Critical Concepts in Asian Studies – serie

The transformation of Japan in the years between 1931 and 1945 into an expansionist and potentially hegemonic power that threatened the stability of the international order in East Asia is a topic that is central to any understanding of the region’s history in the twentieth century.This new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together the best and most influential scholarship on the period, both contemporary and historical. Volumes I and II focus on politics, foreign policy, and diplomacy. Volume III meanwhile covers economic and financial history. Finally, Volume IV assembles key work on social, cultural, and intellectual factors.The collection is fully indexed and includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor. Each volume of this essential work of reference is also supplemented with an invaluable list of suggested further reading.

The academic study of women in Asia developed in the 1970s as a result of the convergence of the then emerging disciplines of Asian Studies and Women’s Studies. Initially, work on women in Asia grew from traditional branches of learning such as history, anthropology, politics, and literary studies. More recently, it has incorporated cutting-edge areas of academic endeavour, including critical theory and new thinking on sexuality, labour, health, media, and material culture. As research in and around the area flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of scholarly literature.Drawing together in four volumes the key research which has shaped the dynamic academic field that explores women’s lives in the Asian region over the past four decades, and edited by two leading scholars, Women in Asia provides users with a comprehensive survey of all the major issues relating to women in the world’s fastest changing and most culturally diverse region.Volume I (‘Women and Political Power’) brings together material which explores the engagement by women in Asia with the law (e.g. struggles to acquire equal pay and inheritance rights), formal political power (e.g. structural blocks to their participation in government), and education. This volume also gathers vital contributions on women’s activism (e.g. feminist groups, comfort women’s groups, housewives’ unions, and transnational activism).Volume II (‘Redefining Working Women’) collects research around topics including: women and unions; women in paid and unpaid labour (e.g. the gendered division of labour in Asian households); women as migrant workers; women in development; prostitution and trafficking; and women as carers.Volume III (‘Health and Sexuality’) brings together the best—and most influential—scholarship on contentious themes such as the increasing imbalance in sex ratios in the region as a result of female infanticide, sex-selective abortions, and the kidnapping of wives. Research gathered in this volume also covers reproductive health; violence against women (e.g. female genital mutilation, dowry burnings, and honour killings); same-sex attraction and diverse gender identity; and medicine and health care (including work on traditional medicine and mental-health problems specific to women in the region, such as the high suicide rates in China and South Asia).The material collected in Volume IV (‘Constructions of the Feminine’) focuses on women in the family (e.g. gendered role expectations); women in religion; Western perceptions of Asian women (e.g. stereotypes of passivity); women in the arts; and official discourses on the feminine (such as the promotion by Asian governments of gender roles).Women in Asia is fully indexed and each of the four volumes has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, which provides extended reading lists and places the material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students—as well as policy-makers and community activists—as a vital one-stop research resource.

Research on Indian culture and society has been conducted from a dizzying range of perspectives. However, in recent decades it has been particularly characterized by a change in focus from the past to the present; from the worldview of the élites to that of the subalterns; from philosophy to everyday life; and from hierarchy to the critiques of hierarchy and the sources of equality in Indian culture.More dramatic than the changes in the focus of research are the changes in Indian society itself. Urbanization, the liberalization and globalization of the economy, the IT revolution, the success of the global Indian diaspora, the affirmation of religious identities and reaffirmation of ancient world views, reinterpretations of history, new medias and transnational megagurus, and new political landscapes denote some of these processes.This new title from Routledge makes sense of these changes by bringing together the very best scholarly work on India's contemporary transformation. As the world's largest democracy emerges as an economic and cultural superpower, there is a pressing need for a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of Indian culture and society. This four-volume collection answers that need and will be welcomed as a vital one-stop research resource.

Since the late 1970s, China has transformed from an inefficient centrally planned backwater to a fast-growing market-orientated economy. While economic reform has enabled average living standards to improve immensely, the benefits have been shared disproportionately depending on demographic factors such as location, age, gender, and social class.This new four-volume collection from Routledge addresses some of the pertinent questions raised by the difference in ordinary people’s experience of China’s economic modernization. In particular: what are the socio-cultural transformations accompanying China’s economic transition? What are the experiences and responses of people who have gone through these social changes? What are the theoretical implications for social scientists who study social and economic development?Social Transformation in China answers these questions by collecting essential and cutting-edge scholarship to reflect and capture experiences of socio-cultural transformations in China. Topics covered include: issues around work, the restructuring of state enterprises, unemployment, changes in welfare provisions, migration and women workers’ experiences; the family, love and marriage, the one-child policy, and ageing; the cultural domain, including works on media and consumption; the emergence of civil society.Given China’s ever-growing economic influence, and sheer population size, there is an increasing demand from the rest of the world to understand Chinese society and its rapid economic modernization. By collecting the work of leading figures on China from disciplines such as Sociology, Anthropology, Social Policy, Cultural Studies, and Political Sciences, this set will not only appeal to researchers and students in Chinese Studies but also more widely to academics and policymakers who are concerned with the social impact of economic development.

Compiled and introduced by D. P. Martinez, the editor of an acclaimed four-volume anthology on Modern Japanese Culture and Society (Routledge, 2007) (978-0-415-41609-2), this new title from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Asian Studies series, is a collection of classic and the very best cutting-edge scholarship on themes and issues around gender in historical and contemporary Japan.Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction newly written by the editor, which carefully situates the collected material in its intellectual context, Gender and Japanese Society is an essential reference work. It is destined to be welcomed by scholars and students as a vital research resource.

Academic and popular interest in China and Japan, the two major powers in East Asia, has risen dramatically in the last decade. While on the one hand their relationship has benefited from high levels of two-way trade and investment underscoring their growing economic interdependence, political rifts have (re-)appeared over such issues as historical memory, territory, and energy security. Without doubt, the way in which this bilateral relationship will evolve over the next few years has the potential to transform the architecture of regional and international politics. It is therefore essential to have a deep and nuanced understanding of the historical, economic, political, and cultural dynamics of the relationship.The academic literature on all aspects of Sino-Japanese relations has burgeoned accordingly, and, in addition to the existing body of work, now provides a substantial, if somewhat overwhelming, corpus. This new Routledge Major Work collection brings together in an accessible format some of the most influential research on Sino-Japanese relations to help steer the reader towards essential texts and provide a comprehensive guide to this rapidly expanding field of study. Each volume contains an introduction by the editor which summarizes the key debates and contextualizes the gathered materials. It is an essential reference and teaching resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and policymakers, and others with an interest in East Asian history, politics, political economy, and international relations.The material in the collection is organized thematically, with Volume I providing the historical perspective, covering two thousand years of friendly exchange versus fifty years that overshadow the rest. Volume II focuses on the problems that have emerged since the end of World War II: history wars, revisionism, and reconciliation. Volume III considers the economic interaction between the two countries, covering aid, trade and investment, and regionalism. Volume IV is given over to traditional and non-traditional security threats, territorial disputes, energy security, environmental concerns and cooperation.

Compiled and introduced by Xiaowei Zang, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sheffield, this new title from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Asian Studies series is a collection of classic and the very best cutting-edge scholarship on themes and issues around gender in historical and contemporary China.The collection will enable users to make sense of the diversity and complexity of gendered China. Key topics covered include: gender, marriage, and the family; gender inequality; gender and migration; and gender and empowerment.Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction newly written by the editor, which carefully situates the collected material in its intellectual context, Gender and Chinese Society is an essential reference work. Indeed, it is destined to be welcomed by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research resource.

Japanese popular culture has developed in many unexpected and fascinating ways. From contemporary pop culture’s beginnings in the shadow of the Second World War and the earlier China campaign, Japan’s sense of identity has been contested, challenged, reconsidered, restructured, and revived through multiple popular media. Pop culture, though, has always occupied a singular place in Japan’s expression of selfhood and otherness, providing vicarious experiences of life within Japan.Today, Japanese popular culture’s global influence is felt most keenly in movie culture, animation, television, the Internet, social media, music, fashion, and comics (manga), to name but a few fields and technologies. Indeed, visual culture, specifically television and movies, with a strong emphasis on animation (anime) and manga, led the first wave of Japanese pop-culture exports in the second half of the twentieth century. Since then, academic interest in these exports, both at home in Japan, and overseas, has developed rapidly. The second wave of Japanese popular culture followed the digitization of much of the global media: rapid communications, global connectedness, and the development of new media have provided platforms on which Japanese pop culture has been presented and critiqued, engaged, and transformed. More complex, more hybrid, and more sophisticated, the relationships between Japan and the rest of the world are often given voice through new readings and interpretations of the interconnected popular cultural world.The assembled articles in Volume I of this new Routledge collection of major works provide a comprehensive overview of the postwar history of Japanese popular culture. Topics include the emergence of popular culture as an academic field in Japan; the genesis of manga and anime; analyses of various cultural artefacts and phenomena, such as censorship and popular culture during the postwar occupation; the 1970s origin of kawaii culture; and street fashion in the 1980s.Volumes II and III, meanwhile, focus on the twenty-first century. Over the last decade especially, the transnational presence of Japanese popular culture has accelerated, and with it scholarship on Japanese popular culture has grown in depth and diversity. The themes explored in these volumes include the role of digital technology in popular culture; esoteric cultural artefacts and activities, such as loli fashion, maid cafés, otaku culture, and traditional music reinvented as pop, as well as more conventionally popular products such as anime, TV drama, and shojo manga. Collectively, the volume demonstrates the complex and heterogeneous nature of the Japanese pop-culture landscape in the twenty-first century.The final volume in the collection addresses broader issues associated with Japanese popular culture and globalization. As Japan sought to boost its international ‘soft power’ via a ‘Cool Japan’ strategy, the academy began to pay serious attention to the political-economic implications of Japan’s pop-culture exports. The soft-power rhetoric has become a significant marker of popular culture in Asia in particular, and Japan’s influence regionally has been explored from a number of angles. Along with seminal pieces from Nye, Huat, and Iwabuchi, authors in the first section of Volume IV examine the rise of Japan’s pop-culture industry, and investigate the socio-economic and political-economic implications of topics such as ‘the Japan Brand’, ‘Cool Japan’, and ‘Cute Japan’. In the second section, case studies of soft power are brought to the fore, and analyses of the implications for people and culture are developed. Collectively, the materials gathered in this volume demonstrate the highly mobile and complex nature of the globalization of Japanese popular culture.

This new title from Routledge, edited by Professor Leszek Buszynski, includes the key literature on Asia Pacific Security. Arranged across four volumes, the collection covers China, the United States, Japan, and South Korea, as well as peripheral players such as Australia and India. It explores in depth trouble spots and potential flashpoints, for example, Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula. It also brings together the major works on regional security architecture and non-traditional security.

While the Asia Pacific region is one of the world’s largest by population size, it has long been known for having the least developed regional and national institutional mechanisms for protecting human rights, particularly compared to the well-developed systems in Europe, the Americas, and increasingly in Africa. Asia has the least uptake of human rights treaties of any region in the world, and serious human rights violations are documented as occurring in numerous countries in the region. Asia has also presented conceptual challenges to the universality of international human rights, for instance through arguments about 'Asian values' (the collective over the individual, the economic over the political, compromise over adjudication) being inconsistent with western notions of rights. At the same time, innovative human rights practices and protections have been developed in some jurisdictions, and increasingly at the transnational level. There is increasing scholarly and practitioner interest in human rights in the Asia and Pacific regions, driven in part by recent efforts by the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) to enhance human rights protections in those sub-regions. This edited collection makes a timely and distinctive contribution to the literature by bringing together the leading scholars in the field who have written across the gamut of thematic human rights issues in Asia and the Pacific. A particular strength of the collection is its inclusion of significant Asian and Pacific authors, who are sometimes under-represented in the mainstream legal debates. The work will be of interest to a scholarly and student audience in law (international, comparative Asian, public, constitutional, and human rights), as well as to readers in international relations, political science, Asian studies, and human rights.

This new 4 volume collection is an authoritative anthology containing the best scholarship on aspects of religion in contemporary China. The articles will focus on religious beliefs, practices and organisations as well as on the interactive relations between religion and other dimensions of communal, social, political and economic life in Mainland China and overseas Chinese communities.

The areas covering the Silk Roads, the ancient and modern roads from China to the West, including the region of modern Xinjiang, have an enduring and most diverse history. The impact that the political, cultural, and economic exchange on the Silk Roads had on the world cannot be overestimated; this exchange constitutes the first instance of a globalized world. The earliest discoveries from recent archaeological excavations date back almost 4000 years and explorers in the early 20th century evoked a considerable interest in the history of these regions, and the cultural relics they brought back from the oasis towns of the Taklamakan initiated entirely new research fields. For instance, Buddhist studies received a new impact and languages hitherto unknown entered the field of Western research. Since the 1990s the International Dunhuang Project of the British Library has attempted to unify all manuscripts, artefacts, and other materials collected from the Silk Roads in a database accessible to the public in order to enhance the visibility of these cultural treasures for researchers and the general public alike. Different aspects of Silk Road studies constitute a research focus at academic institutions all over the world: Central Asian Institutes study the history and the present political and economic situation of the countries that were part of the ancient net of economic and cultural relations, and academic projects, such as the Turfan Research Centre of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, the ‘Buddhist Manuscripts from Ghandara’ project at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, and ‘The Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project’ of the University of Washington, Seattle are primarily concerned with the edition of the manuscripts found on the Silk Roads. Initiatives for a more comprehensive study of the multilayered history of the Silk Roads have been launched at several academic institutions, for instance, at the Buddhist Centre of the University of California Berkeley. The collection of articles on the Silk Roads intends to cover the most relevant aspects of studies on the Silk Roads mainly under a historical perspective, but including some material regarding the present situation of the area. It will focus on more recent publications, but occasionally older, but significant publications will also be included.

Entrepreneurship is recognised as an integral element of economic advancement and social force. With socio-political transformation within China in the past three decades, integration of China’s economy into the global market, and the wide spreading of Chinese businesses to other parts of the world, Chinese entrepreneurs have increasingly absorbed modern entrepreneurial norms, practice and spirit. The cultural and historical effects intricately interact with rapid changes in social, economic and political institutions. This has led to a high degree of continuity of the unique characteristics of Chinese entrepreneurship and significant alterations in how businesses are organised and conducted. Contemporary Chinese entrepreneurship has and will continue to play a significant part in global economic development. Chinese Entrepreneurship is fully indexed with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the articles in their historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research resource.

Chinese security has become a key focus after the Cold War. In just a few decades, China has gone from an obscure position as a closed communist developing country with little integration into international institutions over being designated a prospective strategic partner of the United States to being seen as Washington’s principal strategic opponent. Despite these vast changes in perspective on China’s international role and interests, China is still seen as an enigmatic security actor with hidden agendas and a vast chasm between Beijing’s official policies and strategic practices. The great interest in Chinese security is reflected in the fact that it is hard to find a university program across the world which does not have this topic as part of their teaching and research agenda. Similarly, there is a vast literature on the topic that addresses Chinese security from a great variety of theoretical and empirical angles – including all schools of international relations, foreign policy analysis, strategic studies and also think-tank literature. This large body of academic research has not yet been compiled and analysed with the aim to identify the major works that have generated key debates in this young field of scholarly work on China security studies. A major works collection would make a significant contribution to shaping this young and growing field. The existing literature, in its ambition to make sense of Chinese security strategic thinking and behaviour, focuses on understanding Chinese strategic intentions, power tools, instruments of influence and threat perceptions and which interests and world views they are based on. We include a diverse range of contributions from America, Australia, Europe and Japan to cover all major regional perspectives. We also include major theoretical approaches, such as realist and liberal approaches to Chinese security, English school contributions and constructivist analyses. Each volume will also include work written by Chinese scholars, including analysts in a policy-making role to cover the Chinese perspectives on Chinese security. The scholarly debates that help clarify and understand Chinese security strategies focus first on conceptual debates about similarities and differences between Chinese security strategic thinking compared to the thinking dominating Western tradition and practice. A second theme is China’s national security priorities in Asia and the nexus between China’s homeland security (terrorism and separatism) and international relations. A third theme is China’s approach to the management of international security affairs in the political, economic and military sector, as an emerging great power with increasingly global security interests. Finally, a fourth theme is the making of China’s national security policy, which involves analyses of the main institutions and actors and how they interact in a complex political system characterized by a relative lack of transparency.

The history of imperialism in China is a complex, contentious history. In modern times, China’s experience with imperialism has entailed two parallel stories during the 19th and 20th centuries—stories that are different in their geographic location, in their motivations, and in their outcomes. The facet of imperialism that has received the most attention is that of aggression against China by capitalist nations, culminating in the Japanese invasion of the 1930s. This story evolved in a low-key way before the 19th century, but then entered a more aggressive phase with military action by the British in the First Opium War (1839-1842). Both economic issues and cultural issues have received attention in this story, and are thoroughly explored in two volumes of this Major Work. The simultaneous story of Qing Imperialism in Eurasia (stretching from Tibet through Central Asia and Mongolia around to Korea), as explored in the third volume, entailed a multilateral rivalry, with China, Great Britain, Russia, and Japan jockeying for position. Again, the origins lay well before the 19th century, and again significant military action was important—in this case, led primarily by the Han (Chinese) official Zuo Zongtang on behalf of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty. An important aspect of this second story is that the territories in dispute were inhabited by non-Han peoples. For the most part, Chinese writings do not treat this episode as an example of imperialism, much as American history books do not generally treat the incorporation of the swath of Mexican territory from Texas to California into the United States as an act of imperialism. This reference work gathers together in one place a multitude of academic sources on the history of imperialism and China, providing an essential overview of the many sides of the topic.

China is the world’s most populous country with fifty-five state-recognized ethnic minorities: approximately 123 million people, taking up over 60 per cent of China’s territory. And, while China’s dizzying growth has made it a major world force, both economically and strategically, one of the chief concerns of the rising Chinese state—not new, but gaining an ever higher priority—is to remain united and become better integrated. Yet over the past decade, ethnic tensions appear to have grown sharper among some minorities. Rioting in the Tibetan areas in March 2008 and in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi in July 2009 have shown the volatility of ethnic relations in those particular areas and underscore the urgent need for a greater understanding of the situation.This new Routledge Major Work collection addresses that need. It answers theoretical questions relating to China’s ethnic minorities, detailing the individual separatist movements, and providing the historical background, as well as the politics and policy, economic, social, religious, and educational causes to some of the problems facing China today.