“Your honors, in this venue, I announce my separation from the United States … both in military, but economics also,” said Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte to a burst of applause from an audience of officials in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, the symbolic seat of China's ruling Communist Party. At the Philippine-Chinese trade forum that same day, October 20, 2016, Duterte opened his speech by asking, “What is really wrong with an American character?” Americans are, he continued, “loud, sometimes rowdy, and they have this volume of their voice … not adjusted to civility…. They are the more forward commanding voice befitting obedience.” Evoking some deep Filipino racialist tropes, Duterte then mocked the flat, nasal American accent and rued the time he was questioned at the Los Angeles airport by a “Black” officer with a “black” uniform, “black shoes,” and a “black” gun. Moving from rhetoric to substance, Duterte quietly capitulated to Beijing's relentless pressure for bilateral talks to settle the dispute over the South China Sea, virtually abrogating Manila's recent slam-dunk win on that issue before an international court (Demick and Wilson 2016; DU30 News 2016).

Much has been written in recent years about the environmental degradation in China's ethnic minority regions and the impact that this degradation and the policies that have been implemented to combat it have had on minority populations. To date, however, the research has focused mainly on the livelihood and lifestyle of minority herders and farmers. This article shifts the focus to the more symbolic realm of discourse and identity and to the minority educated urban elite, for whom this environmental degradation is linked primarily to ethnic politics. Based on an analysis of popular songs by famous Mongolian, Uyghur, and Tibetan musicians, along with interviews with the musicians who created them and other minority intellectuals, this article proposes that China's minority intellectuals have appropriated the global discourse of environmentalism to construct minority environmental discourses that they use to assert their ethnic identities, express ethnic concerns and aspirations, and make ethno-nationalist claims.

As studies of technology in modern Asia move from production to consumption, and from big machines to small, so they confront increasingly complex and nuanced issues about the relationship between the local, the regional, and the global; between political economy and culture; and, perhaps most crucially, between technology and modernity. From a South Asian perspective (and perhaps from a Southeast Asian one as well), many of these issues are inescapably bound up with the Western colonial presence, decolonization, and the post-independence quest for national self-sufficiency and economic autarky. In East Asia, as the articles by Antonia Finnane and Thomas Mullaney demonstrate, the issues play out somewhat differently, not least because of the pivotal role of Japan as a major regional force, an industrial nation, and an imperial power. In South Asia in the period covered by these essays, Japan was a far more marginal presence, with only some industrial goods—such as textiles, bicycles, or umbrella fittings—finding a market there by the mid-1930s. At their height in 1933–34, some 17,000 Japanese bicycles were imported into India (out of nearly 90,000 overall), and in 1934–35, barely 1,400 sewing machines (out of 83,000); within three years this had fallen to less than 700. However, as Nira Wickramasinghe has recently demonstrated with respect to Ceylon (colonial Sri Lanka), Japan had a significance that ranged well beyond its limited commercial impact: it inspired admiration for the speed of its industrialization, for its scientific and technological prowess, and as the foremost exemplar of an “Asian modern” (Wickramasinghe 2014, chap. 5). One other way in which Japan figured in postwar regional history was through demands for compensation made in 1946 for sewing machines destroyed by Japanese bombing (or the looting that accompanied it) and the occupation of the Andaman Islands. And yet, relatively remote though Japan and China might be from South Asia's consumer history, across much of the Asian continent there was a common chronology to this unfolding techno-history, beginning in the 1880s and 1890s and dictated less evidently by the politics of war and peace than by the influx of small machines, of which sewing machines and typewriters were but two conspicuous examples.

This article explores how new modes of writing and reading that developed in epistolary culture brought about intellectual, social, and political changes in Chosŏn society. From the sixteenth century onwards, the diverse uses of letters transformed the lifestyle and the mode of political participation of Confucian intellectuals. Letters became the main reading materials for neo-Confucian studies and self-cultivation as well as a medium for political action, especially for rural scholars, who innovated various epistolary genres to raise their political voices. New epistolary practices facilitated their collective activism, the spread of radical opinions, and the mobilization of new political groups. Toward the end of the dynasty, even nonelites emulated these practices for their activism. In this period, “spiral letters” developed in both vernacular Korean and literary Chinese letters. These new letter forms, used by both male elites and women, reflected and subverted the existing gender dynamics and power relations associated with the norms of reading and writing. The rise and fall of spiral letters demonstrate the mutual influence between the written culture and sociopolitical changes. The versatility and resourcefulness of epistolary practices characterized Chosŏn letter writers' fashionable choice of a radical lifestyle, which geared their social life to yield actual political power.

Since the early twentieth century, groups of Burmese Buddhist sorcerers and their followers have taken on the duty of guarding the Buddha's sāsana from colonial, ideological, and Islamic threats. Sāsana (broadly, the teachings of the Buddha and the institutions and practices that support them) and how it should be sustained in the face of its inevitable demise have been central concerns of these societies, expressed in both their textual and oral representations. To illustrate this tension between endurance and change, this article explores ideas of the life cycle of the sāsana and how ideas about its responsibility to wider communities of Burmese Buddhists became expressed through the intersection of sāsana and sorcery. Examining the ways these associations understood themselves to be protecting and propagating the sāsana through various means demonstrates how sāsana vitality gave their beliefs and actions a distinct collective and collectively ethical tone.