In 2016 and 2017, members of Ontario Provincial Parliament and the Parliament of Canada submitted bills to declare commemorative days for the Nanjing Massacre. In response, the National Association of Japanese Canadians mounted a campaign against the commemorative days, arguing that memorialization of the Nanjing Massacre would make Japanese Canadians vulnerable to racial persecution akin to the animus that led to mass incarceration during the Second World War. This paper investigates the transnational political forces that have shaped the controversy around the commemorative days, illuminating the conflicted racial, ethnic, and national affiliations that structure Japanese Canadian community, and Canadian politics more broadly.

A secret pact between the Solomon Islands and China, mainly concerned with internal security in the islands, has sparked new US-China competition in the Pacific Island countries. The United States, Australia, and New Zealand worry about a future Chinese base in the Solomons and elsewhere, whereas most Pacific Island countries worry about environmental and economic problems and want to stay clear of the US-China rivalry. Omitted from most analyses is the overwhelming US naval and air superiority in the Asia Pacific, and the neglect of the United States and its allies of Pacific Islanders' concerns. Belatedly, the United States is trying to get back in the game, while China already is presenting the PI countries with a blueprint for economic recovery and environmental protection.

In 1998, the International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute. With 123 nations now parties to the Treaty, the ICC, headquartered at the Hague, may investigate and prosecute individuals for war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and aggression. It is hampered, however, by the fact that 70 countries, including the US, Russia, China and many other nuclear powers, have not joined and actively oppose the work of the court. What have been its accomplishments and its limits?

While Hong Kong's Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) Movement in 2019 did not lead to systemic policy changes, the protests provided coalitional moments for mainstream Hongkongers to connect with the city's marginalised South Asian community. This essay first contextualises the positionality and history of marginalisation of South Asians in Hong Kong. It then examines moments of rupture during the Anti-ELAB Movement that fostered solidarity between the two ethnic groups. This case study illustrates how anti-authoritarian social movements and the affective charge of protests help cultivate a politics of relation that supersedes racialisation.

Contemporary readers are most familiar with George Orwell's later works of political satire, such as Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Less known is the fact that the writer, who is often considered the epitome of ‘Englishness’, was born in India and as a young man served for five years in the Imperial Police in Burma—an experience that reverberated throughout his oeuvre. In Orwell and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022), Douglas Kerr offers the first comprehensive study of Orwell's writing about the East and of the East in his writing

This essay considers how insights into the dynamic, interconnected, and high-stakes nature of frontier markets resonate with current disruptions in global commodity networks. In the book Unsettled Frontiers (Cornell University Press, 2022), I argue that the tangled social and material networks that constitute frontier markets are prone to rupture—a characteristic that holds significant implications for frontier landscapes and communities. Such processes of rupture—consequential and unequal in their effects—are evident in the disruptions we now see in the wake of Covid-19 and the broader unfolding of our current nature–society crisis.

The current Hong Kong situation is the product of a long-term accumulation of crises and the consequences of the broader interplay of clashes among nations. Taiwan has long seen the PRC's treatment of Hong Kong as a barometer of its Taiwan policy. The “One Country, Two Systems” formula was proposed with an eye on Taiwan. In recent years, Beijing seemed to decouple the Hong Kong-Taiwan nexus as it began to turn the screws on Hong Kong. Taiwan has played a significant but often misunderstood role in Hong Kong's resistance to Chinese domination. This article explores the political impact of the Hong Kong-Taiwan civil society nexus from the early 2010s, through the Umbrella Movement (2014), to the Anti-Extradition Movement (2019) and the implementation of the National Security Law (2020). The ever-more repressive measures China imposed on both Hong Kong and Taiwan have given rise to close and lively exchanges between both civil societies. Taiwan may play a supporting role in Hong Kong's resistance to Chinese repression and subordination.

An essay of mine, with the title “Private War Enterprise in Asia: Air America, the Brook Club and the Kuomintang,” was sent by me in 1970 to Ramparts magazine. But it was impounded by the CIA, and retained in their archives until released in 2009, under three CIA cover slips (one almost fully redacted). It is now published here, under a 2022 Introduction I have written for it.

Even South Korea's President Roh Moo-Hyun had to obtain permission from the United Nations Command (UNC) in order to cross the dividing line between the two Koreas on his way to the summit with his counterpart Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang. The UNC has used its authority to grant permission to cross the dividing line as a wedge in the inter-Korean Railway Projects, and the United States government, which commands the UNC, has been engaged in a tug-of-war to preserve the armistice regime and the Cold War order in Northeast Asia.

This article surveys the highlights of Japanese political assassination from 1909 to 2022 through the commemoration of the victims and photographs of the major sites in Tokyo.

On 8 July, Abe Shinzō was assassinated during a political rally in Nara. He was Japan's prime minister twice, first in 2006–2007 and then again from 2012 to 2020, when he resigned amid falling approval ratings and ill-health. While Abe's legacy is deeply disputed within Japan, abroad he has been widely praised as an unusually resolute, even transformative statesman who helped the country shake off the deadwood of the postwar era. In this compendium, David McNeill collects a series of short assessments of Abe's legacy in key areas by some of the journal's lead writers.

In understanding the authoritarian character of Rodrigo Duterte's rule followed by the return of the Marcoses to power, it is important to situate both within the context of ‘electoral dystopias’ in the Philippines: the colonial and postcolonial history of democratic institutions deployed by rulers to produce undemocratic social effects. Elections thus look two ways: they seek to mobilise popular expectations for change even as they become instruments for reproducing hierarchy and reinforcing the power of elites. It is within this paradoxical conjunction of popular desires for radical change and elite attempts at containing and channelling those desires for conservative ends that we can see the rise of authoritarian figures such as Duterte. This essay is based on the first chapter of the author's The Sovereign Trickster: Death ad Laughter in the Age of Duterte, published by Duke University Press in 2022.

While all historical sources must be used with care, the archival documents found in Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution in New China demanded extra attention. These archival sources—four criminal casefiles from a rural Public Security Bureau in Poyang County, Jiangxi Province—are packed with detail. But they were also composed by outsiders who were unfamiliar with local conditions even as they held preconceived notions about village life. This essay discusses some of the most challenging aspects of working with such documents, including issues of authorship, outsider bias, and the many silences in the historical record.

For almost two decades, Gunma Prefecture has been the site of an intense political struggle over the public representation of the history of wartime forced labor in Japan's public sphere. Following an initiative by a private group, and with the unanimous consent of the prefectural assembly, a memorial dedicated to Korean wartime laborers was set up in a prefectural park in the city of Takasaki in 2004. However, in 2014, the prefecture announced it would not extend permission to maintain the memorial—a decision confirmed by Japan's Supreme Court in June 2022. The debates in Gunma are illustrative of the rise of historical revisionism in twenty-first century Japan and the revisionist campaign to erase the term “forced labor” from Japan's public sphere. The decision taken by Gunma Prefecture in 2014 to ban the memorial was a milestone, not only in this campaign, but also because it triggered massive media interest and encouraged other prefectural administrations to launch similar campaigns of censorship in public spaces.