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Since the 1970s, a continuous exchange of information about conservation between Europe and East Asia has greatly influenced approaches to the treatment of paper objects as well as the tools and materials used. This knowledge is often disseminated and absorbed in a purely practical manner, stripped out of its wider cultural context. However, what is considered 'appropriate' treatment is closely linked to how a particular culture has historically interacted with artworks and arguably the lack of broader cultural perspectives can lead to misguided assumptions in the evaluation of those practices. This article reflects on the differences between European and East Asian cultures of paper conservation. By taking into consideration the relevant cultural, philosophical and historical contexts, the article aims to explore how approaches to conservation, as well as to the profession itself, have developed in these two different parts of the world. It further encourages paper conservators to reflect on their own training and practices while offering an understanding of how these approaches can sometimes be mutually exclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as they are to the events themselves, the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics have become central to academic research on the Games and their political, social, and cultural roles. And so the recent string of Olympic Games held in East Asia – two of them under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic – offer the opportunity to think both about region-specific meanings associated with these highly scripted affairs and about the ways they might destabilize broader judgments about the Olympics and their implications. This paper introduces the contributions to this special volume on the Opening Ceremonies at Asia's recent Olympic Games, aiming to draw attention not only to the specific contributions of each paper but also to the themes that they collectively engage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the latest issue's "Editor's Note" of EASTS, Wen-hua Kuo made a call to East Asian science studies scholars to commit to an archeology of the social and technical infrastructure of epidemics. Coincidently, ten historians and sociologists working on science, technology, medicine, and environment with a focus on China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea had just begun a collective effort to understand how face masks had become the most important part of the current pandemic governance in East Asia. As its first step, a virtual workshop, "The Socio-Material History of Masked Societies in East Asia," was held at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science on 26 October 2020. This forum aims to introduce the virtual meeting's outcome to the wider EASTS community and encourages them to engage with the collaborative enterprise to investigate the history of masks. All papers focus on the socio-material dimension of masks while problematizing current culturalist explanatory narratives about "masked societies" in East Asia. By doing so, the papers show how mask use is closely linked to heterogenous but interconnected entanglements of environmental governance, political movements, and risk cultures in East Asian polities. It interrogates these relationships in the context of scientific controversies and quarantine regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a Bourdieusian field analysis to unpack the intersection among sexuality, place, and mobility through an ethnographic study of Taiwanese gay men's trips to Bangkok. It unveils that how the societal cause of 'Eastern orientation'— a racialised sexual desire for 'white Asians' among Thai gay men — and other material circumstances have transformed distinct scales of territory, including nation-states and gay establishments, into nuanced yet not thoroughly disparate sexual fields. Such nuances are closely associated with gay men's intra-Asian mobility between Thailand and Taiwan that I elucidate through the concept of 'sexuality on the move.' This concept suggests that individuals' geographical movements may diversify their sexual habitus as well as fluctuate their tiers of desirability and vice versa, delineating how different aspects of human sexuality are reshaping and reshaped during or after their embodied mobility. At the same time, their yearning for sexuality alterations also shapes the pattern of individuals' trans-national and intra-urban movements. Moreover, the paper underscores that these alterations are not just objective reality but these gay men's subjective belief which, along with their sexual desire, embodied practices and personal experiences composing a conceptual 'circuit of sex and tourism', attracting and captivating gay men to participate in and then be obsessed with this form of sexual/touristic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a sample of East Asian banks covering the period 1999–2014, this paper analyses the impact of natural disasters on commercial bank performance and how financial integration moderates this relationship. A dynamic GMM model reveals that natural disasters significantly lower deposit ratios but have no contemporaneous relationship with liquidity, credit risk, profitability and default risk. There is also evidence of a lagged effect of disasters, increasing deposits and lowering liquidity one year after the event. Furthermore, foreign banking claims, specifically those extended by regional Asian lenders, help to alleviate the deposits decline in the aftermath of natural disasters. These baseline findings are mainly driven by severely affected countries. Overall, the paper highlights the role of commercial bank deposits and foreign banking claims as sources of finance for post-disaster recovery. In particular, the resilience of Asian foreign claims in the event of natural disasters provides evidence to support intra-regional financial integration in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a relatively novel theoretical approach to investigate cross border student mobilities in East Asia, a region growing in importance as a provider of international education. It does so by bringing Sara Ahmad's writings on the sociality of emotions, with Jacques Derrida's analyses of hospitality, We draw on empirical data from a cross national study to explore the emotions that shape student decisions to choose East Asian study destinations. By problematising the gift of the scholarship, using Derridean understandings of hospitality, we reveal the limits of contemporary forms of international education. Reflecting on histories of Asia-focused student mobilities, the paper highlights the entanglements of hostility and hospitality, and the inseparability of hosts and guests. It is this realisation that will enable ethical, non-exploitative forms of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory article aims to present an overview of the contribution that East Asian scholars have made to Translation Studies as a field of enquiry. Apart from some contributions from countries such as Thailand and Vietnam, most of the publications of the last four decades involve Chinese, Korean, and Japanese themes and are authored by scholars from these areas or focused on the languages and cultures of China, Korea and Japan. The article considers the publications on audiovisual as well as literary and news translation, highlighting articles, book chapters and monographs that have delved into translations involving East Asian languages, notably Chinese, Korean and Japanese. The final section introduces the selection of papers that conform this thematic issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Asian countries signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) in November 2020. This paper demonstrates the importance of ASEAN centrality in East Asian economic integration and makes a preliminary assessment of the agreement in terms of the four expected roles: liberalization, rulemaking, reducing policy risks, and forming a pro-trade middle power coalition. The comparison with the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) reveals the strengths and weaknesses of RCEP. The paper emphasizes the importance of dynamic aspects of mega-FTAs after being in effect and claims that RCEP must be further developed as an evolving agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, East Asian regions have gradually grown into the biggest importers and producers of animal products in the world. Among them, Taiwan has become the world's biggest pork exporter since 1990 but the export market suddenly crashed owing to the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease in 1997. Since then, biosecurity has been increasingly deemed necessary to manage animal lives. While food regime theory has been steadily employed by critical scholars to examine this rapid 'meatification' process in East Asia, it has suffered from 'inclusionary bias', paying less attention to the consequences of market failure. Informed by social studies of economisation and marketisation and work on multispecies, I contend that the studies of global agri-food production need to be more attentive to the issue of disarticulations: the 'dark sides' of network incorporation. With a specific focus on the Taiwanese pork sector after 1997, this paper argues that 'politics of domestication' emerged as markets broke down. I outline three characteristics which have shaped the politics of domestication: disentanglement, marginalisation, and co-becoming. While biosecurity seeks to manage life by separating hog bodies from other species, this paper points out that this enclosure strategy is always subject to threats from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most globally serious in the recent decades is the reshaping, even reversing, of the basic directions of people's imagination of the future, which were mainly established within the intellectual frame of historic progress and strongly motivated by the real social struggles from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s, saying, which have seemingly proved the progress. The most important of the social functions of this reshaping/reversing is to make people including the youth more poor-spirited, nearsighted, self-centred and conservative. Is the judgment outlined above tenable? Is there something very different, which shows the bright side of today's public imagination of the future? How is the complexity and diversity of the imagination in the different areas as well as in the different cultural and social positions of a same society? And more important, how is the situation of the youth in thinking and imaging the future when it's still commonly today to think the youth as a symbol of the future? ... The questions are too big perhaps and the answers will certainly diverse, especially when looking into various social activities to trace the imagination. People always need positive imagination of the future when walking forward, and they are not only shaped by the current but also directed by the past, that's why it's worthy to develop the careful contrast of how people imagine the future today with how they did it before. Urged by what said above, seven authors, from Seoul, Tokyo, HK, Shanghai and Guangzhou, have worked with us to make a collection aiming at the imagination of future in East Asia. The collection composed by two parts: the first has five papers focusing on the current situations of the imagination of the future in different social contexts, and the other has two ones introducing very interesting historical cases of how the 'Chinese revolution' was seen from perspectives out of the mainland China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Asia (here consisting of China, Japan, North and South Korea, and the ten states of the ASEAN) is increasingly being considered as a region which is a potential crucible for conflict. Even the most optimistic authors recognise that there is the potential for security tensions to develop into more comprehensive kinetic actions. In the context of the growing trade tensions between China and the United States, which is drawing in other regional actors, the potential for economic interdependence to mitigate these tensions is reducing. Despite the context in this region we do, however, see evidence of cooperation and coordination emerging within the arena of (so-called) non-traditional security challenges. These papers explore different aspects of the cooperation that we see, and collectively they present the conditions under which there are positive cooperation outcomes in the areas of humanitarian assistance (HA) and disaster relief (DR) and/or peacekeeping operations (PKO). Collectively, they identify that mid-range theories have great explanatory power in exploring and researching this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the rise of anti-Korean sentiment in contemporary Taiwan particularly at the turn of the 2010s. It moves beyond conceptualizing emotion as psychological status to conceive anti-Korean sentiment as a cultural text that debunks the complexity of emotion as an active agent of collective (un)consciousness. Specifically, the paper considers anti-Korean sentiment in Taiwan as an affective space where young Taiwanese demonstrate their active engagement in (re)locating Taiwan in the global imaginative map and their struggle for national identity in the midst of increasing geopolitical tensions in East Asia. Instead of seeing anti-Korean sentiment from an international relations perspective, this paper studies anti-Korean sentiment from a bottom-up perspective through in-depth interviews with young Taiwanese who are actively engaging with anti-Korean discussions and explore various ways that anti-Korean sentiment mediates and transforms imaginative relations between Taiwan and Korea and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper first time describes a small Beremendia from the late Pleistocene deposits in the Koridornaya Cave locality (Russian Far East), which associated with the extinct Beremendia minor. The paper is the first attempt to use a comparative analytical method to evaluate a possible case of redeposition of fossil remains of this shrew. In this case, the 'comparative' part of the method corresponds to the 'faunistic approach' of Jelle Reumer, and the 'analytical' part of the method corresponds to his extended 'morphological approach. ' The analytic method uses morphospace size estimation (MSE) based on principal component analysis and estimation of the variance to evaluate redeposition of Beremendia minor from the late Pleistocene deposits in the Koridornaya Cave. This result allows us to suggest the significant environmental contribution to the East Asian beremendiin extinction, such as climatic fluctuation, landscape changes and shrew community changes between the late Pliocene and early Pleistocene. We discuss the last remains of East Asian Beremendia (Peisorex) described from the Chinese early Pleistocene localities (Chiachiashan, Haimao, Renzidong) and the last remains of Lunanosorex described from the Chinese late Pliocene localities (Qipanshan Hill and Houxushan Hill). MSE was performed for soricine tribes with the 'elongated' condylar process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effects of trade regionalism in East Asia from 1995 to 2018, by applying a series of gravity models. An initial, basic gravity model is repeatedly augmented to account for a range of economic, geographical, cultural, and above all institutional factors representing free trade agreements in effect. Unlike previous studies, this investigation distinguishes between the bilateral and multilateral measures of regional trading arrangements. Two interesting findings are reported. First, the results confirm the impact of trade regionalism on the export flows between the economies of East Asia in the period under study. Second, the effects of multilateral trading agreements vary greatly depending on the agreement and on the particular country's range of influence, in particular cases showing no sufficient economic benefits. Overall, the results point to the complementarity of bilateral and multilateral trading arrangements in the region and to the emergence of a certain distinctive model of cooperation and integration in East Asia – which has been underpinned during the COVID-19 pandemic by the conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and which will be further verified in the post-COVID character of global trade and regional trading arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Asian developmentalism is often depicted as a derivative ideology with its origins in the diffusion of Western thought to the region, first to Japan after the 1868 Meiji Restoration and then to the rest of the region in the twentieth century following the Japanese example. Recent scholarship has challenged that perspective by highlighting important endogenous roots of the developmentalist ideology of Meiji Japan. This paper shows that Chinese developmentalism also has deep local origins in China's own intellectual history that long predated the importation of Western (and Japanese) political economy to the country in the early twentieth century. It also demonstrates that locally-originated Chinese developmentalist ideology diffused beyond China's borders in ways that influenced the emergence of 'developmental mindsets' elsewhere in the East Asia region in the nineteenth century, including in Meiji Japan. Rather than being a laggard in the regional embrace of developmentalist ideology diffusing from the West, China was a key source and exporter of this ideology to the region. For these reasons, Chinese thinkers deserve a more prominent place in histories of the origins of East Asian developmentalism, and of developmentalist thought in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do African migrants become stuck-in-place and experience stuckedness in China? This article interrogates the concepts of stuckedness and social navigation to examine what it means to be 'stuck-in-place' using the stories of four Nigerians—a woman and three men—in Guangzhou City. Two modes of stuckedness were observed: 'truncational stuckedness' and 'identity stuckedness'. While the former resulted from being spatially stuck in Guangzhou on their way to South Korea and Hong Kong, the latter was a product of identity appropriation, where a migrant uses the passport of another country. Despite the constraint of stuckedness and the precarity that those without valid immigration papers faced, migrants managed to reinterpret their situations and stayed put while being opened to emplacement in Guangzhou—albeit a transitory kind. In calibrating their practice of 'moving on' in Guangzhou, however, economic integration, the local and transnational networks of migrants, hope, prolonging one's stay and management of micro-mobilities of the everyday were deployed singly or in combination with one another. The article advances debates in China-African relations and Afro-mobilities in East Asia while also contributing to discourses on migrant trajectories, stuckedness, and mobilities studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For forty years, the East Asian regional order has delivered widespread peace and prosperity. That order faces possible upending by an economically and militarily more powerful China and a decreasingly robust and engaged United States. While accepting the possibility that such structural shifts could upend the regional order, this paper contends that three powerful counterweights are working to counter disruptive conflicts and to foster peaceful change, namely strong and rising economic interdependence, expanding institutionalization, and active preservation efforts by number of other Asian states, particularly the region's middle powers. This article analyzes the contribution of these three forces to creating the existing order and to their roles in its continuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Asia offers a fertile ground for applying dominant theoretical perspectives in International Relations and understanding their relevance and limitations. As this region has seen much conflict and cooperation historically and is re-emerging as a key theater of great power competition in the 21st century even when states maintain high levels of economic interactions, our understanding of the regional order will be enhanced by the theoretical tools available in the larger mainstream IR perspectives. The existence of a peculiar regional order of no war, yet a number of simmering disputes (along with high levels of economic interdependence) can be characterized as cold peace which deserves an explanation. The paper applies two variants of realism—balance of power and hegemonic stability – and the key arguments in liberalism to analyze the cold peace in Northeast Asia and normal peace in Southeast Asia from a historical perspective. It finds both grand theoretical approaches have partial applications for understanding the East Asian order. A hybrid approach is more valuable to better explain regional order during diverse time periods and different sub-regions of East Asia. Although the presence of both hegemony and balance of power can prevent major wars for a period, they do not help resolve the pre-existing disputes. Deepened economic interdependence mitigates some spiraling tendencies as states fearful of losing too much economically do not escalate crises beyond a point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper offers a protocol for the analytic assessment of the intraspecific variability of dental morphology in shrews. Our approach blends a temporal aspect together with a comparative morphological analysis in terms of a unified morphogenetic concept based on the 'activator-inhibitor cascades model' and 'decreasing heritability model'. We used material from the upper Pleistocene and Holocene fossiliferous deposits of Koridornaya and Sukhaya caves in the Russian Far East and analysed the first upper molars of specimens that were similar in size to the teeth of Crocidura lasiura but differed in some proportions and qualitative features. We analysed the temporal variation of the molar shape against samples of the extant species C. lasiura, Crocidura sibirica and Crocidura shantungensis along with fossil specimens using geometric morphometry based on three-dimensional landmarks and semi-landmark datasets. Our results revealed correspondence of the fossil teeth to intraspecies variation of C. lasiura with a slight increase in the morphospace size. We also found two deviant teeth, which, however, also fell in the range of C. lasiura and were determined as Crocidura cf. C. lasiura. A detailed description of the dental features became possible with the use of the computed microtomography approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both financial market deregulation and global external imbalance feature prominently among the potential causes of the 2008 global financial crisis, but they have been largely examined separately. In this paper, we take a different angle and investigate the relationship between financial market regulation and current account imbalances, an area for which limited empirical evidence exists. Using a large data set that includes 66 developed and emerging and other developing countries and a fixed effects identification strategy. We find robust and consistent evidence that countries employing significant repressive financial policies are more likely to run current account surpluses. Specifically, interest rate controls, state ownership in the banking sector and capital account controls are the main policies contributing to external imbalances. Analysis of possible mechanisms confirm that financial repression mainly affects external imbalances through its effect on industrial structure. Furthermore, financial repression has a larger effect on the current account in East Asia than the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first outlines the digital interaction and integration in the dynamic process of production, circulation and consumption of Asia-produced media that evoke the shared values and traditions among Asian audiences. It then introduces the papers collected in this special issue, which explore a variety of widespread but underexplored phenomena in the newly interconnected Asian cultural industries and the sites of digital convergence between production and consumption (digital prosumption). In regard to future research, it suggests that multidisciplinary expertise in and from the region should maintain a critical, dialogical connection with Western scholarship in order to contribute to a holistic understanding of the constantly evolving translational creativity in the global audiovisual world. Simultaneously, novel practices in new media habitats, such as danmaku-titling and video remixes, pose new conceptual and ethical challenges to the present scholarship in user-generated AVT and calls for further theoretical revision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dualistic-order thesis has been emerged as a widely-used concept to describe East Asia's regional dynamics. According to the thesis, the economic and security spheres of the region have become divorced from one other, whereby China and the United States dominate the economic and security realms, respectively. This paper demonstrates the deficiencies of this thesis, based on a comprehensive assessment of the economic and security developments in the region, as well as the strategic choices of small and middle regional powers. In order to form a more accurate and systematic understanding of regional prosperity and stability, this paper develops an economy-security nexus approach by integrating the interactions of regional actors in both the economic and security realms into a unified framework. From this perspective, East Asian regional order is sustained by a delicate coupling of regional economic and security configurations: 'hot economics' is accompanied with cooperative security interactions. Although China and the United States are not the dominant actors in either field, their relatively benign interactions in both realms collectively play a significant role by shaping the strategic environment for regional actors, allowing them to enjoy a large degree of strategic flexibility and increase their security and prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on gender relations has overlooked the similarities and differences among East Asian societies. To fill this gap, this study investigated the association among men's gender-role attitudes, the actual share of housework, and perceptions of fairness in housework division, and how it differs across four East Asian societies. Using data from the 2012 International Social Survey Programme, the results demonstrated that Japanese and Taiwanese men had more egalitarian attitudes than mainland Chinese and South Koreans, while mainland Chinese men did more housework. Korean men held the most traditional gender-role attitudes and were least likely to feel they did less than their fair share. The paper concludes with implications for the gender revolution, suggesting policies should promote men's involvement in the family besides helping mothers balance work and family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. The Kuril Islands Chain demarcates the boundary between the circumpolar and East Asian floras in the amphi-Pacific and is a trans-Oceanic migration route from warm-temperate insular East Asia to north-east Asia and Beringia. This paper reviews the flora of the northern part of Iturup Island in regards to its bryogeography and taxonomic diversity, as well as its relative position among other bryophyte floras of north-east and East Asia. Methods. The paper uses morphological methods to identify the species composition and detrended correspondence analysis to identify the position of the northern Iturup Island in the system of local floras of the eastern, extra-tropical, Pacific. Key results. The flora is closely related to the bryophyte floras of the southern Kurils and Hokkaido Island, but has been found to be distinctly distant from the 'true' cool-temperate East Asian floras, as well as from the boreal and hemiarctic floras of north-east Asia. Instead, the floras of the south Kurils and northern Hokkaido Island belong to a peculiar intermediate phytogeographic province that cannot be unambiguously placed in either the East Asian or circumboreal floristic regions. The hemiboreal character of the bryophyte flora of northern Iturup Island is in contrast to the general appearance of many of the dominant vegetation communities on the island, which are more characteristic of the hemiarctic. Conclusion. There is no robust evidence to refer the bryophyte flora of northern Iturup either to the circumboreal or East Asian Floristic Region, the flora belongs to a unique intermediate province between the two regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the maps of East Asia and Central America drawn by Europeans between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and illustrates the distinctions in the roles of Europeans in these two civilizations through the investigation of cartographic differences. In the initial stage of Europeans' entry into East Asia and Central America, the local maps have both the characteristics and techniques of the outsiders and the insiders, reflecting the distinct scene of the encounter of civilizations. In the process of localization, the map system of East Asia deconstructed European cartography, the original purpose of early Europeans entering China was digested by Chinese society, and their role changed from missionary to royal courtier. European cartography deconstructed and colonized the traditional cartography of Central America, which corresponds to the history that Europeans gradually became the rulers of indigenous people in real life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Declarations of a "New World Order", and the "end of history", formed part of the optimism that, with the end of the Cold War, international organisation as a process, and international organisations (IOs), the physical manifestations of this process, held promise as never before for the provision of international peace and security. Yet East Asia was missing out. With ongoing ideological divides, deep historical mistrust, territorial conflicts, and jealous defence of sovereign state prerogatives, it seemed that the region was doomed to be an exception. Three decades later, despite the proliferation of IOs, East Asian exceptionalism persists. This paper, therefore, assesses why the peace and security-generating function of international organisation has proven so difficult to manifest in East Asia, what hope there may be for progress, and the prospects of several of the main candidate organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many developing countries have recently adopted a swathe of development strategies ranging from extremely selective to non-discretionary, functional policies – some if not all of which constitute what we may term 'industrial policy'. The collection provides an overview on the state of the art about new industrial policy and the place of politics in contemporary analysis of state intervention in the global political economy. This introduction revisits the importance of state-backed economic policies not simply as a reaction to the limitations of market reforms implemented in the 1980s and 1990s, but as a radically new development strategy moving on to the twenty-first century. The task of the paper is two-fold: first, it maps out the lessons from East Asian industrial policy and demonstrates how a new generation of political economy scholars have brought in a more political approach to industrialisation; and second, it synthesises the political economy literature to build a framework that incorporates new aspects of industrial policy, notably on the significance of economic linkages and rent management as a way of addressing global value chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Revolution in Military Affairs, its concepts, processes, and debates, have evolved in five 'IT-RMA waves' since the 1980s. None of them, however, have fully achieved their intended outcomes as their ambitious premises have exceeded available technologies, budgetary resources, and operational capabilities of a given era. This paper argues that a new 'artificial intelligence-driven RMA' wave differs in the political, strategic, technological, and operational diffusion paths and patterns. While the AI-RMA may affect select countries and regions disproportionately, its technological advances coupled with an ongoing strategic competition is sufficiently broad to stipulate significant military changes across geopolitical lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to assess industrial upgrading in the semiconductor industry in East Asia. Research into 25 firms, and subsequently the entire value chain specialization of these firms, as well as the filing of patents in the United States at the aggregate country level show that special focus on technological upgrading is critical to attract or stimulate firms' participation in frontier R&D and wafer fabrication activities. Within these categories supportive R&D in assembly and test operations can be achieved in reasonably strong Science Technology and Innovation (STI) infrastructure in particular national locations endowed with strong basic infrastructure. Only in countries where frontier semiconductor research is carried out at universities and where a strong discipline-based incentive mechanism is around, have semiconductor firms established frontier R&D and frontier wafer fabrication activities, such as in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. China has embarked on upgrading to such activities since 2017 suggesting that it could follow the same path to maturity. Consequently, the evidence shows that semiconductor manufacturing is most sticky with the highest technological sophistication in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan where the upgrading incentives and the STI infrastructure have been the most incisive, while China shows a promising movement in that direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the changing governance of economic development in a globalizing era in relation to the dynamics of global value chains and global production networks. Based on recent development in such East Asian economies as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, I examine how, since the 1990s, the embedded relation between one variant of state institutions, known as the developmental state, and national firms, well integrated into global chains and networks spanning different territories and regions, has evolved. Because of the deepening strategic coupling of these national firms with lead firms in global industries, the developmental state's attempt to govern the market and to steer industrial transformation through direct policy interventions has become increasingly difficult and problematic. Through this process of strategic coupling, national firms have been gradually disembedded from state apparatuses and re-embedded in different global production networks that are governed by competitive inter-firm dynamics. While the state in these East Asian economies has actively repositioned its role in this changing governance, it can no longer be conceived as the dominant actor in steering domestic firms and industrial transformation. The developmental trajectory of these national economies becomes equally, if not more, dependent on the successful articulation of their domestic firms in global production networks spearheaded by lead firms. In short, inter-firm dynamics in global production networks tend to trump state-led initiatives as one of the most critical conditions for economic development. This paper theorizes further this significant role of global value chains and global production networks in the changing international political economy of development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is an empirical analysis of how culture, specifically tradition, affects well-being, i.e., happiness, life satisfaction, and financial satisfaction, along with socioeconomic factors in East Asia. Ordered probit regression model results show that women have higher happiness and satisfaction levels than men even in Confucian cultures in which men generally receive more favourable conditions than women. Additionally, marital status or the impact of religion had strong and positive effects on happiness and sometimes on life satisfaction but not on financial satisfaction. Interestingly, tradition has a statistically significant and important effect on both life and financial satisfaction. Finally, the results show that individuals who value tradition greater also have higher levels of financial satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines relations between transnational activities and immigrant integration in Vancouver. From a large survey, associations are noted between a set of transnational practices and economic and socio-cultural indicators of integration in Canada. These associations depart considerably from comparable studies in the United States and the Netherlands, identifying transnationalism with recent migrants and poor socio-cultural integration, while relations are weak and inconsistent with economic integration. The most transnational profile in the Vancouver survey is shared by business immigrants originating from East Asia, and the second part of the paper comprises an ethnography of this group, interpreting how their spatial practices and identities as business people sans frontières place them at odds with the state's attempt to reproduce integrated national citizens. These general themes are examined in more detail in relation to their holding of global assets in potential non-compliance with Canadian tax law, and their sojourner habitus, in which serial mobility limits participation and identity with Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the special collection on East Asia and the global crisis. After justifying why a focus on East Asia is appropriate, it draws out the main themes that run through the individual contributions. These are the extent to which the region is decoupling from the global economy (or the West), the increasing legitimacy of statist alternatives to neoliberal development strategies, and the impact of crises on the definition of 'region' and the functioning of regional institutions and governance mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how East Asian states have regulated membership and migration through meso-level institutions. Specifically, we examine how states have used the household registration system (China's hukou system, South Korea's hoju/hojeok system, and Japan's koseki system) in the process of nation-state building in the early post-World War Two period, as a security measure to control movement throughout the Cold War, and as a tool to build or sever trans-border kinship ties in the contemporary era. Drawing on the literature on multi-level citizenship, the article contributes to the growing scholarship that unpacks the civic-ethnic divide in comparative citizenship studies by examining how meso-level institutions shape national-level membership in countries that are commonly characterized as having 'ethnic' citizenship regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of papers we have developed the notion that net foreign assets could be better approximated by capitalizing the net investment income line of the balance of payments statistics. Hidden assets or changes in financial costs may change the net return of net foreign assets even when the valuation of assets remains unchanged. By capitalizing the net investment income a more realistic picture emerges on the true burden or return of net foreign assets. This paper estimates external positions for East Asian economies using this methodology and compares the results with that of official accounts. We find that, until the late 1990s, net investment income increased relatively little, signaling that net foreign assets had not grown as suggested by the large current account surpluses of these countries. This is consistent with the fact that the region had attracted large amounts of foreign direct investment, for which the transfer of technology and knowledge are not accurately captured by the valuation of the foreign asset position. Since 2002, however, the trend has reversed, indicating much larger surpluses than officially registered. We discuss individual country cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the relative merits and demerits of different East Asian models by placing them in a historical perspective. It re-interprets Gerschenkron's model of late industrialization, and extends it to compare East Asian economies in view of substituting and complementing models, ft then explains divergent performances among East Asian economics from the late 1990s by examining the different Challenges they faced as their economies became mature and more fully open to forces of globalization. fn conclusion, the paper discusses the applicability of the East Asian models for today's developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign direct investment (FDI) can affect the levelanddispersion of wages, but there is a lack of empirical work in this area. This paper tests for the effects of FDI on wages and wage inequality in five East Asian countries. Wage inequality has been low and decreasing in some, but not all, East Asian countries. Using ILO data for wages and employment by occupation, we do not find strong evidence that FDI reduced wage inequality in five East Asian countries over the period 1985–98. Indeed, controlling for domestic influences (wage setting, supply of skills) we find that FDI has raised wage inequality in Thailand. Because we also find that FDI raises the wages for both skilled and low-skilled workers, our findings should help to move the debate from impact (does FDI contribute to growth and development?) to appropriate policies to utilize FDI (how can we make FDI work for all?). We suggest that the education system in Thailand has not been sufficiently oriented to maximize the benefits from FDI. Countries wanting to develop on the basis of FDI should invest sufficient resources in good quality and appropriate human resources, or otherwise face the possibility that growth coincides with rising wage inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The financial crises of the late 1990s marked an intellectual watershed for the global economy, and also for regionalism as the Janus face of globalization. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the theory and practice of regional cooperation and integration may evolve along different lines to how it was understood for most of the second half of the twentieth century. In East Asia, in particular, this will mean that the relationship between multilateralism and regionalism will change. The 'East Asian' region will become an increasingly important domain within which to explore enhanced protection against financial crises. What we might call 'monetary regionalism', sceptical western voices notwithstanding, is now firmly on the regional agenda in East Asia. Within conventional political economy, the theory and practice of monetary regionalism is not as easy to understand as traditional, trade-driven, regional integration. Thus one aim of this paper is to outline a theory of monetary regionalism and demonstrate the degree to which it represents a break with understandings of the regional project in East Asia prior to the late 1990s. From its start in 1989, APEC claimed to be a new type of regionalism. The promise was that APEC would promote open regionalism. APEC did not achieve this goal. Nor did it provide support to its Asian members during the financial crises of the late 1990s. At the same time, more traditional (what we might call Balassian) understandings of trade-driven regional integration are showing signs of decreasing importance. There is a growing appeal to trade co-operation, but this is notably an increasing interest in bilateral preferential trading arrangements. This leads to a complex picture of competing regional initiatives across the economic policy spectrum. The paper locates these initiatives in the wider context of the growing politico-economic dialogue between Southeast and Northeast Asia that has developed via the ASEAN+3 process since 1997. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UNESCO's relatively high prestige across East Asia has spurred intensifying efforts by governments to use its imprimatur to legitimate official narratives of the past and visions of the future. This article focuses on China's use of UNESCO as an arena for competitive national 'branding' in the education field, especially relating to STEM and AI. We analyse the Chinese state's engagement with UNESCO's education work in the context of shifts in budgetary and political influence within the organisation, and of a growing 'securitisation' of education within China itself. We show how Chinese engagement with UNESCO's educational agenda reflects both domestic political considerations and the 'major country diplomacy' of Xi Jinping, as manifested in the 'Belt and Road Initiative' and intensifying strategic competition with the USA. We conclude by discussing the implications of rising Chinese influence within the organisation for UNESCO's capacity for articulating a coherent and consistently humanistic vision for education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an examination of recent scholarship on family migration for children's education in the context of East Asia, in an attempt to counter tendencies towards ‘adultism’ in migration studies [White, A., C. Ní Laoire, N. Tyrrell, and F. Carpena-Méndez. 2011. “Children's Roles in Transnational Migration.”Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies37 (8): 1159–1170]. It highlights the significant role that children do, in fact, play in precipitating contemporary migration, and educational migration provides an appropriate lens through which to do this. First, the paper considers some of the transnational household forms to have emerged in response educational migration. It then focuses on theorising the importantdriversunderpinning educational migration, including the acquisition (by children) of cultural and linguistic capital and the notion of children as ‘accumulation strategies’ [Katz, C. 2008. “Childhood as Spectacle: Relays of Anxiety and the Reconfiguration of the Child.”Cultural Geographies15: 5–17]. It then turns to consider some of the implications of such mobility, alighting in particular upon its gendered nature, and the ways in which local geographies invariably impinge upon migrant families’ strategic intentions. It concludes with some thoughts on how the role of children might be better integrated into understandings of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in social protection in East Asia. The article focuses on two types of NGO roles in social protection—direct provision and indirect pressure—and examines how the relative proportions of the two types of roles vary by country in East Asia, depending on factors that are contextual (political democratization), pulling (developmental welfare state), or pushing (civil society). A comparative analysis of Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia reveals that each represents a differing mix of pressure and provision functions by NGOs in social protection. In Korea pressure seems to be the main role of NGOs; in Indonesia it is provision; while in Thailand pressure and provision are relatively evenly mixed. The study concludes with a summary of the research findings, discussion on the limitations of the paper, and suggestions for future research in order to develop more sophisticated accounts of NGO roles in social protection in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to gauge the impact of the global financial crisis on bilateral holdings of financial assets among East Asian countries. For this purpose, this paper uses the International Monetary Fund's Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS) data. We first present information about financial linkages between the CPIS-participating eight East Asian economies and other East Asian economies before and after the global financial crisis of 2008. We then apply the gravity model to assess the determinants of the cross-border holdings of foreign securities for four major East Asian financial investors – Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Singapore. We find only few changes in the bilateral holdings of financial assets among East Asian countries in the post-crisis period. In particular, our evidence does not indicate that intra-Asian financial integration has increased noticeably since the global crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that to understand the relevance of developmental states in East Asia and elsewhere, we need to focus on the changing development agenda in the early twenty-first century, especially how this connects with the global challenge of climate change and thereby sustainable, low-carbon development. It combines theories on state capacity and ecological modernisation to form the 'new developmentalism' concept. This is applied to study revitalised and refocused forms of state capacity aimed at realising the transformative economic objectives associated with sustainable development. New developmentalism helps us understand not only current state capacity practice in a climate challenged world but also how we have moved beyond original conceptions of developmental statism. It may be understood in the wider context of the sustainable development agenda and climate interventionism. As is argued, new developmentalism is most clearly evident in East Asia but can be applied in a wider geographic sense where strong forms of developmental state capacity are exercised towards meeting transformative sustainable development goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, the pendulum of regime change across the world has swung dramatically from democratization to autocratization. There has been much contention and debate about the extent, variation, and causes surrounding these processes. This special issue turns the spotlight away from regime change and political elites towards societal agents, particularly societal agents who mobilize and resist against autocratization unfolding within democratic and authoritarian regimes. In this introductory article, we review and critique the literature on autocratization studies, and introduce our concept of "agents of resistance." We argue that agents of resistance can develop and engage in repertoires against autocratization under any regime type. Specifically, the contributions in this special issue highlight seemingly mundane repertoires of resistance, and how they can grow through cumulative interactions among societal agents, and between societal agents and the state. Scholars should recognize the full spectrum of resistance and both their liberal and illiberal elements to better assess the impact on global trends of democratization or autocratization. Finally, this article discusses some methodological trends with regards to the existing literature, and introduces the contributions that compose this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines prospects for solidarity, defined as an ethos of collective responsibility that works across a political community's normative values and policy decisions, as a unifying idea that can inspire and promote steps toward regional political community across East Asia. Just as the European Union's (EU) founders and its past and present visionaries have appealed consistently to an inclusive, transnational model of solidarity in framing and pursuing European integration, notions of solidarity also contain important affinities with prospects for building an East Asian community. First, the paper examines how the idea of solidarity has evolved in European political thought and especially how solidarity has emerged repeatedly as one of the important concepts throughout the political development of the EU. Then, the paper turns to East Asia and considers the relevance of solidarity as an important principle in aspirations and endeavors toward the creation of an East Asian community. We base our analysis upon a variety of sources, including statements and speeches from key political actors, scholarly books and articles, and news accounts and commentaries. We illustrate how earlier manifestations of solidarity in East Asia have often been cast in ways that set the region apart from the rest of the world and have framed particular groupings of Asian countries in opposition to the West, and we argue that a redeployment of solidarity is needed in East Asia that instead emphasizes an ethos of collective responsibility among the principal national actors and external stakeholders within the region and beyond. In contrast with interpretations that suggest that the conditions for developing East Asian community are inescapably distinct from the circumstances in Europe during the second half of the twentieth century, we argue that the idea of solidarity has great potential to advance regional collaboration in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper initiates a comparative analysis of the labour process in three different social systems in order to shed light on the singularities of East Asian social forms. The point of departure for the project highlights the place of substitution central to the labour process in the West. There time's flow entails the replacement of human ingenuity by mechanical power and so distils into Western culture a fascination with the possibilities of substitution that governs much private and public life. It suggests the problem of ‘Civilisation’ derives from this process. By contrast, social life in the South Pacific, amidst cultures historically contiguous with those in East Asia, focuses on flows from original conditions. In this context social life follows organising sequences, not substitution. There follows and features a mimetic singularity of ascribed, ranked socially appropriate and chained action and reaction. East Asia shares with the South Pacific a mimetic aesthetic of sequence, rank and singularity, but there social process transforms into a centralising mass defined by epochal discontinuities organising the flows of life: Understanding that result is the ‘problem’ of East Asian sociality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the last 15 years, computers and electronic goods have been the leading export categories from East Asia to the rest of the world. They are produced within regional production and distribution networks. Japan, South Korea and Taipei, China, construct technology-intensive parts and components and ship them to China and ASEAN for processing by lower-skilled workers and reexport. This paper presents evidence that exchange rate appreciations in countries supplying parts and components to East Asian assembly economies would curtail these sophisticated exports, while exchange rate appreciations in assembly economies would not. The evidence also indicates that decreases in income in importing countries would significantly reduce computer and electronic goods exports. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

All economies experience peaks and troughs in their business cycles. This paper examines eight East Asian economies, employing a Bayesian dynamic factor model that allows the decomposition of aggregate shocks into country-specific, regional and world common business cycles. It therefore allows the identification of causes for major events experienced by these countries. Empirical evidences show that country-specific factors are the most important in determining the major events for all the countries examined here, implying the need for each country to rely more heavily on its own independent counter-cyclical policies. Although the regional factor plays a less important role than the country-specific factor, it accounts for a sizeable share in the output fluctuation of the region. The regional factor is most prevalent for Singapore, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand, indicating that a regional coordinated policy is rather more effective for these economies to respond to disturbances. The world factor explains only around 7% of the output variation in East Asia, which might explain why the East Asian economies are relatively insulated from the recent global financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically examines the role of financial sector development in influencing the impact of exchange rate volatility on the exports of five emerging East Asian countries - China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand - using a GMM-IV estimation method. The results indicate that the effect of exchange rate volatility on exports is conditional on the level of financial sector development. The less financially developed an economy, the more its exports are adversely affected by exchange rate volatility. In addition, a stable exchange rate seems to be a necessary condition to achieve export promotion via a currency depreciation in these economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the economic impacts of the various sequential liberalization scenarios in East Asia, emphasizing the significance of the 'sequence' of the liberalization process in computable general equilibrium (CGE) analysis. The major findings are as follows: (1) 'Sequence' matters in measuring the economic impacts of free trade agreement (FTA) scenarios in the region; (2) Scenario 1 (Korea-China FTA → Korea-Japan FTA → China-Japan FTA) is the sequence maximizing Korea's economic gains, whereas Scenario 3 (Korea-China-Japan FTA) is the one most preferred economically by China and Japan; (3) Korea's FTAs with the United States (US) and European Union (EU) can be evaluated as a preemptive strategic move, causing changes in FTA preferences of Korea and Japan; (4) the prediction of Bond and Baldwin (adjustment cost and juggernaut effect) and that of Evenett et al. (trade diversion effect) are supported by the empirical results that Korea's (China's) expected gains from northeast Asian FTA sequences increase (decrease) after Korea's FTAs with the US and EU are made; (5) predictions about the International Political Economy (IPE) theories (power consideration and domestic politics) upon the sequential FTA formations in East Asia are consistent with the findings above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]