Historians have drawn on newspapers to illuminate the origins of modern nationalism and cultures of literacy. The case of Kiongozi (The Guide or The Leader) relates this scholarship to Tanzania's colonial past. Published between 1904 and 1916 by the government of what was then German East Africa, the paper played an ambivalent role. On the one hand, by promoting the shift from Swahili written in Arabic script (ajami) to Latinized Swahili, it became the mouthpiece of an African elite trained in government schools. By reading and writing for Kiongozi, these waletaji wa habari (bearers of news) spread Swahili inland and transformed coastal culture. On the other hand, the paper served the power of the colonial state by mediating between German colonizers and their indigenous subordinates. Beyond cooptation, Kiongozi highlights the warped nature of African voices in the colonial archive, questioning claims about print's impact on nationalism and new forms of selfhood.

John Stuart Mill's defense of freedom of discussion in On Liberty remains a major influence on philosophical and public debates about free speech. By highlighting underappreciated textual evidence and key distinctions, this introduction attempts to show how the contributions of the symposium authors – Melina Constantine Bell, Rafael Cejudo, Christopher Macleod, and Dale E. Miller – point toward a more complete account of Mill's views.

The law and regulation of the energy sector in Australia is subject to overlapping responsibilities of both federal and state governments. Crucially for energy transition efforts, neither energy, environment nor climate is mentioned in the Australian Constitution. Australia has a tradition of creative cooperative federalism solutions for responding to problems of national importance. In the energy sector this has resulted in an intricate national framework for energy markets, which relies on mirror legislation passed by participating states, with oversight by state and federal executive governments. Independently of these frameworks, both federal and state governments have passed climate change legislation, which crucially includes renewable energy support mechanisms. At a time when a rapid transition to a decarbonized energy system is essential, legal frameworks struggle to respond in a timely fashion. The political discourse around energy has become increasingly toxic – reflecting a dysfunctional state–federal relationship in energy and climate law. Australia needs to consider whether its cooperative federalism solutions are sufficient to support the energy transition and how climate law at the state and federal levels interacts with energy market legal frameworks.

More than 100,000 people from the city of Tianjin were evacuated to the countryside in a civil defense program during the 1970s. Many evacuees refused to submit to state migration mandates, instead sneaking back to the city illegally or petitioning to regain urban residency. City officials responded flexibly to the evacuees’ pleas, sympathizing with family reunification and treating suburban districts (jiaoqu) on the outskirts of Tianjin as a buffer zone between city and countryside. Dominated by agriculture but home to a growing number of factories, workshops, and offices during the 1970s, jiaoqu became a solution to evacuation headaches. When compared with the recent coerced movement of hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens on national security grounds, the civil defense evacuations of the 1970s suggest that it may be misguided to think of the Mao Zedong years as a faraway time that was more radical or repressive than China today.

Using received texts and excavated funerary epitaphs, this article examines the intricacies of gender and migration in early medieval China by exploring women's long-distance mobility from the fourth century to the sixth century, when what is now known as China was divided by the Northern Wei and a succession of four southern states—the Eastern Jin, Liu-Song, Southern Qi, and Liang. I focus on three types of migration in which women participated during this period: war-induced migration, family reunification, and religious journeys. Based on this analysis, I propose answers to two important questions: the connection between migration and the state, and textual representations of migrants. Though the texts under consideration are usually written in an anecdotal manner, the references to women, I argue, both reveals nuances in perceptions of womanhood at the time and elucidates the contexts within—and through—which long-distance travel became possible for women.

It has become known that the Confucius Institute (CI) and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (Qiaoban) are operated as tools of state-led mechanism, or Chinese statecraft with the ultimate goal of expanding China's cultural soft power. Following the direction, Xi Jinping has been pushing the notion of the “Chinese dream,” focusing on the realm of Chinese traditional culture and launching a new state-led mechanism. This article examines an emerging state-led mechanism known as “Chinese Homeland Bookstores” (CHBs), which was proposed by a provincial government-financed state-owned enterprise, and recently expanded to Thailand and various Mekong countries. I contend that the entities, such as CHBs and also CI and Qiaoban, are being extensively utilized as part of a larger state apparatus supporting the regime's Chinese traditional culture campaign. However, the CHB case and those of other government-led institutions illustrate how they combine nation-state work with market-oriented business strategies, to effectively promote Chinese culture “going out” with a focus on financial sustainability.