Asian Studies Commons^™

"The Chinese Animation Industry: From The Mao Era To The Digital Age", Stephanie Jones

Master's Projects and Capstones

Since the 1950’s the Chinese Animation industry has been trying to create a unique national style for China. The national style of the 1950’s and early 1960’s was one of freedom, fantasy, and creativity. With the success of “Heroic Little Sisters of the Grassland”/草原英雄小姐妹(1965), the government administration, namely Jiang Qing of the “Gang of Four”, demanded that all animation should follow specific guidelines based on Social Realism guidelines. This in turn, ushered in a new national style of animation during the Cultural Revolution(1966-1976). During this ten-year period government policies imposed strict restrictions on animators and cause a drain of creative …

Aggression, Information, And Economics: Reinterpreting The Hermit Kingdom In The Era Of Kim Jong-Un, Margaret Pence

Master's Projects and Capstones

North Korea has been the most isolated country on the planet for the past sixty years. Due to its isolation, the Hermit Kingdom has naturally become mysterious, resulting in a common narrative that describes Pyongyang as aggressive and driven by nuclear weapons. Missing from this narrative is what motivates North Korea and its young leader, Kim Jong-un: survival. However, Kim Jong-un has a lot more than the outside world to contend with, as the North Korea he has inherited is much different than that of his predecessors. In response, Kim Jong-un has subtly shifted away from the state ideology of …

Decentralization And The Provision Of Public Services: A Case Study Of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, Mishaal Afteb

Honors Scholar Theses

The effective provision of public services is integral to a functioning democracy as it connects the public to the government and grants it legitimacy. Public services are ones that are provided by the federal and local governments and paid for with constituent taxes. Public services provided by the state are education, health, water/sanitation, environmental measures, security, policing, labor and legal guidelines and so on. Whether the structure of the government is centralized or decentralized is an important factor which impacts the provision of services. Decentralized governments are state or local governments which receive monetary and institutional resources from the federal …

How Black Lives Matter Has Influenced And Interacted With Global Social Movements, Arelle A. Binning

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a chapter-based and member-led organization created out of grief by three queer black women. This thesis examines the international impact of BLM. I conducted telephone interviews with activists and advocacy organizations who have organized activist networks and/or won struggles against institutional racism outside of the United States. These activists are located in Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, Australia, India, Spain, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Paris. I conclude that BLM has inspired the creation and supported the continued development of organizations advocating for national and transnational social and racial justice on a global scale. BLM in spite …

The Wealth Of Nations And The Advancement Of Collective Security, Kerry Daniel Good

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis will address the economic development of countries from the strategic perspective of the United States, and consider how this development will progress overlaid in the context of the Chinese framework for the projection of national power. Using an inter-disciplinary approach, this research will synthesize sources on national security policy and economics, while seeking a Christian apologetic framework to answer these questions: How can the United States promote the economic development of countries in the Asia-Pacific region using a biblical economic-development model, as a part of its national strategy? This thesis focuses on some of the political and socio-economic …

Modernizing The Hermit Kingdom: Bridging The Economic And Cultural Gap Through Soft Power Diplomacy, Jane Son

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

Modernizing the “Hermit Kingdom”:

Bridging the Cultural and Economic Gap through Soft Power Diplomacy

Following the Korean War, the Republic of Korea embraced modernization and rose as an economic power while its Northern counterpart employed isolationist policies and acquired the name “Hermit Kingdom.” In recent years, however, the “Hermit Kingdom” is exhibiting potential for change in under the Kim Jong-Un regime. In the wake of continued economic strife, shifting East Asian political dynamics, and insecure power consolidation, Kim appeared in the international scene with a different attitude: eagerness for dialogue. Such change in Pyongyang’s political stance engenders renewed hope for …

An Assessment Of The Strategic Domestic And Foreign Policy Goals Of North Korea Under Kim Jong Un, Youngju Moon

Student Theses and Dissertations

North Korea’s drastic shift in foreign policy in 2018 focused the world’s attention on Kim Jong-un. This thesis examines the intention of Kim Jong-un, who plans to make North Korea a socialist economic powerhouse; it also analyzes the changes in his foreign policy decisions. This analysis is based on literature reviews and external statistical data suitable for North Korean studies. As a result of analyzing five potential economic growth factors that will bring economic development to North Korean society, it is derived that Kim Jong-un intends to establish a foothold for North Korea’s economic growth through mitigation of relations with …

Descriptive To Substantive Representation: A Study Of Gender Quotas In The National Assembly Of Pakistan, 2002-2018, Ameena Zia

Dissertations

Women’s political representation is linked to the empowerment of women in society. In efforts to alleviate women’s disenfranchisement from the political discourse, the international development framework included gender quotas as mechanisms to facilitate an increase in the presence of women in parliaments. Existing research has examined the link between Hanna F. Pitkin’s conceptualization of descriptive representation and substantive representation with a focus on performative measures of women parliamentarians. This longitudinal study expands the scope of existing inquiry and captures the transformational change in power relations as an outcome of the increase in women members of parliaments. This research provides an …

India’S Surgical Strikes: Response To Strategic Imperatives, Karthika Sasikumar

Faculty Publications

In September 2016, militants who were allegedly backed by Pakistan attacked an Indian Army camp in Uri. The government in New Delhi was facing important regional elections. It faced intense public pressure to muster a military response. Such a response, however, ran the risk of triggering a nuclear exchange. Ten days after the Uri attack, India reported that it had carried out ‘surgical strikes’ on terrorist training camps in Pakistan-controlled territory. The paper examines this specific episode in India–Pakistan deterrence dynamics, focusing on the nomenclature ‘surgical strikes’. The paper argues that the choice of the term itself is new and …

Local Democracy And Education Policy In Newly Federal Nepal, Jack Shangraw

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In 2017, Nepal held its first local elections in twenty years. These were the first elections held under Nepal’s new constitution, ratified in 2015, which transitioned the country from a unitary state to a Federal Democratic Republic. This case study analyzes the effect of the transition to federalism on decision-making and community representation in local governance in Annapurna Rural Municipality in West-Central Nepal. This study focuses specifically on education policy, one of the more public and contentious policy responsibilities devolved from the federal level to the local units under the new constitution. This research is based on interviews with government …

Deterrence Under Nuclear Asymmetry: Thaad And The Prospects For Missile Defense On The Korean Peninsula, Inwook Kim, Soul Park

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The 2016 decision to deploy Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korea has generated multitude of intensely politicized issues and has proved highly controversial. This has made it challenging to alleviate, let alone clarify, points of analytical and policy tensions. We instead disaggregate and revisit two fundamental questions. One is whether THAAD could really defend South Korea from North Korean missiles. We challenge the conventional “qualified optimism” by giving analytical primacy to three countermeasures available to defeat THAAD–use of decoys, tumbling and spiral motion, and outnumbering. These countermeasures are relatively inexpensive to create but exceedingly difficult to offset. …

The Myanmar Business Environment Index 2020: Measuring Economic Governance For Private Sector Development, Malesky Edmund, Dean C. Dulay, Jon Kesssecker

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Economic Governance Index (EGI) is a tool that has become widely accepted by governments to understand economic growth, attract investors, and engage in public-private sector dialogue. EGIs have been used in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kosovo, El Salvador, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Vietnam to offer crucial insight into governance and help guide reform efforts. The Myanmar Business Environment Index (MBEI) follows in this tradition by adapting the EGI model to the Myanmar context. The MBEI is designed to provide Union and state/region government leaders, as well as stakeholders such as business managers, with a tool to understand and address the …

Public Interest Litigation & Women’S Rights: Cases From Nepal & India, Jordan E. Stevenson

2019 Symposium

As a complex, diverse and dynamic region with diverging, constantly changing constitutional and jurisprudential contexts as well as lasting legacies of patriarchy, South Asia’s traditions of public interest litigation are one of the most well-studied institutions by Western audiences due to their contradictory progressive and innovative nature. Particularly in India, where public interest litigation gives ordinary citizens extraordinary access to the highest courts of justice, questions have been raised as to the effectiveness of public interest litigation as a tool to address gender disparities across the region. Although Supreme Court justices have been a key ally in eliminating legal barriers …

How To Be Singaporean: Becoming Global National Citizens And The National Dimension In Cosmopolitan Openness, Wen Li Thian

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper looks at how cosmopolitanism is practised amongst Singaporeans who have experienced Singapore’s education reform in the 1990s. Cosmopolitanism in Singapore is tied to state-intervention with a national orientation. To complement Singapore’s push towards cosmopolitanism, the education reform in the 1990s promoted the idea of a national citizen with a global orientation. I looked at 40 Singaporeans born after the year 1990 to investigate cosmopolitan attitudes that have emerged from the tensions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. To meet the state’s ideals of cosmopolitanism, these Singaporeans employed strategies to practice a particular form of cosmopolitan openness which prioritise national interests. …

Given Today's New Wave Of Protectionsim, Is Antitrust Law The Last Hope For Preserving A Free Global Economy Or Another Nail In Free Trade's Coffin?, Allison Murray

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sanctions For Nuclear Inhibition: Comparing Sanctions Conditions Between Iran And North Korea, Inwook Kim, Jung-Chul Lee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Whendo sanctions succeed in nuclear inhibition? Is there a generalizable frameworkto estimate sanction effectiveness against nuclear aspirants? Instead ofrelying on partial equilibrium analysis, we conceptualize sanctions as threesequential phases—imposition of economic pain, conversation to politicalpressure, and creation (or failure thereof) of zone of possible agreement(ZOPA). The effectiveness of each phase is subject to phase-specific contextualvariables, an aggregation of which helps measure individual sanction’s effectiveness,conduct cross-case comparison, and estimate one’s replicability in other cases.To illustrate its analytical utility, we analyze the divergent sanctionoutcomes between Iran in 2012-2015 and North Korea 2013-2017. Iran waseconomically more vulnerable, politically less resilient, and its bargainingposition …

Jawing Through Crises: Chinese And Vietnamese Media Strategies In The South China Sea, Frances Yaping Wang, Brantly Womack

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Winston Churchill once said, ‘it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.’ However, negotiations are particularly difficult when they are enmeshed in public opinion precommitments. The sharpest crisis between China and Vietnam in the last 30 years concerned the placement of a Chinese oil rig into contested waters in 2014. This study analyses the Chinese and Vietnamese propaganda efforts surrounding the crisis as examples of the instrumental use of propaganda in managing domestic public opinion on diplomatic crises. The article argues that despite very different approaches to public diplomacy during the crisis, both states were primarily concerned with avoiding escalation …

Forced Labor In Hong Kong, Kylan Rutherford

Marriott Student Review

Domestic workers are among the most exploited groups, composing 24% of the estimated 45.8 million forced laborers worldwide. The market for domestic workers has expanded especially rapidly in the Asia-Pacific region; in Hong Kong alone, there are currently 360,000 domestic workers—about 10% of Hong Kong’s workforce—mostly originating from the Philippines and Indonesia (Hincks, 2017). 94% of these workers show signs of exploitation or forced labor (Kang, 2017). The nature of their work in a foreign country limits their access to government protection, forces them to comply with illegally high recruitment fees, and can push them to submit to abuse in …

Perception Of Corrupt Acts: East Vs. West, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Corruption is a major threat faced by China and anyone who wants to do business in the country. In recent years, the Chinese government’s crackdowns in corruption has led to some success. In the Berlin-based non-profit Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2017, China ranked 77th with a score of 41 out of 100, a slight improvement from the score of 36 in 2014. The index ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople with a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.

Ua35/11/1 Chinese Flagship & Confucius Institute, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about the Chinese Flagship program and Confucius Institute.

Connecting The Emerging Markets: China’S Growing Role In Global Digital Infrastructure, Yujia He

Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce Faculty Publications

Rising demand for international communications drive cable capacity growth, yet financing and political risks remain major obstacles. Chinese investments help finance cable systems in multiple emerging market regions. Emerging economies need to develop robust domestic regulations and international coordination to reduce political risks, protect cable infrastructure, and manage cyber risks.

Treatment And Evolution Of Digital Rights: A Comparative Analysis Of China, Russia, The United States, And Germany, Karina Barbesino

Honors Program Theses

The internet and digital technologies allow for the recognition, advocation, and protection of human rights. People around the world have access to faster and exponentially more information than ever before. The possibilities for education, politics, healthcare, work, and equality have greatly expanded. The internet provides new opportunities for the progression of humanity, but not without a cost. The transformative power of the internet to both empower and infringe on human rights has not been lost on states. As a relatively new domain, the policies in cyberspace remain in their trial periods. Each state is implementing, redacting, and implementing again policies …

Surpass, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Where is China going? How will it influence world politics in the twenty-first century? Such questions currently vex commentators not only in the West, but within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as well.¹ In his first month as China’s leader in 2012, Xi Jinping addressed this concern when he proposed the ‘China Dream’ (zhongguo meng) as his vision of the PRC’s future direction. Such discussion of directions and dreams is actually part of a broad and ongoing debate about the ‘moral crisis’ that China faces after four decades of economic reform and opening up. Public intellectuals from across the …

Farmers, Workers, And State Responses To The Food Crises: State-Society Conflicts And The Politics Of Agricultural Development In Indonesia And Nigeria, Sirojuddin Arif

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

A solid agricultural foundation is required to build a strong industrial sector. However, how such a foundation can be established remains debated. This study addressed this question by examining the politics of state responses to the food crises in Indonesia and Nigeria. Despite the similar problem of food shortages faced by the two countries in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, respectively, why did they pursue divergent policy responses? Why did Indonesia implement rural-biased policies while Nigeria urban-biased ones to deal with the food crisis? What factor explains these different policy choices? And how did this factor affect the distributional outcome …

The Roadmap To Liberalization: Myanmar's Transition From Military To Civilian Rule, Nicole Amanda Loring

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

How did Myanmar’s military embrace liberalization more during 2011-2015 than in the 1988-2002 period? Myanmar has long been treated as an outlying case by studies on democratization, liberalization, and transitions from authoritarian regimes due to its longstanding military regime. Protests in 1988 led to pressure on the regime to hold elections in 1990, leading to an electoral victory for the opposition party the National League for Democracy (NLD), but the results were ultimately overturned, and Myanmar’s military regime persisted. The period of 2011-2015 showed marked similarities with the earlier 1988-2002 period, including protests and pressure for democratic elections. Despite the …

International Institutions And Inertia: Unsc Behavior On Myanmar’S Internal Ethnic Conflicts, Matthew Peerboom

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Since the resurgence of Rakhine State's conflict in 2017, and the resulting 750,000 refugees, Myanmar has received increased scrutiny by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). However, some of Myanmar's ethnic conflicts have been continuous since independence in 1948, and thus begs the question: what explains the difference in attention? Three analytical lenses will be utilized to examine UNSC behavior: Bureaucratic Institutionalism, Geopolitics, and the null hypothesis of sheer Magnitude. In the end, it appears Institutionalism has come out as the strongest driver of Council action escalation on Myanmar. For Kayin’s low action period, it met two of the conditions …

Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic In Contemporary Singapore And Malaysia, Kian Chow Kwok

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In an interview published a month before his passing, Hayden Whitesuggested historical studies had finally arrived at an “era of the image,” givenhow long it took for historians to recognize the potentialities of photographyand subsequently cinema and post-cinema as not just historical objects butalso modes of doing history. White cited queer history as an example ofcomplicating the binary between the object and method of historical study,enabling new approaches to understanding history and historiography(Ethan Kleinberg and Hayden White on the Practical Past, Part 2, published onYouTube, February 5, 2018).

Producing The Self-Regulating Subject: Liberal Protection In Indonesia’S Migration Infrastructure, Andy Scott Chang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Labour protection has become a dominant agenda in global migration governance, particularly for sending countries whose diasporic citizens are denied political rights in host states. Despite having limited authority to arbitrate extraterritorial disputes, sending countries like Indonesia have deployed novel techniques of statecraft to improve migrant protection. Through the prism of the professional competence exam and pre-departure orientation seminar, this article investigates the Indonesian state's regulatory practices that focus on migrant conduct. Although outbound domestic workers are subject to a prolonged process of skill formation, other Indonesian contract workers pursue emigration upon acquiring basic legal knowledge without undergoing accreditation. While …

Book Review: Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority And Ethical Improvement In Aceh, Indonesia (By David Kloos) & Chinese Ways Of Being Muslim: Negotiating Ethnicity And Religiosity In Indonesia (By Hew Wai Weng), Charlotte Setijadi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Indonesian Islam has earnedsomething of a bad reputation in recent times. Amid reports of risingintolerance against religious minorities, terrorism attacks, high-profileblasphemy cases and the growing political influence of hard-line Muslim groups,it is easy to take an alarmist stance and assume that Indonesia’s approximately225 million Muslims are heading down the path of puritanism. Indeed, evenseasoned analysts of Indonesia often forget that Indonesian Islam isheterogeneous, and that the everyday experiences of Muslims from differentsocio-cultural backgrounds are extremely diverse. This is why Hew Wai Weng’sand David Kloos’ respective books are much-needed additions to contemporaryscholarship on Islam in Indonesia.

All Eyes Will Be On How Heng And His 4g Team Lead Singapore, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a commentary, SMU Associate Professor of Law Eugene Tan said the choice of Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat as the People’s Action Party’s first assistant secretary-general should not come as a surprise as he was the only fourth-generation (4G) leader to be made a full Minister upon winning his maiden election in 2011, helming the Education Ministry between 2011 and 2015. He opined that Mr Heng’s 4G team will have to stamp their distinctive collective identity and leadership ethos as governance becomes increasingly complex.