This is an essay about the high-Qing imperial house through the prism of a series of eleven munificent actions that subordinated the interests of the public exchequer to image-manufacture, monarchical self-assertion and monarchical self-positioning within the royal descent-line. Scrutiny of the edicts announcing the ten major revenue sacrifices (six universal land-tax remissions, four remissions of the tribute grain) and the famous freezing of the ding quotas shows an attenuation of public-policy content as acts of fiscal grace became accompaniments of personal life-cycle celebrations. The essay probes the edict at the midpoint of this transition to propose an interpretation of the Qianlong emperor’s rashness in proclaiming the one risky universal tax remission, that of 1745. It assesses Qianlong’s attempts to position himself as his munificent grandfather’s inheritor and draws on context and intercultural comparison to portray a young ruler preoccupied with self-actualization and self-differentiation from a father he somewhat resembled.

In the 2023 judgment of Nicaragua v. Colombia, the International Court of Justice ruled that, under customary international law, a State’s entitlement to a continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from its baselines is not permitted to extend within 200 nautical miles from the baselines of another State. In identifying this customary rule, the Court did not apply the two-element approach. The state practice relied upon by the Court to identify the general practice is not sufficiently widespread, representative, or consistent. The opinio juris is inferred from such state practice, which is not necessarily driven by a sense of legal obligation. The Court’s assertion of the customary rule constitutes, in effect, a rewriting of the relevant provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, amounting to a legislative exercise.

Throughout the twentieth century, Taiwan and South Korea underwent rapid economic development and successfully democratized without reversal to authoritarianism. Despite their similar trajectories, the two countries diverge significantly in political and public support for gender equality. Taiwan is widely seen as the most gender-equal country in Asia, while South Korea remains deeply polarized, with uneven progress in women’s representation. What accounts for this divergence between two democracies? This article advances a political institutions thesis, arguing that differences in democratic institution-building—particularly the actors and modes of democratization—have shaped the contour of gender politics of each country. Contrasting the histories of party-driven democratization in Taiwan and mass-driven democratization in South Korea, this article shows that the process of building democracy has had lasting effects on the institutionalization and sustainability of gender equality.

This study re-examines the fiscal collapse of late-Qing China by analyzing how the imperial household’s financial practices destabilized the dynasty’s governance equilibrium. Focusing on the post-1853 period, it argues that the Taiping Rebellion’s devastation of salt tax networks and customary revenue streams triggered a systemic rupture in the Qing’s dual patrimonial-bureaucratic fiscal structure. Deprived of traditional income, the Imperial Household Department abandoned its century-old fiscal segregation from the Board of Revenue, initiating coercive fund transfers in 1857 that persisted until 1908. These transfers eroded bureaucratic control over public expenditures while enabling unchecked imperial extraction through semi-privatized channels. Contrary to previous scholarship emphasizing provincial-central tensions, this study highlights how the imperial household’s ultra-bureaucratic prerogatives subverted fiscal discipline, replacing quota-based budgeting with ad hoc requisitions. The resulting institutional dysfunction – marked by path-dependent rent-seeking and stifled fiscal innovation – exacerbated the regime’s inability to reconcile patrimonial demands with bureaucratic rationalization. By exposing the collapse of the Qing’s historic governance dialectic, this study reframes the dynasty’s fiscal disintegration as a crisis of autocratic institutional design rather than mere resource scarcity, offering new insights into late-imperial state failure.

This article analyses the performance of the Chinese judiciary in administrative ligation during the recent period of reform using a dataset of over 1.6 million judicial documents. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find compelling evidence that the judiciary has become increasingly significant in checking the power of the government. Courts accepted 79 per cent more cases from 2014 to 2020, and plaintiffs’ win rate against the government rose from 33.2 per cent to 42.2 per cent. This increase is even more pronounced in cases with a strong impact on local government, such as those reviewing land expropriations and police penalties. Judicial authority has improved, with chief government officials attending more than 50 per cent of trials as defendants. Our findings illustrate a judiciary that is on the rise, but there are fundamental limits to its ascent. Courts remain silent on citizens’ political rights. Judges are reluctant to conduct substantive reviews of government actions beyond procedural matters. These findings support a tripartite theory for understanding the rule of law in China, where the law and the judiciary are instrumental in routine and even hard cases, but their power rapidly wanes in the face of politics.

The Gāϑās of Zaraϑuštra provide us with the Old Avestan attestations of the adjectives mauuaṇt-, ϑβāuuaṇt- and xšmāuuaṇt-/yūšmāuuaṇt-. The adjective mauuaṇt- occurs twice in the Gāϑās, while ϑβāuuaṇt- occurs five times and xšmāuuaṇt-/yūšmāuuaṇt- occurs seven times. Over the years, little effort has been put into studying the broader context in which these words are situated or into understanding the specific use and significance of these words in the Gāϑās. The basis for their translation has mostly been exogenous, with the early Avestan scholars using the readily available meanings of the Vedic equivalents mā́vat-, tvā́vat- and yuṣmā́vat- for this purpose. In contrast, this article endeavours to understand the meaning and significance of the words mauuaṇt-, ϑβāuuaṇt- and xšmāuuaṇt-/yūšmāuuaṇt- in the context of Zoroastrian theology. It further seeks to examine the morphological basis of their meaning, to offer updated translation options for them and to situate these updated translations into the Gāϑic stanzas in which they occur.

The oeuvre of the philosopher Leo Strauss (d.1973) pivots on the audacious thesis that political esoterism – the protective covering of truth through an exoteric shell – has been central to Islamic intellectual life. Strauss’s work focusses on philosophy, but this article argues that it can be productively extended – while not applied integrally - to Sufism, Islam’s similarly contested, primary esoteric tradition. It investigates the Straussian thesis in a Sufi discussion on valāyat, “spiritual authority” or “Friendship with God,” which idea is central both to Shiite Sufism and Shiism generally. The discussion concerns the Valāyat-nāme, an Iranian treatise of the early twentieth century by the Neᶜmatollāhī master Solṭānᶜalīshāh (d.1909), revealing the dilemmas that Shiite Sufis have faced in simultaneously retaining identity and acceptance to the juristically dominated canon. Four sub-topics are elaborated to assess the validity of Straussian analysis in rendering the treatise and its author: persecution as a context for esoterism; esoterism as a veil for dangerous knowledge; the drive for epistemic subordination; and the political nature of religious knowledge. It is proposed that rather than as “between the lines” dissimulation, as per Strauss, the Neᶜmatollāhīs’ political esoterism ought to be read more subtly as accommodation “along the lines” of Shiite orthodoxy.

Using data from the seventh wave of the World Values Survey, this study examines how social media use shapes the negotiation of transnational identity in South Korea and Taiwan—two countries characterized by distinct forms of nationalism—and whether social capital moderates this relationship. A two-dimensional model encompassing local–global attachment and protectionism–openness was employed to identify latent classes of transnational identity. The findings reveal that nationalism significantly influences identity negotiation in both countries, with Taiwanese citizens exhibiting stronger global ties compared to Koreans. In addition, social media use reinforces local and protectionist identities in these countries, limiting transnational solidarity and amplifying exclusivity through algorithmically mediated digital networks. Notably, social capital moderates this dynamic by fostering global openness, particularly when trust in out-groups is high. This study highlights the intricate interplay between social media use, social capital, and transnational identity negotiation, contributing to a nuanced understanding of the cultural response to globalization in East Asia.

The “Where is Okinawa Going?” forum will present and discuss Okinawan perspectives on the current situation surrounding the southernmost islands of Japan, amid the ongoing controversy over the “Futenma relocation” issue, from three viewpoints: 1) environment and biodiversity in the context of the Convention of Biological Diversity (COP10) in Nagoya; 2) Northeast Asian regional geopolitics in the wake of the Japan-China conflict over the ship collision near the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands; and 3) the Okinawa Japan-US relationship and the issue of US military bases in light of the November 2010 Okinawa gubernatorial election.

In this article, we discuss the introduction and reception of the theology of natural and divine laws in late Ming China. Natural law and the twofold divine laws appear collectively as an object of discussion and exposition in a number of writings by Jesuit missionaries and Chinese Catholic converts of this time. We focus primarily on Michele Ruggieri’s Tianzhu shilu 天主實錄 (The True Record of the Lord of Heaven) and then consider additional texts by Yang Tingyun and Giulio Aleni, referring to other works in passing. While laying out in more detail than previous scholarship the scholastic basis of these discussions, we nonetheless emphasize that these texts do not reflect a fixed version of scholastic teaching but accommodate their discussions to Chinese cultural sensibilities and/or philosophical concepts. Our historical analysis serves as the basis for a comparative philosophical consideration of the relationship between the doctrine of natural law and the Chinese concept of liangzhi 良知 “innate moral knowledge”.

Using quantitative analysis and qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in China in 2022–2024, this study explores a new form of grievance expression and dispute resolution adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): the online petition. While digital technology can receive and handle public complaints more efficiently, local officials under intense top-down pressure and increased accountability often only address citizens’ demands performatively to satisfy the political needs of their superiors. The study of “mechanical responsiveness” reveals that the CCP’s reinforced scrutiny of petitioners as well as local officials not only fails to prevent and resolve disputes at the source but also may lead to increased social discontent and pent-up resentments in the long run when the government fails to live up to its promises. Citizens will also lose faith in the institution and become politically disengaged if grassroots officials are always trying to curry favour with their superiors and avoid punishment rather than address public demands.

The origins of “wolf warrior diplomacy” have been a focus of studies on Chinese diplomacy in the Xi Jinping era. Building on existing research that emphasizes its foreign origins, our study zooms into a micro-level factor: aggressive journalistic questioning. We investigate the linguistic and interactional dynamics between foreign media and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) to assess and highlight its effects on aggressiveness in Chinese diplomatic discourse. Empirically, our analysis is based on a qualitative analysis of 4,556 question–answer dyads taken from MFA press conferences. Overall, our results lend strong support to the causal relevance of this micro-level factor. Aggressive questioning from foreign journalists significantly increases the aggressiveness of the Chinese MFA’s diplomatic rhetoric, although considerable variation exists across issue areas.