Asian Studies Commons^™

Rising Asian Powers And Changing Global Governance, Ann Florini

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

International Relations (IR) scholarship is directly in the path of two simultaneous tidal waves. The first is the rise of China and India in the traditional IR terms of military and economic power. The second is the expanding nature of what IR scholarship needs to address, as global integration transforms the nature of the issues to be addressed and numerous trends expand the number and types of relevant actors. Neither theory nor practice is yet coping well with the profound implications of these fundamental changes. Investigating what kind of a world order might emerge from these two simultaneous tsunamis will …

When Religion Trumps Ethnicity: A Regional Election Case Study From Indonesia, Edward Aspinall, Sebastian Carl Dettman, Eve Warburton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The authors analyse the 2010 mayoral election in the city of Medan, North Sumatra. Medan is an ethnically and religiously diverse city and the authors treat the elections here as a case study of inter-communal dynamics in local elections in plural regions of Indonesia. The first round of the vote was contested by 10 pairs of candidates and occurred in a climate of cross-ethnic alliance building and appeals that, the authors argue, are typical of broader Indonesian patterns. The second round confronted voters with a choice between a Muslim candidate and an ethnic Chinese candidate who was also a Buddhist. …

Decomposing The Changes Of The Divisia Price Index: Application To Inflation In The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a method to decompose the logarithmic change of the Divisia price index into the pure price effect, the preference effect and the substitution effect. Our empirical results in the Philippines shows the effects of preference change on the Divisia price index are heterogeneous but positive across all regions and income deciles. However, they are dominated by the pure price effect.

Interpretations Of Virtue (De) In Early China, Alan Kam Leung Chan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

There is wide agreement that “virtue” finds its closest match inChinese philosophy in the concept of de . As a general concept, deconveys a sense of moral excellence, which finds expression in con-ceptually distinct virtues such as wisdom and courage. In the Confu-cian tradition it is often maintained that de pertains especially tomoral character or “moral charisma,” which defines the junzi or“gentleman” ideal.1 In this discussion, without rehearsing the manystudies on the meaning of de or retracing its usages in classical writ-ings,2 I explore how the concept is understood in three recently recov-ered early Chinese texts.

Oral History Interview With Ho Kwon Ping: Conceptualising Smu, Kwon Ping Ho

Oral History Collection

The interview covered: capturing SMU history, view of Singapore education system, Singapore Institute of Management, third university, business schools, business education, faculty recruitment, differentiating SMU, board of trustees, governance, student interaction, job satisfaction, non-profit organisations, inaugural convocation, differentiating SMU, future of SMU.

Biography:

Chairman, Board of Trustees, SMU, 2000–present
Chairman, Governing Council for Singapore Institute of Management, 1997–2000

One of Singapore’s most prominent businessmen, Mr Ho Kwon Ping, was tapped by Deputy Prime Minister Tony Tan in 1997 to lead the effort to establish a new national university which would be autonomous and based on an American-style of education. An …

Oral History Interview With Low Aik Meng: Conceptualising Smu, Aik Meng Low

Oral History Collection

The interview covered: first involvement with SMU, role and responsibilities, curriculum, student experience, first freshman team building camp, first classes, pioneer class, student activities, student ambassadors, community service, student hostel, student financial assistance.

Biography:

Founding Dean of Students, SMU, 2000–2011

Member of SMU start-up team

An SMU ‘pioneer’, Professor Low Aik Meng was one of the first three faculty to join the start-up team for the new university in 1998. Curriculum development was one his early responsibilities. Professor Low is best known for his next assignment—in 2000 he was appointed as SMU’s founding dean of students, a role in which …

Customer Satisfaction Index Of Singapore 2010: Full Year Overview, Institute Of Service Excellence, Smu

Research Collection Institute of Service Excellence (2007-2024)

The Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG) has completed its fourth consecutive year of measurement since 2007. Under a quarterly measure and release system with two out of eight sectors measured per quarter, CSISG 2010 scores of companies for the Retail and Info-Communications sectors were released in the first quarter of 2010, Transportation & Logistics and Education sectors released in the second quarter, Food & Beverage and Tourism sectors released in the third quarter, and finally the current release of Finance & Insurance and Healthcare sectors, marking the end of measurement for 2010. The CSISG 2010 national score is computed …

The Security Situation For Central Asia: Afghanistan, Water, And Uzbek Stability, Carleton Wesley Becks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Central Asia has emerged on the global stage after spending decades in isolation. As developing nations, most of Central Asia possesses the resources to spur rapid development. Things would seem to be in the region's favor. There are, however, a few events that could derail the region.

Afghanistan is on the periphery of the region and presents a series of difficult dilemmas such as creating a functioning government from a country that has been at war for nearly 30 years, the problem of the insurgency in the south, and narcotics trafficking.

Water is scarce in the region, the leaders cannot …

Changes May Mean Slaying Sacred Cows, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Changing may means slaying sacred crows

Liberalization Of Taiwan’S Securities Markets: The Case Of Cross-Taiwan-Strait Listings, Wen-Yeu Wang, Christopher Chao-Hung Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The purpose of this paper is to examine the liberalization of Taiwan’s capital market regarding cross-Taiwan-Strait listing of securities. Taiwan is in an advantageous position to compete with other Asian rivals to attract issuers and capital from China. However, the long political hostility ensures that there is little regulatory cooperation on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Assuming that the creation of a cross-strait capital market is an unstoppable trend, this paper examines from the perspective of regulatory competition several regimes that may facilitate Taiwan to overcome regulatory obstacles arising from the special Sino-Taiwan relationship. This paper argues that regulatory …

Oral History Interview With Michael Furmston: Conceptualising Smu, Michael P. Furmston

Oral History Collection

The interview covered: first involvement with Singapore and SMU, challenges and opportunities for the law school, faculty recruitment, law research, job opportunities, relationship with legal communities, internships, law building, future developments, dispute resolution.

Biography:

Founding Dean, School of Law, SMU, 2007–present

Professor Michael Furmston became the founding dean of the School of Law in August 2007. The second law school in Singapore, SMU’s undergraduate law programme has been noted for the significant proportion of business and finance courses. Its first students graduated in July 2011. In 2009, a postgraduate law programme was introduced, the juris doctor. During Professor Furmston’s tenure …

Oral History Interview With Ruth Pagell: Conceptualising Smu, Ruth Pagell

Oral History Collection

The interview covered: first involvement with SMU, new library, city campus, role and responsibilities, academic librarians, research support, digital library, PYXIS, changing role of librarians, challenges.

Biography:

Founding University Librarian, SMU, 2005–2011

Ruth A. Pagell served as SMU’s first University Librarian from June 2005 until February 2011. During her time at SMU she led the effort to create a 21st century academic library recognised for enabling university research and teaching. She oversaw the implementation of the digital library (PYXIS) and the institutional repository (InK), and the development of the oral history site. After leaving SMU in February 2011, she moved …

Oral History Interview With Arnoud De Meyer: Conceptualising Smu, Arnoud De Meyer

Oral History Collection

The interview covered: first involvement with Singapore, tertiary education in Singapore, business schools, role of university, city campus.

Biography:

President, SMU, 2010–present

Professor De Meyer became the fourth president of SMU in September 2010. A leader and well-known scholar in management studies, his research interests include manufacturing and technology strategy, management of R&D and innovation, management under conditions of high uncertainty and for novel projects, management and innovation in Asia, the globalisation of Asian firms, and e-readiness in Europe. He publishes widely in academic journals and books.

For twenty three years, Professor De Meyer was associated with INSEAD where he …

Book Review: Fractured Rebellion, Amy O'Keefe

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Walder creates an orderly account of the events, discussions, and political currents that comprised the student movement in Beijing during the first two years of China’s Cultural Revolution. With meticulous attention to sequencing, he comprehends and brings meaning to a whirlwind of events often described as a vindictive political free-for-all, but which he shows, instead, to have been a structured series of rivalries.

Passport To The World: Chinese Students At The University Of Kentucky, Denise Ho, Jared Flanery

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

My Thursday afternoon flight from Shanghai to Chicago exhibited a curious phenomenon. United Airlines Flight 836, which went from China to Midwestern America on August 19, 2010, had the most homogenous set of passengers I had ever seen. They were all in their late teens and early twenties, Chinese youth dressed in the trendiest fashions and carrying the latest electronics. I was so impressed that I broke my rule about photographing people, popped up in my seat in the corner of economy class, and took their picture.

Whether United knew it or not, my flight was a modern school bus, …

Havel, China And Africa, Howard W. French

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I am eager to read Chinese news accounts of the life and death of Vaclav Havel, whose central message might be summed up as the necessity for individuals everywhere to cast off their apathy and assume their rights – and agency – as citizens.

The death of this figure of major importance to the history of the late- and post-Cold War world will inevitably generate talk that is heavily focused on Europe, just as the attention of the Western media and foreign ministries tended to stay almost exclusively bracketed on this region (with China, for a time, serving as a …

Liminal City, Rian Dundon

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

He says he’s lost his city and his society. We drive past a group of demonstrators protesting land seizures. He points out the scene and the gaggle of police cruisers nearby and grins in English “this is Chi-na”, emphasizing the play-on-words between “Chi” and “Chai” (chai, or 拆 being Chinese for “dismantle” or “demolish”). He sees the city’s recent prosperity through a filter of isolation, exclusion, and greed. Tells me how the doors are all closed. How peoples’ sense of self worth is determined by the number of contacts in their cell phones. How they are drifting further …

Review: Consent Of The Networked, Anne Henochowicz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The last two years have seen much talk about the explosion of social media as a tool of real change, most notably during the Arab Spring. Tunisia’s and Egypt’s revolutions were powered by Twitter and Facebook. Though these sites are blocked in China, Sina’s microblogging platform Weibo has also changed the political game in that country, forcing government accountability after last summer’s high-speed train crash in Wenzhou and contributing to the very public downfall of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai. Weibo’s power may also lead to its demise. After rumors of a coup attempt spread recently, the comment function …

Obama, The Dalai Lama, And Us-China Relations: The Current State Of Affairs

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In early 2010, when President Obama met with the Dalai Lama, this made a considerable splash both in the news media and in diplomatic circles, and there have been various repercussions from Beijing’s side when other foreign leaders have met with the Tibetan figure. Obama’s July 16 meeting with the Dalai Lama in Washington, DC led to a furious reaction within hours from Beijing, perhaps even stronger than in the past. So we decided to ask Robbie Barnett, the Director of Columbia University’s Modern Tibetan Studies Program, the author of works such as Lhasa: Streets with Memories, and a long-time …

China’S Empty Apartments, Michael Gsovski

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There are serious problems in the Chinese housing market. While the average urban resident has to deal with constant rent hikes and the threat of eviction in the face of new construction, the rich buy extra apartments to shield their wealth against inflation. Not only is this an economic threat, but in China it is a particular threat to stability as well. Firstly, since the turbulent boom years of the China’s opening and reform period, owning housing has been seen as a useful hedge for ordinary people against an otherwise uncertain economic situation. Secondly, owning—rather than renting—an apartment or other …

Your Discourse Or Mine?, Silvia Lindtner

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

As scholars we speak frequently in public and are confronted with various interpretations of our work by others who at times do not share our own viewpoints. Though this often brings with it excitement at the opportunity to form bridges between academic and other discourses, reaching audiences beyond our own disciplines and engaging a wider public still remains a challenge for many of us. We look at these conversations as opportunities for further debate, for mutual learning, and for being introduced to different perspectives on our work. At times, how one’s work finds resonance elsewhere surprises, illuminating the scholar’s responsibility …

Excerpt: The Tree That Bleeds: A Uighur Town On The Edge, Nick Holdstock

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Nick Holdstock, who readers might remember from a piece on the 2009 riots in Xinjiang he posted here last month, has a new book coming out later this week from Luath Press. In The Tree That Bleeds: A Uighur Town on the Edge, Holdstock recounts the story of his year teaching English in Yining, a border town that in 1997 saw an outbreak of violence, and his efforts to discover the truth about what happened there. Here, in two excerpts from the book’s introduction, Holdstock explains what brought him to Yining and describes his journey to and first encounters with …

Reading Round-Up: Reactions To The Wenzhou Train Crash, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There has been a huge amount of reporting on the July 23 train accident in Wenzhou that killed at least 39 and incited a continuing outcry among Chinese journalists and internet users, as well as government efforts to silence such criticism. Here, a collection of links connected to the rail crash and its aftermath.

Book Review: A Critical Introduction To Mao, Brian J. Demare

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

At the outset of the final chapter of A Critical Introduction to Mao, Jiang Yihua, a senior Chinese scholar, suggests that it will still be many years before historians will be able to draw any definitive conclusions concerning Mao Zedong, revolutionary China’s most imposing figure. This inability to give a final and authoritative interpretation of Mao, Jiang suggests, is due to difficulties of archival access as well as the fact that Mao is still being recreated and reshaped by his ever loyal followers and his equally dedicated detractors. Jiang’s skeptical approach to the problem of knowing Mao, a problem rarely …

A View On Ai Weiwei’S Exit, Geremie R. Barme

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A much shorter version of this essay was originally destined for a leading newspaper outlet. Unfortunately, so much editorial “back-filling” was required to transform it into something more accessible to even a relatively sophisticated readership, I decided that it would be best to pull it. Instead, I offer it here with considerable additional material to readers of China Beat.

Facebook And The People In The Iron House: 非死不可？, James A. Millard

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

“Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others,” Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the [Wall Street] Journal. “We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we’re allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven’t experienced it before,” he said.

China Beat Event: “Nationalism And Religion In Twentieth- Century Asia,” Friday 4/22

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

China Beat readers in Southern California are invited to join us this Friday at UC Irvine for a dialogue between James Carter of Saint Joseph’s University and UCI’s Vinayak Chaturvedi, who will be discussing the topic of “Nationalism and Religion in Twentieth-Century Asia.” Carter’s new book is Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (read an excerpt here); Chaturvedi is author of Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India.

Understanding China, Ron Javers

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Though the lyric was written for and recorded by Nina Simone in 1964, most Americans who remember it at all probably remember best the 1965 cover by Eric Burdon and the Animals, with its twangy guitar riffs and R&B-fired shriek of entreaty.

Ai Weiwei And Qingming, Lionel M. Jensen

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Ai Weiwei (as most readers of this blog will know), perhaps China’s best-known artist and provocateur, is missing. Like so many other people of conscience and voice in the past two years, he is gone. Swallowed by the insatiable fear of the state’s authoritarian belly. It has been more than four days since his apprehension and his wife, Lu Qing, who was also detained and questioned, has not heard from him; he is unreachable by phone.

Mourning The Soviet Union, Nicolai Volland

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Twenty years ago, on 23 August 1991, a grimlooking Boris Yeltsin shoved a sheet of paper in front of Mikhail Gorbachev with the words, “You read this now!” Gorbachev, who had just returned to Moscow after the abortive coup d’état led by KGB generals and hardliners in his own Party, appeared tense and insecure. In front of a stunned international TV audience (original footage here [at 01:25]), he did as he was told. Gorbachev’s decree was the first in a number of documents that led to the ban of the once mighty Communist Party of the Soviet Union.