A major debate is underway in China on a proposed law that would grant new rights to Chinese workers. The debate has not been widely reported outside of China; until recently it has been almost entirely ignored by media in the United States. But when the Chinese government opened a 30-day public comment period this spring, it received nearly 200,000 comments, the majority from ordinary workers. But some comments also came from big U.S.- and European-based global corporations and their lobbying groups. These powerful forces squarely opposed the new law.

Wal-Mart's recent agreement to recognize unions in China has made headlines worldwide. But Wal-Mart and other corporations, including Google, UPS, Microsoft, Nike, AT&T, and Intel, have acted through the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (AmCham) and other industry associations to try to block Chinese legislation that would significantly increase the power and protection of workers.

After the Japanese colonization of Taiwan in 1895, various Japanese Buddhist sectarian traditions arrived in Taiwan and those bringing them actively approached local Buddhist monks and monasteries for cooperation. After 1915, Taiwanese monks separated into two factions: one faction headed to mainland China to study, and the other to Japan. At the same time, indigenous Buddhist traditions in Taiwan gradually developed into four sectarian groups, whose founders all shared deep ties with the Yongquan Temple of Drum Mountain (Gushan) in Fujian province on the mainland. Japanese Buddhists targeted them in particular for co-optation. Venerable Shanhui, who is the focus of this article, was the founder of one of these lineages. Venerable Shanhui was inducted into the Japanese Sōtō Zen sect and was appointed as the abbot of the Lingquan Temple by the head priest (kanchō) of the Sōtō sect in August 1907. Between 1911 and 1939, Venerable Shanhui was active in various chaplaincies in mainland China and Southeast Asia. In December 1933, he returned to Taiwan from Singapore via Hangzhou, where he became president of the Hangzhou Sino-Japanese Buddhist Society. In August 1939, Shanhui accepted the invitation of Narita Hōzui, then abbot of the Sōtō Zen temple Chōtokuin in Shanghai, to leave Taiwan and perform missionary work at temples in central China. This article also examines the existence of two different Hangzhou Sino-Japanese Buddhist societies and Shanhui’s relationship to them.

This article examines the activities of the Japanese Buddhist priest Ueda Tenzui (1899–1974) in wartime Thailand and Burma. Ueda initially went to Southeast Asia to pursue his studies of Buddhist precepts. During the war, he joined a pacification team of the Japanese military in occupied Burma and, as part of this role, became the headteacher of a Japanese language school. He was later ordained and served for some time as a monk in the Burmese Theravada tradition. Since the 1970s, research on Japanese Buddhist involvement in Japan’s wars has focused on criticizing those who cooperated with the war effort and praising those who resisted. In this regard, Ueda is unquestionably a ‘collaborator’. Yet, his case demonstrates the importance of the concept of the ‘grey zone’ between the two extremes of collaboration and resistance. While we have to acknowledge that Ueda acted in support of the war effort at the request of the military, he was also a scholar and a practitioner who deepened his understanding of Theravada Buddhism through personal experience. Ueda criticized the war after Japan’s defeat and also came to actively appreciate Burmese Buddhism’s strict adherence to the precepts. At the same time, he never showed a critical attitude towards Japanese Buddhism. Ueda’s thinking is characterized by his ability to find commonalities between Burmese and Japanese Buddhism without ranking them according to some hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, while also recognizing the differences that exist between these two branches of Buddhism.

Examining Olympic opening and closing ceremonies from the perspective of relational creativity, this article analyzes the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony and the 2016 Rio Games’ Japanese closing ceremony—both experimented with transitory meanings exploring alternative representations of Japan. We consider them as cases of relational creativity; the Nagano opening ceremony explored the fusion of local religious traditions and Western influences, while the Rio closing ceremony experimented with meanings of urban cosmopolitanism, consumerism, as well as cultural and social inclusivity.

This article discusses the activities of three Buddhist monks: the Japanese Fujii Sōsen (1896–1971) and Kanda Eun (1901–1948), as well as the Chinese Daxing (1900–1952) in Second World War-era China and how their paths intersected. Daxing, who remained in the area occupied by Japan, has been accused of having been too accommodating towards the Japanese forces. However, while Daxing did indeed interact with pro-Japanese Buddhist organizations, his actual relationship with the occupation was a lot more ambiguous, as shown by his lacklustre involvement with Japanese-sponsored initiatives. Fujii and Kanda were deeply involved in Sino-Japanese Buddhist exchange from the late 1920s and were two of the few Japanese Buddhists who also became fluent in Chinese. While they remained highly sympathetic to the plight of the Chinese people, they also continued to work with the Japanese occupiers. Thus, the space occupied by Daxing, Fujii, and Kanda is not easily covered by either ‘resistance’ or ‘collaboration’, but falls uneasily between the two. The article uses the example of these three figures to delineate this ambiguous space and examine how Buddhists sought to navigate the treacherous terrain of occupied China.

In July 1934, the Second General Conference of Pan-Pacific Young Buddhists’ Associations was held in Tokyo and Kyoto. Despite the event’s grand scale, with roughly a thousand participants attending from across Asia and North America, and its aspiration to use Buddhist solidarity to promote international goodwill, only a handful of delegates represented the Republic of China. The general absence of Chinese Buddhist leaders was due to widespread anger over the conference organizers’ treating Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state in Manchuria, as an independent nation in conference materials. Yet conference attendees (including Japanese, Chinese, and others) were not necessarily collaborationists who supported Japan’s imperial expansion, as some used the platform to criticize Japanese imperialism and the conference’s normalization of Manchukuo.

This article uses this 1934 conference as a lens through which to examine the complex relations between Buddhists from Japan and China (and elsewhere) and Japan’s early wartime empire. It argues that many occupied a kind of ‘grey zone’ between collaboration and resistance, hoping that Buddhist institutions could promote genuinely peaceful international relations, but also aware that their involvement in Japanese projects could be used to help justify Japanese imperialism. It first provides an overview of the colonial and anti-colonial politics of international Buddhist conferences in the early twentieth century (with particular attention given to the First Pan-Pacific Young Men’s Buddhist Associations Conference held in Honolulu in 1930) before closely examining the organization of the second conference, especially the controversies that developed around the Chinese delegation that led to a near-boycott by Chinese Buddhists.

Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko’s vision of a city where everyone can “shine” masks systemic contradictions in Japan’s future-making endeavors. While public proclamations frame Tokyo as inclusive and equitable, actions by Koike’s administration reveal abiding inequities. These efforts align with decades-long projects, most recently manifested in Society 5.0 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which prioritize market-driven growth while erasing systemic concerns of poverty and homelessness. Ethnographic insights from advocacy groups highlight the necessity of cultivating meaningful alternatives that emphasize empathetic dignity—a critique that underscores the necessity of reimagining Japan’s trajectory beyond performative policies of technologically mediated utopia futures.

This article discusses the activities of the Sino-Japanese Society of the Study of Esoteric Buddhism, which was active in North China from the early 1930s until the end of the Second World War. The organization was founded by Yoshii Hōjun, a young priest of the Japanese Shingon sect. It attracted the support of a wide range of actors, including a range of former Beiyang government politicians, Japanese diplomats, as well as prominent members of the Japanese community in North China. It had contacts in the Japanese military that have garnered the Society the reputation of having been a front for Japanese intelligence operations. This article critically investigates these claims and seeks to understand the relationship between religion and politics manifested in the Study Society for Esoteric Buddhism. Its history reflects the fraught relations between the two nations as well as between the various interest groups on both sides and thus provides a window into the complexities of pre-war North China in the 1930s.

This article considers the ways in which the material infrastructures of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) intersect with other infrastructural formations, and how the resulting overlaps can trigger processes of what I call ‘infrastructural splintering’. These processes cause infrastructure to be experienced in differentiating ways, creating divisive politics where once there might have been unity. Embracing these politics as an analytical starting point undermines the techno-material stability of the BRI and reveals its more-than-material affects. I illustrate these ideas by developing a case study of the impacts of the China-backed Colombo Port City project on Catholic fishing communities that are dependent upon the aquatic commons for survival. The construction of the Port City has brought about significant aquatic pollution and ecosystem destruction, and public erasure by Colombo’s political elites. Complicating matters is the dominance of the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces, which has become divided by a universalist politico-ecological consciousness imposed by the Vatican, a corruptible local hierarchy, and environmental activists who engage communities via the Church’s sacred infrastructures. By working through these processes of infrastructural splintering, I consider how the BRI has caused Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces to face increasingly fractious futures.

In Singkawang, West Kalimantan, the local Chinese Indonesian community is currently engaged in a major Chinese religious revival centring around inter-ethnic spirit-medium practices. At the centre of this revival are processes of recreating Chinese Indonesian identities in relation to both highly localized gods, spirits, and territorially grounded senses of belonging and re-Sinicization processes that relate to transnational circulations of Chinese language education and media circulations within a greater Chinese cultural sphere. As China rises as a global superpower, it is manifesting political and economic hegemony through investments in ambitious infrastructural development projects along the territories within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including the Maritime Silk Road (MSR) which runs through Indonesia. Alongside this, members of this socially, culturally, and geographically peripheral diasporic community are realigning themselves symbolically and imaginatively with China as a social-historical force in the world. While the BRI is a multinational, regional infrastructural development programme that consists of both physical infrastructures and corresponding imaginaries of Global China, in this article I develop a case study from the vantage point of what I term the ‘shadow of the BRI’. Existing in this shadow are diasporic Chinese communities with their own networks, connections, and concerns that differ greatly from the state-driven BRI infrastructural development projects. Within this shadow of the BRI, I argue, there is a further shadow—the symbolic infrastructure of Chinese religion, which maintains a figurative connection with China, even when physical connections with China are weak or absent. In this article, I explain how, alongside the material infrastructures of the BRI, the figurative aspects of Chinese religion act as a shadow infrastructure that transports practitioners into a transnational realm of stories, myths, and politics in which divine bureaucrats demonstrate their power (Man. shen and ling) by interacting with and intervening in peoples’ daily lives. Building on existing scholarship that recognizes that the BRI is not merely a composite of infrastructure projects but also an act of the imagination, in which a specific civilizational imaginary of China’s place in the world is being articulated, this article further argues that for diasporic communities who are reorienting their Chinese identities in relation to these civilizational imaginaries, the figurative infrastructure of Chinese religion remains important, despite being in the shadows, as a hidden source of power and structure. In imperial times, political and religious infrastructures were representations of each other and deeply intertwined, forming a yin-yang complementarity. At present the infrastructures connected to the Chinese state and its policies and the figurative infrastructure of Chinese religion are unconnected with each other, comprising two completely distinct worlds that complicate the ambivalent connections to China of the Chinese Indonesian community in Singkawang.

In this article, we explore the material and discursive spaces around the Sinamale’ Bridge, which at the time of its construction was the sole infrastructure project financed by foreign investment in the Maldives archipelago—a distinction it held until recently with the start of the new Thilamale’ Bridge project funded by India. We look at the ways in which this Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure project produces, both socially and symbolically, particular and often contradictory conceptions of religion and nation in this ‘100 per cent Muslim’ country. Under the presidency of Yameen Abdulla (2013–2018), mega development projects were envisioned primarily as symbols and sources of economic transformation. Simultaneously, there was a targeted government effort to revive sentiments of nationalism across the country through the circulation of songs, folk stories, and national heroes. Elaborations of the concept of Dhivehinge isthiqlaal (Maldivian national sovereignty) conflated religiosity and nationalism in popular discourse on development. The concept is also used to frame narratives of geopolitical relations and tensions, particularly with reference to the competing regional profiles of China and India, which are often framed in the Maldives along domestic political party lines and pitted against the other as presenting a lesser or greater threat to Maldivian identity. Examining the symbolic deployment of the Bridge through the analytic lens of political theology, we argue that it affords a prominent locus of political contestation around which understandings of religion and national sovereignty come together at both the local level and on the sprawling trans-regional scale of the BRI.