Education About Asia: Online Archives

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Feature Article

China’s “National Champions”: Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei

by Jeffrey Melnik

Before reading this article, maybe you checked your Apple iPhone or Google Android phone for today’s weather or the news or caught up on some email. Maybe you logged onto Facebook and caught up with your friends or shopped for things on Amazon. Maybe after some intense study reading the pages of EAA, you plan to unwind by watching some movies on Netflix or playing some Fortnite on your gaming console. The work of American tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook is an essential ...

Feature Article

Asia’s Role in the Four Industrial Revolutions

by Mousumi Roy

The United States and Europe have been at the forefront of the Industrial Revolutions over the last two and a half centuries. Almost all Asian countries, except Japan, were latecomers to these revolutions. Nevertheless, many of them, including China, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia, made significant progress by the end of the Third Industrial Revolution. What follows is a brief depiction of the involvement of Japan; the “Asian Giants,” China and Indi...

Columns, Digital Asia, Resources

MOOCS (Massive Online Open Courses) and Asian Studies

by Jared Hall

“Given that education has been calcified for 500 years, we really have to completely reimagine it. It’s like going from ox carts to the airplane.” This was the challenge laid out to a TED audience in January 2014 by Anant Agarwal, CEO of EdX. In his talk, Agarwal promised nothing less than to revolutionize education through MOOCs (or massively open online courses). By the end of the year, an article in the MIT Technology Review hit back, suggesting that “For all the hype, MOOCs are reall...

EAA Interview, Resources

#AsiaNow: An Interview with Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

by Education About Asia

#AsiaNow, which debuted in March 2017, is the blog of the Association for Asian Studies. The blog includes Asia content and features interviews with authors and scholars, new media available for those interested in Asia, pedagogical strategies for the classroom, and other posts. #AsiaNow also is an excellent repository for learning about both AAS opportunities and other Asia-related professional development, conferences, and research initiatives. #AsiaNow is available to both AAS members and ind...

Feature Article

Kim Dae-jung’s Cyberinfrastructure Legacy

by Hang Ryeol Na

In the Western Pacific region, there are typically four stages in the development of a tropical cyclone, classified by their maximum sustained wind speed—typhoon, severe tropical storm, tropical storm, and tropical depression in the descending order of wind speed. On November 1, 1991, for example, a tropical depression was identified in the western Pacific Ocean with estimated winds of forty-five kilometers per hour (km/h) (thirty miles per hour [mph]). Three days later, it was upgraded to a t...

Feature Article

New Media in Korea and Japan: Emergent Trends

by Damien Spry

Japan and the Republic of Korea (South Korea henceforth) have highly developed mobile and broadband Internet infrastructures and enthusiastic, innovative mobile media cultures. Japan pioneered new forms of communication and entertainment, and Japanese society still produces startling innovations in the use of technology, for example, using robots as surrogate pets and as nursing attendants. South Korea has more recently overtaken Japan and everyone else to enjoy the world’s best Internet servi...

Feature Article

China’s Weibo: Political and Social Implications?

by Xinyue Chang

Sina Weibo, China’s microblogging answer to Twitter, has become one of the most popular sites in China’s cyberspace since its debut in 2009. Today, the microblog has about 140 million active users. Compared to noninteractive communication channels, Weibo and similar social networking sites have the potential to challenge China’s authoritarian rule. What follows are depictions of how this microblogging technology is being used in China as a source of news, as a tool for combating corruptio...

Feature Article

China’s Happy Farm and the Impact of Social Gaming

by Wang Huang

Social network games (SNG or social games), the online games played through social network sites (SNS) or mobile devices, began to grow in 2008, after SNS such as Facebook opened up for developers to make video games in 2007. SNG distinguish themselves from other types of online games in that they are embedded in SNS, where people usually connect to real-life friends and family members with real-life identities. SNG are often casual, easy-to-pick-up, multiplayer experiences that allow interactio...

Feature Article

Wa Minority Youth and Mobile Phones in Urban China

by Tzu-kai Liu

This is a tale of labor migration and the social networking experiences of China’s Wa ethnic minority group. The PRC government classifies the Wa people as one of fifty-five ethnic minorities in the country. Facing poverty and dismal economic opportunities in their rural homelands, the Wa—along with innumerable minority youths in their teens and twenties, such as the Miao and Tibetans—have migrated to China’s coastal manufacturing centers in search of menial factory work. These “floati...

EAA Interview, Feature Article

Social Media in the South Korean Presidential Election: An Interview with Hoon Lee

by Hoon Lee, Lucien Ellington

Hoon Lee (PhD, Communication, University of Michigan) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Nam Center for Korean Studies and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Prior to the doctoral program at Michigan, he studied the political economy of East Asia at Stanford University. Lee’s current research agenda centers on emerging social media and how they intersect with interpersonal communication to shape the attitudes and behaviors of ci...

Feature Article

Cyberbullying in Asia

by Christine Suniti Bhat, Moira A. Ragan, Shih-Hua Chang

In Japan, a high school male attempted suicide twice and rarely left his room after receiving intimidating messages on his cellphone and having embarrassing photographs posted on the Internet. When a seventeen year-old female in India started to refuse to go to school, her mother discovered that material of a sexual nature was posted on her social networking site and that her peers were teasing her about it. A young male in India received death threats on his cellphone, warning him of dire conse...

EAA Interview, Feature Article

EAA Interview with Pradeep Singh

by Pradeep Singh

Lucien: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. Would you please tell our readers a bit about your early years and recount some of the major factors that motivated you to start your own company in Bangalore? Pradeep Singh:I am a software entrepreneur and a firstgeneration immigrant to the US, as well as a husband, a father, and the many other identities that world-famous economist Amartya Sen would encourage us all to recognize!

Curriculum Materials Review

Shuhai Wenyuan: Classical Chinese Digital Database and Interactive Internet Worktable

by Jim Deitrick

The Shuhai Wenyuan Classical Chinese Digital Database and Interactive Internet Worktable is a Web-based resource developed and maintained by the University of Hawai`i at Manoa.1 This valuable resource enables even first-time users with limited knowledge of Chinese languages and cultures to encounter “classic” Chinese texts (jing); e.g. the Lunyu or Analects of Confucius and the Dao dé (jing) in their original language. Users of this site are enabled, for instance, to construct their own tra...

New to EAA?

Before viewing the full archives, view Editor’s Choice Articles, handpicked by EAA Editor, Lucien Ellington, which provide a good overview of EAA and introduction for new readers.