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The Xi Jinping Effect

By Ashley Esarey, Rongbin Han

The Xi Jinping Effect explores the relationship between the People's Republic of China's current "paramount leader"—arguably the most powerful figure since Mao Zedong (1893–1976)—and multiple areas of political and social transformation. It illuminates not just...

Late Industrialization, Tradition, and Social Change in South Korea

By Yong-Chool Ha

South Korea's rapid industrialization occurred with the rise of powerful chaebǒl (family-owned business conglomerates) that controlled vast swaths of the nation's economy. Leader Park Chung Hee's sense of backwardness and urgency led him to rely...

Cold War Deceptions

The Asia Foundation and the CIA

By David H. Price

During the early Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency created dozens of funding fronts to support work that aligned with CIA goals, from clandestine operations and research to liberal anticommunist programs. While investigative journalists and...

Heartbreak City

Seattle Sports and the Unmet Promise of Urban Progress

By Shaun Scott

To cities, sports have never been just entertainment. Progressive urbanites across the United States have used athletics to address persistent problems in city life: the fights for racial justice, workers' rights, equality for women and...

Surviving the Sanctuary City

Asylum-Seeking Work in Nepali New York

By Tina Shrestha

Over the past several decades, the vibrant, multiethnic borough of Queens has seen growth in the community of Nepali migrants, many of whom are navigating the challenging bureaucratic process of asylum legalization. Surviving the Sanctuary...

Governing Water in India

Inequality, Reform, and the State

By Leela Fernandes

Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and expose...

The Story of Propaganda in 50 Images

By David Welch

From ancient Greek coinage to the sound bites of modern-day political spin doctors, propaganda has existed for thousands of years. But it was in the twentieth century that the art of persuasively communicating ideas truly...

Contemporary Asian American Activism

Building Movements for Liberation

By Diane C. Fujino, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

In the struggles for prison abolition, global anti-imperialism, immigrant rights, affordable housing, environmental justice, fair labor, and more, twenty-first-century Asian American activists are speaking out and standing up to systems of oppression. Creating emancipatory futures...

Pure and True

The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China's Hui Muslims

By David R. Stroup

The Chinese Communist Party points to the Hui—China’s largest Muslim ethnic group—as a model ethnic minority and touts its harmonious relations with the group as an example of the Party’s great success in ethnic politics....

Love for Liberation

African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

By Robin J. Hayes

During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the US and Africa came together to fight for Black self-determination and the antiracist remaking of society. Beginning with the 1957 Ghanaian independence celebration, the...

The Borders of AIDS

Race, Quarantine, and Resistance

By Karma R. Chávez

As soon as US media and politicians became aware of AIDS in the early 1980s, fingers were pointed not only at the gay community but also at other countries and migrant communities, particularly Haitians, as...

Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx

The Fight for a Secular World of Universal and Equal Rights

By Jonathan I. Israel

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world’s most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots...

The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance

By Bertil Lintner

The United Wa State Army (UWSA) is a nonstate armed group that administers an autonomous zone in the difficult-to-reach Wa Hills of eastern Myanmar. As China expands its geopolitical interests across Asia through the Belt...

Protecting Whiteness

Whitelash and the Rejection of Racial Equality

By Cameron D. Lippard, J. Scott Carter, David G. Embrick, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

The standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch, the rise of white identity activists on college campuses, and the viral growth of white nationalist videos on YouTube vividly illustrate the resurgence of white supremacy and overt racism...

Korean Skilled Workers

Toward a Labor Aristocracy

By Hyung-A Kim

South Korea’s triumphant development has catapulted the country’s economy to the eleventh largest in the world. Large family-owned conglomerates, or chaebŏls, such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG, have become globally preeminent manufacturing brands. Yet Korea’s...

A Secular Need

Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India

By Jeffrey A. Redding

Whether from the perspective of Islamic law’s advocates, secularism’s partisans, or communities caught in their crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islamic law and secularism as antagonistic and increasingly discordant. In the United States...

Taiwan in Dynamic Transition

Nation Building and Democratization

By Ryan Dunch, Ashley Esarey, Thomas B. Gold

Following a remarkable transition from authoritarian rule to robust democracy, Taiwan has grown into a prosperous but widely unrecognized nation-state for which no uncontested sovereign space exists. Increasingly vigorous assertions of Taiwanese identity expose the...

Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

By Erik Mobrand

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In...

Sensitive Space

Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border

By Jason Cons

Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border have posed conceptual and pragmatic challenges to both states since Partition in 1947. These pieces of India inside of Bangladesh, and vice versa, are spaces in which national security, belonging,...

Beyond Death

The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea

By Charles R. Kim, Jungwon Kim, Hwasook B. Nam, Serk-Bae Suh

Suicide and martyrdom are closely intertwined with Korean social and political processes. In this first book-length study of the evolving ideals of honorable death and martyrdom from the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910) to contemporary South Korea,...