Education About Asia: Online Archives

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Editor's Message

Editor’s Message

by Lucien Ellington

I hope readers are anticipating an improved summer 2021 relative to what many experienced last year. As this issue goes to press, the magnitude of India’s COVID-19 crisis became apparent. Our thoughts and prayers go to the Indian nation. This issue’s special section is “Asia’s Environments: National, Regional, and Global Perspectives.” In contemplating what might be the most useful approach to this topic, a reoccurring thought became my conceptual foundation for this issue’s theme...

Columns

In Memoriam: Ezra F. Vogel (1930–2020)

by Glen S. Fukushima, Peter K. Frost

Those of us who are committed to studying East Asia lost an extraordinary scholar, teacher, and friend when the retired Harvard University Sociology Professor Ezra F. Vogel died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this last December.

Feature Article

Making China And India Great Again? Why China’s and India’s Paths to Power May Hit a Wall, Part II: Foreign Policy Challenges

by Tommy Lamont

For the past decade, experts in international relations have suggested that the world’s center of power is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the main reason is the extraordinary rise of China. They add that the equally remarkable, though slightly slower, rise of India will move the center of global power even further from the West. A number of observers strongly believe the efforts of the United States under former President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy to ...

Feature Article

Waste Politics in Asia and Global Repercussions

by Adam Liebman

“Your garbage is on the way. Prepare a grand reception. Eat it if you want to.” In 2019, this was Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s message to the Canadian government. He had finally convinced them to pay for the return of almost seventy shipping containers of imported garbage that had been sitting in a Philippine port since arriving from Canada in 2013–2014, and he was gloating about the small victory. The Canadian government had been pointing out that it was originally a private c...

Feature Article

The Politics of Climate Vulnerability in Asia

by Pamela McElwee

The seriousness of climate change has become readily apparent over the past decades, with increasingly visible evidence of impacts and risks across the globe—from intensifying hurricanes to large-scale destructive wildfires. Asia is often pointed to as one of the most vulnerable regions, given numerous countries with long coastlines and large populations in low-lying areas, such as the Philippines, which regularly experiences destructive typhoons from the western Pacific Ocean. Othe...

Teaching Resources Essay

Under the Dome

by Andrew M. McGreevy

Under the Dome was first shown in China on February 28, 2015 The documentary is now included in the Global Environmental Justice Documentaries Project, which is based in the USA and Canada and supported by the International Documentary Association. The title of the documentary was taken from the book Under the Dome, written by Stephen King and published in 2009. (The documentary is about China; the book is about the USA.) The documentary is also available online.

Teaching Resources Essay

Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness

by Franklin D. Rausch

Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness (seventy minutes), directed by Suhee Kang and Patrick Lydon, is an exploration of the natural farming movement conducted primarily through interviews with practitioners based in Japan, Korea, and the United States. The late Larry Korn, translator of Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution (first published in 1975), the germ of this manifestation of the movement, is featured throughout, his explanations of the principles of natural farming providing struc...

Feature Article

Turtles All the Way Down: An Update on the Asian Turtle Crisis with New Directions

by Bradley R. Reynolds, Pelf-Nyok Chen, Penni Jo Wilson, Rajeev Chauhan, Tabitha M. Wilson, Team Salamander, Thomas P. Wilson

In Chinese mythology, the goddess Nuwa cuts the legs off the giant turtle Ao and uses them to prop up the sky. In Hindu mythology, Kurma the Tortoise King, one of the avatars of Vishnu, props up Mount Meru and assists in the churning of the Ocean of Milk, thereby allowing the gods to recover the Elixir of Immortality.1 The concept of a World Turtle, supporting the very earth upon its back, is a mythical theme that appears in a variety of mythologies, including those of Asia. That turtles are re...

Feature Article

Developments for Tribal Farmers in Rural India

by Barun S. Mitra, Ken Schoolland

The great obstacle to economic development in rural India is a lack of property rights, according to Trupti Mehta, lawyer for the Action Research in Community Health and Development (ARCH) center. Optimistic and determined, Trupti and her husband, Ambrish Mehta, solved this problem for tribal farmers on their thirty-three-year journey in Gujarat Province, a few hours’ drive from the city of Baroda. Joining Anil Patel, a physician who founded ARCH to help the rural poor, they initially pushed ...

Feature Article

Mongolia’s Environmental Crises: An Introduction

by Morris Rossabi

In the US, China, Russia, and other countries with a sizable population, it is often difficult to discern the effects of climate change and other environmental afflictions.1 A country with a small population offers a greater opportunity to observe the implications of environmental crises. A study of Mongolia, with a population of approximately three million, provides a clearer view, although it is important to remember that Mongolia is quite distinct from these other lands due to its d...

Online Supplement

Cauvery Calling: A Possible Solution for a Dying River and Desperate Farmers

by Helen Kaibara

This story begins with a crisis of food insecurity. In 1966, a severe drought compounded India’s problems of producing sufficient food for its growing population and created near famine conditions in many parts of the country. The government had to import large amounts of wheat from the United States to avoid calamity. As a result of this situation, and with external pressures from the United States and international organizations, the central government made a concerted effort to reform agric...

Teaching Resources Essay

Searching for Sacred Mountain

by Blake Hestir, Dave Aftandilian, Mark Dennis

This review was written by three colleagues and close friends at Texas Christian University (TCU) in Fort Worth, Texas. Although slightly unusual in this sort of review, we believe that describing our academic training and contemplative practices will help readers better understand our comments that represent, like any good interpretive exercise or classroom discussion, multiple, sometimes-incompatible assumptions, orientations, and conclusions. Rather than a shortcoming, however, we see these ...

Book Review Essay

Brother’s Keeper

by Julie Lee

BY JULIE LEE NEW YORK: HOLIDAY HOUSE, 2020 320 PAGES, ISBN: 978-0823444946, HARDCOVER Reviewed by Mary Connor Prior to reading Julie Lee's Brother's Keeper, I had read many of the most respected accounts of the Korean War. However, the author of Brother’s Keeper is a gifted new writer. Inspired by her mother’s wartime recollections of the war, the author focuses on one family, but the reader also becomes aware of the overall civilian experience in wartime and the particular...

Book Review Essay

Batu, Khan of the Golden Horde: The Mongol Khans Conquer Russia (The Silk Road Series)

by Christy Davis

BY DIANE WOLFF GENGHIS PRODUCTIONS, 2020  182 PAGES, ISBN: 978-0578780894, PAPERBACK Reviewed by Christy Davis History, as we know, is written by the victors. But what happens when the victors write nothing down? In the case of the Mongols, history was written by the vanquished, despite exceptional Mongol brutality, and carries with it all the prejudice and bitterness of defeated empires and kingdoms. Over time, and with the absence of any documents to the contrary, the...

Columns

Facts About Asia: Human Flourishing, Energy, and the Environment

by EAA Editorial Office

By the end of 2019, four Asian countries ranked in the top ten world-wide in total energy consumption, the majority of which is derived from fossil fuels. The Asia Pacific region alone consumed 257.6 exajoules (a joule is a unit of energy measurement and one exajoule is one quintillion joules) of energy, the most in the world. China leads the world by a considerable margin with 141.7 exajoules of energy consumed, almost 50 more than the second-place user, the United States.

Feature Article

“Louder than Words”: A Profile of the Destruction of the Aral Sea and Its Consequences

by Reuel R. Hanks

The collapse of the Aral Sea is the greatest human-induced ecological catastrophe in history. Worse than Chernobyl, Bhopal, Minamata, London’s killer smog, and all the other disasters of the industrial age, the unprecedented decline of the Aral stands as a testament to the folly of myopic “economic planning” and the dangers of totalitarianism. Millions of people living in the vicinity of the sea have had their health and livelihood destroyed, and the damage to the region will continue for ...

Online Supplement

India’s Historical Impact on Southeast Asia

by Patit Paban Mishra

India’s historical impact on Southeast Asia forms an important component of world history. In this age of globalization, relations between two significant regions are important. The Look East and Act East policies have become the catch word of Indian foreign relations since the 1990s, where Indian policymakers desired close cooperation with Southeast Asian countries. This is nothing new from an Indian perspective, but an enactment of déjà vu. What we know of today as Indian and ...

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.