The books in this series explore the political, social, economic and cultural consequences of Asia's twenty-first century transformations. The series emphasizes the tumultuous interplay of local, national, regional and global forces as Asia bids to become the hub of the world economy. While focusing on the contemporary, it also looks back to analyze the antecedents of Asia's contested rise. Asia's Transformations aims to address the needs of students and teachers.
By Samuel Y. Liang
May 24, 2017
China’s rapid urbanization has restructured the great socialist cities Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou into mega cities that embrace global capitalism. This book focuses on the urban transformations of these three cities: Beijing is the nation’s political and cultural capital; Shanghai is the ...
By Gene Cooper
May 24, 2017
During the early communist period of the 1950s, temple fairs in China were both suppressed and secularized. Temples were closed down by the secular regime and their activities classified as feudal superstition and this process only intensified during the Cultural Revolution when even the surviving ...
By Minh T. N. Nguyen
May 24, 2017
Since Vietnam introduced economic reforms in the mid-1980s, domestic service has become an established sector of the labour market, and domestic workers have become indispensable to urban life in the rapidly changing country. This book analyzes the ways in which the practices and discourses of ...
By Noah Y. McCormack
December 20, 2016
The Tokugawa Shogunate, which governed Japan for two and a half centuries until the mid-1860s, classed people into hierarchically ranked status groups (mibun). The early Tokugawa rulers legally established these status groups through the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, adapting and ...
Edited
By Jie Yang
December 20, 2016
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 ...
Edited
By Yasemin Nuhoḡlu Soysal
March 03, 2016
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 ...
By Brian Yecies, Aegyung Shim
December 21, 2015
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 ...
Edited
By Joseph Esherick, C.X. George Wei
July 31, 2015
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 ...
By Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morris Low, Leonid Petrov, Timothy Y. Tsu
February 27, 2015
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, ...
By Donald M. Seekins
February 27, 2015
While most of Asia’s major cities are increasingly homogenized by rapid economic growth and cultural globalization, Rangoon, which is Burma’s former capital and largest city, still bears the imprint of a unique and often turbulent history. It is the site of the Shwedagon Pagoda, a focus of Buddhist...
Edited
By Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Mark Sidel
February 27, 2015
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 ...
By Norton Wheeler
March 13, 2014
In the waning years of the Cold War, the United States and China began to cautiously engage in cultural, educational, and policy exchanges, which in turn strengthened new security and economic ties. These links have helped shape the most important bilateral relationship in the late-twentieth and ...