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This paper presents a general review of the recent research advances of the East Asian paleomonsoon, based mainly on studies of the loess-soil sequences in the Chinese Loess Plateau. In the last 2.6 million years, the paleomonsoonal history may be divided into about 166 events on a time scale of the Earth's orbital variations. During the last glacial period, millenial-scale oscillations of the monsoon system were prominent, which can be fairly well correlated with the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles recognized in the Greenland ice cores. The monsoonal rainfall belt has experienced a wide, repeated advance-retreat change during the glacial-interglacial cycles of the Pleistocene. Both temporal and spatial changes of the monsoon system in the Quaternary could have been linked closely to global ice-volume variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on diverging destinies provides a compelling and influential framework for understanding relationships between socioeconomic bifurcation in family behavior and inequality within and across generations. Articulations of the diverging destinies framework stress its broad relevance for low-fertility societies, but empirical evaluations in East Asia are limited. We address this gap by summarizing and synthesizing scholarship on socioeconomic differentials in family behavior and relationships between family circumstances and children's well-being in mainland China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. We seek an understanding of how and why the diverging destinies framework is or is not helpful for understanding family change and inequality in societies characterized by a highly asymmetric gender division of labor, strong emphasis on family investment in children, and limited public support for families. This article provides a contextual and empirical basis upon which to build subsequent research on family change and inequality in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the recent literature on the determinants of socioeconomic success among immigrants from Europe and East Asia. The survey focuses on the larger, better studied groups and gives particular attention to historically based investigations of their progress. The concluding section emphasizes the need for additional descriptive and explanatory research on the labor market outcomes of ethnic Americans since the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trends toward later and less marriage and childbearing have been even more pronounced in East Asia than in the West. At the same time, many other features of East Asian families have changed very little. We review recent research on trends in a wide range of family behaviors in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. We also draw upon a range of theoretical frameworks to argue that trends in marriage and fertility reflect tension between rapid social and economic changes and limited change in family expectations and obligations. We discuss how this tension may be contributing to growing socioeconomic differences in patterns of family formation. This focus on East Asia extends research on the second demographic transition in the West by describing how rapid decline in marriage and fertility rates can occur in the absence of major changes in family attitudes or rising individualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transatlantic international relations (IR) theory has more or less neglected the international relations of East Asia. This relative neglect has come in different forms: excluding East Asian cases from analysis, including East Asian cases but miscoding or misunderstanding them, or including them but missing the fact that they do not confirm the main findings of the study. A review of the East Asia-related literature on three important clusters of theorizing-structural theories of conflict, institutional design and efficacy, and historical memory-suggests that this neglect of the region (and other regions) may come at a cost to transatlantic IR, not only in terms of data problems but also in terms of omitted or downplayed explanatory variables and theoretical arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the paleoanthropological evidence from Asia, which has become critical to several debates on human evolution. The debate focuses on topics such as the phylogenetic significance of Homo erectus, the reality of Asian australopithecines, the origin of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, the cultural capacity of Middle Pleistocene hominids, and the tempo and mode of human evolution. A model favoring the local evolution of Homo Sapiens from Homo erectus in the Far East is evidently the most prudent analysis of the latest evidence.