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The paper explains the relationship between Japan and its neighboring countries, and the influence of Japanese neo‐nationalism on the idea of an East Asian community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the PRC as a producer of mass culture marks a reconfiguration of "East Asian Popular Culture" as media producers are now actively seeking opportunities to enter the Mainland Chinese market. While the implications of this trend for the media industries of Taiwan and Hong Kong are well-documented, Singapore's participation in this cultural formation remains comparatively understudied. Often deemed by their Chinese counterparts as lacking in sociocultural capital and production niches, why and how do Singapore's producers navigate their ventures into the Mainland Chinese market? Drawing on interviews with key Singaporean producers situated in different locales (Singapore production companies venturing into China; Singaporean productions reproduced for the Chinese market; and individual Singaporean producers exploring such opportunities), this article teases out the processes of marginalization and power as understood and experienced by those residing in the margins of "Cultural China." By exploring what these mean for Singapore's producers as they navigate cultural capital, power and identity from the margins of an emerging cultural superpower, this article interrogates relations between global, national and regional forces as manifested in producers' subjectivities in the era of the "rise of China." My thesis is that the experiences of these transnational Singaporean media producers are characterized by a paradoxical combination of the de-nationalizing of production and re-politicizing of national imaginations, the everyday manifestations of which continually rehearse and further engender tensions between the self and the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents an introduction to the journal's special issue on the implications of China's rise in East Asian popular culture. Topics include background on East Asian popular culture, which was coined by the Singaporean sociologist Chua Beng Huat, militarism and consumerism as the two concepts to explain Chinese state's role in cultural production, and complicities between the Chinese state and Western/global capital as according to Arif Dirlik.

Without direct fieldwork access, one can nevertheless imagine what possible changes can happen in the everyday life of North Koreans, by references with conditions elsewhere in East Asia which resonates with current conditions in North Korea. First, the division between North and South Korea can be referenced with the other instances of nations divided by a communist and a capitalist regime; namely, the present China and Taiwan and the previous North and South Vietnam. In contrast to these references to possible routes to reunification, it also can be referenced to instances of peaceful separations, such as the case of Malaysia and Singapore. Second, now that a nascent private market economy has been introduced, the experiences of Vietnam and China in marketizing their respective centrally planned economy can serve as references to imagine the possible economic transformation of North Korea. Third, the penetration of imported media/popular cultures into North Korean media consumption may stimulate new aspirations of local population for a different material future, as it has done in other parts of East Asia. Drawing on the experiences of other East Asian nations as reference points, potential and possible changes in the everyday life in North Korea can be imagined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates the stakes involved in responding to transpacific texts in East Asia, specifically in universities in Macau and Taiwan. It focuses on responses to two texts that represent in distinct ways precariatized lives in a transpacific frame: Souvankham Thammavongsa's Found, a text that uncovers a path from Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand to Canada, a path made legible through a scrapbook kept by Thammavongsa's father; and Rita Wong's forage, a text that cuts across and between South China and North America to track the movements of peoples and goods and waste, including the movement of electronic waste (or "e-waste"). By discussing selected responses to these texts, this essay investigates how such responses can be considered as part of a long-term pedagogical process of cultivating imaginations and striving to develop forms of responsibility to what this essay calls transpacific precarities. It suggests that carefully attending to such responses, always partial and in progress, can help us to better understand Asian American studies in East Asia as it continues to evolve through acts of teaching and learning in different sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article problematizes the modern construction of "love" in colonial and contemporary Taiwan and South Korea through historicizing the concept from the nineteenth century to the present. The conception of modern love in East Asia emerged during the late nineteenth century that coincided with the beginnings of civilization and nation-building discourses advocating as a strong mediator for the reconfiguration of social and intimate relationships. In the case of colonial Taiwan and Korea, the colonial governments and intellectuals constantly pivoted on "exceptions" - obscene sex, indecent behavior or illegitimate subjects - to justify their political legitimacy/hegemony to love that prescribed a normative social relationship. Fully embraced by colonial Taiwan and Korea, this mechanism was extended to their postwar regimes; that is, love is celebrated and worshiped without the recognition of its underlying ideology of discrimination and exclusion. I coin the term "love unconscious" to characterize the colonial legacies of love in the contemporary social movements in Taiwan and South Korea. Furthermore I examine how both religious groups and LGBTQ activism were stuck in the "love unconscious" with two cases of contested love: the definition of love in the dictionary, and the rhetoric of love in (anti-)same-sex marriage movements. This article argues that Taiwan and South Korea's LGBTQ and marriage movements are based neither on Western discourses nor inspiration, but are instead driven by the reality and legacy of colonial history. To envisage the decolonization of love is to deconstruct the love unconscious and reconsider the history of colonial love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be national in origin but can hail from different national origins – and this despite the existing political realities of the region and its history of political fractures. Chua Beng Huat cautions, though, that the national popular can also be marshalled to defeat the border-crossing potential of an inter-Asian pop culture. What is the “Asia” imagined or being represented in such cultural production? Chua’s work is also distinctive in that it deals with the political and economic conditions that underpin mainstream pop consumption as a socio-cultural phenomenon, instead of examining consumption as identity politics. The article concludes by noting the significance that Chua as an institutional builder has played in enabling the study of East Asian pop culture in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Late imperial China is often viewed as a period when China was growing more xenophobic and gradually closing her doors to earlier much stronger global links. The forcing of China open to trade and exchange after the Opium War did not immediately change China's international orientation. The early Chinese self-strengthening efforts were more directed towards domestic change and did little to change China's official and intellectual view on her global position. With the more systematic introduction of western sciences, starting in the 1860s and gaining full momentum in the 1880s and 1890s, however, China's international orientation changed in fundamental ways. This article argues that the translations and reception of international law as a branch of the western sciences from the 1860s radically changed China's global outlook and her world orientation. When the process of translating international law commenced systematically in the 1860s, this branch of legal studies was entirely alien to its translators as well as its potential readership. When China's international outlook was gradually transformed in the 1880s and her cultural and political links in Asia changed with the expansion of Japanese power in the middle of the 1890s, however, international law quite rapidly became a framework for constructing a new discursive global orientation among Chinese intellectuals. Cultural and political change within Asia made this former alien interpretation of inter-state relations highly relevant in the Asian-Chinese context. This article argues that the Chinese world orientation changed from an East Asian construction and orientation of relations between suzerain and vassal to a world orientation based on concepts of national sovereignty and balance of power between states as constituted in international law. By focusing on the introduction and reception of international law in China, this article shows that international law as a branch of western learning contributed strongly to international orientation and inter-cultural processes in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent time, the need for an East Asian perspective is being increasingly discussed in the Taiwanese intellectual community. A noteworthy attempt is a special feature entitled 'Overcoming the Division System' published in the June 2009 issue of Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies. In this feature, Paik Nak-chung's 'division system theory' is used as a reference to the cross-strait issue. However, the 'division system discourse' as a reference framework leads to a difficulty because it involves national unification, one of the most sensitive issues in Taiwan. Indeed, we encounter a serious dilemma: the dichotomous structure of the People's Republic of China versus Taiwan has to be overcome to ensure that the cross-strait discussion does not degenerate into a dispute on nationalism, while it is impossible to hold a productive discussion unless Taiwan's relation to China is dealt with. Facing this dilemma, Chen Kuan-Hsing focuses on Paik's concept of a 'nation', which could transcend nationalism owing to its orientation toward democracy, third-world solidarity, and anti-capitalism. Capturing this concept, he proposes 'Chinese as a post-nation' in order to overcome the cross-strait system. However, it is questionable how the 'Chinese' would ensure people-orientation that resists a nation-state and maintains solidarity with East Asia. The concept of the 'Chinese' may be effective in deconstructing the ideological identity of Taiwan, but it is vulnerable to the dilemma of being identified as another 'super-identity'. Taiwanese nationalism should be overcome immediately. However, for the ultimate solution to the cross-strait dilemma, it is an important task to develop the capacity of a civil society in both Taiwan and mainland China. These efforts are closely related to achieving regional peace across East Asia. Therefore, the cross-strait issue is a burden that has to be shouldered not only by Taiwan but also by East Asia as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the development of the field of the East Asian pop culture studies in Asia. It mentions pop as a profit-driven cultural product meant for mass entertainment. It discusses the pop culture in China and its relation with the East Asian pop culture. It further mentions the works of the Asia Research Institute (ARI).

In this article, I would like to focus on an analysis of internal logic of the 'Haruki phenomenon' as a symptom in current East Asian public culture. In particular, I will discuss how Haruki searches for the healing method for the '60s complex' among Japan's 'Sixties' Kids,' including Haruki himself, through an analysis of his novels Norwegian Wood (2000[1987]) and Kafka on the Shore (2005[2002]). In the process of analysis, we can witness that Haruki abandoned his task of 'reconciliation with the 1960s' through faith, rather than facing it directly, and fiznally stripped the 1960s of historicity and reality. He regarded the 'reconciliation with the 1960s' as something beyond an individual's ability. Transforming the 1960s from a history of postwar Japan into an object of abstract and universal nostalgia, which is closed to the present, Haruki effectively met the latent desire of the East Asian people, who were experiencing the dissolution of their ideologies, at the right time. This is the essence of the Haruki phenomenon that emerged in East Asia over the last decade. I use the phrase 'nostalgia that lost its nationality' to describe the uncanny cultural phenomenon of East Asian readers longing for the 1960s pictured in Haruki's novels as if this were their own past, despite their very different national memories. Nostalgia, a cultural symptom of the postmodern society, where remembering the nation's past totally is impossible, is a blank imitation deprived of its original source. In short, the substance of the Haruki phenomenon is nostalgia that developed from a desire to forget the traumatic memories of the national histories in individual East Asian countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major purpose of this study is to critically reassess China's hierarchical view of East Asia and, specifically, its manifestation toward Korea, particularly in the context of the East Asian discourse that has been active in China and Korea since as early as the 1990s. According to this discourse, East Asians have been preoccupied with 'a dream for the strong nation-state' in the past century that specifically accounts for the secularized concept of modernization, 'the wealth and power of the nation-state'. But rising above the dream is more desirable in both bringing peace to the region and helping carry the grand project of East Asian regional integration through the 21st century. This is an integration initiated from the periphery (weaker states) to the center (strong states), and an integration that differs from the past Chinese empire and the Japanese Greater-East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. However, the East Asian discourse falls short of efforts to combine intellectual discourse to concrete political issues in the region. In this regard, the discourse is likely to remain merely a normative and abstract subject of study unless it is related to practical and pending issues among the regional countries. This study is a response to this critical viewpoint, by applying the East Asian discourse to a critique of China's view of East Asia and its manifestation toward Korea. For the full materialization of the spirit of the East Asian discourse, the essential component is continuous dialogue among intellectuals from throughout the region to gain and improve a horizontal perspective among them and to overcome the obsolete and redundant geographical concept of the nation-state. The East Asian discourse will therefore provide a communication network to support active intellectuals in their striving to provide an academic framework capable of supporting the regional positive development and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, popular cultural products have criss-crossed the national borders of East Asian countries, enabling a discursive construction of an 'East Asian Popular Culture' as an object of analysis. The present essay is a preliminary attempt to provide some conceptual and analytic shape to this object, delineated by its three constitutive elements of production, distribution and consumption. Each East Asian location participates in different and unequal levels in each of these component processes. Production can either be located entirely in a single geographic location or, alternatively, each of the necessary constituent sub-processes can be executed from different locations; preference for either arrangement tends to reflect the relative dominance of the production location in exporting its finished products. Consumption and thus consumers are geographically located within cultural spaces in which they are embedded. Meanings and viewing pleasures are generated within the local cultures of specific audience. Conceptually, among the several possible consumption positions, the one in which an audience watches an imported programme is most intriguing. In this viewing position, differences between the cultures of the location of consumption and that of the production location become most apparent. The audience member has to bring his or her own cultural context to bear on the content of the imported product and read it accordingly. In this sense, the cultural product may be said to have crossed a 'cultural' boundary, beyond the simple fact of its having been exported/imported into a different location as an economic activity. Such an audience position requires the consumer to transcend his or her grounded nationality to forge abstract identification with the foreign characters on screen, a foreignness that is, in turn, potentially reabsorbed into an idea of (East) 'Asia'; a potential 'East Asian identity', emerging from consumption of popular cultural products, is thus imaginable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay attempts to map out the global networking of counter-feit production and consumption by considering the historical and economic complications of fake superlogograms in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China as a point of departure. It traces not only the 'capital logic' of the counter-feiting industry, which duplicates the international division of labour, but also its 'cultural logic', which creates the Euro-American superlogograms under the spell of Western imperialist ideology. The essay is divided into three main parts to foreground the 'glocal' circulation of fake superlogos. The first part considers the famous French Louis Vuitton as a case study to explore the economic, historic and cultural formation of the logomania in East Asia piloted by Japan in the 1980s. The second part discusses the double cultural reproduction of fake logos in Taiwan as both an imitation of Japan and an imitation of Japanese imitation of Europe. The third part seeks to theorize the fake under the context of Asian consumption of the superlogo and to foreground further the historical change of how the 'fake' becomes ubiquitous, how the 'fake' could be produced out of no originals, and how the 'fake' turns out to be perfectly indistinguishable and doubly authentic, which could rewrite the whole theory of mimesis. A new theorization of 'fake dissemination' is attempted in this essay to map out the co-dependent ongoing (de)construction between 'fake globalization' and 'globalization.' What we mean by 'fake' here is no longer the mere difference between real/fake; the 'fake' in 'fake globalization' means 'counter-feiting' as well as 'appropriating'. (In Chinese, 'Jia' means both 'fake' and 'by a particular means'.) That is, counter-feit products appropriate the power of globalization to disseminate themselves. 'Fake globalization' is the 'dark flow' within globalization; it counter-feits and appropriates globalization, repetitively reduplicating and deconstructing it. 'Fake globalization' and 'globalization' are not a pair in binary opposition. 'Fake globalization' is the 'subversion' of global capitalism; it is subject to global superlogo fashion consciousness and simultaneously resistant to the manipulation of 'glogocentrism'. This subversive fake globalization is different from the traditional anti-globalization movement, which tends to highlight the protection of international worker's rights, anti-monopoly and anti-sweatshops, for the latter focuses chiefly on the 'oppositional' stance while the former stresses more the 'reverse' side of it. Fake globalization helps to turn globalization itself inside out and outside in. Fake globalization is not an external attack on globalization from without, but an internal exposure of how the historical and psychic formulations of the logics of global capitalism are subject to the cultural imagination under (western) imperialist ideology, and how they are influenced by the political-economic deployment of international divisions of labour. What fake dissemination does is to expose from within the possibility and impossibility of 'glogocentrism.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a Korean perspective on the issue of China's role in East Asia. Tendency of Chinese intellectuals not to think of themselves in terms of an Asian perspective; Concept of East Asia as an intellectual praxis; Chinese consciousness of Asia; Discourse on the distinction between Asia as a civilization and Asia as a regional solidarity; Search for an East Asian identity.

Part I. Discusses the impediments between a reconciliation in East Asia. Parallelism of the relation between Taiwan and Mainland China with that between North and South Korea; Assessment of the status of the Cold War in East Asia; Issues pertaining to the era of territorial colonialism and its subsequent anti-colonialism in the region; Focus of the 1994 film, 'Dou-san,' on the colonial effects in post-Second World War Taiwan.