Human rights debates can provoke strong reactions, particularly among people of different cultural backgrounds. The debate over Asian values and the use of human rights diplomacy are the most obvious manifestations of divisions between Asia and the West and reflect particular world views and historical legacies.
In this new book, scholars from the United States and several Asian countries debate fundamental issues such as 'Asian values', 'peaceful evolution' and cultural imperialism. Provocative and challenging essays analyse the debate between East and West, presenting critical...

The drug trade was a significant element underpinning the whole of colonial market expansion and British imperial economy. This work explores in detail the growth and development of the opium trade in relation to colonial market expansion.

Akami's study of the Institute of Pacific Relations offers insight into the formation of the dominant ideologies and institutions of regional and international politics in the Pacific during the inter-war years.

Around 18 million young Chinese people were sent to the countryside between 1966 and 1976 as part of the Cultural Revolution. In this collection of interviews with former Red Guards, members of the first generation to be born under Chairman Mao talk frankly about the dramatic changes which have occurred in China since 1980. In discussing the impact these changes have had on their own lives, the former revolutionaries give a direct insight into how ex-Maoists view contemporary China, revealing an attitude perhaps more critical than that of most Western commentators. These memoirs tell the very...

Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948 provides a compelling study of leading women writers in modern China, charting their literary works and life journeys to examine the politics and poetics of Chinese transcultural feminism that exceed the boundaries of bourgeois feminist selfhood.

Unlike recent literary studies that focus on the discursive formation of the modern Chinese nation state and its gendering effects, Haiping Yan explores the radical degrees to which Chinese women writers re-invented their lives alongside their writings in distinctly...

One of the few studies of imperialism to concentrate on Southeast Asia, Tarling's work focuses on the establishment of political control from 1870 to 1914 and analyses attempts to re-establish control after the Second World War.

After more than twenty years of economic and political reform, China is a vastly different country to that left by Mao. Almost all the characteristic policies and practices of the Maoist era have been abandoned, with the goals of revolution in foreign and domestic policy being replaced by an emphasis on economic modernization, accompanied by radical social transformation and an increasingly significant international role. Yet, despite these dramatic changes other fundamental features of China's policy remain unchanged.
This book explores the strategies of reform in China and their...

This book is an attempt to understand and analyze Singapore's culture of control. In addition to being a nation which has moved very rapidly from colonial status to one of the economic power houses of Asia in less than forty years, Singapore is also one of the most intensively controlled societies in the world. The state offers the paradox of a free enterprise economy alongside one of the most rigorously policed and closely directed social formations in existence. This book explores the city-state's colonial heritage as well as the forces that helped to mould its current social...

Japan is rightly regarded as one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, yet the development and deployment of Internet technology in Japan has taken a different trajectory compared with Western nations. This is the first book to look at the specific dynamics of Japanese Internet use.
It examines the crucial questions:
* how the Japanese are using the Internet: from the prevalence of access via portable devices, to the fashion culture of mobile phones
* how Japan's "cute culture" has colonized cyberspace
* the role of the Internet in different musical...

This text provides a detailed study of the legal, economic, political and cultural practices surrounding the provision and consumption of the internet in Indonesia at the turn of the twenty-first century. Hill and Sen detail the emergence of the Internet into Indonesia in the mid-1990s, and cover its growth through the dramatic economic and political crises of 1997 and the subsequent transition to democracy. Conceptually the Internet is seen as a global phenomenon, with global implications, however this book develops a way of thinking about the Internet within the limits of geo-political...