Mainstream media faces challenges in developed democracies like never before. On one hand, seemingly “free” digital (including social media) options are eroding the market for print drastically. Ads are not so much shifting from print to digital, but apparently simply disappearing. In the face of the pressures stemming from changing economics of the news business—which still has to be gathered at great expense, even if it can be distributed or shared by third parties practically for free (denying the gatherers their share of revenue)—one now encounters a new form of threat that is more political and cultural, namely, “fake news” and state and nonstate actors who wield it to undermine the public's trust in traditional media or news sources.

The Vietnamese story about the arrival of Buddhism and the building of the first Buddhist temples in what is now northern Vietnam contains no distinctively Buddhist content, but rather is a tale of thaumaturgy, the worship of trees and of rocks, and rainmaking. This essay analyzes the textual history of the story, which is dated in the early third century CE. It examines the names of the two major protagonists of the story and, although the names were later absorbed into the Sinitic literary tradition, this study proposes a Tamil Hindu origin for them. One is reminded of the trade route that connected India and China along the coasts of Southeast Asia at that time; the evidence of Brahmans from India in early Southeast Asia, including northern Vietnam; and evidence of Hindu elements in Vietnamese texts.

Does ongoing animosity between South Korea and Japan over the disputed Dokdo Islands and other issues that originated from historical disputes generate rally effects in Korean domestic politics? This article argues that the Dokdo Islands dispute—and related disputed issues rooted in the colonial experience of Korea under Japan's rule historically—strongly influence Korean presidents’ abilities to effectively mobilize domestic support for not only the issues, but particularly the public opinion of presidents. Using data on Korean presidents’ approval ratings between 1993 and 2016, this article shows that Korea's bilateral disputes with Japan tend to promote Korean presidential popularity. The findings suggest that external crises with Japan related to historical disputes have positive political effects on leadership ratings in Korea.

Between 1950 and 1953, the United Nations (UN) undertook two related tasks in Korea: the first was to assist the Republic of Korea in achieving military victory in its conflict with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea; the second was to support postcolonial economic and political reconstruction on the peninsula. In both, the UN promoted the implementation of modern agricultural and resource management practices, directly tying increased domestic farm and forestry productivity to military success. Through the lens of UN development projects, the Korean War, often characterized as a point of rupture, represented less a moment of disjuncture than it did a period of accelerated continuity. This article interweaves environmental, military, and development history to analyze several UN programs in the Republic of Korea between 1950 and 1953, demonstrating that the UN viewed resource development as among the most effective ways to wage and win a war.

It is well-known that the educated elite of China, Vietnam, and other neighboring polities participated in a shared community of inquiry, but how did it work in practice? This article examines Phạm Thận Duật's 1856 Hưng Hóa Gazetteer in order to discover the process by which knowledge was contested and produced within this broader culture of knowledge. Writing within the gazetteer genre, Phạm Thận Duật engaged with foundational classical Chinese texts, recent Vietnamese works, and the Qing-era kaozheng movement of evidentiary scholarship. That he took himself to be participating in a literary culture that transcended Vietnam is clear from an analysis of his textual citations, as is his confidence in rejecting, reconfiguring, or adding to a transregional culture of knowledge. Phạm Thận Duật and others like him were autonomous contributors to a community of inquiry that transgressed political boundaries. For Vietnamese scholars, this community was rooted in classical texts but centered in Vietnam.

Why are histories of colonialism and religious transformation in Southeast Asia so often told as inextricably interrelated? Why were Buddhist movements identified as both the locus for resistance to colonialism and the central means of constructing colonial modernity? Part of the reason lies in how religion served as both a European technique of colonial governmentality and a local repository of techniques for comprehending and responding to change. More than this, religion seems to have offered a multivalent medium for a variety of innovations. Pali examinations were central to Buddhist reform in colonial Burma at the turn of the twentieth century but also fomented conflicts between the colonial state and monastic factions over the purpose of language study. However, beyond such conflicts, Pali examinations proved fertile grounds for Buddhist laypeople to experiment with multiple interpretations of what Buddhist modernity might mean in Burma.

John Lee's, David Fedman's, and Lisa Brady's essays persuasively show the value of studying environmental issues on the Korean peninsula. Each of the essays carefully explains how drives led by individuals and entities, such as the state, engineered nature for human needs, security, and later economic growth. In so doing, they show how these drives simultaneously altered nature and remade institutions, systems, and cultures that influenced people's agency and identity and reshaped forms of consciousness. By judiciously making visible the agents and social forces behind the reconstitution of nature, the essays collectively introduce diverse approaches to the study of environmental issues in Asia and elsewhere. Most of all, they demonstrate that transnational environmental history on the Korean peninsula can no longer be overlooked when dwelling on and debating major historical and theoretical issues in Korean, Asian, and environmental studies.

In Apple CEO Tim Cook's keynote speech at the Chinese government's 2017 World Internet Conference, he extolled the values of “Privacy. Security. Decency” (Apple Newsroom 2017). The last two terms, “security” and “decency,” have long been closely associated with Chinese government efforts to control the Internet. Indeed, in 2017 Apple agreed to turn over user data to Chinese government servers and start a Chinese provincial government-run data storage center. Yet in 2015, Apple refused to turn over the passcode for one user in the United States during the FBI investigation following the San Bernardino terrorist attacks. The company's different policies in the United States and China relate directly back to Apple's concern for market share and access.

Most studies of the Republic of Vietnam's nation-building programs have focused on its security and land reforms. Yet spirituality was a fundamental element of Ngô Đình Diệm's Personalist Revolution. This article analyzes how the Republic of Vietnam attempted to channel the religious nationalism emerging from the First Indochina War. The spiritual dimension of the Republic's Personalist Revolution did not involve state interference in all religious activities. Instead, it promoted religious freedom and diversity, provided that the spiritual values they propagated opposed communism's atheism. In practice, this framework did not succeed in creating a religious alliance against communism. In fact, it strengthened a religious consciousness that would increasingly challenge the state, its assumption that religions opposed communism, and the very principle of religious diversity.

On December 4, 2016, Jatupat Boonpattararaksa, known by his nickname “Pai,” then a law student at Khon Kaen University in northeastern Thailand, was arrested and accused of violating Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, or defaming, insulting, or threatening the king, queen, heir-apparent, or regent. Two days prior, he had shared to Facebook a biography of the new king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, or Rama X, who became king following the death of his father, Bhumipol Adulyadej, Rama IX, on October 13, 2016. The BBC Thai biography was candid and highlighted Vajiralongkorn's string of wives, his four abandoned sons, and his conferral of a military rank on his pet dog, as well as his recent bike rides for charity (BBC Thai 2016). Over 2,600 people shared the BBC Thai link, but Pai was the only person to be arrested in December 2016 and the only person to be prosecuted to date (TLHR 2017a). The complaint that led to Pai's arrest was filed by Lieutenant Colonel Phitakphon Chusri, a Khon Kaen–based soldier who has followed him closely.

As the East India Company prepared for its First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42), its officials grew suspicious of a Muslim uprising within British India. They became convinced that itinerant Muslim reformers—mislabeled “Wahhabis”—were inciting princes of India's Deccan region to rebellion. This article describes how the very talk of this “Wahhabi conspiracy” not only triggered the interventionist impulses of the colonial state, but also inspired local intrigues associated with the downfall of two Indo-Afghan princes of the Deccan, Kurnool's Ghulam Rasul Khan and Udayagiri's Abbas Ali Khan. In both cases a preoccupation with the transnational Wahhabi operative masked local and sometimes petty interests, which drove the politics of these smaller regimes. The case studies of Kurnool and Udayagiri illustrate how news of events arising in one region of imperial conflict could “travel” to remote regions of India's Deccan, evolving into conspiracy narratives along the way. The discourse of conspiracy provided a pretext for military action and the annexation of territory. The story being told, however, is not simply about paranoid colonial officers who were all too eager to intervene, but is also about local entrepreneurs who knew how to exploit the situation toward their own ends.

Nancy Abelmann passed away on January 6, 2016, at the age of fifty-six. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990, after completing her dissertation under Nelson Graburn. That same year, she was hired by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she worked for two and a half decades. She was a beloved teacher, mentor, and colleague to many, and she was a key figure in multiple departments and centers. At the time of her death, she held the Harold E. Preble Professorship in Anthropology, Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Women and Gender Studies and was also Associate Vice Chancellor for Research.

Thailand has seen a growing number of women elected to Parliament in recent decades. Yet, little research has been done on who these women are and how they affect the quality of democracy. This article is an attempt to fill this lacuna. Drawing on previously untapped Thai-language primary sources, it argues that the majority of female members of Parliament elected since 1975 have contributed to entrenching family-based rule and stunting the growth of political pluralism. This argument is based on the finding that most female MPs are related, by blood or marriage, to former male MPs. These women from political families constitute one part of the long historical process through which Thailand has lapsed increasingly into a family-based patrimonial polity since the absolute monarchy was abolished in 1932. The importance of families remains undiminished over time; the advent of electoral politics has only accentuated it by bringing more women with powerful family connections into Parliament.

A former part of the Qing Empire, Taiwan was colonized by Japan in 1895 and returned to China, upon Tokyo's defeat, in 1945. Two years later, a revolt broke out against the mainland Chinese authorities and was brutally crushed. This episode, known as the February 28 Incident, has been at the center of memory wars in Taiwan since democratization. Historical accounts have tended to focus on the background causes of the Incident and on the role played by the Taiwanese elite. This article argues that devoting more attention to grassroots participants and their repertoire of action can shed new light on the events. During World War II, many young Taiwanese were mobilized in the Japanese army and paramilitary structures. This experience persisted in collective memory after Japan's defeat. During the revolt, young Taiwanese spontaneously “remobilized” the repertoire of actions and symbols formed during the war, with important consequences.

Rabindranath Tagore's visit to China in 1924 was a milestone in the May Fourth Movement's envisioning of modern literature as a vehicle for social transformation. Moving beyond interpretations of the visit as a political failure, this article locates the reception of Tagore's ideal of Eastern spirituality within the larger climate of literary production, specifically in new poetry. Through close reading of poems by Xu Zhimo and Bing Xin, this article argues that Tagore's ideas were fundamental for the development of poetry as an interpersonal medium that both portrays and effects social bonds. This understanding developed as Chinese poets and literary critics engaged with Tagore's critique of Western materialism and his positioning of Asian religious sensibilities in contrast to Western materialism. Tagore's view promoted literature as a medium connecting religion, the individual, and the universe. In this sense, though Tagore's pan-Asianism failed as a viable political project, it carried powerful resonance in the arena of modern Chinese literature.

This article takes the case of the Vietnamese Cao Dai religion to examine how Asian religious leaders and translators, in a context of colonial modernity, invested a European language with their own cosmologies and discourses, building both a national identity and an alternative spiritual universalism. Studies of translation in colonial contexts have tended to focus on the processes and impact of translating European texts and ideas into the languages of the colonized. This article discusses the inverse process, examining how Caodai textual production used French spiritist language and tropes to occult its Chinese roots, translating Daoist cosmology into a universalist and anti-colonial spiritual discourse rooted in Vietnamese nationalism. These shifts are examined through a close examination of translingual practices in the production and translation of the core esoteric scripture of Caodaism, the Đại Thừa Chơn Giáo 大乘真教 (The True Teachings of the Great Vehicle), rendered in its 1950 Vietnamese-French edition as The Bible of the Great Cycle of Esotericism. This study demonstrates how colonial religious institutions and networks of circulation in Asia stimulate the emergence of new movements and textual practices that mimic, invert, jumble, and transcend the cosmologies of both the Chinese imperium and the European colonial regime.

This article discusses Nancy Abelmann's scholarship on the university and includes a new study of the South Korean media discourse on Chinese international students—a work she planned but could not undertake. Abelmann studied the university, viewing it as a window to society's particular desires and anxieties regarding the future. Her research on South Korean university students reveals their personal fervor and struggle to stay afloat amidst the country's rapid modernization and globalization. Her later work on the American university considers the struggles of Asian American and Asian international students, illuminating the new realities of a global educational market and exploring new ethics of sharing the same university. The study in the second part of this article demonstrates how South Korean universities and public discourse have attempted to “optimize” the increasing numbers of Chinese international students as financial and symbolic capital. The shift between 2001 and 2016 from maximizing to distancing shows that Korean universities were straddling a line between the desire to become global institutions and the realization that they are a second-choice destination in the global higher-education market.