Asian Studies Commons^™

Uighurs In Xinjiang: A General Assessment Of The Roots Of Unrest, Vladislav Shchukin

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Chinese governmental repression in Xinjiang against the Uighur minzu, or ethnic group, constitutes a significant infringement on human rights. The atmosphere of repression in Xinjiang is perhaps unmatched even by that of Tibet, and it is virtually the only region in China where execution of political prisoners is still common. Uighurs are subject to severe censorship, arbitrary arrest and the denial of due process, torture and inhumane treatment, and punishment disproportionate to their crimes.

The Preservation Of Lik-Luong Poetic Literature Among The Shan Communities Of Northern Thailand, Jotika Khur-Yearn, Kate Crosby

Asian Review

Shan Buddhists use a form of poetic performance to make Buddhist teachings interesting. These texts are read in the context of temple activity on holy days. They are read by specialists, called tsale, who have years of training in the specific ways of reciting this poetry, for the rhyming systems are very complex and the texts are usually written in the old style of writing that does not indicate tone. A normal Shan speaker cannot read these texts. Even listening to them is a skill acquired over time. The traditional homeland of the Shan straddles the modern boundaries of Burma, …

Thai Yai, Shan, And Tai Long: Political Identity Across State Boundaries, Nicola Tannenbaum

Asian Review

No abstract provided.

Notes For Contributors

Asian Review

No abstract provided.

Multifactor Productivity And Idea Transmission Channels In The Malaysian Economy, Ester Shen Ai Chan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper examines the contribution of multifactor productivity (MFP) growth to output per worker growth in Malaysia from 1961-2000. MFP growth is found to contribute about 74 percent to output per worker growth from 1987-2000, but has only minimal or negative contribution to growth in the earlier years. This paper then attempts to explain why MFP growth has such a large contribution to output per worker growth in the period 1987-2000 by looking at international trade as channel of technology or idea transfer from the G5 countries into Malaysia. MFP grows because ideas from these advanced nations are transferred into …

Validation Of Inverse Seasonal Peak Mortality In Medieval Plagues, Including The Black Death, In Comparison To Modern Yersinia Pestis-Variant Diseases, Mark R. Welford, Brian H. Bossak

Earth, Environment & Sustainability: Faculty Publications

Background: Recent studies have noted myriad qualitative and quantitative inconsistencies between the medieval Black Death (and subsequent ‘‘plagues’’) and modern empirical Y. pestis plague data, most of which is derived from the Indian and Chinese plague outbreaks of A.D. 1900615 years. Previous works have noted apparent differences in seasonal mortality peaks during Black Death outbreaks versus peaks of bubonic and pneumonic plagues attributed to Y. pestis infection, but have not provided spatiotemporal statistical support. Our objective here was to validate individual observations of this seasonal discrepancy in peak mortality between historical epidemics and modern empirical data.

Methodology/Principal Findings: …

Im/Possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, And Affinal Solidarity In Modern South Asia, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila,South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the “modern” selves envisioned within them are …

Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, And Defecating Men: The Power Of Storytelling In Maithil Women’S Tales, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

What can we learn about the way that folk storytelling operates for tellers and audience members by examining the telling of stories by characters within such narratives? I examine Maithil women’s folktales in which stories of women’s suffering at the hands of other women are first suppressed and later overheard by men who have the power to alleviate such suffering. Maithil women are pitted against one another in their pursuit of security and resources in the context of patrilineal formations. The solidarities such women nonetheless form—in part through sharing stories and keeping each other’s secrets—serve to mitigate their suffering and …

Organizational Justice And Fairness In China: An Inductive Analysis Of The Meaning And Dimensions, Chun (Grace) Guo, Jane K. Giacobbe-Miller

WCBT Faculty Publications

Taking an inductive approach, we examined the meaning and dimensionality of the organizational justice construct in the People's Republic of China. By triangulating qualitative data from in-depth interviews and structured open-ended surveys, we found that organizational justice and organizational fairness were perceived as distinct constructs in a Chinese context.

The Orphan As Mirror: Postmodern Alienation And Societal Crisis In Japanese Film, Leann Wolley

Global Tides

This paper discusses the cultural significance of orphans in the post-modern media, using as a case study two Japanese films: Grave of the Fireflies and Nobody Knows. Through comparing the films and examining their approach to the orphan storytelling this paper attempts to gain insight into post-modern Japanese attitudes about social issues. By analyzing the appeal of the films to Japanese and international audiences, it also attempts to explain their popularity by drawing parallels between the main characters of each motion picture and the average postmodern citizen.

Pals For Pals: The U.S. And Pakistan, Anna Mcdermott

Global Tides

Of all the nuclear arsenals in the world, Pakistan’s faces the most risk. With over forty terrorist organizations active within the country, frequent power fluxes between the military, government and intelligence agencies, and a history of security breaches plaguing its nuclear program, Pakistan makes North Korea seem secure and stable. With all the challenges that face the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, it still lacks one basic security technology, Permissive Action Links (PALs), which are use control devices that make it virtually impossible for any unauthorized person to detonate a nuclear weapon. Over the years, there have been barriers that …

A Palestinian State, Jennifer A. Hileman-Tabios

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Should an independent, sovereign state of Palestine have the right to exist? The establishment of an independent Palestinian state is important because it could possibly end an extended period of violence with Israel, where civilian casualties have been high, and it could help to solidify a foundation of political tolerance and acceptance in the Middle East. Under the proposed two-state solution, an independent Palestinian state is possible. However, to determine if a Palestinian state is viable, it will be necessary to examine internal political struggles, economic resources, systems of communication, political systems and internal and external political policies. This qualitative …

Loss, Gain, Survival: Women In Bangladesh, Caitlin Harrison

Theses : Honours

This dissertation explores the changing public and private paradigms of Bangladeshi women in a modernising society, and investigates the aspects of modernisation that are driving such change. It argues that there is a rising level of violence against women, as traditional patriarchal paradigms meet modernisation and the Western hegemony. While modernisation has been instrumental in encouraging the integration of women into the public sphere, the Western assumption that modernisation will increase women's empowerment in an incremental manner ignores the new issues and tensions that modernisation creates. ·In both the public and private spheres, women's empowerment in Bangladesh is a constant …

The Journey Of An Image: The Western Perception Of Tibet, Diana Martinez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This paper is about how Western travelers perceived Tibetans from 1900 until 1950. It explores the travelogues of Westerners from various national and professional backgrounds to examine how their view of Tibetans had changed.

The International Law Of Outer Space And Consequences At The National Level For India: Towards An Indian National Space Law?, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

The discussion on a forum on the famous web-based LinkedIn networking site has already taken off: should India, as party to the four most important international space treaties, also develop a national space law, as other states increasingly are doing? That India is currently one of the leading spacefaring nations in the world is beyond discussion. In itself, however, that does not necessarily necessitate going through the trouble of drafting and implementing a national space law.

This article, however, argues that indeed, following the examples of a growing number of spacefaring states around the world discussed in some detail as …

Has The Introduction Of Bookbuilding Increased The Efficiency Of China's Ipo Pricing?, Jiehui Fei

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Book-building is commonly adopted in global primary markets and regarded as the most efficient pricing method for accurate IPO pricing by literatures. China has introduced book-building in 2005 to increase IPO pricing accuracy and the capabilities of domestic institutional investors. However, with the current IPO data from China, I find the level of under-pricing has unexpectedly increased after book-building, which is against the empirical studies of a few domestic papers. Secondly, there's some evidence that with better information disclosure from issuer-side through book-building process, the signaling and ex-ante uncertainty effect that previously caused under-pricing has been reduced. But there're unique …

Multivariate Garch Models For The Greater China Stock Markets, Xiaojun Song

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper reviews the commonly used multivariate GARCH models and uses the daily data of the four Greater China region stock markets, namely Hongkong, Shanghai,Shenzhen, and Singapore, and data of Japan as one ex-ogenous variable to investigate the volatility and shocks spillover behavior and to establish the market linkage among the four markets. We find that the volatility spillover between Shanghai and Shenzhen is obvious and correlation contagion is detected. Conditional variance and conditional correlations are time varying and dynamic which conforms to the arguments in most of the literature. Shanghai and Shenzhen present a very high correlation level during …

The Effects Of Patent Characteristics As Signals On The Growth Of Follow-On Innovations: Evidence From Chinese Patenting Activities In U.S, Wenxin Guo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

As global trade and business activities intensified, cross-national patenting activities have been playing an increasingly important role in the process of innovation accumulation and growth. However, few studies (to my knowledge) have examined the characteristics of cross-national patents and their relationship to the accumulation and growth of innovation, especially in the context of a developing versus a developed country.
Motivated by the anecdotal evidence and `Patent Signaling Theory'(Spence, 1973), I investigate the possible influential factors on the `quality' of a US patent with a Chinese priority (thereafter `US-CN' patent) and their impact on the growth of follow-on innovation. By developing …

Alexander In The Himalayas: Competing Imperial Legacies In Medieval Islamic History And Literature, Anna Akasoy

Publications and Research

In 1888, Rudyard Kipling published a collection of stories in a volume with the title The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales. The collection includes the short story The Man Who Would be King, in which Kipling's alter ego, a British journalist in India, makes the acquaintance of a pair of adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, who demand his help as a fellow Mason. The two shady characters have set out to take advantage of divisions among the natives and are determined to install themselves as kings in Kafiristan, a remote region inhabited by pagans in the north of the …

Russia And The Cis In 2008 : Axis Of Authoritarianism?, Charles E. Ziegler

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Russia’s seamless presidential succession produced no major changes in domestic politics or foreign policy. Ties with Asia remained strong, though several key relationships—with China, Japan, and the Central Asian states—frayed under the impact of Russia’s military action in Georgia. Impressive economic performance in the first half of the year boosted Russian confidence as a great power, but its vulnerability to the global financial crisis together with the heavy-handed operation in the Caucasus undermined Moscow’s standing with both Asia and Europe by the end of the year.

Introduction, Montira Rato

Asian Review

No abstract provided.

The Sao Hpa Administration Of Baan/Mong In Mong Tai Or The Shan States, Sao Noan Oo

Asian Review

This paper traces the history of administration in the Shan States from ancient times to 1962. The Tais are descendents of an ancient race that existed thousands of years ago in China. During the early turbulent periods in China the Tais migrated into several parts of Southeast Asia, settling along the river valleys to cultivate wet rice for their livelihood. They also brought with them their sociopolitical organization of baan/mong with the Sao Hpas as their leader. In 1886 the Shan States were annexed by Britain but were autonomous. In 1922, they became the Federated Shan States, with established law, …

Negotiating Cooperation: Shan Politics And Burma, 1946-1962, Samara Yatunghwe

Asian Review

This article examines what is required for ethnic unity in Burma/Myanmar by examining the early stages of independence in Burma through the lens of Shan political negotiation. This is to provide insight into what the Shan sought to achieve and why they insisted on constitutional reform in the early 1960s. Juxtaposing the attitudes of the ethnic leadership, prominent Burman politicians and military strongmen of that period can lead to concrete conclusions about how certain points of view encourage debate and cooperation, while other stifle it and result in fragmentation.

Shan Printing And Publication In Thailand, Paphatsaun Thianpanya

Asian Review

This paper is a survey and preliminary analysis of Shan printing and publication in Thailand. The survey was conducted in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Chiang Rai where there are active Shan communities. The Shan publications found include eight magazines and several books classified as textbook, dictionary, religious literature, traditional knowledge, history, manual, and report. The problems of Shan printing and publication are: many writing systems; no standard character set; no standard vocabulary; lack of literary language skill; limited promotion and support for book printing; limited distribution; and limited educational content.

Shan Royal Ladies' Roles In Life Narratives, Jiraporn Achariyaprasit

Asian Review

This article analyzes the roles of Shan royal ladies in private and public spheres in three life narratives: Twilight over Burma: My Life as a Princess by Inge Sargent (1994); The White Umbrella by Patricia Elliott (1999); and My Vanished World: The True Story of Shan Princess by Nel Adams (2000). Shan royal ladies were actively involved in both private and public spheres. They were creative in catering. They had opportunities to become family leaders, and to help compromise conflicts. Moreover, they took part in political issues. The public and private spheres were related, as private matters or roles in …

Contributors

Asian Review

No abstract provided.

Tahira Khan On Wives, Widows, Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal In Colonial India By Mytheli Sreenivas. Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press, 2008. 169pp., Tahira Khan

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Wives, Widows, Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India by Mytheli Sreenivas. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. 169pp.

Peace From Below: Recent Steps Taken Along The Track-Two Diplomacy Path, Michael Thomas Kuchinsky

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Peacemakers in Action: Profiles of Religion in Conflict Resolution. Edited by David Little. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

and

Peace Out of Reach: Middle Eastern Travels and the Search for Reconciliation. By Stephen Eric Bronner. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

The One-Child Policy, Gay Rights, And Social Reorganization In China, Kody Gerkin

Human Rights & Human Welfare

China’s youth are becoming adults in an unprecedented era. The Chinese have achieved rapid, sustained economic growth under a Communist government that has simultaneously been initiating a wide range of social planning initiatives.

Education For All Children, Sharon Harrall

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The UN Declaration of Human Rights, ratified in 1948, declared for the first time the right to education as a human right. Article 26 (1) states that “everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory.” Since then, the right to education has been reaffirmed in subsequent treaties and global conferences. These treaties have also highlighted the need to provide education to all children without discrimination, and particularly to ensure equal access for girls. Historically, we have seen great gender disparities in the enrollment rates of …