Geoffrey C. Gunn

Laos in 1990: Winds of Change

Laos in 1990 saw winds of change blowing but not all in the direction willed by the ruling Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party. Overall, the momentum of economic reform and restructuring was abetted by further infusions of Western aid. However, looming prospects of a cutoff in Soviet bloc aid and disillusion stemming from the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe saw Laos once again bidding up ties with Thailand and China. Otherwise, Laos retains its client status vis-a-vis Vietnam and, as with Vietnam, has sought to keep the lid on pressures for political opening. Thus, while 1990 saw Laos drafting its first post-1975 Constitution, the surface calm of the country was beset with stirrings on the part of both ethnic minorities and urban elements that suggested an impatience with the regimes failure to entertain political reform.

Brunei Darussalam in 1994: The Triumph of Regionalism?

While Brunei Darussalam, alone among the ASEAN nations, does not aspire to Newly Industrialized Country status-indeed, seems to dread the prospect-there is no question that Brunei is going down that path. But its route is an Islamic one and minus the export-oriented manufacturing base characteristic of the model. More than ever, the year saw Brunei enter deeper into regional economic and political relations, especially via its membership in ASEAN and APEC, and in the process, positioning the Sultanate in the vanguard of modernizing Islamic societies globally.

Akihiro Iwashita, Japan’s Border Issues: Pitfalls and Prospects

could be argued that Murphy’s distaste for these New Japan Hands and the actions of the American government, with respect to key bilateral issues such as the military bases in Okinawa, allocates them too much causal influence when there is probably a more complex array of factors at work. On the economic front, Murphy relies heavily on the analysis by economist Richard Koo in explaining Japan’s stagnation. Chief economist at the Nomura Research Institute, Koo understands the present economic woes as a result of what he terms a “balance sheet recession” (179). While it is difficult to disagree with Koo’s Keynesian interpretation and deep understanding of the Japanese economy, it is also true that his model can be easily assimilated to a mere variant of the well-known debt deflation spiral, first theorised by Irving Fisher in 1933. Murphy explains how Koo’s suggested solutions to economic torpor by public spending to compensate for lack of private investment are derailed in Japan due to institutional conditions that steer too much of the public spending towards unproductive pork-barrelling. The conspicuous presence of Koo in Murphy’s analysis is a second shortcoming in this engaging piece of work. In summary, Murphy’s Shackles is an enjoyable and easy to read introduction to Japan’s history and society. It is also a key, updated overview of the country from the heterodox perspective inaugurated by Chalmers Johnson in 1982. The author’s insights and analysis allow a clearer perspective on contemporary Japan.

Justice and Governance in East Timor: Indigenous Approaches and the “New Subsistence State”

be met with indifference by the international media. Explosive accounts of the riots foretold the changes in perceptions of Tahiti that would follow and be recounted in later chapters. Throughout, Kahn consistently and effectively employs cultural description to hammer home contradictions. As the dust settles on an arid post-nuclear havoc in some islands, she picks up a proper ethnology of Tahiti through the perspective of locals. Kahn reverts to tackling true mao’hi traditions and belief systems while the big issues appear more inescapable. Central to cultural tensions and conflicts between the mao’hi and power structures are their rootedness in local traditions. Attachments to their land, or te fenua are contested in the battleground between respect and appropriation for economic and political purposes. Clearly, Kahn is not one of those anthropologists who are caught in the muddle of representations for peoples under study. She uses the mao’hi attachment to land and other material artefacts as concrete symbols of the local struggle for an identity. With a five-star vacation getaway image to promote, Tahitian land and its neighbouring islands are overrun with contrived tourist attractions and reconstructions of their heritage. Ancestral shrines or marae, comprised of stone pillars that evoke the charm of Stonehenge, underwent an official facelift according to the tastes of the ruling government and the tourist markets (p. 155). Then, of course, the almost irrevocable damage wrought by radiation from nuclear tests – a parching of lands and a corruption of the seas – is also a grave symbolic infliction that could heighten tensions between the government of French Polynesia and the locals. Where could France then position itself ideologically vis-à-vis the territories it maintains? The complex dynamic between coloniser and colonised begs off naı ̈ve and facile notions of complete independence. Beneath Kahn’s powerful depictions of FrenchTahitian relations are implicit conclusions about dependency created through coloniser’s projects, more concretely in the inescapable economics of tourism. Dialogue with the ma’ohi is not exactly palpable, not even in the measure of Kahn’s well-meaning interventions favouring native subjectivity over politics and economics. Tahitian salvation from the pretty picture could get ugly – and it already has, from accounts of the riots and the impunity with which nuclear tests were conducted – but at least Kahn’s book already alerts the international media to scrutinise Tahiti and French Polynesia under critical commentary, and not just in the travel pages.

Passion, Betrayal, and Revolution in Colonial Saigon: The Memoirs of Bao Luong

Author of works on, variously, Vietnamese peasant millenarianism and the origins of the Vietnamese revolution, Hue-Tam Ho Tai is well known to students of modern Vietnamese history. This shorter work is different in the sense that it offers a portrait of a relative, a declared heroine of the revolution. The scene is colonial Saigon and the passion of the title is a double entendre playing upon, variously, a possible crime of passion, and love of nation, a sense of patriotism albeit only belatedly grasped by French adversaries and not at all by Americans. Remembered in Vietnam today as the nation’s first female political prisoner, Nguyen Trung Nguyet (a.k.a. Bao Luong, b. 1888) was the author’s second aunt. She was also a member of the Revolutionary Youth League or Thanh Nien, one of the Communist Party precursor organisations originally created by Ho Chi Minh in 1925. In 1928, as a young women of barely 20, Bao Luong had been the subject of a sensational murder trial called the Barbier Street affair, after a Saigon street now named after another Vietnamese revolutionary heroine, Nguyen Phi Khanh. The French colonial dossier on this affair provides the major historical armature for this work although, as a ‘‘hostile’’ source, the author ranges wide in interrogating Bao Luong’s own memoir in raw manuscript form (as opposed to an officialised, published version), alongside press pieces of the day and oral accounts drawn from family members. What emerges from the reconstruction of Bao Luong’s life is the emancipatory role played by this young woman along with her female companions, both in rejecting feudal stereotypes, embracing modernity and taking a stand on colonial injustice. In handling the raw memoir – ellipses and all – the author was also obliged to create an appropriate method, especially as the colonial context is obscure to most readers and in that, she is expert. Added to that, Bao Luong’s memoir was composed some 30 years after the murder on Barbier Street. Her time in prison, war and revolution are all additional encumbrances upon memory. The result, she calls, an experiment in hybridisation although, as a truth-seeking exercise, it is also a collage of texts and interpretations. Four opening chapters take us through Bao Luong’s early life in rural southern Vietnam, her upbringing, her talent for patriotic prose poetry, her conversion to the anti-colonial cause, her voyage to Guangzhou via colonial Hong Kong (leaving Saigon as a stowaway disguised as a boy), sojourn in Guangzhou, and return. We are offered a grim glimpse of post-revolutionary Guangzhou with its public executions, beggars and dire poverty. Training in Guangzhou at the Youth League headquarters Journal of Contemporary Asia Vol. 42, No. 1, February 2012, pp. 134–154

A Review of “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor”

Some eleven years have passed since the key events described in this book occurred, namely a United Nations–conducted ballot of August 30, 1999, to ascertain the wishes of the people of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, brutally occupied and annexed by Indonesia in 1975–76. Yet, civil society in the young nation of Timor-Leste, to offer its official name—still continues to demand justice, not only relating to Indonesian military and militia violence unleashed on East Timorese before, during, and after the historic independence ballot, but for crimes committed from 1975 through 1999. In other words, the “masters of terror,” or perpetrators of serious crimes, have yet to be held accountable. Such inertia is all the more perplexing given the international hand-wringing about “no-more Rwandas,” linked with a normative shift in UN thinking toward humanitarian intervention and such doctrines as “responsibility to protect,” of which East Timor was a beneficiary. In other words, while the UN intervention in East Timor went far in rescuing East Timorese from an even worse fate, many opportunities to draw a line in the sand were missed, notwithstanding the best efforts of a number of individuals and even attempts at institution-building. This is perplexing and even hints at a kind of Indonesian exceptionalism alongside the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, where international tribunals were established and judgments passed down.

Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Sorting and Strategy

argument. Reports from scholars in the field indicate that the highly personalistic and clientalistic networks of political candidate support – koenkai – remain alive and well. Furthermore, many young scholars have reported on the opposition party’s attempts to ‘‘out-LDP’’ the LDP by offering financial incentives and pork barrel projects to rural residents and farmers. Ichiro Ozawa himself appealed to farmers and agricultural co-operatives upset with plans to reduce rural subsidies. Despite any flaws, this well-written, short book will be excellent for undergraduate and graduate courses focused on Japan, political economy and institutional change. Instructors looking to present students with multiple perspectives might pair it with Robert Pekkanen and Ellis Krauss’ new book The Rise and Fall of Japan’s LDP (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010) which finds electoral system explanations wanting and favours historical institutionalist approaches. Japan Transformed is sure to spark debate in the scholarly community about the weight which should be placed on electoral systems or electoral system change as explanations.

Islam and Politics in Southeast Asia

The study of Islam and politics in Southeast Asia is a crowded field and reaches back to colonial state apprehensions of reformist Islam but also to secular nationalist narratives surrounding the Indonesian Republican purge of Darul Islam in the early 1950s. But after 9/11, academic Islam is also a growth industry. The edited volume at hand seeks to examine how political Islam engages democracy – positively or negatively – in Southeast Asia. As explained by editor Johan Saravanammutu in a highly useful summary of literature on political Islam in its current transnational manifestation (Chapter 1), one working assumption in explaining the nature of Muslim politics is the character of the concerned state. Eight contributions seek to broadly test this assumption against an array of country studies with considerable reference to Malaysia alongside Indonesia. In a wide-ranging essay (Chapter 2), Judith Nagata proposes to examine the intersection of democratic processes and Muslim movements in Malaysia and Indonesia, acknowledging wide ethnographic variation in Muslim societies generally, alongside case-specific definitions of democracy. She also traces Islamic discourses on religious authority and governance, finding no single political blueprint. No less compelling is the discussion on self-professed liberal Muslim spokespersons or even political parties, as with Abdullah Badawi’s post-9/11 ‘‘civilizational Islam.’’ Malaysian Islam, Nagata contends, is ‘‘unavoidably political,’’ as both the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and opposition Parti Islam (PAS) have upped the ante by making Islam a political issue. But dakwah or revitalisation movements are also part of the scene in Malaysia. Indonesia, by contrast, is more pluralist or multicultural, although the fall of Suharto brought forth both dakwah and Wahabbist movements, even if most Islamic organisations accommodate with the military-business elites. Overall, she concludes, political and religious formations mutate rapidly according to changing situations. In a third chapter, Jacques Bertrand confirms Nagata’s basic contention that political Islam in Indonesia engages political parties that play by the rules. But, in taking a longitudinal view, he also shows how Islamic groups have adopted or embraced authoritarian solutions through to the post-Suharto era even if, acting like secularist parties, they sometimes serve as a check on corruption. He also offers case studies of Aceh as an autonomous not Islamicist movement and the surge in postSuharto era of Islamicist terror as with Jemaah Islamiah (JI) and affiliated groups. Notably, alongside the government, mainstream Islam in Indonesia has condemned Journal of Contemporary Asia Vol. 41, No. 2, May 2011, pp. 331–348

Vietnam 1946: How the War Began

Stein Tonnesson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) This work by the former director of the Oslo International Peace Research Institute, actually an update of an earlier published Fren...

French Indochina: Ambiguous Colonisation – Unambiguous Nationalism

Drawing in both foreign investments and tourists, an emerging link in regional and global manufacturing supply chains, as well as a World Bank-designated lower middle-income status economy, Vietnam’s post-socialist status appears secure today. More the irony, perhaps, that Vietnam seems to have consummated the dreams of late French colonial planners with their wrenching vision of creating an industrialised colonial base by harnessing-exploiting its abundant natural and human resources. With the model of Thailand in mind – a country outside of direct European colonisation – modernity would undoubtedly have reached Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, respectively, but undoubtedly in different ways. Notably, it was France which brought the gift of its ‘‘civilisation’’ to Indochina, not only science as with the Pasteur Institute – honoured with a surviving street name in Saigon – but also, ambiguously, a toolkit of emancipatory ideas, that are best summarised as ‘‘liberty, equality, and fraternity.’’ A product of a valuable new press series on Indochina, the work under review by two eminent French historians is actually a translation and updated revision of a book originally published 1995 in French (Brocheux and Hémery, 2001). It is also dedicated to the memory of two other French Indochina specialists, Jean Chesnaux and Georges Boudarel, whose critical scholarly traditions they inherit. As made clear in the preface and introduction, back in the 1990s, French historiography on Vietnam was literally at a crossroads, riven between anti-colonial historiography, its