The renunciation of the slaughter of yaks has become a significant cultural movement among Tibetan pastoralist communities in China, influenced by prominent figures in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. This movement promotes a compassionate approach to livestock management, encouraging pastoralists to abstain from slaughtering yaks or selling them to slaughterhouses. While existing scholarship acknowledges the widespread adoption of this ethical practice, it often overlooks the ways in which pastoralists actively resist and reinterpret these norms. In this article, I propose the concept of performative agency to examine how pastoralists in the Pema Rito area of Qinghai province use an annual yak pageant as a platform to articulate their own desires and aspirations. I contend that the yak pageant functions as a crucial site of contestation, where pastoralists assert their agency by negotiating externally imposed ethical norms to advance their own vision of pastoralist life on their own terms.

This article examines how China’s central political inspections indirectly enhance municipal provision of invisible public goods. Such goods (e.g., underground pipelines, drainage systems) eludes reliable public assessment through daily observation. Drawing on Mani and Mukand, we emphasize their two defining attributes: (1) conditional evaluation (public judgment requires specific triggers like extreme weather), and (2) temporal accountability lag (delayed quality assessment). Unlike technical business inspections, political inspections prioritize provincial leaders’ political loyalty, generating cascading deterrent effects on municipal officials. Confronting heightened career risks, rational local officials strategically reallocate resources to rectify undersupplied invisible goods. Empirical analysis leveraging the first wave of nationwide inspection data confirms this causal mechanism.

This study revisits the long-standing consensus that the number and nature of basic-level administrative units in imperial China remained static over two millennia. It argues that this view underestimates the size and sophistication of field administration during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127). During this period, towns (zhen) emerged as administrative centers, undertaking roles akin to the predominantly rural counties but within urban settings. Through a systematic analysis of the administrative functions of towns, this article reveals that approximately 30 percent of the 1,891 towns documented in 1085 were staffed by imperial officials and played a crucial role in delivering urban public goods such as fire prevention and law enforcement. In doing so, they supported the Song state’s extraordinary reliance on commercial taxation. These findings prompt a reassessment of the prevailing view in Chinese urban history that a disconnect between administration and commerce began during the Tang-Song transition.

Scholarship on overseas Chinese and modern Chinese diplomacy often centers on nationally recognized leaders and officials with prominent global roles. However, a fuller understanding of the diaspora requires examining lesser-known diplomats and local leaders who often had a greater impact on their communities than distant official policies. The transnational life and evolving identity of Yü Shouzhi (1907–1999) – a grassroots Chinese diplomat, community organizer, and small business owner in Mexico – exemplifies this dynamic. Initially trained and appointed by the Chinese Nationalist government, Yü’s diplomatic work extended beyond official channels to foster transethnic, transnational, and intergenerational networks within the Chinese-Mexican community. His transition from formal diplomacy to community leadership and commerce reflected how individual migrants successfully navigated transnational and national politics, community relationships, kinship, and transethnic relations and gained social power. In the process, Yü adjusted his sense of belonging and developed diasporic nationalism, transforming from a representative of the Nationalist government to a deeply rooted Chinese-Mexican community member. This article argues that Yü’s ability to adapt his role as a Chinese diplomat and cultivate a Chinese-Mexican identity was shaped by the interplay of formal state affiliations, grassroots networks, transnational and cross-ethnic relationships, and his personal initiative.

Many of Yi In-sŏng’s works, including On an Autumn Day and Room in Summer, depict tropical plants and exotic vegetation. Although the specific types of foliage he portrayed remain unclear, Yi’s use of foreign foliage clearly conveys the allure of exotic scenery. Beginning in the 1930s, coinciding with Japan’s expansion into the South Sea region, images of palm trees and exotic plants found their way into colonial Korean homes. This article investigates the emergence of the practice of portraying ‘others’ in colonial Korea, with a particular focus on the artworks of Yi In-sŏng. Yi was a renowned Western-style painter during the colonial period in Korea, celebrated for his depictions of exotic landscapes and vibrant foreign flora. While Yi’s work is often characterized as an expression of Korean ‘local colour’, this article, instead, explores Yi as an urban bourgeois and delves into his appreciation for exotic elements in his work. By contextualizing the depiction of diverse rural flora and exotic interior decorations in Yi’s urban intellectual cosmopolitanism, this article discusses how the practice of imagining ‘others’ emerged in colonial Korea during the 1930s.

In recent elections across major destination countries in the developed world, migration has become a major issue of political salience. Japan has traditionally been an outlier to the trend, but migration did become a major topic driving public opinion in the 2025 Upper House election. This article explores the overall political salience of migration in Japan, focusing primarily on how the ruling coalition managed public discourse as it pushed through major reforms over the past decade, why it lost control of the narrative in the recent election, and what this means for the politics of migration in Japan going forward.