In this article, we take the charitable activities of the Shaolin Temple as a case study for our analysis of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) management of religion under Xi Jinping. Our fieldwork and in-depth interviews reveal that the Shaolin Temple has, through its charitable work, assumed the attributes of a “cultural broker” for the CCP. And because the temple has an abundance of symbolic capital and is respected by the public, it presents the CCP with a “dictator’s dilemma.” On the one hand, the CCP allocated resources to the temple’s orphanage so that it could assist the regime with its poverty alleviation efforts; on the other hand, there is a danger that the temple may gain sufficient ideological and discursive power to threaten the CCP’s rule. So, for political security reasons, the Party bureaucracy endeavours to maintain tight control over the orphanage.

A robust literature on the professional advancement of Chinese officials has paid comparatively little attention to an important elite group: the foreign policy bureaucracy. We introduce original data documenting over 11,000 career assignments of 1,357 senior officials in the foreign ministry from 1949 to 2023 and leverage these data to offer the first systematic analysis of who rises to the top of China’s foreign affairs system. We find that diplomats who spend a greater share of their careers in postings abroad are less likely to be promoted to higher ranks than diplomats who remain at home – and that these patterns persisted even after the professionalization of the foreign affairs bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the analysis finds only mixed evidence that diplomatic performance assists promotion. The data and analysis draw attention to the unique challenges of professional advancement in bureaucracies charged with managing China’s foreign relations.

This study explores an emerging yet under-researched group within the Chinese bureaucratic system: grassroots female civil servants. Although there is a growing focus in academia on female officials in China, existing research mainly concentrates on the gender representation and career pathways of high-ranking female officials. This research delves into the work and life choices faced by female civil servants in local governments. Despite official discourse advocating for gender equality, interviews with 21 female public servants from a poverty-stricken county in northern China reveal that the demands of local government work and gender norms impose a double burden on them. Although the civil service is known for its stability, these women often have to put in extra effort into demanding and exhausting jobs, frequently sacrificing promotion opportunities to balance family and caregiving responsibilities. However, they seldom express dissatisfaction with this situation, reflecting the entrenched nature of gender role perceptions. This study provides a new explanation for the underrepresentation of female officials at higher levels from a grassroots perspective and reveals the impact of overloaded bureaucratic work on career mobility.

This brief article explores forms for the verb “melt” in Gyalrongic languages, demonstrating that they are cognates and not Tibetan loanwords. Clarification is made on a phonological rule in Japhug, where w- transforms to m- following a nasal, merging the nasal and w-. The article also suggests that the preinitial m- in Mazur Stau and Geshiza is a fossilized autive prefix, possibly resulting from independent changes or language contact. Additionally, Tangut, Bawang, and Puxi Stosde’s usage of a labial medial -w-/-v- for “melt” is hypothesized as an ancient labial causative infix.

Reading, writing, and literary engagements are often assumed to be solitary practices, but looking at the places where books are sold and discussed, and amateur literature written, reveals the relational side to this creative engagement. This article presents an ethnographic study of haiku composition in Booktown Jimbōchō in Tokyo, Japan, an area known for its literary bookstores, to explore how the social practices of literature unfold. Sketching the social life of a bar in Jimbōchō, I explore collaborative creativity through an ethnographic study of a bi-monthly haiku meeting that takes place in this social space.

This article examines professional diviners employed by the Qing (1636–1912) government to assist in local administration. Known as yin-yang officers, these officials served among the technical and religious specialists embedded in prefectural and county governments across the empire. Although they held marginal or unranked positions within the formal bureaucracy, yin-yang officers played a vital role in both administrative and ritual life at the grassroots level. By tracing their training, sources of authority, and everyday responsibilities, this article sheds light on the Qing’s local technical and religious bureaucracy—an often-overlooked dimension of imperial statecraft that bridged ritual, cosmological knowledge, healing and divination, and official governance. It argues for the importance of examining imperial bureaucracy from below, showing how these unsalaried, low-level figures helped sustain the empire’s overstretched administrative apparatus well into the early twentieth century.

In-person networks based on imperial legacies, immigrants, and general trading companies that share a common language and culture can help expand trade in differentiated goods. However, little is known regarding how such networks can facilitate deals for differentiated goods. To investigate the role played by general trading companies in this context, we study how major trading companies navigated a sensitive transaction—the procurement of distillation facilities for oil shale in Manchuria—in imperial Japan during the first age of globalization. Our archival research revealed that trading companies logistically supported Japanese buyer engineers when they met in person with engineers associated with Western suppliers, and visited plants in the West with the aim of acquiring tacit knowledge beyond the scope of written specifications. The role played by Japanese trading companies in this context involved promoting knowledge spillover from the West by providing logistic support for such in-person meetings.

Although some modern popular songs are deliberately composed for the purpose of commentary or protest, most are produced for commercial reasons. However, such songs may nonetheless be adopted by political, cultural, and social movements, and in these cases, fans’ participatory meaning-making has an important role in the songs’ new purpose. Taking the 1935 Korean ballad ‘Tears of Mokp’o’ as a representative example, this article traces how the melancholy love song acquired successive layers of meaning against the backdrop of changing politico-economic contexts throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on political, popular music, and sports histories, I first examine how ‘Tears of Mokp’o’ became known as an anti-colonial anthem under Japanese rule, a position that persisted in postwar South Korea. I then investigate the ways in which fans of the Haitai Tigers, a professional baseball team, utilized the song to express a complex set of emotions and commitments regarding their politically oppressed and economically neglected home region of Chŏlla. Against the backdrop of their traumatic memories of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, Haitai fans, through their collective singing of ‘Tears of Mok’po’ in stadiums during games, transformed it from a colonial-era pop hit/anti-colonial anthem into a baseball fight song that expressed their spirit of regional insubordination in the 1980s and 1990s. Entering the twenty-first century, ‘Tears of Mok’po’ no longer played the same role for the Tigers and their fans, and it receded into historical memory. This change in meaning and association shows how the political and historical meaning-making of popular songs can be constructed, reintegrated, and even dismissed.

Historians of the Indian Partition focus on the permit systems the governments of India and Pakistan put in place to stem refugee entry and prevent the return of evacuees. However, the prevention of exit became, alongside non-entrée and the prevention of return, part of an official strategy of immobility in South Asia directed at marginalized castes. At Partition, Pakistan saw the labour of ‘non-Muslim’ marginalized castes as essential to its national wealth. It believed it had to retain them at all costs. On the other side of the border, the article discusses the Indian government’s laggardly, and often indifferent, response to the struggles of caste-oppressed groups trying to migrate to India. The article builds on scholarship on mobility capital and partial citizenship in the aftermath of Partition to argue that with the prevention of exit, citizenship incorporated an imposed nationalization that embodied the status of marginalized castes as more than a minority and produced a form of bonded citizenship.