In this article, we argue that Central Asian (CA) states' approach to the Ukrainian crisis should be defined as strategic silence. Such foreign policy reflects how CA's ideological and geographic factors and a shared information space, largely dominated by Russian and Russian-language media, facilitate the understanding of historical continuity among Russian and CA leaders. However, we also demonstrate that CA public officials' and general public's uses of strategic silence reflect the complicated reality of CA states. Their leaders and populations are cognizant of both their dependence on educational and labor opportunities in Russia and their necessity for postwar coexistence with Russia, China, and other states that are not sympathetic to the intentions of the European Union/USA in CA. Therefore, strategic silence is an approach for CA states to voice their disagreement with Russia's approach to Ukraine while avoiding being victimized by Russia and its allies for an openly anti-war stance.

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a commercial network of Chinese Hui Muslims emerged in China's mid and lower Yangzi River region. Through this commercial network, Muslim merchants achieved economic success and positioned themselves as Muslim community leaders and leading reformers of Chinese society. Past scholarship on Chinese Hui Muslims has focused on intellectuals or warlords and missed this important group of Muslim leaders – a group that, with the rising prominence and influence of entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century, had growing political clout. Chen Jingyu, a Muslim merchant from Nanjing, symbolized the culmination of the Muslim commercial network. Indeed, Chen's economic achievements were the direct result of the coordinated effort of Muslim merchants. With sufficient financial backing, Chen then invested in charitable activities and gained unprecedented influence in Muslim communities and Chinese society at large.

Covid-19 seems to have unlocked the reality of democracy's ongoing tension in many parts of the world, including India. The present government, led by Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, enjoys absolute majority in the lower House of Samshad (Indian Parliament); thus satisfies WHO requirement of strong political leadership for meeting the challenge of Covid-19 pandemic. Through analysis of various acts, rules, notifications, social media behaviour, media-representations and reports, two aspects of governance become relevant: the process of policy-communication on the pandemic, particularly while declaring and extending lockdowns, through widely publicised speeches of the Prime Minister, packed with emotive appeals and policy-propaganda. However, government's several omissions and commissions have defied the norms of democratic accountability. In response, opposition political parties and civil society activism have continuously contested these trends, for stretching the democratic space wider and achieving better governance outcomes.

To date, the research on Chinese figures residing or settling abroad and their residential settlements has mainly focused on trade merchants. Merchants frequently traveled abroad due to the characteristics of their occupation and were therefore more likely to reside in foreign countries for varying periods of time in the process. Song-era records that document figures staying overseas, however, largely center around intellectuals and bureaucrats who were trained in the Chinese systems of knowledge or administration, as opposed to merchants. Examining the records concerned, it is difficult to conclude that merchants accounted for the majority of overseas Chinese citizens at that time. This paper strived to focus on the emergence of people who looked for opportunities overseas as the background for the formation of Chinese communities in the Song period, as opposed to trade voyages by merchants. This situation is clearly revealed through the Song's ban on overseas travel for those with different traits from merchants. This indicates that the emergence of people who sought to journey abroad for new opportunities had begun even before 1078. As Chinese citizens sailed abroad to look for new opportunities, Chinese communities began to form in foreign countries around the twelfth century.

This study analyzes the little known Manchukuo Young Girl Envoys – Manchukuo's first government-appointed diplomats – and their official visit to Japan between June 22 and July 12, 1932. Existing studies on the Envoys tend to interpret them from an angle of contemporary Japanese people's national sentiment and deem their visit to Japan a show that the Japanese authorities in Manchukuo and Japan orchestrated together, to render Japan a strong world power. This study problematizes that view and considers the Envoys more of a product of intense power struggles inside Manchukuo's highest Japanese ruling strata, suggesting that Manchukuo's decision-making circle in 1932 was far from being a unified entity. Examining the Envoys' interactions in Japan and comparing relevant Japanese- and Chinese-language news coverage on them, this study argues for the possibility of tracing the intertwined national ideals of Manchukuo's Chinese and Japanese government leaders based on the inspiring example of the Envoys.

This article examines the incident of a “revolt” in the Ockenden Tibetan refugee school in the early 1960s. By analyzing this previously unknown incident of “revolt” in the Tibetan refugee school within the broader historical context of early years in exile, this article aims to underline the contested and contingent process of nation-building in exile. I argue that the Ockenden incident, as forgotten fragments of the Tibetan past, provides us a rare glimpse into the early history of contestation over the production of national history and discourse on Tibet, where exiled Bonpos, a non-Buddhist minority, attempted to renegotiate their marginality by producing alternative history and discourse on Tibet. By focusing on the history of the Ockenden incident as a forgotten fragment from the exile Tibetan past, this article aims to decenter the teleology of Tibetan nationalism by bringing to light one of the unrealized alternative future agendas different groups of exiled Tibetans had in those early moments of discursive formation.

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 article takes a life course perspective to examine the immigration and settlement processes experienced by children of Japanese war orphans left behind in China. Due to legal, social and biological factors, the lifecourses of immigrants are analysed in four groups, determined their age and, concomitantly their year of immigration. “Child immigrants” immigrated by the mid-1980s at school age and steadily built working careers. Due to multiple factors, “adolescent immigrants” made a hasty decision to immigrate to Japan before reaching twenty in the late 1980s. As they did not have special skills, they remained unable to achieve upward mobility. “Young adult immigrants,” falling outside the age-limit eligible for government support, immigrated in 1990s at their own expense while in their 20s. It took a long time before attaining stability in life. “Elder adult immigrants” immigrated in the late 1990s and later while in their 30s. They continue to live at the bottom of the social ladder in Japan.

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.

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.

Moving away from the text-centered paradigm in film studies, the present research explores the relationship between the growing popularity of the film in Shanghai during the first two decades of the twentieth century and city governance in the International Settlement. It argues that the rise of movie halls contributed to creating a new kind of crowd that blended Chinese moviegoers with non-Chinese viewers. The emergence of the cinema as a space where people of different racial and ethnic origins encountered impelled the Shanghai Municipal Council – the governing body of the International Settlement in Shanghai – to respond by implementing new measures of public safety and altering its decades-long unspoken rules of segregation in the realm of everyday life. For Chinese enlightenment intellectuals and government officials, meanwhile, anxiety over their fellow Chinese's lack of basic decorum in public spaces arose with the intense intermingling of Chinese and non-Chinese filmgoers under the same roof. Thus, the cinema became a “contact zone” – a space of asymmetrical relations resulting not necessarily from colonists' exercise of colonial power but from the Chinese elite's wrapping of the discussion of movie theater etiquette reform within a political and ideological framework of modernization, patriotism, and anti-imperialism.

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.