Education About Asia: Online Archives

Browse and download over 1,500 articles — feature articles, lesson plans, interviews, classroom resources, and book and film reviews — from Education About Asia (EAA)!

Sign up for the EAA Digest E-Newsletter and receive monthly updates and announcements from the EAA editor. Subscribe

Help us do more

by supporting EAA through print subscriptions and donations.

How to use the EAA Online Search Engine

PLEASE NOTE: All article and essay illustrations, including many images and graphics necessary for understanding the content, may be viewed in the PDF.

  1. 1

    Use the dropdown menus

    to search by author, geographic location, article type, and academic field

  2. 2

    Enter keywords

    to search the full text of articles (where search terms may not appear in the article title, eg.)

  3. 3

    View an article

    by clicking on its title. To view the original print version of the article, select “PDF”

Search for Articles

(culture, history, art, marriage, etc...)

NOTE: Archive articles may be downloaded and reproduced for personal or classroom use only.

Facts About Asia

Facts About Asia: Transparency International: Asia’s Most Populous Nations

by EAA Editorial Office

Transparency, or the lack thereof, is a critical factor in evaluating any nation. The column that follows focuses upon Asia’s six most-populous countries. In order to enhance teacher and student critical thinking about transparency, the column also includes content on two of the most-populous Western nations, the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany.

Facts About Asia

Facts About Asia: The Elephant in the Classroom: The US Literacy Crisis and Asian Studies

by James A. Tucker, Lucien Ellington

Editor’s Note: Professor James Tucker, the McKee Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, coauthored this column. Professor Tucker is a national leader in research in teaching and outreach for the study of dyslexia and related exceptional-learning conditions. He has held various positions in a long and illustrious career, including Director of the Bureau of Special Education, Pennsylvania Department of Education and has extensive national and international consulting ...

Facts About Asia

Facts About Asia: Rome and the Indian Subcontinent: A Forgotten Story of Impactful Economic Interactions?

by Lucien Ellington

Editor’s Note: Richard Davis’s AAS Key Issues in Asian Studies volume—Global India circa 100 CE: South Asia in Early World History—inspired me to incorporate part of his work and draw upon other sources as well in the following essay. Richard deserves the credit for stimulating my interest in this topic, but none of the blame for any errors I might have committed paraphrasing excerpts from Richard’s volume or working with additional sources. “The quest for India is a moving force of...

Facts About Asia, Resources

Facts About Asia: EAA Archival Recommendations: Asia in World History (Part 2), and Comparative Asia and the World Websites

by EAA Editorial Office

EAA Archival Recommendations: Asia in World History (Part 2), and Comparative Asia and the World Websites In order to provide recommended, highly-utilized teaching resources that directly relate to this special section, the first part of this column includes (arranged, roughly chronologically, from the latter part of the sixteenth century to the present), annotations of a variety of EAA feature articles, teaching resources essays, and in some cases, book reviews. Annotated entries in this porti...

Facts About Asia, Resources

Vigil: HONG KONG IN CRISIS An Interview with Jeffrey Wasserstrom

by Lucien Ellington

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of five previous books, including China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (coauthored by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham) and Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo. In his latest book, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, Professor Wasserstrom combines his extensive knowledge of Hong Kong from the ground up with a broader unders...

Columns, Facts About Asia, Resources

Facts About Asia: South Korea and Singapore: Economic and Political Freedom

by EAA Editorial Office

Editor’s Introduction: By the 1990s, the dynamic economic growth of four polities—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—earned them the nickname “Four Little Dragons.” Each of the “Little Dragons” also obtained moderate to significant levels of political freedom (Freedom House ranks South Korea and Taiwan as free and Hong Kong and Singapore as partly free). Please see our column from fall 2019 on the other two “Little Dragons”: Hong Kong and Taiwan. Economic ...

Facts About Asia

Facts About Asia: Asia and Education

by EAA Editorial Office

Editor’s Note: EAA readers are invited to send material for this column. Please include a source for your “Asian fact.” Reported Literacy Rates of Select Asian Countries (age 15 and over) Taiwan 98.5% China 96.4% Indonesia 95.4% Việt Nam 94.5% Thailand 92.9% Bangladesh 72.9% India 71.2% Pakistan 57.9% Source: CIA World Factbook https://tinyurl.com/hhhvnby. Years of statistics compiled range from 2014–2017. Percent of Populations with Tertiary Educat...

Facts About Asia, Resources

Facts About Asia: Two Significant Maritime Achievements

by EAA Editorial Office

Purposes of the Voyages: The purposes of Columbus’ four voyages were to find a trade route to the Indies, to expand and enrich both the Spanish empire and Columbus (who received a tenth of all riches acquired), and to convert the natives to Christianity, some of whom were also enslaved.

Facts About Asia, Resources

Asian Factoids: Fall, 2001

by EAA Editorial Office

A special survey published in the June 2, 200l issue of The Economist assessed India’s economy ten years after it launched major economic reforms, including lowering trade barriers, devaluing the rupee, and abolishing industrial licensing, which dictated to businesses just how much of a particular product they could manufacture. The conclusion was “On most measures, the reform was a triumphant success.” Economic growth during the 1990s made India one of the world’s fastest-growing econom...

Facts About Asia, Resources

Asian Factiods

by EAA Editorial Office

Debunking the Myths Myth: Everyone in China speaks the same language. Truth: Chinese speak many dialects, sometimes making communication difficult. Although the Chinese have shared the same written language for more than 2,000 years, they have often spoken different dialects. Some are as different from each other as Spanish is from French.

Facts About Asia, Resources

Asian Factoids: Spring, 1998

by

Expatriate Americans in Asia Note: Figures are for 1996 and exclude U.S. government employees and military personnel and their families. Philippines 118,000 Japan 73,300 Hong Kong 40,800 Taiwan 36,600 S. Korea 35,500 Source: U.S. government ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ To Get Rich is Glorious Percentage of China’s urban households owning: Color television 90.8 Refrigerator 88.7 Washing machin...

Facts About Asia

Asian Factoids: Spring, 1997

by EAA Editorial Office

Taiwanese Students, Examination Success, and Religion In Taipei’s Dragon Mountain Buddhist Temple, students seeking examination success can buy, for the equivalent of $23.00, a computer label with name, address, and prayer that is attached to a brilliance lamp’s glass door. The lamp, which is an offering to the god of scholarship, contains tiny electric bulbs that revolve continuously on several cone shaped stands. While there are brilliance lamps dedicated to other deities such as the god ...

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.