This edited volume by Leo Suryadinata continues his leadership in producing scholarship on China-Southeast Asia relations and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia.As a sequel to the edited volume Rising China and Chinese New Migrants in Southeast Asia (Suryadinata and Loh 2022), this book builds on the research of a network of scholars in Southeast Asia on China Southeast Asia relations but goes one step further to focuses specifically on China's recent rise of soft power in education, language, and art in Southeast Asia.With contributors mostly hailing from Southeast Asia, this book comprehensively examines the recent intensification of educa tional engagements between China and Southeast Asia and their broader implications on Chinese soft power.In this book review, I will first provide a general summary of each chapter of the book and then I will provide more detailed review on a couple of select chapters that I personally find very interesting and worth pursuing further analysis on.Finally, I will offer a reflection on how this edited volume informs us about China's increased soft power through education in Southeast Asia.The book is divided into four parts.The first part provides a general overview, focusing on China's historical and contemporary relations with the overseas Chinese community in the region and their implications for understanding how renewed education engagement between China and Southeast Asia means for the former's soft power in the latter.Building on this foun dation, the second part examines China's soft power through education in Mainland Southeast Asia, while the third part continues this theme, shifting the focus to Maritime Southeast Asia.Finally, the fourth part delves into the role of popular culture in advancing China's soft power, rounding out an interesting collage of perspectives on its impact in Southeast Asia.The first three chapters collectively examine China's history of engagement with the over seas Chinese community in Southeast Asia, through various institutional, educational, and cul

By the time Singapore celebrated 25 years of nation building in 1984, the city-state was being praised for its “good governance” and economic achievements. However, what has constantly been overlooked is that these achievements were the result of a compliant civil service. After the People’s Action Party (PAP) was elected to office in 1959, it cracked down on its leftist political opponents and the press, while introducing “attitudinal reform” of the civil service. Civil servants learned very quickly that they were not supposed to question the wisdom of the ruling party. While Singapore today continues to highlight the Westminster system of government as a positive legacy of British colonialism, the reality is that the civil service is no longer politically neutral. This article explains how the PAP government worked to dominate the civil service in the 1960s before using it to serve its own political interests by the 1980s.

Holy Things: The Genealogy of the Sacred in Thai Religion is an ambitious composite of inter secting analyses.Nathan McGovern critiques the notion of syncretism in Thai religious studies, presents a history of rituals seeking boons from sing saksit or "holy things," and locates Thai religious discourses in a deep history of developments across India and Europe.A central argu ment across these themes is that key concepts in Thai Buddhism and spirit rituals changed dra matically with the impact of Western discourses of religion, rationality, and science.The starting point of McGovern's explorations is the question of how Thai Buddha images came to be regarded as sing saksit alongside Brahmanical and other deities deemed capable of granting boons.McGovern observes that while most Thais view sing saksit as a unified cate gory, scholars have often seen the worship of magical spiritual personalities as a syncretic mix of traditions.In contrast, the author contends that the worship of deities and Buddha images to obtain boons for worldly objectives is not a syncretic accretion but rather emerges from the his tory of Buddhism itself.Holy Things is the first extended study of sing saksit as a central element of Thai magical knowledge, or saiyasat, and McGovern examines the discourses surrounding the seeking of boons and the rituals to honor deities when boons are granted.While showing that ideas of syn cretism as the supposed pollution of an original pure Buddhism are fundamentally misguided, the author states that Thai religion nonetheless presents situations "for which syncretism is a seductively attractive explanation" (p.8).In addressing this paradox, he takes readers on an odyssey through the religious histories of Europe, India, and China as well as an exegesis of early Thai texts relating to religious belief and ritual.Developing from studies of scripture-based traditions-Christianity, Judaism, and Islamreligious studies has had difficulty developing concepts for religions based more on ritual than

Ford's research into multi-party democracy and anticommunist activities in the Kingdom of Laos

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is often considered the main driver of the declining number of increasingly rare animals (including tigers, rhinos and pangolins), although there is little biomedical evidence supporting the usage of animal products from these species. What, then, are the underlying cultural and ontological factors driving demand for them? Based on published sources on Chinese (Han) and Vietnamese (Kinh) tiger lore and culture as well as anthropological fieldwork among the Katu and related Katuic-speaking groups, this paper analyzes how the tiger has been viewed over time in Vietnam and China, two core demand areas for animal-based traditional medicines, and compares “high-culture” and rural perceptions in the Sino-Vietnamese region. Tentatively, the paper reveals a transition from a view of the tiger as a divinity or powerful spirit towards a more material and instrumental (magical) perception in more recent iterations of the TCM complex. Heuristically using Descola’s typology of ontologies, the paper attempts a holistic analysis of this perceptional and conceptual transformation, interpreting it as a movement along an animism-analogism continuum.

The advent of World War II in 1940 and the occupation of the Indies by the Japanese military for almost three and a half years were great shocks to residents of the Indies and brought about innumerable changes. However, the commonly reproduced cartoonish image of a nation uniformly suffering under the yoke of arbitrary Japanese military overlords from 1942 to 1945 was not particularly apt. The beloved Indonesian pasar malam festival is assumed to have vanished during the wartime years, as has been explicitly claimed in the case of the Pasar Malam Gambir. In fact, while somewhat unstable during the wartime years, the institution of the pasar malam never really disappeared, and 1943 could even be described as the “Year of the Festival” due to the relatively high visibility of pasar malam around Indonesia. Examinations of newspaper articles and published programs help to show how these festivals continued to be socially, economically, and even administratively important in somewhat new ways, foreshadowing postwar changes.

“Asian solidarity movement” has been a catchphrase for the international activities of Korean civil society for three decades. The activism of Korean civil society started to become tangible in the early 1990s, mainly because of Korea’s democratization and globalization. This article begins by describing the origin, growth, and diversification of this solidarity movement. It then emphasizes recent changes that can be observed in two key areas, namely, issues and participation. Unlike in earlier phases of the movement, when activists focused mainly on issues directly relevant to Korea, today’s activism is more concerned with universal values. It also attracts citizens beyond activists and intellectuals.