Asian Elites Research Articles

Assessing Effects of China's Party Diplomacy vis-à-vis Southeast Asia: Ideas, Interests, and Controversies

Abstract: China's party diplomacy—the Communist Party of China's own international outreach—has become an important component of China's foreign relations. Given Southeast Asia's strategic importance, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been proactively engaging political elites in the region. What are the immediate changes party diplomacy brings about for Southeast Asian actors, and how do they translate into long-term consequences? I propose a three-pronged framework to explore the local effects of China's party diplomacy, respectively, concerning exposure to ideas, the pursuit of interests, and the emergence of controversies. Drawing on a novel dataset and using illustrative cases of Vietnam, Singapore, Myanmar, and Malaysia, I show how the effects are contingent on the agency of Southeast Asian actors and domestic dynamics in each country. From the standpoint of Southeast Asian elites, engagement with the CPC could bring about ideational and material benefits, while domestic pushback, if any, is easy to deflect and tends to fade away over time. China's party diplomacy is best described as a moderate status quo multiplier that leads to noticeable changes without triggering structural shifts.

‘Two parts – one whole’? Kazakh–Kyrgyz relations in the making of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, 1917–24

ABSTRACT This article argues that the Kazakh–Kyrgyz relationship in many ways shaped the emergence of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyz elites were willing to collaborate with Kazakhs while simultaneously trying not to be marginalized by them. Kazakh elites in the Turkestan ASSR’s government supported the first Kyrgyz nationalist project, the Kara-Kyrgyz Mountain Oblast (KKMO), in 1922. However, the division of Turkestan during the Central Asian national–territorial delimitation in 1924 and the increased linkage between national identity and political and cultural rights deprived the Kazakh–Kyrgyz regions of their socio-economic unity. Consequently, Kyrgyz leaders, to get their fair share of the disintegrating Central Asian economy as a separate group, had to contrast themselves to their Kazakh allies. The case of Soviet Kyrgyzstan shows that the intertwined relationship among Central Asian elites provides a more nuanced and complicated story of the formation of Soviet national republics in the region. Particularly, Central Asia’s settled/nomadic dichotomy and the inter-elite relationship within each population have been more influential than scholars have acknowledged.

Bound ‘Together by the Golden Thread of a Common Tradition’? Decolonization, Identity, and the Legacies of EmpIre in British-South Asian Relations

It is commonly argued that, between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, there was a shift from cooperation in the formerly ‘British’ Commonwealth to a set of national priorities determined by the more realist considerations of the Cold War. Accounts of South Asian decolonization and relations with Britain in this period understandably tend to highlight the political and cultural nationalism espoused by the leaders of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon. Whilst valuable, they do not adequately explain why espousal of ‘British’ values, customs, and traditions continued to be important to South Asian political leaders, at a time when it was widely believed that British power and influence were in global decline. Here we address the central question: how did perceptions of the legacies of empire shape British-South Asian relations during and after formal decolonization? South Asian elites deployed ideas about the legacies of imperialism and the post-independence Commonwealth that were refracted through the interpretive lens of a complex and multi-layered range of both shared and contested British and world historical experiences and identities in order to justify specific political goals. South Asian leaders’ overall intellectual commitment to constitutionalism, representative government, international cooperation, and a liberal world order was a genuine product of their deep historical reflection on the experience of empire and the ‘British World’. These ideas sometimes came into conflict with political realities at the local level, however.

Noblemen in business in the nineteenth century: the survival of an economic elite?*

This editorial introduces the 10 articles included in the special issue on ‘Noblemen-entrepreneurs in the Nineteenth Century. Investments, Innovation, Management and Networks’. The collected works focus on the business activities of noblemen in Europe and Asia, thus offering up opportunities for comparison in an age of economic expansion and globalisation. What was the contribution of the nobility to the economy? Can we consider noblemen to have been endowed with an entrepreneurial spirit? What differences or similarities can we draw between the European and Asian elites? In this introduction, we give a synthetic overview of the relevant issues in the broad topic of the collection and their importance to business history, and briefly present the accepted articles. As two of the articles deal with the Japanese case, while the others focus on Europe, we have dedicated specific sections to the European and Japanese nobilities.

소비에트 연방정부 수립에 대한 중앙아시아 엘리트들의 대응과 ‘민족-공화국’ 경계 형성의 역학

This article examines the background of the establishment of Central Asian ‘nation-republics’ in the 1920s-1930s, which is the period of the Soviet Union Building. And it also examines the process of defining the borders that determined the present five Central Asian countries. There were various responses of the Central Asian elites to the advance of the Bolshevik’s central government into Central Asia, ranging from active cooperation to extreme resistance.<BR> Nevertheless, Central Asia was integrated into the Soviet Union and was divided into each ‘nation-republic’. The intention of the central government was fulfilled in the border setting process, but the ambition and division of the local elites also worked as a factor. Looking at these processes, it seems that there is a limit to the identification of the Soviet Union with the general imperialist countries of the West. Unlike the Western imperialist countries that divided and ruled colonies for their own expropriation and economic gain, it can be evaluated that the territory and the human and material resources were divided for the development of the entire vast federal state of the Soviet Union.<BR> However, it is difficult to agree with the premise that the Soviet Union promotes the establishment of a nation-state by first creating a nation for the nation without a nation, and then creating the Soviet Union as a post-nationalist state. In the case of the Bukhara and Khiva Khanates, not only were they culturally outstanding, but they were also in the form of states, so it is difficult to see that they were only engaged in conflicts at the ethnic level, as identified by the Soviet central government. Nevertheless, the establishment of a nation-republics and the setting of the borders also promoted the centralization of the Soviet Union.<BR> The process of demarcation from above has had a profound impact on the history of Central Asia. The border making formed new identities and created new conflicts. And it created enclaves and territorial disputes that continue to this day.

Authoritarianism as an Institution? The Case of Central Asia

AbstractWhile much of the English School has focused on liberal aspects of solidarism, forms of “illiberal solidarism” in contemporary international society remain underexplored. Drawing on archival material and elite interviews conducted in Central Asia in the period 2013–2019, this paper advances the claim that the Central Asian elites have developed the institution of authoritarianism in their region through the mechanisms of mimicry/emulation and praise/blame. By looking at specific discourses and practices over the last two decades, the paper discusses how the Central Asian governments have been using the new elements of the “democratic transition” in combination with the traditional legitimation offered by diplomatic recognition to secure authoritarian regimes in the democratic age, to create authoritarian state-centric solidarity in the region, and to make “avtoritet” and “stabil'nost'” fundamental pillars of the Central Asian regional order. The paper contributes to the English School literature by providing an initial account of illiberal solidarism and by showing how authoritarianism can potentially be an institution of specific regional international societies; to the authoritarian diffusion literature by demonstrating that authoritarianism can have a deontic component alongside considerations of domestic survival; and to the broader norm diffusion literature by focusing on the spread of illiberal values.

The Bourgeois Cinema of Boba Liberalism

If what characterizes Asian American radical politics in 2020 is an articulation of the difference between, and interrelatedness of, the Asian diasporic elite and the migrant poor, the 2018 Asian American films Crazy Rich Asians and Searching achieved mainstream success by celebrating the emergence of the former. The media paratexts of Crazy Rich Asians used race-consciousness as putative resistance, engendering “messianic visibility”—an over-investment in cinematic identification as possessing transformative, even curative, political and personal potential for liberal cisheteronormativity. Meanwhile, Searching's marketing as a film not about race was a significant talking point in the U.S. press. Its colormuteness functioned to normalize the entanglement of Asian diasporic elites in the ranks of Silicon Valley's digital empire. The films’ lack of friction in relation to surveillance capitalism and neoliberal empire ultimately highlights the contradictions of race and/as resistance in the present moment.

Editor’s Introduction: Southeast Asia Plus

Southeast Asia – its politics, governance and foreign relations – is the strong suit of this 44th issue of Asian Politics & Policy. From May 2018 until May 2019, we witnessed several elections taking place in this region which is known for its very diverse political systems and lively internal power dynamics. For this edition of Praxis, editor Jacob Ricks has assembled brief essays providing analyses of elections in Malaysia, Timor Leste, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. All are written by young scholars working on these six countries. As Ricks notes, we have been bemoaning the decline of democracy at the global level in recent years. Both the government’s backtracking on the practice and promotion of multi-party democracy, and authoritarian China and Russia’s touting of their own model, represent threats to democracy. Whether or not influenced by these trends, how the Southeast Asian elites and publics try to grapple with their own challenges of governance and development through elections is as important to the future of democracy in the world. Governance in Southeast Asia is also given the spotlight in Hai Hong Nguyen's article which looks at state-society relations in Vietnam, mediated by the communist leadership that has to maintain strong central control for the regime to survive, and yet be responsive to demands from below. Gabriel Lele examines the effects of asymmetric decentralization, a situation where several subnational governments of the same level (e.g. provincial level) are allowed varying political, fiscal, and administrative arrangements by the central government. The experiences of four Indonesian provinces – Papua, Papua Barat, Aceh, and Yogyakarta – are offered as case studies of how asymmetric decentralization can succeed or fail. On another note, how domestic political factors affect the foreign policy choices of three countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, and China) in relation to the South China Sea territorial disputes, are the subject of three articles by Chow-Bing Ngeow, Yohanes Sulaiman and Mingjiang Li, respectively. These papers draw from a research project curated by Mingjiang Li and run from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. An accompanying contribution on the Philippines by Mark Bryan Manantan looks, not at the domestic factors, but at the geopolitical calculations of a weak country navigating relations with and between two competing great powers in this same maritime arena. Finally, to give us a breather from Southeast Asia Glenn Diesen takes us to the far opposite end of the continent as he writes about the economic interests and strategies undergirding Russia’s Greater Eurasia Initiative – a geopolitical project, too, no doubt, as Russia inches closer to the rest of Asia at this time of turbulent great power relations.

Practices of traditionalization in Central Asia

Over the last two centuries, ‘tradition’1 has been invoked in Central Asia by Russian and Soviet regimes, as well as by local Central Asian elites, largely in two ways: either as a deficiency to be...

ПОСТСОВЕТСКИЕ ГОСУДАРСТВА ЦЕНТРАЛЬНОЙ АЗИИ В ПОЛИТИКЕ КИТАЯ

Основные направления взаимодействия с КНР постсоветских государств Центральной Азии (ЦА) проанализированы в контексте становления Китая как мировой державы, завязавшей тесные контакты с другими странами и регионами мира в рамках своих глобальных проектов. Показано взаимодействие Китая с рядом государств Южной и Юго-Восточной Азии при реализации инициативы “Один пояс, один путь”. Определены интересы Китая в Центрально-Азиатском регионе, выявлены основные сферы взаимного сотрудничества Китая и центральноазиатских государств. Рассмотрены риски, возникающие в ЦА вследствие активной экономической экспансии Китая в сочетании с предоставляемой им помощью развитию. Проанализировано в связи с этим восприятие в ЦА китайского фактора.

Shah Abuʾl-Maʿali , Mir Sayyid ʿAli, and the Sayyids of Tirmiz: Three Portraits Challenge Akbari Historiography

Abstract This essay closely examines three early Mughal portraits—the Portrait of Shah Abuʾl-Maʿali, Portrait of Mir Musavvir, and an alleged self-portrait of Mir Sayyid ʿAli—as well as a seal impression from an early sixteenth-century copy of Jamal al-Din Husayni Shirazi’s Rawżat al-Aḥbāb. The resulting scenario challenges certain scholarly assumptions that are based on a blind acceptance of the narrative contained in official Mughal sources. The analysis serves to substantiate and articulate evidence on the role of Central Asian elites (more specifically, religious elites) in the early Mughal period. It also contributes to the socio-historical contextualization of Mughal paintings on the basis of the inscriptions contained in them and stimulates further discussion on the origins of Mughal portraiture.

Replica localization in East Asia: the case of the Asian hedge fund industry

ABSTRACTHedge funds exemplify complex finance in the global economy and are appearing in diverse national settings. One question that follows is whether hedge funds in the Asian region have been localized and exhibit significant differences to their US/UK counterparts or whether there is predominantly one global model. The analysis here point to the importance of what is called replica localization, wherein local control has entailed little deviation from the practices of Anglo-American hedge funds. Evidence generated from databases and interviews confirms the largely equivalent structures and strategies found in the new Asian hedge fund sector. The significance is that a small but growing Asian financial space has been carved out that is funded by Asian capital and managed by Asian elites but matches external models. To further delineate globalized finance, comparative research is needed to determine when and why complex finance is either present or absent outside of Anglo-American economies.

Humanitarianism and the Overseas Aid Craze in Britain’s Colonial Straits Settlements, 1870–1920*

This paper builds on a recent trend in the historiography of the British Empire, one which emphasises the multi-centred origins of ideologies, policies and social movements, to explore flows of humanitarian aid which emanated from Britain’s late-colonial Straits Settlements and then traversed the globe to reach Europe, India, Persia, South Africa, China and Japan. It therefore challenges the Eurocentricism of recent, purportedly global, histories of the modern humanitarian movement, while reinforcing this movement’s close relationship with the history of international capital. Between 1870 and 1920, many leading humanitarian activists in the Straits Settlements were wealthy Chinese, Indian and Arab merchants, who (along with their employees) made up the principal donors during the charitable funds ‘craze’. In part, the humanitarian impulses of these activists derived from the alternative universalisms being articulated by local Asian intellectuals at this time, with their well-publicized notions of ‘universal brotherhood’ and common humanity. At the same time, the Straits’ charitable funds ‘craze’ took on an undeniable pragmatic political character determined by the wider colonial context. Ultimately, overseas aid-giving became a field of action which bolstered the British Empire yet offered Asian elites a space in which to contest the racial hierarchies which the Empire enforced, and to demand new rights as imperial citizens.

Blum, Douglas W. The Social Process of Globalization: Return Migration and Cultural Change in Kazakhstan Molchanov, Mikhail A Eurasian Regionalisms and Russian Foreign Policy (review)

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 584 Blum, Douglas W. The Social Process of Globalization: Return Migration and Cultural Change in Kazakhstan. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2016. vii + 214 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £64.99: $99.99. Molchanov, Mikhail A. Eurasian Regionalisms and Russian Foreign Policy. The International Political Economy of New Regionalisms Series. Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2015. xiii + 190. Map. Tables. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. These authors share a geographical focus on Russia’s main neighbours and partners in the post-Soviet region (Kazakhstan and for Molchanov also Ukraine and Belarus) and a thematic focus on the process of transnational integration. That said, it is remarkable that there should be no perceptible links between their analyses. In large part, of course, that is because Douglas Blum (Providence College, RI) is concerned with the diffusion of cultural values while Mikhail Molchanov (St Thomas University, Canada) writes about political economy and geopolitics. But there is more to it than that. What Blum has produced is an account of the experience of young Kazakhs who study in the United States, are influenced to a greater or lesser extent by American cultural values and practices such as self-sufficiency and informality, and then have to ‘negotiate cultural difference’ after returning home. This is a worthy and interesting topic in its own right. What I would question is how much it really tells us about ‘the social process of globalization’ (which is, after all, the title of the book). Nowhere does the author assess the importance of returning students relative to other carriers of cultural change. And by listening exclusively to people who studied in the United States while ignoring those who studied in Russia, Turkey and especially China, he equates globalization with Americanization. (A rapidly increasing proportion of the members of Kazakh and other Central Asian elites obtained their higher education in China.) ‘Globalization’ here is no more than a fashionable label attached to a study of cultural contact between two national societies. Kazakhstan,astheEurasianstateparexcellence(Molchanov,p.85),isapivotal and committed participant in efforts at Eurasian integration. Molchanov has provided a useful and balanced assessment of the various evolving and overlapping regional integration projects in Eurasia (defined as the former Soviet Union plus China). His approach is refreshing in several respects. First, he differs from many commentators in not viewing these projects solely or primarily as vehicles of Russian (or Chinese) hegemonic ambitions, although he acknowledges the centrality of Russian (and Chinese) foreign and energy policies. ‘The regionalist turn in Russia’s foreign policy’, he concludes, ‘suggests flexibility and adaptation, not neoimperialism, hegemonism or reassertion of spheres of influence’ (p. 157). REVIEWS 585 Second, he does not, as do many Eurocentric theorists of regional integration, adopt the model of the European Union as a universal benchmark for comparison. Finally, he is to be commended simply for taking Eurasian integration projects seriously and not assuming that they are impractical and doomed to failure. Molchanov’s analysis of Ukraine’s ‘multivectorism’, although already overtaken by events, remains essentially relevant. He attributes the tragedy in Ukraine not to regionalism as such but to ‘the contamination of [regional] economics by geopolitics’ (p. 157) — a distortion for which the West bears much of the responsibility. Where then does this leave ‘globalization’? Is it just a fancy and misleading name for a specific class of regional integration processes — those centred in Europe, the United States and Japan? Would it not then be more honest to make regionalism our central concept and recognize that we still live in a divided world? Providence, RI Stephen D. Shenfield Wilson, Andrew. Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2014. ix + 236 pp. Maps. Tables. Notes. Index. £12.99 (paperback). One of the first of many books to come off the presses following the tumultuous events in Ukraine that began in early 2014 was Andrew Wilson’s latest study of a country he has written on extensively and about which he is a respected expert. The book can be divided into three parts. The first three chapters provide context and background to the crisis. The following four lay out a chronology...

Rising Sino-Japanese competition: perspectives from South-East Asian elites

ABSTRACTOne of the biggest challenges for the East Asian region today is the Sino-Japanese relationship. Starting with the fishing trawler incident in September 2010, followed by Japan's nationalisation of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, this relationship is experiencing an escalation of tensions in most, if not all, areas of the bilateral relationship. In response to the intensifying competition, China and Japan have elevated the importance of South-East Asia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in their foreign policy strategies. Focusing on how elites from five South-East Asian states—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam—perceive the engagement of China and Japan with the region, this article poses two questions: (1) How do South-East Asian elites view the Sino-Japanese competition? and (2) How do South-East Asian elites view the role of ASEAN in managing the competition? The analysis here concludes that while some South-East Asian elites see opportunities in the Sino-Japanese competition, they nevertheless do not perceive it as an issue of critical significance. Instead, the concern lies generally with major-power dynamics, and particularly with Sino-US relations. ASEAN is viewed to lack the ability to manage the negative consequences of the Sino-Japanese competition, although its external balancing function has perceptibly helped to restrain any escalation of major-power tensions.

Reviving Central Asia’s religious ties with the Indian subcontinent? The Jamaat al Tabligh

As a consequence of Russian and Soviet domination in Central Asia, local Islam has been considerably isolated from the rest of the Muslim world. However, the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened the door for the reestablishment of new relations between Central Asian Muslims and their brethren in other countries such as Turkey, Iran and the Arab peninsula. Most of these new foreign Islamic influences have been the subject of a good deal of scholarly analysis. However, the influence of one region has been insufficiently analysed, despite its importance and the deep historical relations between the two regions: the contribution of South Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, to the Islamic revival in Central Asia. The Indian subcontinent’s share in the re-Islamisation of Central Asia is essentially the work of the Jamaat al Tabligh, the most transnational Islamic movement in the world. Very active in Kyrgyzstan, where it benefits from the tacit support of the local authorities, it is nevertheless completely banned in Uzbekistan, while it has been episodically tolerated in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. Thanks to its particular method of proselytism the movement has been very successful in a very short period of time. Its activism in Central Asia, India and Pakistan will reinforce cooperation between these two regions despite the general suspicion among Central Asian elites and leaders towards any kind of influence coming from the south.

Failed Asian Values Subjects and Neoliberal State Discourse in Malaysia and Singapore

Since the 1990s, and currently in state discourses of free-market integration, ruling Southeast Asian elites have deployed the narrative of Asian cultural ascendance – ‘Asian values’ discourse — as an explanation for Southeast Asian developmental exceptionalism. Ruling elites continue to push for a social consensus that mobilizes neoliberal capitalist subject-formation as the proper postcolonial nation-building teleology. However, my reading of the widely performed contemporary plays, Family, and Ang Tau Mui, A Modern Woman by highly acclaimed Malaysian-Chinese playwright, Leow Puay Tin, examines how the Asian values discourse is interrogated and disrupted through subaltern historiographical interventions that remember colonial-capitalist subjugation, social mobility failure and class fragmentation that are otherwise evacuated in the dominant retelling of Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese success stories.

Settled Strangers: Asian business elites in East Africa (1800-2000)

Settled Strangers: Asian business elites in East Africa (1800-2000)

The Constraints of the Past and the Failure of Central Asian Regionalism, 1991–2004

This article examines the failure of regional integration in post-Soviet Central Asia. It proposes a narrative of the rise and fall of Central Asian regionalism between 1991 and 2004 centered on the perceptions and expectations of the region’s republics. The argument is that these states did not emerge from the USSR in an ideational vacuum, where their construction of self at the international level was to be defined from scratch. Rather, the Central Asian elites inherited pre-existing understandings of the role and place of their respective state in the new international system. At the regional level, an actual and a perceived set of power relations led to incompatible preferences and strategies, thus making it impossible to find common ground for Central Asian regionalism.

THE ‘TROPICAL DOMINIONS’: THE APPEAL OF DOMINION STATUS IN THE DECOLONISATION OF INDIA, PAKISTAN AND CEYLON

ABSTRACTThe paper examines the reasons that India, Pakistan and Ceylon chose to become Dominions within the Commonwealth instead of becoming republics on independence as many expected. Each of these South Asian states had different motives that compelled them to take on a form of government more associated in areas where the British had settled in significant numbers. The ‘Tropical Dominions’ differed from the settler cases and tested this vague British concept. The British and South Asians had to compromise their wishes in order to satisfy their wants. India is characterised here as the ‘Expedient Dominion’, Pakistan the ‘Siege Dominion’ and Ceylon the ‘Imitation Dominion’. This paper focuses on the years immediately prior to independence to understand the various objectives of the South Asian elites that negotiated with the British for their sovereignty and how they varied from each other and from the Dominion ideal.