The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12)

The once-implemented Chinese one-child policy has reinforced the imbalanced gender ratio and created a significant surplus of bachelors in China. (Involuntary) female migration from Vietnam to China to ease this demographic pressure is a topic that has gained relative media attention in Vietnam. The Vietnamese female migrants (VFMs) who had migrated to China and returned to Vietnam often encounter several problems during their reintegration, including social stigmatisation and negative reactions from local communities, but this receives little academic and media attention. Using this migration route as a case study, this paper employs in-depth interviews with the VFMs who had migrated to China but returned to Vietnam to understand the issues that they often face with and their tactics in dealing with such issues. This paper’s aims are to comprehend the VFMs’ (re-)migratory experiences, their strategies in dealing with media representation and local attitudes, and their reactions to the media and social encounters. Anchoring in the intersectional framework, cultivation theory and learned helplessness, it argues that social structure, local norms, gendered hierarchy and the media portrayal of these women contribute to the VFMs’ struggles to reintegrate. Further analysis shows that female migration is often equated to prostitution in the locals’ perception. The VFMs, under intersectional and psychological constraints, have limited access to social media to use it as a platform to challenge the media and local discourse about themselves. Future research should pay special attention to the intersectional identities of VFMs to better understand their social media use and reintegration process.

This article discusses a rarely discussed manuscript dictionary A Vocabulary of the Cochinchinese Language compiled by Italian missionary Joseph Morrone and published by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau and aims to interpret and discover the understanding of the Cochinchinese characters and their relations with written Chinese characters from the perspective of European missionaries and linguists in the early 19th century. Through analyzing and examining the Cochinchinese entries in the dictionary, Du Ponceau was greatly inspired to challenge the axiom about the term “ideographical” which became the roots of Sinological debate (the Boogberg-Creel controversy) and aroused the “Critique of the Ideographican Myth”.

With the background of foreign concessions in Shanghai as a result of the Treaty of Nanjing and subsequent treaties between China and Western powers, the Shanghai Stock Exchange (1904-1941) was established by foreign businessmen (mostly British) in Shanghai. This foreign Shanghai Stock Exchange symbolises Western capitalisation in China and deserves the attention of economic historians to investigate its function in semi-colonial Shanghai. However, due to constraints in available archives and difficulties in utilising multilingual research materials, the history of the foreign Shanghai Stock Exchange has been untold. Among the inchoate existing literature on stock exchanges in Shanghai, literature in Chinese lays focus on Chinese stock exchanges while literature in English dismisses the foreign stock exchange from the broad context of financial capitalism in China reflected locally in Shanghai. This paper aims to bridge the scholarship between Chinese and English on this topic and put forward the future direction to digger into this important but missing piece of economic history.

This paper aims to shed new light on the history of the abolition of Chinese indenture by analysing the relationship between domestic service and penal sanctions in Singapore. In response to international pressure, legislative reforms designed to abolish Chinese indenture were introduced in Singapore from 1914. The reforms brought an end to long contracts and criminal convictions for breach of contract. In the period after the First World War, the global campaign against indenture stepped up pace, spearheaded by the International Labour Organization (ILO). Seeking to assess whether indenture had indeed been abolished in British Malaya, the ILO commissioned a report in 1927. In their assessment of Singapore, the ILO concluded that “labour is free” except in the case of domestic servants who could be fined or imprisoned for leaving their place of employment without giving notice, or, for being wilfully negligent or disobedient in their duties. This paper explores why it was that Chinese domestic servants in Singapore were treated as a special category of labour for whom the provisions of indenture remained necessary. I argue that one factor in the continued use of penal sanctions was the perceived need to discipline a group of workers who were renowned for their collective bargaining and individual acts of rebellion.

Many Russian analysts and officials recognize that the expansion of Chinese influence through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) represents a fundamental, long-term challenge. Yet cooperation between Moscow and Beijing in the regions encompassed by the BRI appears to be increasing at the institutional, economic, and diplomatic levels. Russian reactions to the BRI have gone through three phases: immediately following Xi Jinping’s September 2013 proclamation of the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, Russian analysts and commentators were mostly critical of the initiative, which they portrayed as incompatible with Moscow’s own vision for Eurasian integration. Russian reactions pivoted following the March 2014 annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war with Ukraine, when the prospect of sustained confrontation with the U.S. and its European allies made Chinese support critical. Subsequently, Russian analysts and thinkers—followed by policy makers—developed new ideas for reconciling the BRI with Russia’s own Eurasian ambitions, leading to sustained efforts at coordinating or integrating the EEU with the BRI. By 2019-20, a new debate broke out over Russia’s relationship to the BRI as well as Sino-Russian relations more generally. This new debate centers on the extent to which Russia’s embrace of the BRI remains consistent with Russia’s great power ambitions in Eurasia and beyond. Scrutiny over the BRI could intensify if and when the ongoing crisis between Russia and the West eventually stabilizes.

This paper conducts firstly a historiographical research of the concept zhiyin (perfect connoisseur) and explores the mirror and empathic relationships between Nature and creators as well as creators and their auditors/viewers. It will try to clarify the role of imagery intuitions (xingxiang zhijue 形象直觉) in seizing the zhi 志 (intention) of an artist by searching for the signified of the statements “zhi zai gaoshan 志在高山 ” (aiming at the “high mountains”) and “zhi zai liushui 志在流水 ” (aiming at the “flowing streams”). These statements appear in the story of the Chinese zither qin player Boya and the lumberjack Zhong Ziqi, the perfect connoisseur of Boya's music. This anecdote can be found in many Chinese classics such as the Taoist text Liezi 列子. It was later sung with the qin and fictionalized with many Confucian reminiscences under the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), thus, gradually moving away from its original Taoist version. Classical Chinese artistic creation pays attention to the power of the intuitions, while Western artistic creation, at least before the birth of modern art in Western countries, was knowledge-based and focused more on the representation of the real world. Drawing on studies of ancient Chinese music and poetry, as well as Chinese and Western aesthetic theories, our paper will explore in its second part the evolution of the artist’s “intention”. This examination will allow us to understand the interdependent and sometimes interchangeable relationship between “zhi” (intention), qing 情 (emotions) and yi 意 (intention, idea) - major notions in Chinese aesthetics.

Early modern India (1500-1800 CE), particularly the littoral, witnessed a host of “nationalities” as migrants, expatriates, itinerant merchants, diasporic residents, communities, agents, adventurers, mercenaries, diplomats, envoys, missionaries, sailors and more. Europeans and Asians thronged and interacted with “natives” in cosmopolitan hubs like Delhi, Agra, Masulipatnam, Fort St. George, Golconda, Bijapur, Surat, and also scattered in various ports, like Daman, Bassein, Goa, Chaul, San Thomé etc. and smaller towns and the countryside. What were the perceptions of the self and the other for the European diaspora and itinerants in their purported identities of themselves as Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and/or European, the natives as “Moors” or “Gentus”? How do the constructs of nation, religion, class, ethnicity, language and race express in interstitial identities in contemporary European accounts? From ‘Passeur culturel’ Italian Manucci - a liaison person masquerading as a physician, to English mariner Thomas Bowrey’s experiments with cannabis and horror at brutal indigenous religious practices, French Abbé Carre’s accounts of quivering ‘conversion’ to Islam, lured by fabulous riches, French traveler/physician Bernier’s acutely alienating ‘othering’, European mercenaries employed by native rulers, what glimpses can we discern of the nature of cultural adaptations and transformations experienced and effected by the Europeans in their sojourns in pre-modern India? In terms of perceptions of the self and the other, how did European contemporary accounts compare, juxtaposed with vernacular and Sanskrit accounts with their references to ‘‘Hunas’’ (Europeans) with ‘‘svetavadanah’’ (White-faces)? Can such vicissitudes nuance our understanding of distinct cultural spheres and world-views in the global context of the pre-modern ethos?

Since 1951, the alliance with the United States has so predominated Japanese security considerations that the UK-Japan security partnership, its origins and revival, have received limited attention. Previous UK-Japan security partnerships had existed as imperial alliances prior to the Great War, in which they fought as allies, and re-emerged in the most unlikely situation amid immediate postwar animosity as Britain sought to deal with surrendered Japanese troops and recolonise large areas of South-East Asia. Cooperation occurred during the occupation of Japan, and expanded to include Korean War minesweeping, yet from 1951 Anglo-Japanese security engagement lay largely dormant other than defence technology trade until a return to minesweeping cooperation in 1991. The re-founded security partnership can be traced to this naval operation, and to civilian and military personnel forming functional relationships during peace, humanitarian, and security operations. Despite lacking an Economic Partnership Agreement with Japan, the UK was the first non-alliance strategic partner to conduct air combat training and army exercises in Japan, while continuing extensive naval cooperation. Brexit shocks, however, dented images of the UK as Japan’s gateway to Europe for trade and security collaboration. This paper examines the century from Anglo-Japanese alliance, through post-war occupation/re-armament, Cold War stasis, to post-Cold War engagement and partnership, combining historical and International Relations methodologies. It attempts to evaluate how the UK-Japan security relationship changed throughout the twentieth century, how it developed in the century from the end of the alliance up to 2022, and what continuation can be charted through alliance, wars, animosity, distant trading amity, and to the embrace of strategic partnership? Many of these elements are to be included in a Thomas W. French (Ritsumeikan University) edited volume (2022).

This paper discusses one of the covert methods Indonesian President Soeharto (1966-1998) employed to buttress and justify his grip to power and subsequent decades-long authoritarian rule. After the Indonesian Army staged a Coup on 30 September 1965, killing six generals and one lieutenant, it put the blame for the atrocities on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The PKI-affiliated Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerwani) was specifically targeted. With the concoction and nationwide dispersal of a misogynistic hoax, the Army had given itself the legitimization to not only torture, imprison, and irreversibly stigmatize Gerwani-women but also to impose an anti-Gerwani – hence anti-Communist – State gender ideology. This State gender ideology could not exist in the absence of the Gerwani hoax. Even more crucial, Soeharto’s New Order was founded on this hoax, and for his regime’s existence, it perpetuated gendered, anti-Communist fearmongering in direct and indirect ways, including film. Not only were all Soeharto era films stringently subjected to censorship, but film narratives were also interconnected with State narratives – and hence anti-Communist gender propaganda. This paper scrutinizes the narrative of the Gerwani hoax and its references to Indonesian folkloric female monstrosities. It argues that horror films produced during the New Order regime which include a ‘monstrous-feminine’ function as psychological warfare tools to perpetuate the Gerwani hoax in order to legitimize Soeharto’s hold on power.

Anthropologists have, in recent years, taken renewed interest in interspecies sociality and communication. Part of this enterprise has been an attempt to locate anthropological alternatives to the theory of mind concept in psychology. How may an anthropological theory of mind inform multi species ethnography, particularly within a framework of sensory methodology? In light of these concerns, the author explores recent debates on mutual knowability in interspecies lifeworlds, focusing on the doing/undoing of communicative congruence in ethnographic examples of wolf-human (and other) relations in South Central Siberia. Of particular interest are ethnographically situated experiences of body orientation and expression within landscapes and through material implements, such as landscape formations.