Lively debates around property, access to resources, legal rights, and the protection of livelihoods have unfolded in Vietnam since the economic reforms of 1986. Known as Doi Moi (changing to the new), these have gradually transformed the country from a socialist state to a society in which a communist party presides over a neoliberal economy.

By exploring the complex relationship between property, the state, society, and the market, this book demonstrates how both developmental issues and state-society relations in Vietnam can be explored through the prism of...

East Asia is now the world's economic powerhouse, but ghosts of history continue to trouble relations between the key countries of the region, particularly between Japan, China and the two Koreas. Unhappy legacies of Japan's military expansion in pre-war Asia prompt on-going calls for apologies, while conflicts over ownership of cultural heritage cause friction between China and Korea, and no peace treaty has ever been signed to conclude the Korean War.

For over a decade, the region's governments and non-government groups have sought to confront the ghosts of the past by developing...

The Qing dynasty was China's last, and it created an empire of unprecedented size and prosperity. However in 1911 the empire collapsed within a few short months, and China embarked on a revolutionary course that lasted through most of the twentieth century. The 1911 Revolution ended two millennia of imperial rule and established the Republic of China, but dissatisfaction with the early republic fuelled further revolutionary movements, each intended to be more thoroughgoing than the last, from the National Revolution of the 1920s, to the Communist Revolution, and finally the Cultural...

The rapid development of Korean cinema during the decades of the 1960s and 2000s reveals a dynamic cinematic history which runs parallel to the nation's political, social, economic and cultural transformation during these formative periods.

This book examines the ways in which South Korean cinema has undergone a transformation from an antiquated local industry in the 1960s into a thriving international cinema in the 21st century. It investigates the circumstances that allowed these two eras to emerge as creative watersheds, and demonstrates the forces behind Korea's positioning of...

When thinking about the culture and economy of East Asia, many attribute to the region a range of dispositions, including a preference for consensus and social harmony, loyalty and respect towards superiors and government, family values, collectivism, and communitarianism. Affect is central to these concepts, and yet the role of affect and its animated or imagined potentialities in the political economy of East Asia has not been systematically studied. The book examines the affective dimensions of power and economy in East Asia. It illuminates the dynamics of contemporary governance, and...

In the years Bbetween the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the beginning of the war mobilization boom in 1930, collieries in Europe and America embraced new technologies and had long since been excluded women from working underground. In Japan, however, mining women witnessed no significant changes in working practices over this period. The availability of the cheap and abundant labor of these women allowed the captains of the coal industry in Japan to avoid expensive investments in new machinery and sophisticated mining methods;, instead, they continued to intensely exploit workers and...

In September 1951, Japan signed a peace treaty with forty-eight countries in San Francisco; in April 1952, the treaty came into effect. The San Francisco Peace Treaty is an international agreement that in significant ways shaped the post-World War II international order in the Asia-Pacific. With its associated security arrangements, it laid the foundation for the regional structure of Cold War confrontation: the "San Francisco System" fully reflected the strategic interests and policy priorities of the peace conference's host nation, the United States. The treaty fell far short of settling...

In recent decades, East Asia has become increasingly interconnected through trade, investment, migration, and popular culture at regional and global levels. At the same time, the region has seen renewed national assertiveness and nationalist impulses. The book interrogates these seemingly contradictory developments as they bear on the transformations of the nation and citizenship in East Asia. Conventionally, studies on East Asia juxtapose these developments, focusing on the much-exercised dichotomy of the national and transnational. In contrast, this book suggests a different orientation....