ASIEN: The German Journal on Contemporary Asia

Inhalt

DGA — 2023-09-18

Neuere Literatur über Asien

Uwe Kotzel — 2023-09-18

Cheng, Chiung-ming: Gedanken in Weiß. Gedichte aus Taiwan

Felix Rheinfelder — 2023-09-18

Fang Fang: Weiches Begräbnis. 软埋

Thomas Weyrauch — 2023-09-18

Udo Haase: 50 Jahre Mongolei. Mit den Nachfahren Dschingis-Khans unterwegs

Peter Schaller — 2023-09-18

Deike Lautenschläger: Das Glück verkehrt herum. Homophone in Taiwan

Thilo Diefenbach — 2023-09-18

Montesano, Michael J., Terence Chong und Mark Heng (Hgg).: After the Coup. The National Council for Peace and Order Era and the Future of Thailand

Felix Rheinfelder — 2023-09-18

Rongfen Wang: Steinway. Aus dem Chinesischen von Lao Men

Thomas Weyrauch — 2023-09-18

New Challenges in Doing Research on China, Workshop des Arbeitskreises Sozialwissenschaftliche Chinaforschung (ASC)

Julia Marinaccio — 2023-09-18

China Workshop “Chinese Research and Academic Discourses in Contemporary China Studies”

Ryanne Flock — 2023-09-18

Akademischer Workshop Wissenschaftsdiplomatie Deutschland–China

Matthias Stepan — 2023-09-18

“Modernizing Rural China” workshop and network meeting

Mads Vesterager Nielsen — 2023-09-18

Roundtable: Quo vadis Documenta fifteen? Between accusations of anti-Semitism, politics, German and Indonesian understanding of art – Where should the boundaries of art lie?

Patrick Keilbart — 2023-09-18

Die Redaktion

DGA — 2023-09-18

Politics of Belonging and Exclusion: Nation-Building in Contemporary Asia

Carmen Brandt — 2023-09-18

The present special issue is the outcome of a call for papers by members of the ASIEN editorial board. Across six contributions — four research articles and two research notes — various perspectives on and aspects of nation-building in Bangladesh, China, Myanmar, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam are discussed. The diversity of these countries highlights how challenging a systematic comparison would be. Additionally, each contribution focuses on a particular aspect of nation-building, nationalism, and/or national belonging. Hence, the six pieces illustrate that there are many different and at times highly contested factors crucial to the success or failure of nation-building.

A Long-Term View of Thai Nationalisms: From Royal to Civic Nationalism?

David M. Malitz — 2023-09-18

This article offers a history of Thai nationalisms, drawing on primary sources as well as the secondary literature on the country’s political history. Rejecting a linear evolution of Thai nationalist ideas, it traces the development of very different political imaginations of a Siamese/Thai political community from the early nineteenth century through the student protests of 2020/2021. It does not consider, therefore, these recent demands for reform of the country’s monarchy to represent a radical rupture with established Thai political culture. Rather, the student protests constitute a new iteration of a long-standing trend of contesting official nationalisms in the country. This is evident in the students’ own symbolic embracing of the history of the Siamese Revolution of 1932. For analytical purposes, the article employs a twofold approach. As such, it differentiates between inclusive and exclusive imaginations of the national community on the one hand and between its democratic versus autocratic political organization on the other.

Identity, Conflict, and Social Movement Activism in Bangladesh’s Nation-Building Politics

Hosna J. Shewly — 2023-09-18

In the last half a century, the search for a Bangladeshi national identity has been driven and contested by different forces and political imageries. This paper looks at the interrelations between nation-building policies and social-movement activism. Since its independence in 1971, the country has been caught up in debates surrounding Bengali, Bangladeshi, and Muslim identities and activism in its nation- building process, leading to multiple exclusions along ethnic, religious, gender, and class lines. Identity formation in postcolonial society has mainly relied on constructing majority populations with shared commonalities, such as religion, language, heritage, or social traditions. We show how state initiatives in crafting a so-called natural identity and homogeneity in the name of nation-building have turned into counterproductive and politically profit-oriented projects, masking inequalities and persecution. We propose that achieving a sophisticated understanding of the nation- building process requires paying attention to the causes, outcomes, and influences of social and political movements. We also posit that nation-building is a protracted process of political integration that often remains unfinished, even decades after a nation has gained its independence.

South Korea’s Partial Withdrawal from the 2015 Korea–Japan Comfort Women Agreement: Changed National Role Conceptions via Increased Social Influence (2015–2018)

Bohyun Kim — 2023-09-18

Why did Moon Jae-in’s South Korean government (2017–2022) show highly ambivalent foreign policy behavior around the 2015 comfort women deal with Japan, one of its most important economic and political partners in the East Asian region? This paper pays attention to the possibility of increased social influence on South Korea’s foreign policy around the period of the candlelight movement in 2017, investigating whether this social influence affected South Korea’s national role conceptions. By doing this, the research delivers an empirical contribution to the academic discussion of domestic influence on Korea-Japan historical conflicts. The analysis identifies how the national role conception of South Korea has changed between Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in administrations and analyzes which national roles were vertically addressed during the period after the agreement until its de facto withdrawal. To conclude, it demonstrates that domestic contestation had influence on the change of the Moon government’s national role conception as “civil collaborator” and “diplomatic position re-shaper” simultaneously, which eventually led to South Korea’s ambiguous diplomatic position.

From Arabian Nights to China’s Bordeaux: Wine, Local Identity, and Ningxia’s Place within the Chinese Nation

Michael Malzer — 2023-09-18

Ningxia, a comparatively small and underdeveloped autonomous region for China’s Muslim Hui minority in the country’s northwest, has increasingly received attention as the home of Chinese grape wine in both domestic and international media. This image of Ningxia as a home of wine is comparatively recent, and significant in several regards: first, wine fills a void in Ningxia’s local image-building strategy for tourism and trade, which had emerged from the abrupt abandoning of an earlier strategy of stressing Ningxia’s identity as a Muslim region. Second, wine is an agricultural product that is highly compatible with an urban, modern, and middle-class lifestyle as conceptualized by the dominant party-state discourse. Third, this framing lays claim to a new self-confidence in China’s domestic wine market, which is expected to be able to compete internationally in terms of both quantity and quality. Ningxia wines have been winning a number of international awards in recent years, and the region at the eastern foot of the Helan Mountains, belonging to its capital Yinchuan, is aspiring to become an equivalent to France’s Bordeaux, while also building up a distinct Chinese wine identity. As such, Ningxia wine is linked to Chinese nationalism: wine serves as both a global marker of taste and prosperity and source of local identity. Building on theories of nationalism and globalization, this paper traces the discourses surrounding Ningxia wine via ethnographic observations and several interviews conducted during a six-month field stay in Yinchuan in 2019, as well as through analysis of academic discussions, news items, and social media posts.

Between Memories and Taboos: The Formation of Alternative Vietnamese and Myanmarese Spaces of Citizenship and Belonging

Franziska Susana Nicolaisen — 2023-09-18

In the postcolonial states of Southeast Asia, governments weaponize their histories to create spaces of legitimate memories for nation-building processes. Local identities that do not conform to the official historiography are silenced. Beyond these state-sanctioned boundaries, however, alternative practices of remembrance are upheld that can challenge the state to produce different forms of belonging, identity, and citizenship. This paper analyzes the creation of opposing spaces of memory and belonging. The case studies include the struggle for meaning and identity between the State of Myanmar and the local population in Rakhine State as well as the inclusion and exclusion of the memory of war in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora in Germany. Governments in Myanmar and Vietnam use their respective histories to create patterns of continuity and exclude those defined as outsiders. Memories of local struggles are maintained, practiced, and even celebrated in local communities and the diaspora. Hereby, we point to practices that maintain excluded memories and enable alternative forms of belonging and citizenship to endure.

Authoritarian Developmentalism in Contemporary Sri Lanka

Sören Köpke — 2023-09-18

After the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009), the victorious Government of Sri Lanka was confronted with the need to “win the peace” and re-build the nation in both material and ideological terms. The rule of Mahinda Rajapaksa (president 2006– 2015), an example of authoritarian populism in power, was characterized by an infrastructure construction frenzy and the attempt to establish national unity on the terms of the Sinhalese Buddhist majority. The post-war period also saw the emergence of new tensions, namely the conflict between Sinhalese Buddhist militants and the Muslim minority, as well as the precarious human rights situation in the formerly secessionist north. Discontent with Mahinda Rajapaksa’s increasingly authoritarian rule and the unsolved problems of the civil war legacy brought his rival Maithripala Sirisena into power in 2015. Sirisena’s attempts to rule on a platform of liberal, more inclusive “good governance” (yahapalana) failed due to power struggles within his alliance and a lack of coherent policymaking. The 2019 Easter Bombings by domestic Jihadist terrorists marked the beginning of a new phase of securization and militarization. With the victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the 2019 presidential election and the subsequent instatement of Mahinda Rajapaksa as prime minister, a process of authoritarian consolidation was initiated. The Covid-19 pandemic opened a window of opportunity to reconfirm the leading role of the security forces in handling domestic crises. Yet the country’s ongoing financial and economic crisis, aggravated by debt and the slump in global tourism connected to Covid-19, question the prospect of stability. The social and ethnopolitical contradictions in Sri Lankan society are not addressed by the current authoritarian policies. Therefore, these contradictions are prone to further undermining the long-term consolidation of governance institutions, national identity, and non-sectarian civil society.

Wofür steht die JNU und wem gehört ihr Campus? – Der symbolische Deutungskampf um den Campus der Jawaharlal Nehru Universität

Anna Schnieder-Krüger — 2023-09-18

This article examines how the campus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has changed since 2016 (materially and structurally) and how these developments influence everyday life on the campus. I argue that these changes represent a negotiation process around the symbolism of JNU, which links to the understanding of the idea of nationality as well as the idea of a university. This article shows how the JNU university administration (and furthermore the government) strategically attempts to intervene in the campus space and thereby change the idea represented by JNU. Further, I look at resistant patterns of action and reinterpretation as well as transmedia memory practices used by students to sustain an inter-generational narrative of JNU as a utopian space based on the identity markers “excellent teaching” and “anti-establishment culture.” In this context, I understand the university and its campus as a space that is discursively and materially constructed through narrative, collective memory practices, and everyday tactics. Starting from an apparent micro-event in campus life, I argue that the campus has become a symbolic battlefield in the ongoing fight over spaces, bodies, and memories. Everyday practices of resistance are used to counter state- directed techniques of control.

Chinese Nurses in German Nursing Homes: A Bourdieusian Perspective on Migration Motivation

Julia Trautner — 2023-09-18

International nurse migration is a well discussed topic in the Asian context. While the Philippines, for example, is often the focus of the discourse, there is also already a profound base of literature on Chinese nurse migration. Much has been written about Chinese nurses in Australia or Singapore, but little is known about them working in Europe. Why is it that Chinese nurses can be found working in German nursing homes? What motivates them to live so far away from their home country and work in a nursing home setting? This article criticizes the fact that motivations for nurse migration have mostly been studied from an economic push-and-pull perspective with weak explanatory power when it comes to individual motivations. Thus this qualitative study conducted among nine Chinese nurses working in German nursing homes breaks new ground by employing a Bourdieusian sociological approach to researching motivations for migration. It finds that instead of economic considerations, aspects of cultural capital like mobility, working and living conditions, or education are central to the decision to migrate among those nurses. This article shows that all nine nurses leveraged their “nursing capital” to free themselves from the influence of others and so change their life trajectories.

Reaktionen auf Russlands Angriffskrieg gegen die Ukraine und Südkoreas Außenpolitik auf Abwegen

Hannes B. Mosler — 2023-09-18

Der russische Überfall auf die Ukraine im Februar 2022 hat neben den verheerenden Folgen vor allem für die ukrainische Bevölkerung auch zu globalen Verwerfungen geführt. Die Rivalität zwischen den Großmächten USA und China, die sich im letzten Jahrzehnt sukzessive aufgebaut hat, scheint sich durch den Ukraine-Konflikt zu einer Konfliktkonstellation zwischen den USA, der NATO, der EU und ihren Verbündeten auf der einen und Russland, China und ihren Verbündeten auf der anderen Seite zu erweitern und zu verschärfen. Südkorea gehört zu einer Reihe von Ländern, die sich in dieser Situation noch enger an den Westen binden wollen. Vor diesem Hintergrund beschäftigt sich der folgende Text damit, wie Südkorea – mit dem neuen konservativen Präsidenten Yoon Suk-yeol etwas mehr als ein Jahr im Amt – auf den Ukraine-Konflikt und die daraus resultierenden weltpolitischen Herausforderungen reagiert und was die Gründe dafür sind.

Vielstimmiger Nachruf auf Prof. Dr. Boike Rehbein, 18.2.1965–11.6.2022

DGA — 2023-09-18

Prof. Dr. Boike Rehbein war Mitglied im wissenschaftlichen Beirat der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Asienkunde und hat die DGA in dieser Funktion vor allem zu Südostasien-bezogenen Fragen beraten, sich bei der Vergabe der Small Grants eingebracht und die DGA-Nachwuchsgruppe unterstützt. Wir werden Boike Rehbeins Engagement in guter Erinnerung behalten und sprechen seinen Angehörigen unser aufrichtiges Beileid aus. Um den vielen persönlichen Erinnerungen an Boike Rehbein Raum zu geben, hat der DGA-Arbeitskreis Südostasien stellvertretend für die vielen bewegenden Einträge des Kondolenz-Boards „Kudoboard“ den Eintrag von Daniel Bultmann (derzeit Vertretungsprofessor HU Berlin) und Auszüge aus fünf weiteren Blog- Einträgen sowie einem Beitrag der DGA-Nachwuchsgruppe zusammengestellt. Das Board ist zu finden unter: https://www.kudoboard.com/boards/iDGVMvbs.