The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12)

The emigration movement to Manchuria began in full scale with the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932, when approximately 300,000 Japanese people migrated to northeastern China to the end of the war. Recent scholarship on Manchuria has focused on non-state, non-elite actors, unlike postwar scholarship that centered its attention on national economic and political elites in order to critique the governing structures and their operation. Following this trend, this paper explores the settlers from Tokyo who were poor but dreamed about renewing their lives in Manchuria, thereby supporting the Japanese empire. Considering the sheer number of settlers who participated in the emigration movement, cases of Tokyo might not reflect largely on the national efforts. However, Tokyo occupied an indispensable place in the emigration campaign by modeling the patterns and structures that would form the national agenda. This paper examines why many people willingly supported the occupation of foreign land and analyzes the complex apparatus that structured and managed the mobilization operation without imposing a cohesive authoritarian regime. The paper concludes that what enabled such popular participation was a widespread culture of imperialism made evident in the action of the poor Japanese citizens who chose to become farmers in Manchuria.

China and Italy are both countries with a strong culture and long history, that share positive bilateral relations. In 2019, Italy was the first EU country to sign a MoU with China on collaboration within the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s major diplomatic outreach system. However, more than two years later, most agreements have not materialized yet. Is it due to political implications or economic interests? It is arguable that one of the main reasons for this slow development is connected to communication barriers and differences in identities and perceptions, and therefore to the cultural relations between the two countries. By applying the Constructivist theories, it is possible to demonstrate how the lack in mutual understanding can hinder deeper cooperation between people and countries. This leads to the main questions addressed in this paper: what are the obstacles to a deeper Italy-China partnership, how to overcome them and improve the overall relations? This paper is the first part of a bigger thesis that will be completed in 2023. Rome and Beijing had planned a “China-Italy 2020 Year of Culture and Tourism”, to enhance the people-to-people exchanges, tourism and cultural cooperation. However, due to the Coronavirus pandemics the events have been postponed to 2022. This paper analyses the Italian public opinion on China during 2020, when instead of learning about the other culture, people were forced to practice social distancing. It will be necessary to compare the 2020 public opinion polls with surveys conducted after the 2022 Year of Culture and Tourism. If the results will show improvement in the Italian public opinion on China and increased interstate cooperation, it will be possible to demonstrate the idea that the collaboration between the two countries can improve thanks to further cultural exchanges and mutual understanding.

This paper focuses on the community engaged endeavors of an art collective based in Xisan village, an urban village in the outskirt of Guangzhou, under a loosely organized socially engaged art project entitled “Xi-San Film Studio.” The project, founded by curator Zheng Hongbin in collaboration with his artist friends in early 2017, has focused on raising the publicness of contemporary art and expanding the space of civic participation for ordinary people through artistic activities. In particular, intersecting art, documentary making, and citizen journalism, the collective embeds their social criticism and activism through producing and disseminating short documentaries that center on the daily experiences of people (both native villagers and migrant residents, artists themselves included) living in urban peripheries. Situating Xi-San Film Studio and its activities within the context of Guangzhou’s urban development and market-driven social transformations, the paper discusses how these documentary makers seek to bring to light challenges, uncertainties, and social injustices residents have to negotiate with in the village. It illustrates that through focusing on personal lives of many residents and the village’s changing built environment, their films provide valuable documentations of how lives are lived by people in geographically, economically, and socially marginalized locations.

Despite participating in the occupation of Japan from March 1946 through to October 1947, the participation of the Indian Army and Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) in the Allied Occupation has been largely ignored. This chapter provides background to the despatch of the Indian troops to Japan and outlines some of the duties and activities of both forces during their deployment to Japan. It introduces the make-up of both contingents and some of the interactions between the troops and the local Japanese as well as other troops.

The outbreak of the coronavirus has upended people’s lives with marginalized populations the most impacted. In Hong Kong, domestic workers face pressure from their employers who expect them to simultaneously keep the household clean and COVID-free, and to provide care duties to families, children and the elderly. Many workers have reported taking on additional workload, working longer hours and in some cases, continuing to work through their days off. Concurrently, domestic workers worry about their families back home who may have lost jobs or had fallen ill during the pandemic. Workers carry the additional financial burden to support and keep everyone afloat in this time of global health crisis. With few social protections and lack of policies to protect domestic workers in Hong Kong, they are left vulnerable, and their health and well-being severely affected. This paper seeks to explore the impacts of COVID-19 on Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong. Through preliminary surveys and semi-structured interviews, the paper examines how domestic workers have adjusted to the 'new normal’, and made use of varying strategies and resources to survive in this time of crisis. The paper also discusses the issues and challenges faced by domestic workers, and contemplates on the uncertainties of COVID-19 and lasting after effects of the pandemic on this community.

In recent years, a growing number of Chinese urban TV dramas both adopt a women-oriented perspective and feature main female characters with strong career ambitions for upward social mobility. Noticeably, a common narrative stock in this type of women-centric urban TV dramas is the struggle of young white-collar women of rural background to establish their lives in the cities while being constantly haunted by their original families with backward gender norms. Conducting narrative analysis on three popular women-centric urban TV dramas between 2016 and 2020, this paper illuminates how rural China has been “othered” in urban dramas that represent and underline young women’s autonomy from an apparently feminist stance in contemporary China. By doing so, the paper fills the gap in the existing literature of Chinese TV studies in terms of the intersectionality of gender, class and the urban-rural hierarchy in media representations. The paper demonstrates that these three women-centred TV dramas analogously construct an abject rural other that disrupts the rural migrant protagonists’ endeavour to establish a normalized middle-class life in urban China. The stereotyped and essentialized rural otherness on the one hand serves to highlight the protagonists’ individual aspirations and career pursuit in spite of their immanent tensions. On the other hand, it also consolidates and romanticizes the urban middle-class masculine authority which underpins the reemphasis of women’s domesticity in contemporary China.

In 1915, the first middle school for Taiwanese students, Taichu middle school (臺中中學校), was established in central Taiwan. The campaign attracted nearly 250,000 yen in donations from 203 local elites across the island. This study will focus on the campaign first, making extensive use of the donor lists. By utilizing prosopographical, GIS and SNA methods, this study aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the donors, focusing on their family and educational backgrounds, social network and spatial distribution. With these methods, this study extends the discussion to lesser-known local elites, rather than just limited to well-known figures. To be sure, this case happened in the context of Japanese suppression of the last large-scale arms rebellion and the emergence of the modern-style Taiwanese socio-political movement in the mid-1910s. So this study will trace the linkage of the Taichu Middle School Establishing Campaign with the later socio-political movement in the 1910s to the 1930s. From the failed attempt of Taiwan Assimilation Society (臺灣同化會) in 1914 To the end of the Taiwan Parliament Petition Movement (臺灣議會設置請願運動) in 1934. This study will conclude with a discussion on continuities and ruptures the elites faced in the post-war era, with 78 socio-political organizations across two periods as the subjects, focusing on the experiences of the Taiwan Political Construction Association (臺灣政治建設協會, TPCA) members. This study will provide visualization and discussion of the formation and the transformation of the Taiwanese local elites, shedding new insights on changing configurations in different socio-political contexts.