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The tuberculosis epidemic of Meiji and Taishō helped to define the relationship between Japan’s government and the foreign, Protestant nondenominational evangelist organizations and individuals who had recently arrived on the archipelago. For those willing to undertake medical missionary work, particularly concerning public health issues that the government chose to ignore, tuberculosis could have provided an arena in which to prove both utility to the nation and enthusiasm for Japan’s industrial modernization, a moral enterprise. Yet theirs was also a utilitarian mission—more converts would mean more funds for the mission, either from the pockets of the recently converted or from foreign supporters who were bolstered by promising statistics. The victims of the tuberculosis epidemic were pawns in the interactions between the Japanese government and foreign evangelists, as their existence (physical and spiritual) was often used to mediate the relationship between their government and their caretakers. These potential caretakers included the Y.M.C.A., The Salvation Army, and individuals who formerly fell under the auspices of each. These organizations, and the Japanese government, at whose behest they often worked, parsed and differentiate the value of human life medically, politically, culturally, and in terms of gender, labor, and utility.

This collection reveals how, in Manchukuo (1932-1945), literature both furthered national aims while contesting them, as writers of varied ethnicities engaged in multivalent strategies to continue cultural production amidst difficult political circumstances. Studies of their work by transnational scholars today demonstrate that these writers faced factors influencing outcomes of their production, such as censorship, the Japanese puppet regime's propaganda aims, and even the market. In addition, particular hybrid language practices emerged, with writers engaging in transnational practices in a border region. This volume examines what we call "Manchukuo perspectives" unique to cultural producers in a state transformed by Japanese interests, but later shaped by more inclusive multivalent aims, reflected in the writings of Chinese, Korean, and Russian intellectuals who felt a keen loss of nation, which also included Japanese converted leftists who transformed their antipathy towards imperialist capitalism into support for a fascist state offering the utopian promises of a "right-wing proletarianism".

This book addresses the politics of higher education in Imperial China during the Northern Song period (960-1127). How did different political agents -- namely emperors, scholar-officials, teachers and students -- interact in shaping the Imperial University and compete over different agendas? Earlier studies often conceived the Imperial University as a static institution and framed questions within the context of institutional and social history. Building on recent insights/developments in new political history, this book is distinctive for its emphasis on the fluid political processes shaping institutional changes and the interaction of the people involved. Based on a close reading of the surviving records of court archives, chronological accounts and biographical materials of individual agents, the author shows the agendas behind the structures and regulations of the Imperial University and the ways in which they actually functioned, among them the assertion of autocratic rule, the elimination of political opposition, and the imposition of strict morality. Competitions and negotiations over these agenda, the author proposes, lead to changes in educational policies, which did not occur in a linear or progressive fashion, but rather back-and-forth due to ongoing resistance.

Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities examines the germination and movements of emergent queer cultures and social practices in the early twenty-first century. Under the dual pressure of compulsory familism and compulsory development, the configurations and understandings of gender and sexuality have become less sedentary and increasingly mobilized beyond traditional frameworks, categories, and boundaries. Through a reconsideration and requalification of queer mobilities, this groundbreaking project integrates and intervenes into the changing family and kinship structure, internal and international migrations, cultural flows and counterflows, and social inclusion and exclusion in queer China and Sinophone Asia. It considers the values and pitfalls of the development-induced mobilities and post-development syndromes that have conjointly structured and sustained queer people’s ongoing longings and sufferings, establishing fresh concepts and new paradigms in a rich and provocative social analysis and cultural critique of queer homecoming and homemaking, cultural production and circulation, and middle class formation and position. Through an interdisciplinary approach and expansive scope, Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities offers a revolutionary framework that interweaves sexual mobility and modernity with geographical, cultural, and social class migration and mobilization to interrogate the meanings of mobilities for queer people amid China’s internal transformation and international expansion for its great dream of revival in the twenty-first century.

In a work that will force scholars to re-evaluate how they approach Sinophone studies, Wai-Siam Hee demonstrates that many of the major issues raised by contemporary Sinophone studies were already hotly debated in the popular culture surrounding Chinese-language films made in Singapore and Malaya during the Cold War. Despite the high political stakes, the feature films, propaganda films, newsreels, documentaries, newspaper articles, memoirs, and other published materials of the time dealt in sophisticated ways with issues some mistakenly believe are only modern concerns. In the process, the book offers an alternative history to the often taken-for-granted versions of film and national history that sanction anything relating to the Malayan Communist Party during the early period of independence in the region as anti-nationalist. Drawing exhaustively on material from Asian, European, and North American archives, the author unfolds the complexities produced by British colonialism and anti-communism, identity struggles of the Chinese Malayans, American anti-communism, and transnational Sinophone cultural interactions. Hee shows how Sinophone multilingualism and the role of the local, in addition to other theoretical problems, were both illustrated and practised in Cold War Sinophone cinema. Remapping the Sinophone: The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War deftly shows how contemporary Sinophone studies can only move forward by looking backwards.