war and compassion between 1867 and 1945 and in the early postwar era.

This study applies a genealogical mode of enquiry to the history of tigers as a symbol of Korea and the Korean people. The zoomorphic idea of Korea as a tiger is conventionally traced to the writings of the intellectual, Ch'oe Namsŏn (1890–1957). However, we argue that while Ch'oe was the first to link tigers with modern Korean nationalism, low levels of literacy and Ch'oe's later ambiguous status as a Japanese “collaborator” meant his promotion of the tiger symbol failed to gain traction. Instead, we locate the making of the modern Korean tiger metaphor in multiple post-colonial sites of cultural inscription, including national newspapers, zoos and museums, which generate and diffuse narratives about the ancient and continuous origins of the Korean people. In particular, it was during the 1980s that the successful Seoul Olympic bid and the Chŏn dictatorship's cultural policy converged to facilitate the “rediscovery” of the tiger as a national symbol with a supposedly ancient heritage, and with Ch'oe and his problematic legacy effaced. We also observe a continuing resistance to Japanese hegemony and a post-colonial construction of Korean identity through the recasting of the tiger – originally a Japanese symbol of Korea – in a new light.

The mid-1920s to the 1950s witnessed the uneasy imbrication of the rural, the peasantry, and women as symbols and subjects of the nation in the era of anti colonial and socialist movements in both India and China. This essay examines this rural/peasant/woman nexus within conflicting representations of the peasant woman as embodiment of the nation's past, present and future, to map a range of connected global political-aesthetic imaginations of Indian and Chinese nationhood. A close analysis of the convergence of three texts – Pearl Buck's novel, The Good Earth (1931), Katherine Mayo's polemic, Mother India (1927), and Indian director Mehboob Khan's re-staging and transformation of both in his 1957 film, Mother India – opens up to a wider set of entangled Indian and Chinese co-texts within an expanded space of global aesthetic circulation. Together, these texts reveal a contested history of representations of the rural, the peasantry, and women in projections of Indian and Chinese national becoming that, in the end, cannot be easily recuperated or consolidated within singular nation-state narratives.

Natsume Sōseki and Masaoka Shiki, two of the towering figures in modern Japanese literature, exchanged kanshi poems for eleven years starting in 1889 when they were students. What Sōseki and Shiki enacted in their kanshi exchanges was not simply an admiration for Chinese culture, but rather a performance of literati cultural exchange. In the personae that these two writers adopted in these exchanges, and in the poetic voices that each writer meticulously honed, they were achieving a return to a cultural homeland and to an “imagined community” in the Sinosphere. Further, the exchange of poetry in a language that was simultaneously both foreign and hauntingly familiar demonstrated a performative quality that reflected their appreciation of the dynamics of poetic exchange in China but also of the yose theater and of the rakugo performances that they frequented as students in Tokyo. In fact, for Sōseki and Shiki, kanshi composition and exchange served two paradoxical purposes: it offered both the challenge of poetic expression in a foreign language and a return to an imagined community and to the familiar rhythms and conventions of a sacred language.

Many books have been written about the incorporation of the Caribbean region, South Asia, Africa and Latin America into the global economy. Remarkably, few have dealt with Island Southeast Asia or Maritime Southeast Asia as a macro-region. For the Caribbean nations, it has been amply discussed how the legacies of the plantation economies consisted of meagre economic growth and massive unemployment. Conversely, scant attention has been given to the question how societies in Island Southeast Asia were turned into providers of cheap commodities and how this impacted their long-term development prospects. This silence is even more remarkable considering some striking parallels with Caribbean socio-economic trajectories. Today, emigration of millions is the fate of Island Southeast Asia, as it is for the Caribbean region. To break the silence and to invite further discussion I wrote The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter. After reading the review by Dr Aguilar on this book in a previous issue of this journal, I felt that it could be worthwhile to highlight some of the main points of my argument about the peripheral integration of Island Southeast Asia in the global economy. I am grateful to the editors of the International Journal of Asian Studies for granting me the opportunity to do so.

Literary Critic and Sinologist, Takeuchi Yoshimi, provides post-colonial and decolonial studies a logic of resistance that seeks to destabilize the colonialist projects of Western modernity without repeating its structural logic. In this regard, Takeuchi's logic of resistance functions as a dialectical lens into the “emancipatory traps” of Western modernity that frame the victim–victimizer paradox by turning negativity into a method of generating heuristic possibilities. But in this pursuit to look for alternative sites for mining theoretical possibilities, Takeuchi returns to the origins of Chinese modernity for imagining a proper logic of Asian resistance, that which could be deployed as a resource for negating the imperial gestures of modernist thought while affirming the positive kernel of the Enlightenment with the hope of bringing forth a global world that is continuously transformed by the cultural particulars themselves. The goal of this article is to further elucidate Takeuchi's logic of Asian resistance and to discuss how this logic can be read as having the potential to correct Nishida Kitarō's and the Kyoto School's failed attempt to overcome modernity.

Tracing the assumption behind China's nationality identification that the Dan constituted a littoral minzu, this article examines the rise and circulation of “Dan” as a racial entity in writings by Chinese thinkers, reformers, and scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. It explains how “Dan” emerged as a zu, minzu, zhongzu, and renzhong in late-Qing political polemics and pedagogical texts, and how this notion was combined with Republican-era scholarship on the Dan within and across the disciplines of popular literature, folklore, ethnohistory, and anthropology. Both Western and imperial Chinese scholarly trends and racialist ideas shaped pre-1949 Dan studies. Modern intellectuals presented the Dan as a non-Han minority based on various nationalist concerns as well as their Han and regional identities. From a historical perspective, this article redraws the geoethnic landscape of modern China by taking transregional littoral fringes into consideration and calling for attention to those identified as non-Han before the nationality investigation in the 1950s but as Han afterward.

From the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco to the resumption of diplomatic relations between China and Japan, Japan has always adopted a political and economic separation policy that maintains diplomacy with Taiwan and economic and cultural relations with China. Within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, to break the existing deadlock, Kenzo Matsumura of the Japanese House of Representatives and others formed a foreign policy group in 1959. This group spoke highly of China's importance to Japan's development on the grounds of national interests rather than ideology and national sentiments, played a bridging role in the political communication between China and Japan, and created a precedent for the nontraditional improvement of international relations in Japan.

This paper explores how Japanese officials and others conceptualized police power at particular junctures in imperial Japanese history (1868–1945). It does so by synthesizing prior scholarship on the Japanese police into a broader genealogy of the police idea in prewar Japan, beginning with the first translations and explanations of police in the Meiji period, the changing perceptions of the police in the 1910s, and the evolution from the “national police” idea in the 1920s to the “emperor's police” in the late 1930s. The essay proposes that the police idea in Japan (and elsewhere) can be read as a boundary concept in which the changing conceptions of police power demarcate the shifting relationship between state and society. Indeed, it is the elusiveness of this boundary that allows for police power – and by extension, state power – to function within society and transform in response to social conditions. Approached in this way, the essay argues that the different permutations of the police idea index the evolving modality of state power in prewar Japan, and thus allows us to reconsider some of the defining questions of imperial Japanese history.

The current study reveals that the Buddhist egalitarian spiritual message found global resonance in an era of globalized inequality. By comparing three modern retellings of an ancient romance between an outcaste (untouchable/Dalit) maiden and the Buddha's attendant Ānanda, this study showcases a shared socio-spiritual horizon that emerged in the Indian and Chinese Buddhist revivals and that thwarted colonial epistemic domination and offered powerful social critiques. More specifically, this study shows that the Indian and Chinese afterlives of the romance display innovative formations of Buddhist social consciousness. The authors reinterpreted equality and freedom on Buddhist terms, creating a new standard of civilization. Employing this “already democratic” Buddhist civilization, they launched critiques of the Indian caste system and Chinese patriarchy. This socio-spiritual horizon subverts the typecast images of “spiritual India” and “rational China.” Whereas these images reflect the limits of the comparative lens based on political regimes – namely, Indian democracy and Chinese socialism – the current study goes beyond regime types by examining diverse formations of universal religion in the cultural sphere. More broadly, a critical strategy for provincializing Europe is to block the colonial gaze and instead showcase the vibrant cultural productions and meaning-making that circulated at the margins of empire.

The North Korean police were arguably one of the most important organisations in liberated North Korea. It was instrumental in stabilising the North Korean society and eventually became one of the backbones for both the new North Korean regime and its military force. Scholars of different political orientation have attempted to reconstruct its early history leading to a set of views ranging from the “traditionalist” sovietisation concept to the more contemporary “revisionist” reconstruction that portrayed it as the cooperation of North Korean elites with the Soviet authorities in their bid for the control over the politics and the military, in which the Soviets merely played the supporting role. Drawing from the Soviet archival documents, this paper presents a third perspective, arguing that initially, the Soviet military administration in North Korea did not pursue any clear-cut political goals. On the contrary, the Soviet administration initially viewed North Koreans with distrust, making Soviets constantly conduct direct interventions to prevent North Korean radicals from using the police in their political struggle.

Cross-cultural exchanges between India and China during the first millennium are often understood through a Buddhist lens; by investigating the impact of Indian Buddhist sources, be they literary, doctrinal, or artistic, to receiving Chinese communities. In these cultural transactions, instigated by traveling pilgrim-monks and enacted by imperial power players in China, India emerges as a remote, idealized, and perhaps “hollow” center. Imagined or real, the importance of images of India in medieval Chinese Buddhist landscape has been established beyond doubt. What seems to be missing in this unidirectional looking is the impact of these cultural communications in India. What were the Indian responses to Chinese Buddhists' demands and their physical presence? How was China imagined and translated in medieval India? This essay proposes to locate the activities of Chinese monks in India and the iconographies of China-inspired Indian Buddhist images within the larger historical context of shifting cultural and political geography of the medieval Buddhist world. By exploring different types of evidence from borderlands, vis-à-vis the monolithic concepts of China and India, the essay also complicates the China–India studies' comparative model.

This paper uses the decade-long collaboration between the Indian paleobotanist Birbal Sahni (1891–1949) and his Chinese doctoral student Hsü Jen (Xu Ren 徐仁, 1910–1992) to offer a connected history of mid-twentieth century scientific activity in China and India. Possibly the first Chinese scientist to earn a PhD from an Indian university (Lucknow, 1946), Hsü was certainly the first to be appointed to a faculty position in India. Sahni and Hsü's attempts to build Asian networks of scientific activity, characterized by the circulation of experts, scientific knowledge, and specimens, provide the grounds for considering a practice of Pan-Asianism. Such a formulation adds to existing work on the Pan-Asianist articulations of intellectual and political figures and urges for an expansion of how we understand scientific activity across China and India from the 1930s to the 1960s. In so doing, the paper makes two historiographical interventions. In the first instance, the collaboration presents an opportunity to move beyond the two dominant frames through which histories of science in China and India are studied: the nation state and Non-West/West binaries. Second, a focus on science widens the scope of China–India history, a field dominated by research on cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic topics.

This paper offers a first analysis of the philosophy of history developed by Jian Bozan (1898–1968), the author of China's earliest comprehensive exposition of historical materialism. Despite his central importance for the establishment of professional historical studies in PRC, the existing studies neglect Jian's original contribution to the development of Chinese Marxism and his pre-war works in general, focusing solely on his participation in the debate over the relation between history and theory in the 1960s. The paper seeks to fill this lacuna by providing a critical account of Jian Bozan's understanding of historical laws, progress, the stages of history, human freedom and the class struggle. Jian's synthesis of historicism and historical materialism, which at a time was seen as an alternative to the Maoist view of history, was officially condemned during the Cultural Revolution and led to his premature death. However, this paper demonstrates that, following the public rehabilitation of the thought of Jian Bozan in 1978, it was his system that had an important impact on the historiography in Dengist China. Furthermore, the paper argues that Jian's approach to historical materialism brought many novelties in relation to the preceding Sino-Marxist views of history.

This paper examines how Islam in Japan tends to be tolerated as (foreign) “culture,” especially within the framework of tabunka kyōsei, multicultural coexistence, and cosmetic multiculturalism to circumvent religious apathy, phobia of religion, and prejudice against Islam. In doing so, this paper will: first provide a history of Muslim–Japanese relations and Muslim communities in Japan as well as an overview of the total estimate of the Muslim population in Japan as of 2018; historicize and denaturalize religious apathy, phobia of religion, and prejudice against Islam among the general Japanese public; analyze the rhetoric of tabunka kyōsei and its relation to cosmetic multiculturalism as well as its problematics; investigate the cases of local oppositions to the building projects of mosques and my observations made at events organized by Muslim groups; and conclude with a critical remark on the cosmetic multiculturalist understanding of “Islamic culture” and its approach to tabunka kyōsei.