Sharifah Munirah Alatas is a scholar and author whose writings focus on Malaysian politics, civil society, good governance, higher education reform and the future direction of universities. In late 2023, AAS Publications will release Reform and Nation-Building: Essays on Socio-Political Transformation in Malaysia, an Asia Shorts collection of articles by Alatas that discuss recent elections, […]
In spring 2008, recently hired CIA analyst Erin Murphy was tasked with a one-month assignment to cover Myanmar in the lead-up to the country’s first vote since 1990. One month soon turned into a career: over the past fourteen years, Murphy has moved between the public and private sectors, keeping Myanmar at the center of […]
Ghost and goblins, spirits and specters … such supernatural beings manifest in stories told around the world, including many classics of the Chinese stage. Yet these spooky tales presented a problem for twentieth-century reformers, who struggled to reconcile their condemnation of “superstition” with the fact that some of the country’s best-known artistic works included superstitious […]
By Alessandro Rippa In 2015, a mind-blowing statistic made the rounds of all major news outlets: China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the United States had in the entire 20th century. While astounding, the news was hardly surprising. During the previous two decades China watchers and the general public alike had become […]
Below is the Editor’s Message from the newest issue of Education About Asia, the open-access teaching journal of the Association for Asian Studies. For complete online access to this issue, as well as over 1,500 articles from 22 years of Education About Asia, please visit the EAA website. By Lucien Ellington, Education About Asia Editor […]
By Tyrell Haberkorn In an essay for the May 2017 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies (“The Anniversary of a Massacre and the Death of a Monarch,” currently free to download), I reflect on the fortieth anniversary of the 6 October 1976 massacre, when state and para-state forces brutally murdered unarmed students at Thammasat […]
By Maria Rosaria Coduti “Dangerous bedfellows,” “rogue brothers in arms,” and “friends in need” are some of the expressions experts and journalists have used to describe North Korea-Myanmar [Burma] relations in the past. In 2005, then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice labeled Myanmar an “outpost of tyranny,” a feature that saw the country enter […]
In the early afternoon of May 12, 2008, a devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake ruptured the countryside of China’s southwestern Sichuan Province. More than 85,000 people died, including at least 5,000 children killed when their schools collapsed—victims of corruption on the part of local officials and building contractors, who had skimmed from the top of building funds […]
