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In the two decades since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia cinema has become one of the most productive and exciting film industries in Asia. From a position in the 1990s when local films were on the cultural periphery, they are now part of the mainstream with two new films in the cinemas every week. This book traces how the film industry reformed and returned to popularity and conceptualises it as a process of going mainstream. It overturns long held paradigms of national cinema and statism to see the film industry as pop culture in which market mechanisms are determinant. In going mainstream, new independent-minded filmmakers representing new creativity had to accommodate with capital and producers from old production companies. Appeal to audiences has resulting in the reimagining of the horror film and its traumas and the representation of new kinds of piety in a new subgenre Islamic themed films. Yet legacy structures and players remain, as the film industry has struggled to overcome regulation and censorship and the oligopoly of senior producers. In catering to a growing audience, the exhibition sector has become the focus of new investment as it becomes a site for competing local operators and global capital. The book argues for a reconceptualization of Indonesian cinema as pop culture with consequences to how Asian cinema is studied.

This book describes and theorizes the experiences of Uyghur graduates of the “Xinjiang Class” national boarding school program. These experiences reveal how young, educated Uyghurs strategically and selectively embrace elements of the corporate Chinese “Zhonghua minzu” identity in order to stretch the boundaries of a collective Uyghur identity. More specifically, Xinjiang Class students establish cross-regional bonds with Uyghur classmates and non-Xinjiang Class Uyghurs in inner China (neidi) and transnational bonds based on shared faith with foreign Muslims living in Chinese cities. These networks activate and perpetuate a transregional and often transnational ethno-national identity that is regularly communicated through Islamic practice.

A Chinese Melting Pot: Original People and Immigrants in Hong Kong’s First ‘New Town’ traces the transformation of Tsuen Wan from a poor and marginal district of agricultural villages, culturally distinctive in that all were Hakka. Like others present in the New Territories in 1898, they enjoyed special privileges under British colonialism as ‘original inhabitants’. This study is focused, in part, on one of their villages: its history, lineages, relationships among and through women, and their songs and laments. In the aftermath of the Japanese occupation and revolution in China, the town, with its daily coastal market, rapidly grew into a major industrial area and assumed an intense, if chaotic, urban form. Its industries attracted enormous numbers of immigrants from China, who created a large variety of voluntary associations to ease their adaptation to the new environment, while the original inhabitants, as property owners, benefited financially from the immigrants’ need for housing, and politically from continuing government support. In the 1980s, changes in economic policies in China led to Tsuen Wan’s present post-industrial form. The original inhabitants remain as a small fragment of the population, their villages intact, although re-sited away from the town centre as part of greatly increased government intervention in creating a planned ‘new town’. Their language and traditions are disappearing as they, like the immigrants, are absorbed into the wider Hong Kong lifestyle.

This book reconsiders what actually constitutes the collection of the Qing imperial household during the Qianlong reign, which leads to the re-evaluation of the collection’s historiography, implications, significance and function. It questions the common presumption that there was a single and readily definable assemblage, which includes every physical object that had once been kept in the imperial palaces. This study also challenges the pervasive notion that collecting at the Qianlong court was highly individual and that the supposed collection reflected the emperor’s personal preferences and tastes. Lastly, this research confronts the popular interpretation of the function of the assumed collection, which was to display authority and to project various images to different groups of audience.

This volume aims to restore laughter to its proper position in the Mao-era culture. The Mao era was actually a period when laughter was bonded with political culture to an unprecedented degree. Spurred by dynamic political exigencies, many cultural products sought to utilize laughter as a more pliable form of political expression. Laughter was used to highlight antagonisms or downplay differences, to expose and ridicule the class enemy, or to meliorate and conceal contradictions; it could be ritualistic or heartfelt, didactic or cathartic, communal or utopic. In Maoist culture, laughter became a versatile discourse that brought together the political, the personal, the aesthetic, the ethical, the affective, the physical, the aural, and the visual. Therefore, the art of laughter was carefully moderated and regulated for political ends. Maoist laughter reveals the diversity, complexity, dynamics, and inner contradictions in the cultural production and reproduction in Mao’s China.

Tales of Hope and Tastes of Bitterness sheds light on Chinese-led development from below, revealing its contested nature. Zooming in on everyday encounters between Chinese managers and Ethiopian laborers on a road construction site in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, the book shows that Ethiopians define Chinese-led development as much as they are defined by it. By mobilizing civic and legal authorities, Ethiopian workers have managed to increase their leverage to such a degree that they occasionally outplay Chinese management. On the other hand, Chinese narratives of bitterness reveal that Chinese road builders perceive themselves as lacking agency. Speaking, as they do, of thwarted goodwill, these narratives are not only linked to the everyday challenges of Chinese–Ethiopian encounters and the chasm between their confident expectations and the much less rosy realities on the ground, but also to workers’ socioeconomic backgrounds and their state of suspension, as they try to stay afloat in the competitive Chinese society to which they hope one day to return.

Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors of this volume reexamine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in thiscollectiontackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today. If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production.

As part of the paradigm shift from the transatlantic to the transpacific in transnational American studies, this volume not only offers critical ways in which we rethink American exceptionalism, but it also engages the critical visions represented by New American studies, Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Pacific studies. By calling attention to the “oceanic archives” and indigenous epistemologies, the volume addresses colonialism and imperialism at their roots from both sides of the colonizer and the colonized and articulates what has been central to de-colonial thinking—indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, non-Western knowledge production and dissemination. As the transpacific continues to hold the global spotlight as moments of military, cultural, and geopolitical contentions as well as spaces of economic integration, negotiation, and resistance on national and global scales, we develop transpacificAmerican studies as the new cutting-edge in transnational American studies, global studies, and postcolonial studies.The essays collected in the volume recover the early oceanic archives to remap transpacific movements in different directions and at different moments, interrogate the colonial archives to reinvent indigenous ontologies and epistemologies,explore alternative oceanic archives to develop competing visions and forms of the transpacific. Above all, it speculates upon new directions in which transpacific American studies may pursue.

In Strait Rituals: China, Taiwan, and the United States and in the Taiwan Strait Crises, 1954-1958, this book argues that the Taiwan Strait Crises could be understood as an evolution towards tacit accommodation. Exploiting new materials from mainland China, Taiwan and the United States, a reevaluation of the international relations of all three parties via a simultaneous presentation of their disparate perspectives is made. At the heart of its argument, this book proposes that conflict resolution had become ritualized progressively as the protagonists implicitly constructed a framework of understanding. An uneasy peace was thus a product of a ritualization of discourses and maneuvers, embodied in verbal signaling and symbolic gestures. These exacting understandings laid the groundwork for a substantive change in the nature of Sino-American relations - from hostile nuclear confrontation in 1954 to tacit accommodation in 1958. In particular, this book highlights relevant aspects of “culture” to better understand the intricacies of the Sino-US-ROC relations. This aspect complements existing scholarship on realism, strategy, economics, ideology and domestic aspects of the Taiwan Strait crises. Strait Rituals will show the significance of “ritualization” in explaining the transition of “tacit communication” to “tacit accommodation.” It will demonstrate how both parties engaged in ritualized actions that facilitated the process of conflict resolution. Strait Rituals will establish how the US and China achieved a limited but shared understanding of the modus operandi of the other party through their ritualized actions in terms of their use of public symbols, identity issues, cultural images and official discourses on one hand, and military posturing, diplomatic canvassing for international support, and negotiations on the other hand.

Although the official propaganda surrounding the drug detainees in China is that of helping, educating, and saving them from their drug habits and the drug dealers who lure them into drug abuse, it is clear, according to Vincent Shing Cheng, that those who have gone through the rehabilitation system lost their trust in the Communist Party’s promise of help and consider it a failure. Based on first-hand information and established ideas in prison research, Hypocrisy gives an ethnographic account of reality and experiences of drug detainees in China and provides a glimpse into a population that is very hard to reach and study. Cheng argues that there is a discrepancy between the propaganda of ‘helping’ and ‘saving’ drug users in detention or rehabilitation centres and the reality of ‘humiliating’ them and making them prime targets of control. Such a discrepancy is possibly threatening rather than enhancing the party-state’s legitimacy. He concludes the book by demonstrating how the gulf between rhetoric and reality can illuminate many other systems, even in much less extreme societies than China.