ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

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Inequality and Its Enemies in Revolutionary and Reform China

During the epochs of revolution and reform in China over the past six decades, under what conditions have heightened inequality and perceptions of inequality translated into the discernment of inequity and the stimulus to challenge the order perpetuating it? The paper throws light on the key institutions and mechanisms underlying, structuring and restructuring patterns of inequality, the changing features of popular resistance that inequality has bred, and the contested meanings and discourses of it.

Japan, the United States and Yasukuni Nationalism

This paper considers the Yasukuni Shrine, Japanese war memory and representation in relationship to contemporary nationalism and its implications for the future of the Asia-Pacific. It emphasises three aspects about the "Yasukuni Problem" and contemporary nationalism that are absent in much of the discussion in Japan, the Asia-Pacific and internationally. The first is the need to transcend an exclusively Japanese perspective by locating the issues within the framework of the Japan-US relationship. The second locates war nationalism in general, and Yasukuni in particular, within the broader purview of competing nationalism in the Asia-Pacific. The third recognises deep fissures among the Japanese people with respect to Yasukuni, nationalism and the emperor in whose name Japan fought, and memories of colonialism and war.

Terrorism Before and After 9/11

What gives the nation that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that has waged war far from its shores throughout the world on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented destruction of lands and peoples, the prerogative to define global norms of absolute good and absolute evil?

OnAsian Wars, Reparations, Reconciliation

The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery offers a unique perspective for posing issues pertaining not only to Japanese war crimes, but also to those committed by other nations.

Okinawa Citizens, US Bases, and the Security of Asia

the Security of Asia Masamichi Sebastian Inoue John Purves Mark Selden Since 1995, with increasing militancy, inhabitants of Okinawa, a Japanese island, are demonstrating against the military presence of the US on it While the US-Japanese alliance has designed to tie up the persistence of US military base within an economic package for Okinawa's development, the island's inhabitants are determined to oppose both tooth and nail.

Fifty Years after the Bomb-Commemoration, Censorship and Conflict

Fifty Years after the Bomb Commemoration, Censorship and Conflict When either Americans or Japanese talk about the bombings, they not only engage thinking about the meaning of the second world war, but also of subsequent wars, the relationship of citizens to the state, the meaning of democratic participation and the state's prerogatives to make war. While the two official stories reveal much about the national myths of each nation, in the end, the official stories are wholly inadequate to capture the lived experience of all the people of either country or to grasp the ongoing significance of the nuclear era.

Atomic Holocaust, Memory and the War

Mark Selden THE commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the second world war and the dawn of the nuclear era in the US and Japan makes clear that neither the leaders nor public opinion in these nations have yet to come to terms' with the great moral-political issues posed by the conflict. In both nations, impressive bodies of scholarship have reinterpreted the war and the making of the postwar world. Their assessments of the human costs and crimes of war, the political and moral equations of victim and aggressor, the relationship between the end of the war and the subsequent structuring of global power relations in the nuclear era, and the responsibility for life and death that rests on the highest leaders of both nations, have nevertheless had little discernible influence on official statements and policy. Nor have they gained ascendancy in public opinion. That leaders and the dominant media in both nations prefer to emphasise the heroism of their acts and the suffering and the humanity of their own people under wartime conditions is hardly surprising or unique. Yet this unwillingness to accept responsibility for crimes against humanity committed in the search for victory casts a long shadow over contemporary international relations and the prospects for a just peace. The recent abortive efforts by prime minister Maruyama Tomiichi to gain support in the ruling coalition for a meaningful official apology for Japanese crimes against Asian peoples during the era of colonial rule and aggressive war speaks volumes about the continued refusal of the Japanese nation to come to terms with its past. It is a failure made all the more glaring in contrast with German actions to make amends in word and reparations to the victims of Nazi atrocities This leaves officially unresolved Japanese responsibility for a range of issues including crimes against thousands of military forced prostitutes (so-called Comfort Women) from Korea, Taiwan, China, the Netherlands and other nations, the Rape of Nanking, the conduct of vivisection experiments in perfecting chemical and biological weapons, and the use of such weapons in China, and more generally the slaughter of millions of Asians in the course of Japan's colonial wars in the first half of the 20th century, This official position may be contrasted with the unremitting efforts by numerous citizens, including peace activists and historians, to critically assess the historical record and prevent the recurrence of war and particularly crimes of war.

Poverty and Inequality in China and India

Poverty and Inequality in China and India Jim Matson Mark Selden This paper reconsiders the relationship between development strategies and poverty and inequality in China and India over four decades from the 1940s, with particular attention to the consequences of the shifts in strategy in the 1980s. The objective is to reassess the social and economic consequences of specific strategic choices.

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