Education About Asia: Online Archives

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EAA Interview, Feature Article

EAA Interview with Edward J. Lincoln

by Lucien Ellington

Edward J. Lincoln returned to Brookings as a Senior Fellow in September 1996. For the previous two-and-a-half years, he served as Special Economic Advisor to Ambassador Walter Mondale in Tokyo, Japan. In that capacity, he was responsible for providing Ambassador Mondale with analysis and advice on economic developments important to the conduct of bilateral affairs. Prior to his position in Tokyo, Dr. Lincoln had been with the Brookings Institute for nine years.

Resources, Web Gleanings

Web Gleanings: Asian Economics

by Judith S. Ames

TITLE: UNITED NATIONS ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMISSION FOR ASIA AND THE PACIFIC URL: http://www.unescap.org/ A large number of documents pertaining to economic development are presented on this site. Among the highlights are an Economic and Social Survey for 1999, a four-volume document, “Integrating Environmental Considerations into the Economic Decision-Making Process,” and “Asia in Figures,” providing data for many Asian nations.

Essay, Resources

Money, Anyone? Fulbright Program Funds for Group Projects

by Philip C. Brown

The U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) Fulbright Group Projects Abroad programs offer a unique and interesting opportunity for area studies faculty to extend their reach into professional schools, junior colleges, and precollegiate education programs in addition to permitting innovation within more standard area studies programs in our college and graduate education.1 The Group Projects program may not be familiar to many, so I should note that these projects span four general project types:

Film Review Essay, Resources

Tapoori: Children of Bombay and Daughters of the Veil: Impact of Education on Women in Pakistan

by Keith Snodgrass

One of the best ways to introduce cultures of other nations to American students can be by helping them to understand at least a little about the lives of their peers, other children, in the countries they are studying. Two recent videos attempt to address this issue in India and Pakistan, and I offer some thoughts on the content of the videos and their utility in the classroom.

Film Review Essay, Resources

Trav’s Travels China

by Marleen Kassel

A shorter version of this review was published by the Asia Educational Media Service (AEMS) of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. AEMS provides information about Asia-related materials to scholars and educators. For further information contact: Sarah I. Barbour, Program Coordinator. Phone: (888) 828-2367 or (217) 265-0641. E-mail: aems@uiuc.edu.

Film Review Essay, Resources

Round Eyes in the Middle Kingdom

by Jonathan Goldstein

Ronald Levaco, a member of the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University, spent over six years producing his autobiographical video, Round Eyes in the Middle Kingdom. He has assimilated his father Ben’s extraordinary black-and-white movies and still shots of pre-Revolutionary China with historical footage and with interviews Ronald conducted in the 1990s with Israel Epstein. “Eppy,” Ben’s boyhood friend in Tianjin, became a revolutionary and remained in China in 1949 when th...

Film Review Essay, Resources

Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square

by Diana Marston-Wood

This thirty-minute film presents a vividly artistic and highly personal view of China, especially during the period 1960 through 1989. Truly unique is the fascinating mix of graphics which the filmmaker, Shui-Bo Wang, utilizes to convey impressions of his life. Wang mixes cartoon animation with both black-and-white still photos and colorful propaganda pictures. He never uses video clips; instead, Wang himself manipulates still images to convey the movement he wishes. For instance, he shows a ske...

Feature Article

Globalizing Intellectual Property Rights: Asian Resistance and US Pressure

by Denise Eby Konan, Sumner La Croix

Over the last twenty years, the U.S. government has repeatedly clashed with Asian countries over their intellectual property laws and enforcement. Arguing that weak Asian intellectual property laws fail to adequately protect the intellectual property of its citizens, the U.S. government has regularly threatened to impose trade sanctions unless Asian intellectual property rights (IPRs) are strengthened. These hard-nosed threats have been accompanied by some remarkable rhetoric: Asian countries sh...

Feature Article

Ten Years After: Essential Features of APEC’s Evolution and Future Prospects

by David McClain

It’s been less than a year after the Nobel Prize for economics was awarded to Robert Mundell, who provided much of the conceptual underpinning for the single currency, the euro, adopted at the beginning of 1999 by eleven of the fifteen members of the European Union (EU). Thus it seems particularly appropriate to review the ongoing enterprise of teaching about another, much younger regional grouping, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), which celebrated its tenth birthday in 1999.

Feature Article

Teaching Asian Political Economy: The Evolution of an Ethnographic Survey Course

by Gene Cooper

Let me confess at the start that I am not an economist, but an anthropologist with an interest in comparative political economy, and an area specialization in China. In the early 1970s, I conducted field research in Hong Kong on urban craftsmen, apprenticing as a woodcarver in a factory producing “art-carved” furniture and camphor wood chests. In later years, I conducted a study of the rural industrial sector of Dongyang County in China’s Zhejiang province, the native place of my former Ho...

Feature Article

Lessons from Development of the Indonesian Economy

by William E. James

Indonesia, a vast archipelago containing many thousands of inhabited and uninhabited islands, is the fourth most populous country on the planet. The Indonesian Archipelago is 5,000 kilometers in breadth and straddles the equator, with a dramatic diversity of flora and fauna. Indonesia contains the fabled Spice Islands· the Moluccas that Iberian and other European explorers sought in the epic voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Long before the Europeans finally arrived in the early...

Book Review, Resources

Beyond Spring: Tz’u Poems of the Sung Dynasty

by Beata Grant

This elegant book is a fitting addition to a publication series which, since 1961, has published translations of classic works of literature from India, China and Japan by such master translators as Burton Watson, Donald Keene, and Barbara Stoler Miller. Julie Landau’s translation of Chinese tz’u or song-lyrics from the Sung Dynasty (960–1279) is limited to a selection of works by fifteen poets. However, her judicious choice of which authors and poems to include and her spare yet evocative...

Feature Article

Teaching About Southeast Asian Economics

by R. L. Curry Jr.

The rich cultural and social milieu of Southeast Asia provides a superb background within which to study the region’s national economies and the way that they are linked as an economic region, particularly via participation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The intellectual richness of the region’s diversity is augmented by the wide variety of national economic structures that add to the regional mosaic. As a result, studying and teaching about Southeast Asia is truly an...

Book Review, Resources

Thailand’s Boom and Bust

by Sunil Kukreja

Thailand’s Boom and Bust is an examination of both the fundamental changes and subtle developments associated with Thailand’s decade-long economic expansion that ostensibly started in the mid-1980s. In my view, Phongpaichit and Baker do a fine job of steering clear of indulging in what often tends to be a dry and worst yet, one-dimensional economic analysis of Thailand’s experience during the aforementioned period. At first glance, it might appear as if the authors embark on a rather overl...

Book Review, Resources

Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

by Paul A. Rodell

As the title implies, Craig A. Lockard has written a book that is far more than a traditional ethno-musicology. Originating in the author’s own 1960s American experience that combined political awareness and action with contemporary popular music, this text seeks to interpret modern political trends and developments in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia, and Singapore through an examination of contemporary popular music culture. The work is prefaced by an introductory chapter th...

Book Review, Resources

Stories from South Asia

by Keith Snodgrass

One of the best aspects of teaching literature classes at any level now is the amazing variety of material from around the world available in the English language. This phenomenon is in part the legacy of the British Empire, and much of the best of this writing comes from the former “jewel” of that empire, South Asia (British India in the colonial era). With the observation a couple of years ago of the fiftieth anniversary of independence for India and Pakistan (I’m not sure how this occas...

Book Review, Resources

The Japanese Way of Tea: From Its Origins in China to Sen Rikyū

by David D. Buck

The present-day tradition of the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) takes Sen Rikyū (1522–91) as its founder. The author of this specialized history is the current master in one of three lineages of chanoyu schools that trace their origins back more than four hundred years to Sen Rikyū. The present Sen Soshitsu (b. 1923) is the fifteenth descendent in the Urasenke branch. The Urasenke tradition is the most prominent in Japan and has actively promoted itself overseas. Sōshitsu XV, among his var...

Book Review, Resources

Hojoki, Visions of a Torn World

by Mike Sugimoto

This new translation of the Hōjōki available as a handsomely published, separate volume, is a welcome addition to the earlier Keene and Sadler versions. The new work comes complete with endnotes and an informative introduction elucidating the poetics of the text, the historical upheavals of late Heian and early Kamakura politics, as well as some fundamentals regarding the emerging egalitarianism within Mahayana Buddhism.

Book Review, Resources

Seasons of High Adventure: Edgar Snow in China

by Barbara Mori

To be successful, a biography must make the reader care about the subject. Whether people are depicted as angels, devils, gods or sinners, the reader must come to care passionately about them and what they do or what happens to them in the course of their lives. Some subjects loom large on the historic stage and by this means are an easy subject to attract the attention of the reader. The names are surrounded in mystery, intrigue, or controversy, and the reader is drawn to follow their stories. ...

Book Review, Resources

Modern China: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism

by Chen-Main Wang

In this age of large, multivolume publications on China, both past and present, another encyclopedic work on the modern period, albeit a single volume work, is welcome in the library and in the classroom. Moreover, while it is a most difficult task to transform the extremely complex history of modern China into a balanced and coherent reference work, Wang Ke-wen and his collaborators have accepted the challenge and made a fairly good showing of it.

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.