The article uses the scandal surrounding Jackson Yee, a state-endorsed celebrity and household name in China, as a case study to critically examine how the “government–industry–fan–platform” alliance co-conducts what we call “collaborative celebrity PR” to rescue co-opted stars from scandal. We find that the relationship between the four agents is symbiotic but that the government plays the most important “arbitrator” role. We argue that the state-endorsed celebrities face an inherent dilemma of “power(lessness)” in which they have to dedicate more effort towards propaganda and behave in a moral and exemplary way to please the government to gain more political capital and power and minimize their own precarity. We also highlight the uncertainty and risks using celebrities in its pop propaganda can bring to the CCP: if a state-endorsed celebrity cannot be saved, the scandal can damage the legitimacy and reliability of the Party propaganda.

Between 1975 and 1979 the genocidal regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) in Cambodia targeted minorities including the Cham Muslim population. To hold the regime to account for its crimes against the Cambodian people, the Cambodian government in 2001 formed the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Using transcripts of testimonies and judgements from the ECCC, this article examines Gender-Based Violence (GBV) among the Cham Muslim population. The study shows that Alexander Hinton's arguments to explain GBV using cultural frameworks are insufficient in this case. Indeed, Nicole Rafter has proven it is important to take into account the broader genocidal context to the violence. This article argues that ECCC documentation proves that GBV cannot be explained by cultural contexts alone and instead needs to be understood as a means to destroy the Cham and Cham culture.

This article explores the long roots of swadeshi (economic self-reliance) in nineteenth-century India, focusing on attempts at industrial revival through pedagogical institutions, exhibitions, and associations. These roots, which influenced the Swadeshi Movement and Gandhian swadeshi activity in the early twentieth century, demonstrate how it is impossible to understand swadeshi without taking an extensive global perspective. Indian thinkers engaged in contemporary global economic debates and with British imperial deliberations on free trade and protection; they fine-tuned comparative perspectives on the Indian economy through international travel and their readings of global history. In a similar spirit, Indians forged core swadeshi techniques through observing associational, institutional, and technological innovations across the British empire and the wider world. History was a powerful motivating force. Popular conceptions of deindustrialization under colonial rule fired Indians’ imaginations about a past when the country was a global powerhouse for manufactured exports—and directly stimulated specific swadeshi endeavours. Situated at the confluence of profit-making and patriotism, swadeshi enterprise in the nineteenth century created some unexpected alliances: between Britons and Indians, colonial officials and nationalists, and urban intellectuals and small-town entrepreneurs.

The dominant role of the authoritarian state in Chinese volunteerism has been noted but little examined in the scholarly literature. This study illuminates the ways in which the Chinese state controls and administers volunteerism and volunteering through a detailed analysis of the governance of volunteering in Beijing. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and archival research, we analyse how Beijing administers volunteering and its structures through the work of its administrative authority for managing volunteering in regulation and public policy, management structure, resources, internal operations, monitoring and evaluation. We argue that Beijing has built a comprehensive apparatus to manage and control volunteering through a Party- and state-controlled, multi-layered and centralized management structure. However, this state corporatist structure carries within it the seeds for over-formal controls and conflicts between official, professional service providers and the increasing number of volunteers throughout Chinese society.

This original analysis of the World Values Survey waves of 2007, 2012 and 2018 reveals important relationships among political trust and satisfaction, happiness, views of corruption, local elections and activism from the last half of the Hu Jintao administration through the first five years of Xi Jinping's rule. These data shed new light on the deeper dynamics underlying the high and growing levels of trust in government documented in other studies. Among this report's more novel findings, we find increased trust in government coincides with decreased local electoral participation, suggesting that participation in local elections is not key to perceptions of regime legitimacy. Views of corruption and a sense of personal efficacy through non-institutionalized forms of political participation such as peaceful demonstrations appear more relevant. Thus, constraints on people's ability to engage in peaceful demonstrations are likely to negatively impact views of regime legitimacy. In addition, the report uncovers demographic variations in these dynamics, indicating that regime legitimacy is more precarious among citizens at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy and among younger Chinese. Overall, these findings complicate existing explanations of regime legitimacy centring on economic performance, nationalism, responsiveness/adaptiveness and efforts to combat corruption.

This article identifies and examines Persian-language culinary manuals that were produced in South Asia between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. In doing so, it centres three empirical loci: the definition of food as it was conceptualised during the period under study; the impetus for the textualisation and standardisation of culinary knowledge; and core principles that undergird the cuisine of the Mughal elite. Engaging with these themes, the article privileges the intersection between the discourses on body, food, and ethical self-fashioning as the key site of analysis.

This article examines the translation of foreign films in cosmopolitan Shanghai from 1896 to 1949. Silent films were introduced to China at the end of the nineteenth century, and live narration was provided to allow Chinese audiences to better understand Western shadow plays. With an increasing number of foreign films exhibited in Shanghai theatres, distributors and exhibitors made printed film plot sheets and experimented with the use of subtitles. With the arrival of sound cinema, experiments with techniques such as simultaneous interpretation, voiceover, and dubbing were also conducted. At this time, Shanghai was a semi-colonial city, where the languages spoken included the Shanghai dialect, Cantonese, standard Mandarin, and English, among others, and where the written Chinese language was transitioning from classical Chinese to vernacular Chinese. Film translation is perceived as a space where the mediation between the foreign and the local is materialized. Using materials such as official regulations, newspapers, memoirs, and archives, this article examines various modes of foreign film translation in Republican Shanghai to demonstrate the ways in which the vibrant translation activities of early cinema mediated between languages and cultures, connected local audiences with the foreign, and constructed a cosmopolitan cultural scene.

This article investigates the developments of hawker discourse and movements across the Malay(si)an peninsula in the first decade of independence. Looking at news coverage and municipal records, it examines the contingent, gendered, and egalitarian qualities of hawking as labour which led to its adoption by people experiencing hardship, and influenced the ways in which municipal authorities and the public discussed hawkers. In effect, hawkers, long significant to the historical and cultural systems of Malayan trade, were recharacterized as vulnerable subjects at the urban margins. The article then explores how local administrations understood and regulated hawkers through categories of location, race, and food, shaping the politics and governance of hawkers in public spaces. To engage with such governance, hawkers formed associations that protested against injustice and established dialogue with municipal and town councils, impelling authorities to consider a more significant inclusion of hawking in street planning. Throughout the period, the potential and limits of hawker inclusion in post-colonial public spaces became subject to significant debate between municipal authorities, political representatives, and hawkers. As local administrations eventually deepened their commitment to support hawkers, they also expanded their regulation, signifying a cautious imperative to legitimate hawkers and influencing the logic of post-independence planned spaces.

This article describes how Taiwanese farmers adopted irrigation pumps to enhance their livelihoods under the shifting relationship of sugar and rice production in late colonial Taiwan. I argue that farmers utilized commercial technologies to make a living and prosper within the established order of Japanese colonial rule. With allocated procurement districts granting exclusive purchasing rights over sugarcane, sugar companies maintained substantial influence over sugarcane cultivation. However, with the proliferation of Penglai rice and new agricultural implements, the situation of the farmers changed substantially. Serious problems in the sugar industry due to economic depression and the rising price of rice in the 1930s led farmers to shift from sugarcane to rice cultivation by introducing a variety of pumps. Those with the means installed new motor pumps, while others independently constructed wind pumps by combining newly introduced parts with older techniques. Despite a prohibition by the colonial government, farmers continued installing pumps until the government established a planned economy in preparation for war. Moreover, distribution of pump capacity through both sales and sharing shows that Taiwanese farmers sought to maintain an informal yet significant cohesion throughout the process of agricultural commercialization. By focusing on the social dynamics surrounding agricultural technologies, this article challenges simplistic portrayals of technology transfer from Japan to the colonies.

After the Second World War, the US government established a new oil order, forming close ties with three major oil companies—Standard Vacuum, Shell, and California-Texas—referred to as the ‘Three Sisters’ in Korea, which was newly liberated from Japanese colonialism. Even after the South Korean government was established, the US government and the Three Sisters worked to maintain the order. Using the carrot of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) funds, in 1949 the US government pressured the South Korean government into oil agreements that would facilitate the supply of petroleum products to the country. The 1949 oil agreements were completed after three rounds of negotiations. The process of signing the agreements was not limited to the import, storage, and sale of petroleum products in exchange for US aid to South Korea. It also sought to respond to the various interests of Koreans who wanted to create an independent economic structure in the midst of establishing a new government. This article explores the three rounds of negotiations for the 1949 oil agreements whereby the symbiotic relationship between the US government and the Three Sisters was realized in partnership with the interests of the South Korean government. Furthermore, it seeks to broaden the research on the history of Korean oil by promoting an understanding of how US oil policy affected Korea immediately after its liberation from Japanese colonial rule.