CIAO DATE: 06/07

Pacific Affairs:
An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

 

Summer 2006 (Vol. 79 No. 2)

Articles

• Citizens Movements and China's Public Intellectuals in the Hu-Wen Era
  David Kelly

  Citizenship implies a termination of subject status, a "right to hold rights" recognized and safeguarded by the state. The emergence of citizen movements in China today and the relationship between citizen movements and public intellectuals are the focus of this paper. Citizen rights movements of different orders—rural migrant workers (mingong), urban homeowners (yezhu), and investors in company shares (gumin)—help us gauge the role of specific rights, in particular property rights, in shaping the content of citizenship contention. Lawyers and journalists have moved into the role of "public intellectuals" able to contest these rights. Finally, both citizenship and intellectual politics in China are heavily coloured by dilemmas of political identity. While Chinese politics is destined to remain Chinese, this does not preclude it from being a hybrid featuring a Chinese citizenship.

• China Turns West: Beijing's Contemporary Strategy Towards Central Asia
  Kevin Sheives

  China's involvement in Central Asia occupies an under-researched and emerging area of Chinese foreign policy, one which primarily revolves around its attempts to maintain regional stability in and around its periphery, strengthen its energy security in the region and maintain stable relations with the United States. Through its codominance with Russia of the nascent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), it has and will likely continue to find cooperation with SCO member states over the former two issues, but will encounter some difficulty in finding cooperation regarding the latter. The PRC's relations with Central Asia hold important short- and long-term implications for understanding the role of Xinjiang in China's foreign relations, China's energy security and its relations with the US. Furthermore, Sino-Central Asian relations function as a proving ground for testing the viability of China's grand strategy, effectively articulated by Avery Goldstein, in a specific foreign policy setting. Beijing's Central Asian policies reflect its larger geopolitical strategy, meant to ensure its peaceful rise to regional prominence, assuage fears of a China threat and focus on domestic development. This study concludes that China's relations with Central Asia meet vital national interests in regional stability, energy security and stable US-China relations, while achieving secondary benefits crucial to its grand strategy of a peaceful rise.

• State, Society and Democratic Consolidations: The Case of Cambodia
  Kheang Un

  This article argues that certain conditions are crucial to democratic consolidation, and that an imbalance in the power configuration between state and society impedes democratic consolidation. After democracy was introduced, Cambodian elites continued to employ patronage and corruption to advance their interests and strengthen their positions through the provision of benefits to members of their patronage networks. These networks extended throughout and crosscut formal political institutions. The embeddedness of these elements in Cambodian politics prevents democracy from consolidating, because consolidation requires both the establishment and strengthening of vertical and horizontal accountability institutions. Following the introduction of democracy in 1993, there have been new elements of civil society, including most importantly non-governmental organizations, attempting to transform the imbalanced relationship between state and society. However, their efforts have been an uphill struggle, given the unequal power configuration between state and society. The state appears to be strong in that it can silence and oppress government opponents; however, the state apparatus is apparently weak in providing services and ensuring the rule of law. In the meantime, civil society has not acquired sufficient strength to pressure the state to adopt meaningful reform due to its exogenous and endogenous weaknesses. This paper concludes that the sober reality is that civil society cannot really contribute substantially to democratic consolidation until Cambodia has a larger urban, educated population, a larger middle class, and more experience with the idea of non-political "secondary associations," which can build up "social trust" and generate "norms of reciprocity" that deviate from standard patronage networks.

• Political Leadership and Civilian Supremacy in Third Wave Democracies: Comparing South Korea and Indonesia
  Yong Cheol Kim, R. William Liddle and Salim Said

  With Third Wave democratization, civilian supremacy has been firmly established in Korea but not in Indonesia. What accounts for this disparity? Structural factors are important, but must be turned into political resources by the human actors who shape policies and institutions in particular contexts. In Korea, four successive presidents made strategic and tactical decisions that smoothed the transition and produced a consensual and definitive outcome. In Indonesia, President B.J. Habibie and Armed Forces Commander Wiranto laid a foundation for civilian supremacy, but progress stalled under Presidents Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri. External pressure from political opposition and civil society forces was important in both countries. Indonesia and other new democracies with fragile civilian supremacy can learn much from the Korean experience.

• Foreigners and Civil Society in Japan
  Apichai W. Shipper

  Scholars have consistently characterized political life in modern Japan as consisting of a strong central government in a homogenous society, in which defining membership rules and state responsibilities has been a monopoly of the state. In recent years, Japanese citizens have responded to an influx of foreigners and a lack of government programmes to assist unskilled Asian workers by organizing support groups to help unprotected foreigners, groups that are pushing local governments to accept responsibility for caring for all their residents. In addition, the 1998 NPO law, which granted incorporation authority to local governments, has deepened partnerships between certain support groups and local governments. The larger role that small foreigner support groups play in redefining membership rules and state responsibilities in Japanese society demonstrates the increased political strength and independence of civil society organizations.

• Review Article: The Shadows of Kashmir and Bombs in the Pakistan-India Conflict
  Robert S. Anderson

Books Reviewed In This Issue

Asia General

• Crossing National Borders: Human Migration Issues in Northeast Asia. Edited by Tsuneo Akaha and Anna Vassilieva.
  Reviewed by Mikhail A. Alexseev

• Rethinking Asia's Economic Miracle: The Political Economy of War, Prosperity and Crisis. By Richard Stubbs.
  Reviewed by Seokgon Cho

• Interregionalism and International Relations. Edited by Heiner Hanggi, Ralf Roloff and Jurgen Ruland
  Reviewed by Saori N. Katada

• The Past is Within Us: Media, Memory, History. By Tessa Morris-Suzuki.
  Reviewed by Hyung Gu Lynn

• Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand. By Janet C. Sturgeon.
  Reviewed by Jack Patrick Hayes

• Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria. By Hyun Ok Park.
  Reviewed by Mariko Asano Tamanoi

China and Inner Asia

• Organizing through Division and Exclusion: China's Hukou System. By Fei-Ling Wang.
  Reviewed by TJ Cheng

• SARS in China: Prelude to Pandemic? Edited by Arthur Kleinman and James L. Watson.
  Reviewed by Angela Kiche Leung

• Narrative of the Chinese Economic Reforms: Individual Pathways from Plan to Market. Edited by Dorothy J. Solinger.
  Reviewed by Huang Shu-min

• Chinese-language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Edited by Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh.
  Reviewed by Helen Hok-Sze Leung

• China's Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History. By Dong Wang.
  Reviewed by Prasenjit Duara

• Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World: An Eyewitness Account of China's Party Work Conference and the Third Plenum (November-December 1978). By Yu Guangyuan, edited by Ezra F. Vogel and Steven I. Levine.
  Reviewed by Frederick C. Teiwes

• China's Rise, Taiwan's Dilemmas and International Peace. Edited by Edward Friedman.
  Reviewed by Alan M. Wachman

Northeast Asia

• Japan's Development Aid to China: The Long-Running Foreign Policy of Engagement. By Tsukasa Takamine.
  Reviewed by Marie Sšderberg

• Reprogramming Japan: The High Tech Crisis under Communitarian Capitalism. By Marie Anchordoguy.
  Reviewed by Mark Tilton

• A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan: Volume 2, Road to Self-Reliance, 1952-1959. Edited by Shigeru Nakayama with Kunio Goto and Hitoshi Yoshioka.
  Reviewed by Jeffrey Alexander

• Democracy without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State. By Ethan Scheiner.
  Reviewed by Paul Talcott

• Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Japan: Politics, Organizations, and High Technology Firms. By Kathryn Ibata-Arens.
  Reviewed by Edward J. Lincoln

• Japanese Politics: An Introduction. By Takashi Inoguchi.
  Reviewed by Miranda Schreurs

• Inequality amid Affluence: Social Stratification in Japan. By Junsuke Hara Kazuo Seiyama, translated by Brad Williams.
  Reviewed by Ito Peng

• Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family. By Gail Lee Bernstein.
  Reviewed by Cary Shinji Takagaki

• Wearing Cultural Styles in Japan: Concepts of Tradition and Modernity in Practice. Edited by Christopher S. Thompson and John W. Traphagan.
  Reviewed by Merry I. White

• Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China. By Timothy Brook.
  Reviewed by Joshua A. Fogel

• Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945. By Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper.
  Reviewed by Robert Bickers

• A Woman with Demons: A Life of Kamiya Mieko (1914-1979). By Yuzo Ota.
  Reviewed by Tsuneharu Gonnami

• Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan. By D. Max Moerman.
  Reviewed by Richard Bowring

• Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art. Edited by Ellen P. Conant.
  Reviewed by Timon Screech

• Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power. By Alexis Dudden.
  Reviewed by Kyu Hyun Kim

• Forever Alien: A Korean Memoir, 1930-1952. By Sunny Che.
  Reviewed by Chong Bum Kim

South Asia

• Migration, Modernity and Social Transformation in South Asia. Edited by Filippo Osella and Katy Gardner.
  Reviewed by Sharad Chari

• Culture and the Making of Identity in Contemporary India. Edited by Kamala Ganesh and Usha Thakkar.
  Reviewed by Amanda Weidman

• Caste in Question: Identity or Hierarchy?. Edited by Dipankar Gupta.
  Reviewed by Ashwini Deshpande

Southeast Asia

• Nation-building: Five Southeast Asian Histories. Edited by Wang Gungwu.
  Reviewed by Sumit K. Mandal

• Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia. Edited by Andrew C. Willford and Kenneth M. George.
  Reviewed by Beng-Lan Goh

• Revolution, Reform and Regionalism in Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. By Ronald Bruce St. John.
  Reviewed by William S. Turley

• Myanmar: Beyond Politics to Societal Imperatives. Edited by Kyaw Yin Hlaing, Robert H. Taylor and Tin Maung Maung.
  Reviewed by Bruce Matthews

• Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature. By Khoo Gaik Cheng.
  Reviewed by Richard Baxstrom

• Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia. By Edward Aspinall.
  Reviewed by Vedi R. Hadiz

Australasia and the Pacific Region

• After the Rush: Regulation, Participation, and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860-1940. By Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald andd Paul Macgregor.
  Reviewed by Roderick Ewins

• Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact. By Inga Clendinnen.
  Reviewed by Joshua A. Bell

• The N Word: One Man's Stand. By Stephen Hagan.
  Reviewed by Gaynor Macdonald

• Bougainville: Before the Conflict. Edited by Anthony J. Regan and Helga M. Griffin.
  Reviewed by Don Mitchell

• Island at the End of the World: The Turbulent History of Easter Island. By Steven Roger Fischer.
  Reviewed by Rosalind L. Hunter-Anderson

• Pacific Journeys: Essays in Honour of John Dunmore. Edited by Glynnis M. Cropp, Noel R. Watts, Roger D.J. Collins and K.R. Howe.
  Reviewed by Nancy J. Pollock