In this historical tour-de-force Victor Lieberman moves beyond the traditional area studies boundaries to examine common patterns in another configuration, Eurasia. He argues that island and mainland Southeast Asia, Japan, Russia, France, China, and South Asia experienced parallel developments in territorial consolidation, administrative centralization, and cultural integration that strengthened lowland polities at the expense of outlying areas. What made it all possible was the convergence of a number of factors: the expansion of material resources, new cultural currents, intense interstate competition, and state interventions. Lieberman nonetheless acknowledges that there were “major discrepancies” in geography, population, and social and cultural models among the polities that he examined (Lieberman II: 50–1). For island Southeast Asia, these “major discrepancies” constituted a fundamental impediment to the “territorial consolidation, administrative centralization, and cultural integration” by which Lieberman characterizes Eurasia

I am grateful to The Journal of Asian Studies for organizing this forum and to the seven contributors for taking the time to read my volume(s) and to wrestle with the issues raised therein. The resultant essays fall into two categories. Eric Tagliacozzo, Carolyn Cartier, and John Wills, Jr., examine Asia or Eurasia broadly conceived, whereas Robert Hellyer, Victor Mair, Ramya Sreenivasan, and Leonard Andaya weigh the applicability of my work to particular Asian regions. I consider each set of contributions in turn.

On August 30, 2009, East Timor's Prime Minister, the former resistance leader Xanana Gusmão, quietly authorized the release of a man directly implicated in one of the country's most notorious massacres. Maternus Bere, a commander of the pro-Indonesian Laksaur militia group, had been indicted for his role in the September 1999 killing of as many as 200 unarmed supporters of independence who had taken refuge in the Catholic Church in Suai. Of the 40 victims whose identities could be determined, three were priests, ten were under the age of 18, and more than a dozen were women. The Suai Church massacre was part of a shocking campaign of violence that followed a United Nations-organized referendum in which Timorese had voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia.

Drawing on recent survey data, digital ethnography and comparative analysis, this article presents a critical re-appraisal of the interactive blogosphere in China and its effects on Chinese social and political life. Focused on the discursive and behaviorist trends of Chinese netizens rather than the ubiquitous information control/resistance paradigm, it argues that the Sinophone blogosphere is producing the same shallow infotainment, pernicious misinformation, and interest-based ghettos that it creates elsewhere in the world, and these more prosaic elements need to be considered alongside the Chinese internet's potential for creating new forms of civic activism and socio-political change.

The field of Chinese internet studies is rich and diverse. Just this past year, exciting new books have been published on internet use among urban youth (Liu 2011), online videos (Voci 2010), online carnival (Herold and Marolt 2011), new media events (Qiu and Chan 2011), and cyber-nationalists (Shen and Breslin 2010).