Discussions on populism in Japan have often been overlooked in the comparative politics literature. However, as theoretical and empirical discussions progress, the need for more Japanese contributions to expand observers’ understanding of the global populist phenomenon is evident now more than ever. The sudden rise of Ishimaru Shinji as a populist figure in the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election sparked claims that “social media populism” has arrived in Japan. However, although social media certainly played a role in propelling Ishimaru’s popularity during his campaign, limiting considerations of populism to election campaign performances overlooks a greater question: What happens when populists are elected? This article suggests that the Ishimaru phenomenon needs to be contextualized with examples of distinct practices of populist governors. This article argues that, in a neoliberal era of “political reform” (seiji kaikaku) populist political entrepreneurs have introduced “innovations” to governing practices as a way to personalize the executive in pursuit of their policy agendas. Specifically, three governing practices of the populist governors Hashimoto Tōru and Koike Yuriko are identified and considered as a “populist playbook” from which Ishimaru, and future populists, will likely borrow.

This is an extended review of Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) that addresses several important issues in the methodology of historical Arabic linguistics.

In China’s resource-based cities, work and everyday life have historically been shaped by extractive industries. Amid the ongoing restructuring of the coal industry, examining social dynamics beyond labour – particularly those linked to housing, displacement and resettlement – reveals critical mechanisms of power. Based on fieldwork conducted in Datong, Shanxi province, this article introduces the concept of “extractive governmentality at home” to analyse territorialization as a governing technique that shapes miners’ practices and subjectivities. The relocation of miners from unsafe, self-built dwellings to a new urban neighbourhood, built and managed by their coal state-owned enterprise (SOE), reveals a form of corporate power. While resettlement has improved living conditions for most insiders, it has reinforced SOE dependency and highlighted the social marginality of less- or unaffiliated local residents. More recently, the gradual separation of SOEs from their social responsibilities has increased the administrative burdens on local governments, while resettled populations continue to face territorial stigmatization. This article contributes to scholarly debates on China’s “just transition” by underlining the socio-political complexities of housing provision and management in extractive contexts. Beyond the workplace, housing represents an overlooked yet important domain of power in China’s “independent industrial mining areas,” emphasizing inhabiting practices and territorial subjectivities as key elements for understanding the broader transformations induced by coal industry restructuring.

This special issue, “On Their Own Terms: Experts in Imperial China,” examines various kinds of expertise from Han times into the twentieth century from the angle of practitioners themselves, and sometimes even on their own terms.

Politicization is one of the most fundamental characteristics of Chinese society, manifested in the direct and comprehensive control of society by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Methods include soft control through ideology and coercive control through campaigns. Based on the varying degrees of the CCP’s social control, the trajectory of China’s regime politicization can be divided into four periods: (1) the politicized regime of 1949–1965, (2) the hyper-politicized regime of 1966–1978, (3) the de-politicized regime of 1979–2012, and (4) the re-politicized regime of 2013–2023. We established an annual politicization index for the years 1949 to 2023 through a content analysis of two million articles in the People’s Daily, validating the trajectory of politicization changes in China. We use a model analysis of CCP membership attainment to demonstrate the applicability of the index in assessing how regime dynamics affect Party membership across the four periods.

In the final decades of its existence, the Qing imperial state sought to unify and standardize policies of frontier management. In this context, mapping and surveying practices developed as socio-technological discourses that transformed how Qing authorities asserted their territorial claims in the Eastern Himalayas. Most scholarship on the history of Qing-era frontier management has tended to focus on Chinese nation-building practices. However, this article foregrounds the deconstruction of the epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about the Eastern Himalayas by investigating the appropriation and rejection of the interlocutors of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors.

How did military surveyors establish authoritative ideas about their own expertise? This article focuses on the late-Qing surveys of the Dzayul river basin commissioned by Zhao Erfeng and carried out by his subordinate officials Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu. Between 1910 and 1911, Zhao Erfeng ordered new surveys of the regions located at the north-easternmost tip of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, to demarcate the Qing Tibetan dominions and Chinese territory from that of British India. The surveyors Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu, mapped the route of the Dzayul River which flowed into British Indian territory through the Mishmi hills into Assam as the Lohit. These surveys largely claimed that natural features marked the “natural” or “traditional” boundaries of the imperial state, against local knowledge productions that framed those same topographical features as connectors rather than dividers. By dissembling the various strands that informed this archive of Qing colonial knowledge, I investigate the processes by which state-produced narratives created new kinds of citational practices to designate who could be recognized as an “expert” of the mountainous geography of Tibet and the trans-Himalayan regions.