This article analyses multiple visions and perspectives offered by Chinese-speaking Muslim intellectuals during the Republican era (1912–1949) concerning their status as a Muslim community by looking into their debates on the modernization and secularization of the Turkish Republic under the Kemalist regime. The transformation of the multi-ethnic and religious Qing empire into a Republican Chinese nation-state presented new challenges to the ruling elite, intellectuals, and minority communities. This article explores how Chinese Muslims navigated the complex intellectual landscape as alternative visions and ideologies concerning nation-building, ethnic autonomy, religion, and modernity emerged in China. The article focuses on how Han Chinese intellectuals, the Kuomintang (KMT) elite, and Chinese Muslims selectively interpreted Turkish modernization in different ways to promote their socio-political cause. It analyses the overlaps and the complex, nuanced differences between Chinese Muslim interpretations of Turkey as a success story of the awakened modern Muslim and the KMT ruling elites’ view of Turkey in the 1930s as a model of developmental authoritarianism, highlighting Turkey’s success in establishing a homogenous nation-state that superseded religion with a sanctified state ideology. The article thus demonstrates how Chinese Muslim intellectuals responded to the KMT state’s increasingly authoritarian rule in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion and the subsequent era of the Civil War when the Chinese Communist Party emerged as a powerful alternative to KMT rule and ideology.

This article examines the paradoxical impact of emerging communication technologies on social cohesion by investigating the struggle to standardize Ramadan observance among Chinese Hui Muslim communities in the early twentieth century. Reform-minded Hui intellectuals hoped that modern media, such as print periodicals and the telegraph, would disseminate moon-sighting news and unify the diverse temporal practices of Hui Muslims across China, thereby forging a modern, unified Hui identity. However, this article argues that these technologies did not lead to seamless temporal homogenization. Instead, they amplified local divisions and precipitated a crisis of authority by forcing Hui communities to confront a new and divisive question: who and what to trust in a new information landscape? Drawing on case studies of disputes in Guangzhou, Xi’an, Beijing, and Chengdu between 1931 and 1934, the article demonstrates that Hui Muslims’ trust was not monolithic but fragmented along lines of faith in the communication technology, the messenger, and the information itself, which in turn prevented the implementation of a standard Ramadan temporality. By centring the analysis on the social dynamics of trust, this article contributes to the history of technology and media studies, revealing that the adoption of technology is fundamentally a process of building, challenging, and negotiating authority through the fragile and fragmented medium of trust.

The Korean Peninsula is often neglected in investigations on Islam in East Asia. The region already occupies the conceptual peripheries of studies on Muslim societies. During the two decades after the Korean War (1950–1953), however, Seoul hosted a small yet active community of Korean Muslim converts and visitors from places such as Malaysia/Singapore, Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The early Korean Muslim leaders, some of whom first encountered Islam in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, attempted to plug themselves into transnational Islamic networks and politics in the transformed context of the Cold War. Internally, Korean Muslim leaders advocated for the utility of Islam as a diplomatic resource for the South Korean government in the struggle against communism, thereby reformulating pre-war articulations of Islam policy that had circulated across China and Japan, as well as narratives on unified Islamic civilization with an inherent cultural essence. Externally, they forged educational and philanthropic networks by connecting with Muslim diasporic figures in the East and Southeast Asian sphere, such as Ibrahim Omar al-Saqqāf, the Hadrami Arab consul of the Saudi consulate in Singapore and an agent of the World Muslim League in Mecca. By situating the emergent Korean Muslim community in Seoul within a regional and trans-regional religio-political nexus, this article repositions it as having formed through encounters with modern state(s) and power, and through interactions with Muslim diasporic agents who (re-)directed post-war mobility channels.

According to Islamic geographical texts, the route that passed along the southern bank of the Gamasiab River on the current Bisotun–Sahneh plain, connecting Kermanshah (Qarmisin) and Bisotun (Behistun) to Madharan, Kangavar (Qasr al-Lusus), and Nahavand, was very significant during the early Islamic centuries. However, based on archaeological evidence, it seems that a major part of this importance was attributed to the construction projects of the Sassanids, especially the later kings of the Sassanian Dynasty, such as Khosrow II, who focused on developing the current Kermanshah province, especially the Kermanshah–Bisotun region, and built extensive constructions including communication roads, bridges, palaces, and magnificent mansions along the southern bank of the Gamasiab River. The present research specifically and comprehensively investigates, for the first time, the southern route of the Gamasiab River in the southern part of the Bisotun–Sahneh plain and localises seven historical toponyms along this route. This research is mainly based on the analysis of Islamic geographical texts, especially those from the ninth and tenth centuries. Additionally, archaeological evidence such as the remains of old bridges, buildings, and sites, as well as the topographical and geographical features of the region, have been taken into consideration.

East Asia is rarely identified as a distinctly Muslim space. This article sheds light on the hitherto neglected history of modern East Asia as a site of Muslim activity and encounters. Mobile Muslims, who travelled and migrated to the East Asian space in the course of imperial globalization, often suffered discrimination as colonized subjects, but in other instances benefitted from imperial privileges and protection. The Tatars of Harbin, who came to Manchuria as Russian subjects, are emblematic, but understudied, actors in this regard. The city of Harbin, administered by the Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway, emerged in the late nineteenth century as a rapidly growing transport hub and colonial settlement in Manchuria. Similar to colonial port cities, Harbin simultaneously exhibited characteristics of both the metropolis and the multi-ethnic and multi-religious composition of the empire. This situation created many opportunities for Tatars to seek their fortunes, especially in trade. Zooming in on the Harbin Tatars, this article discusses, first, the place of Tatar Muslims and their institutions in Harbin’s colonial society; second, the intertwining of notions of (economic) competition in the colonial space with ideas of progress and decline; and third, the potential for Muslim encounters across colonial boundaries. Taking into account the Muslim side of modern East Asian history is not only an essential part of understanding the development of global connections, it also helps us to rethink the dichotomy between colonizer and colonized, and focus our attention on the ambitions of Muslim actors in shaping their futures across the colonial space.

This article explores the global imagining of China as a site of Islamization at the turn of the twentieth century. While previous scholarship examined this fantasy-making among European Orientalists and Christian missionaries, we put the writings of the latter in dialogue with other (Arabic and Ottoman Turkish) discursive nodes and networks in the Middle East, as well as those of Chinese Muslims, highlighting the production and co-constitution of this narrative on a global scale. We argue that by the late nineteenth century the birth and spread of this narrative was tied to the growing acceptance of a particular conception of religion as a classificatory framework wherein ‘world religions’, as bywords for separate civilizations, were locked in intense Darwinian competition with one another. Entangled with narrational processes like the invention of global religions and the construction of the Muslim world, the vision of an Islamized China became a fertile (and long-lived) battleground for a wide range of imperial anxieties, anti-colonial aspirations, and minority counterclaims, many of which we explore in this article.

Our Forum envisions East Asia as part of Islamic Asia, treating it as a space where Muslim communities have forged cross-border networks across time, episodically, and where discourses about Islam have circulated and been appropriated in interconnection with Muslim-majority regions of the continent (that is, ‘Islamic’ Asia). We hold that Islam, as a constellation of religious, political, cultural, and social formations, questions the spatial and conceptual boundaries of East Asia, while East Asia expands the known geographies of Islamic Asia. The articles in this Forum show that Islam was a shared paradigm of meaning-making across inter-Asian geographies, and offered alternative modes and axes of spatial production and political idioms that both Muslims and non-Muslims latched onto across Asia, including its easternmost reaches.

Drawing on archival sources from Albania, China, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, this article places the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s (DRV) response to the Prague Spring in 1968 within an international framework. The available documentation suggests that DRV policymakers repeatedly expressed deep concern about Alexander Dubček’s radical reform programme and, prior to the Warsaw Pact invasion, signalled their support for external intervention. The article moreover contends that Hanoi’s stance reflected broader anxieties about its own national reunification struggle, fears of ideological destabilization, and continued reliance on fraternal assistance.

This article explores the evolving relationship between li (rites) and fa (law) in early China amidst social transformations. It demonstrates that although li and law initially existed in tension following the publication of penal law in the late Spring and Autumn period, they gradually moved towards the process of reconciliation through Shang Yang’s legal reforms in Qin and Xunzi’s theoretical synthesis during the Warring States period. Ultimately, the integration of li into Qin’s legal framework marked the culmination of this process, with li and law collectively structuring the state’s social and familial hierarchies. The article demonstrates that the convergence of li and law was based on their shared nature as impersonal and authoritative rules regulating socio-political life beyond specific circumstances, while their differing scopes and methods of enforcement were gradually harmonised.

Drawing upon archival records from the Republic of China and first-hand memoirs of direct witnesses, this article examines the June 15 and August 10 incidents of 1948 in Thailand,1 highlighting the intricate interplay between anti-communist and anti-Chinese politics. While existing scholarship has largely located these events within Phibun Songkhram’s anti-Chinese educational policies, this article moves beyond conventional narratives by uncovering their deeper political implications. The June 15 Incident primarily targeted overseas Chinese communists, the Qiaodang, substantially undermining its mobilizational and organizational capacities, whereas the August 10 Incident predominantly affected prominent Chinese merchants and Kuomintang-affiliated groups, reflecting broader anti-Chinese objectives. The article argues that anti-communist and anti-Chinese agendas were mutually constitutive, strategically intertwined by the Phibun regime to garner international support from Western powers and consolidate domestic control. By employing flexible diplomacy and deliberate ambiguity, the Thai government adeptly navigated Cold War tensions and internal political pressures, minimizing geopolitical risks while strengthening regime stability. Ultimately, these incidents reveal the profound consequences of instrumentalizing ethnic and ideological tensions, which significantly reshaped diasporic Chinese communities and the trajectory of Thailand’s early communist movement.

Taiwan’s partisan politics have long centered on Cross-Strait relations with Mainland China, yet over the past decade, cultural and moral issues—such as same-sex marriage, the death penalty, and surrogacy—have introduced new axes of division and intensified polarization. This article traces how civic groups and party actors during the same-sex marriage campaign and the Sunflower Movement framed and mobilized moral debates, and it uses two decades of Taiwan Social Change Survey data to show the rise of issue partisanship around civil rights and family values in the mid-2010s. These cultural cleavages persisted through 2020 without displacing Cross-Strait relations as the dominant divide. Taiwan’s case illustrates how cultural polarization can develop within a geopolitically constrained democracy and East Asian context, contributing to comparative debates on culture wars and partisan polarization.

This article reconceptualizes Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (Xi Thought hereafter) not as a coherent doctrine but as a rhizomatic ideological formation. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it treats Xi Thought as a configuration in which coherence is not presupposed but produced through the continual recombining of fragments across institutional sites. Based on an analysis of official publications, including collected works, excerpt volumes and study readers, the article shows how Xi’s speeches are disassembled and reassembled across domains such as law, economy, diplomacy and culture. These recompositions render ideology modular and resilient, allowing elements to be activated, re-weighted or sidelined without destabilizing the system as a whole. The article further argues that ideological coherence is generated through distributed and compulsory participation by Party and state actors, who are required to embed fragments of Xi Thought into institutional practice. Conceptualizing Xi Thought as a rhizome shifts analysis from doctrinal meaning to the operational logic through which ideology acquires administrative force within the Chinese party-state.

This study uncovers hidden disputes in China’s law-making process by systematically tracking bill changes across executive and legislative phases. Utilizing an original dataset of 45 executive-initiated bills (2008–2023), it identifies a consistent pattern of reversions – instances where executive-approved changes to draft bills were overridden in the legislature – revealing the National People’s Congress to be a key policy battleground. Reversions are concentrated in bills concerning health, safety and environment, often involving scope, regulatory frameworks and legal liability. Combined with qualitative case studies, these findings demonstrate the legislature’s crucial role in facilitating monitoring and negotiation in the policy process, offering new insights into executive–legislative dynamics in China’s single-party regime.