: Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 (forthcoming with Cornell University Press in December 2022) explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan’s empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. Here’s the unabridged introduction to the volume.

"Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China From Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi." Asian Affairs, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

"Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan’s Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945." Asian Affairs, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

advocates tolerance among civilisations, there are differences, which need immediate attention for the project to flourish and participants to coexist in peace. There could have been a fuller discussion of the real capacity of such joint initiatives to open world economies and also uphold the global free trade regime. We cannot deny the fact that in spite of serving the common goal of benefitting countries, the BRI poses significant strategic, economic, and normative risks and challenges for the future. For example, whilst the BRI on one hand might be judged as a success by China, on the other it may be seen as deleterious for other countries, with its open and concerted efforts to generate further dependency on China, and its capacity to disrupt the existing alignments of economic and strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific.

A key challenge for the social and economic fairness of Southeast Asian nations is not institutional weakness, but institutional strength. That is the main conclusion drawn from this breezy journalistic swoop across parts of the region. Institutions such as the military, police, Church or government can be self-serving or corrupt. That is especially problematic when they lack counterbalances, as they long have in much of Southeast Asia.

China. It describes how the PRC is “constructing a new mode or form of capitalism”. This is “characterised by deep internal regional and local heterogeneity, the overlapping of multiple labour production regimes” (pp. 3–16). This has led to an increase of informal, heterogeneous, and small-scale investors (sanhu or scattered players) in the Chinese stock market, which is dealt with in chapters 4 and 6. Unlike the formal financial expertise of the haigui, sanhu are mostly ill-equipped in understanding the complex turnarounds of the stock market, making decisions believing in either luck or on dahu (large-scale well-off investors, pp. 75–103). In chapter 7, the book explores the increasing role of institutions and financial organisations that point towards the increase in foreign capital stimulation into China. This has fundamentally altered and reset the “state structure and orientation” in the Chinese economy (pp. 175–206).

The title is a misnomer, for there was no tea war. The book does not discuss any military contretemps. There was not even that much of an economic battle. The fragmented Chinese tea trade initially seemed not to care greatly about the nascent competition in India. Chinese labourers were lured to India to help educate people on tea growing and processing. Many had no experience in tea and were apparently chosen simply because they were Chinese. Such was the reputation of Chinese tea at that time.

This article will relate a history of planned railway routes passing through Bangkok or elsewhere in Thailand in pursuit of linking the potentially vast commercial market of China with the transport hub of Singapore. Those plans historically did not come to full fruition. But the current Chinese-backed plans mean that a rail link between China and Singapore is finally likely to become a reality within the coming decade. The benefits for Thailand are contested: while there will be more passenger and freight capacity the financial cost will be high. But there will for the first time in history be a direct rail connection from China to the Malayan peninsula. Indeed in theory it will be possible to board a train in Britain and step off one in Singapore, without having used any other form of transport on the way. Chinese motivations are commercial and geopolitical, as were those of historical schemes by other countries. Unlike historical schemes, however, China looks set to make the planned southeast Asian railway network a reality.

This tome joins a growing corpus of work assessing what the rise of China means for other nation-states. The purchase of the Greek port of Piraeus is but one of many purposeful moves which the auth...