Continuity_and_Change_in_Asia_VUPO by Flexibooks

in Asia and Change Continuity

Filip Kraus, ed.

Kateřina Šamajová, ed.

Blanka Ferklová, ed.

Renata Westlake, ed.

Continuity and Change in Asia

Edited by Filip Kraus, Kateřina Šamajová, Renata Westlake and Blanka Ferklová

Olomouc Asian Studies

Volume II

2023

Olomouc Asian Studies

Volume 2

This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund [Sinophone Borderlands – Interaction at the Edges].

Project number: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000791.

Unauthorized use of this work is a violation of copyright and may establish civil, administrative or criminal liability.

1st edition

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) To view the license terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

DOI: 10.5507/ff.23.24463476

ISBN 978-80-244-6347-6 (print)

ISBN 978-80-244-6348-3 (online: iPDF)

Filip Kraus, Kateřina Šamajová, Renata Westlake, and Blanka Ferklová

Relief Manuals as a Means of Crisis Management: Plants

Korean A-bomb Victims’ Movement and the Power of Nationalism

Yuko Takahashi

Modernist Protestantism Triumphs over Chinese superstitions: sun Yat-sen’s Religious Quest to overthrow the Yellow Empire

Jasper Roctus

Continuity and Change in Us–Asia Tensions: A Critical discourse Analysis of Us–Japan Trade War in the Headlines

Damien Ng

social omissions on Chinese Environmental NGo Agendas: Knowledge Production that silences 173

Taru Salmenkari

Re-setting sustainability Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic: A system Thinking-Based Preliminary Analysis of the Two special Economic Zones in Mainland southeast Asia 203

Marco Zappa

Construing ”the Public” in Contemporary China: An Empirical Analysis of the Wenming discourse 239

Aran Romero-Moreno

Continuity and Change in the Contemporary Tensions of Regional and Rural Places 269

Anthony Scott Rausch

Ripening Bananas: A Case study of Inter-generational Conflicts Within the Vietnamese diaspora in Czechia 305

Filip Kraus and Mai Thi Thu

The Emergence of an Alternative Public space in Contemporary Japan: The (Trans)formation of Civic Movements in a Working-class district in osaka 333

Jeehwan Park

Vulnerable selves: The long decline of Japanese Masculinity 367

Maria Grajdian

Tradition and Change: Naming Practices in Contemporary Japan and Taiwan

Ivona Barešová and Petr Janda

Caste, Gender, and social distancing in the Times of the Pandemic

Madhu

Yuko Ogasawara

PART V – ART ANd lITERATURE

”AI Art” and delegated digital Creativity: Victor Wong’s TECH-iNK Paintings and Chen Qiufan’s Novella ”state of Trance” 467

Giorgio Strafella and Daria Berg

The Traditional and the Modern in Yone Noguchi’s Writings about Japanese Women Until 1906 495

Andrea Szilagyi

Gender Matters?: The Evolution of Gendered Voices in the Cinema of Colonial and Postwar Korea (1936–1961) 513

Gabor Sebo

New Wine from an old Bottle: Remaining ”The dunhuang library Cave” through the long Twentieth Century 545

Zhenru Zhou

”The Only Constant in Life Is Change.” (Heraclitus)

Contributors

Ivona Barešová

Palacký University Olomouc

ivona.baresova@upol.cz

Ivona Barešová is an Associate Professor at the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. Her research interests focus on Japanese language and society. She has been exploring various aspects of Japanese given names and naming practices, with her publications including Japanese Given Names: A Window into Contemporary Japanese Society (Palacký University Press, 2016). She is currently heading a project investigating the recent phenomenon of non-gender-specific names in Japan, its manifestations, and social implications.

Daria Berg

University of St.Gallen daria.berg@unisg.ch

Daria Berg is a Chair Professor (Ordinaria) of Chinese Culture and Society at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. She has published extensively on Chinese literature, culture, and visual arts, including Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580–1700 (Routledge, 2013) and co-edited with Giorgio Strafella a China’s Avant-Garde, 1978–2018 (Routledge, 2023). Her current research explores art, media, and culture in China.

Blanka Ferklová

Palacký University Olomouc blanka.ferklova@upol.cz

Blanka Ferklová is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. Her research interests include the Korean language, especially Korean ideophones, culture, and society.

Maria Grajdian

Hiroshima University grajdian@hiroshima-u.ac.jp

Maria Grajdian is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Hiroshima University, Japan. Her recent publications include numerous articles

in academic journals and scientific books, e.g., After Identity: Three Essays on the Musicality of Life (ProUniversitaria Press, 2019) and Cyberspaces of Loneliness: Love, Masculinity, Japan (ProUniversitaria Press, 2019), Takahata Isao (ProUniversitaria Press, 2021) and Post-Cold-War Japanese Animation: Five Directors and Their Visions (ProUniversitaria Press, 2021). Currently, she is completing two books that will be released in 2024, Fast-Forward the Future: Takarazuka Revue’s Mythologies of Anti-Nihilism and Miyazaki Hayao.

Petr Janda

Palacký University Olomouc p.janda@upol.cz

Petra Janda is a Researcher at the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. His research primarily focuses on Taiwan and translation studies. He has recently collaborated with Ivona Barešová on comparative research of Japanese and Taiwanese given names and naming practices.

Filip Kraus

Palacký University Olomouc filip.kraus@upol.cz

Filip Kraus is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. He was a Senior Researcher and the Primary Investigator in the research project Sinophone Borderlands, Interactions at the Edges. In his research, he specializes in socio-cultural anthropology of Vietnamese society, Vietnamese literature, politics, and migration.

Madhu

Miranda House, University of Delhi madhu@mirandahouse.ac.in

Madhu is an Associate Professor of Modern Indian History at Miranda House, the University of Delhi, India. In her career spanning over two decades, she has taught classes on Modern Indian History, History of the United States of America, Global Environmental Issues, and History of Delhi to undergraduate students. She received her education from the Department of History, University of Delhi and her research interest includes the histories of marginalized people, especially migrants, Dalits and women, visual culture, and digital humanities. She heads the Equal Opportunity department at Miranda House which looks after the interests of marginalized college students. Her latest publications are ”Caste, Hierarchy and Cultural Construction of Food (Waste?)” in Waste and Discards in the Asia Pacific Region: Social and Cultural Perspectives (Routledge, 2023) edited by Viktor Pál and Iris Borowy, and ”Dalit Activism, Social Media and Transnational Advocacy”

in Voiced and Voiceless in Asia (Palacký University Press, 2023), edited by Halina Zawiszová and Martin Lavička.

Damien Ng

Durham University

damien.ng@juliusbaer.com

Damien Ng is Executive Director at Julius Baer, a Swiss private bank based in Zurich. As a Thematic Research Analyst, he focuses on demographic and healthcare issues ranging from genomics and digital health to extended longevity and global education. Damien obtained his Ph.D. at Durham University (UK) and his academic research interests lie at the intersection of media discourse analysis, international relations, and Asian studies. Damien‘s first monograph is entitled Currency Wars with China and Japan in Western Newsmagazines (Routledge, 2022).

Thi Thu Mai

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University cuadaiha@gmail.com

Thi Thu Mai is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan and a Lecturer at the Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. In her research, she focuses on Vietnamese internal and external migration and its social consequences.

Yuko Ogasawara

Nihon University ogasawara.yuko@nihon-u.ac.jp

Yuko Ogasawara is a Professor of Sociology at Nihon University College of Economics in Tokyo, Japan. She has published articles on Japanese dual-earner couples, gender-role attitudes, and work and gender in journals such as Japanese Sociological Review, Japan Labor Issues, and Japanese Journal of Research on Household Economics. Her work in English includes ”Working Women’s Husbands as Helpers or Partners” in Beyond the Gender Gap in Japan (University of Michigan Press, 2019), edited by Gill Steel.

Jeehwan Park

Seoul National University jeehwan95@snu.ac.kr

Jeehwan Park is an Associate Professor of Japanese studies at the Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul National University, South Korea. He earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. He has con-

ducted research on social inequality in contemporary Japan by examining topics such as career guidance in a Japanese junior high school and social activism in a working-class district of Osaka. Currently, his research focuses on studying Japanese youths who are inclined to stay in their rural hometowns or migrate to rural areas.

Anthony Scott Rausch

Hirosaki University

asrausch@hirosaki-u.ac.jp

Anthony Scott Rausch is a Professor at Hirosaki University, Japan. He has a Ph.D. from Monash University, Australia. His research focuses on the sociology of rural Japan, and has published on volunteerism, local media, cultural commodities, and cultural economics. His books include Cultural Commodities in Rural Revitalization: Tsugaru Nuri Lacquerware and Tsugaru Shamisen (Brill, 2010) and Japan’s Local Newspapers: Chihoshi and Revitalization Journalism (Routledge, 2012).

Jasper Roctus

Ghent University

Jasper.Roctus@UGent.be

Jasper Roctus is a Ph.D. Researcher affiliated with the East Asian Culture in Perspective: Identity, Historical Consciousness, Modernity research group at Ghent University. He is currently working on the research project Narrating Sun Yat-sen: Explaining the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China’s (Taiwan) Developments Concerning Leninism, Christianity, and Democracy. His project is supervized by Prof. Dr. Bart Dessein and funded by the Research Foundation –Flanders (FWO). Jasper is also an Associate Fellow at the Egmont Institute in Brussels, where he engages with domestic Chinese politics and cross-strait relations.

Aran Romero-Moreno

Autonomous University of Barcelona

Aran.Romero@uab.cat

Aran Romero-Moreno is a social anthropologist specializing in the study of Chinese urban life and China's ”process of civilization.” He was a Pre-doctoral Fellow at Nanjing University and, in 2020, successfully completed his Ph.D. in Intercultural Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. He has participated in the study of the Chinese diaspora in Spain within the research project Young Natural Interpreters: Child Language Brokering in Education, Social Services, and Healthcare, at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In his current capacity, he serves as the Project Manager of INSPIRE, an initiative founded

by the European Union and is dedicated to establishing Europe’s Center of Excellence on Inclusive Gender Equality in R&I, financed by Horizons-Widera-2021.

Taru Salmenkari

University of Helsinki

taru.salmenkari@helsinki.fi

Taru Salmenkari is a Senior Lecturer of global development studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Earlier, she worked as a senior lecturer at Leiden University, Netherlands and as an Associate Professor at Tallinn University, Estonia. She obtained her Ph.D. degree and habilitation to Associated Professor from the Institute for Asian and African Studies at the University of Helsinki. She has conducted fieldwork in East Asia with grants or exchange programs founded by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Korea Foundation, and MOFA Taiwan Fellowship program, among others. She published a monograph, Civil Society in China and Taiwan: Agency, Class and Boundaries (Routledge, 2018). Currently, she is working on a monograph, Activism in Authoritarian China (Edward Elgar, 2025). She has published academic articles in various international journals, including Urban Geography, Modern Asian Studies, Memory Studies, and International Migration Review. Her research interests include civil society and bottom-up political influencing mainly, but not exclusively, within East Asia.

Gabor Sebo

Seoul National University gabor.sebo0526@gmail.com

Gabor Sebo earned his Ph.D. in the field of North Korean Studies at Korea University in 2018, where he studied unification policies. Consequently, he was a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and subsequently a Visiting Scholar at the Research Institution of Korean Studies (RIKS) at Korea University. In the academic year 2021/2022, he was a Lecturer at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. In 2023, he began to work as a Visiting Research Fellow at Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies (KIKS) at Seoul National University (SNU). Currently, he is working on a monograph about North Korean cinema.

Giorgio Strafella

Palacký University Olomouc giorgio.strafella@upol.cz

Giorgio Strafella is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. He was also a Senior Researcher at the Sinophone Borderlands, Interactions at the Edges project associated with

the same department. His current research focuses on art criticism, intellectual discourse, and ideological currents in contemporary China.

Andrea Szilágyi

Japan Women's University ameris.andrea@gmail.com

Andrea Szilágyi is a Japanologist (BMA) who completed the Japanese Literature Ph.D. courses at Japan Women’s University and is currently working on her dissertation research focused on Yone Noguchi’s early writings.

Kateřina Šamajová

Palacký University Olomouc katerina.samajova@upol.cz

Kateřina Šamajová is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. She is focused on interdisciplinary research in anthropology, linguistics, and food history. Her research focuses on the dispersal of plants and their significance in culture, cultural exchange between Europe and Asia, and its role in the utilization and domestication of plants, particularly in the context of social crises, such as famine, and the role of plant-focused writings in these crises. Currently, she is working on tracing the origin of Brassica rapa varieties in China and mapping their cultural salience or tracing the dispersal of fermented food and beverage techniques in East Asia.

Yuko Takahashi

Osaka Metropolitan University and Hiroshima Jogakuin University yuko.takahashi@ymail.com

Yuko Takahashi is a Research Fellow at Osaka Korean Studies Platform, Research Center for Human Rights, Osaka Metropolitan University, and an Adjunct Lecturer at Hiroshima Jogakuin University, Japan. Her research interests include Korean-Japanese relations in modern and contemporary times, Korean atomic-bomb victims, Japanese-resident Koreans (Zainichi Koreans), and Christianity in Korea and Japan. She is preparing a monograph entitled Korean Nuclear Diaspora: Caught Between Colonialism, Nationalism, and the Cold War (Lexington, forthcoming in 2024).

Renata Westlake

Palacký University Olomouc renata.westlake@upol.cz

Renata Westlake is earning her Ph.D. degree in Chinese philology at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. Her main research focuses on China discourse

and media representation. She is currently completing her Ph.D. dissertation on China discourse in Czech presidential speeches. She was a Researcher at the Sinophone Borderlands, Interactions at the Edges project associated with the Department of Asian Studies, Palacký University Olomouc. She is currently involved in the research project, the EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, associated with the same university, as an Early Career Researcher.

Marco Zappa

Ca' Foscari University of Venice marco.zappa@unive.it

Marco Zappa is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His main research interest focuses on the international relations of East Asia, Japanese development cooperation, and Japanese contemporary politics. He is broadening the scope of his research to environmental history and urban studies, analyzing the development of smart cities in Japan, and export urbanism in Southeast Asia. He is a co-researcher in the AKS-funded research project East and West in Korean Studies

Zhenru Zhou

Tsinghua University in Beijing zhouzr_23@qq.com

Zhenru Zhou is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. She received a Ph.D. degree in art history from the University of Chicago. She specializes in premodern Buddhist art and architecture in China, along with the eastern Silk Roads.

Foreword

The current volume is the second book published in the series of Olomouc Asian Studies (OLAS). The core of the volume consists of the contributions of authors who participated in the 15th Annual Conference on Asian Studies (ACAS), organized by the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. The volume also derives its title from the conference’s general theme on continuity and change in Asia. Its final version consists of chapters collected through a public Call for Chapters and, as a result, scholars from a great variety of fields have come together to provide the readers with their insights into topics revolving around the general theme.

In order to demonstrate the great complexity of continuity and change in Asia, its relevance, and the profound research potential of the region, we selected 18 chapters that are organized into five parts, representing the main directions of our research. We hope that our volume will be an adequate contribution to the OLAS publication series and that it will continue with many more intriguing studies, facilitating a greater understanding of Asian societies.

The volume was published with the support of the research project Sinophone Borderlands – Interaction at the Edges and we would like to hereby express our gratitude to our colleagues, the scholars, and the contributors who kindly lent their aid and expertise in the peer-reviewing, collating, and completion of this volume.

The editors

INTRodUCTIoN: THE INTERPl AY oF ECoNoMIC, PolITICAl, ANd soCIo-CUlTURAl

CHANGEs IN AsIA

Filip Kraus, Kateřina

Šamajová,

Renata Westlake, and Blanka Ferklová

”Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” (Lao Tzu)

The introduction demonstrates how the recent economic transformations of Asia led to political, social, and cultural changes that are, at least discursively, counterbalanced by a certain traditionalism and continuity in patterns of sociocultural behavior. The introduction consequently introduces the structure of the book, which is divided into five thematic parts to indicate how the interplay of continuity and change in Asia produces and reproduces itself. As a result, the book begins with an excursion into various historically relevant studies on this phenomenon. The final part is organized according to different fields of study to demonstrate how economic and technological development triggers socio-political changes and transformations in contemporary art production.

Keywords: continuity, change, Asia, economy, society, politics, art

Asia is one of the most dynamically developing regions in the world. It is also a region well known for its rich cultural heritage and strong emphasis on traditional values. The current book contains chapters focused on a relatively limited number of topics, ranging from sustainable economic development and social changes to the art reflections of those changes in four Asian countries – China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. It attempts to understand Asia as a region where the economic, technological, and environmental changes are capable of influencing

various aspects of local societies, politics, cultures, or art. In the following sections, the nature of the different facets of the changes are sketched out in general while examples are provided of what we perceive as representational cases of these cultural and societal dynamics in the region.

The process of economic change in parts of Asia has already been known since ancient times (Fu 1981, 116). In modern history, however, the significance of economic changes is best demonstrated with the economic developments of Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong during the second half of the twentieth century. These emerging economies, known as the four ”Asian tigers,” laid the foundation for what is currently called ”the East Asian Miracle” (Gulati 1992; Litsareva 2017, 75). At that time, these underdeveloped economies attracted foreign investment and established various labor-intensive, usually light industries (typically manufacturing of consumption goods and clothing industries). Later, the economies developed more capital-intensive industries, for example, the pharmaceutical industry in Singapore and the production of advanced computer chips in Taiwan, which further enhanced their economic performance. The improved economic situation typically triggered broader socio-political changes, and simultaneously spilled over into other economies in the region, such as those of the People’s Republic of China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand (Nguyen 2017).

The rapid economic transformations described above inevitably led to political changes in the region (Fabrizio 2015). The originally absolutistic serfdom-based regimes changed only slightly under the colonial or semi-colonial systems (Benda 1965). With the end of the Second World War, however, the process of decolonization led to different outcomes (Cottrell 2014). Some of the countries re-established royal ascendancy of an at least symbolic nature. Other countries became authoritarian regimes. This process may be best demonstrated with the case of Korea, where the northern part remained a communist totalitarian state, but South Korea was transformed from a military totality to a politically open but socially conservative polity (Lee 1988). A similar development can be observed in Vietnam, having undergone a division which was forcefully revoked in 1975 after the country was reunified under the name Socialist Republic of Vietnam. But, as a result of its poorly executed centrally-planned economy, the socialist regime nearly collapsed economically. The bad economic situation triggered the launch of a political and economic reforms, known as Doi Moi Renovation. As a result, since 1986, Vietnam officially became a country with a market economy that was necessary to facilitate the economic transition of Vietnam into the developmental stage where it would be ripe for a new socialist revolution (Kiernan 2017). Such political and economic transformations also lead to changes in the social composition in East and Southeast Asian countries (Fabrizio 2015).

At the end of the nineteenth century, most of the societies in Asia were polygynous, with the patrimonial family model as the basis of its social organization (Faucon 2015). The majority of Asian women had obtained suffrage by the middle of the twentieth century, but in parts of Asia polygynous marriages were abandoned only in the late 1950s (Teele 2020). It was the opening of the job market to women, however, together with a certain degree of gender imbalance in East Asia, that changed the power relations in Asia (Asian Developmental Bank 2011).

In the region, the economic transformations started with labor-intensive industries dominated by men (Morris 1996). Only gradually, more capital-intensive modes of production requiring more profound changes in education were introduced, and the job markets across Asia become accessible to women (Litsareva 2017, 75). In this process, women were partially liberated from their commitments at home and started to compete with men in various, especially administrative, positions (Fang 2010). Currently, women are able to enter the job markets in great numbers, which leads to changes in the family and whole social systems (ILO 2011). But in Southeast Asia, the position of women is still far from being equal to men. In some countries, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore, polygyny has persisted (Alamgir 2014). Monika Arnez (2024, 3-5) shows that those problems are innate to Muslim societies, where not only women’s bodies are strictly controlled. Equally controversial is criminalization of homosexuality, sex outside marriage, and cohabitation of unmarried couples by criminal codes of those societies (ibid, 3). At the same time, in some of East Asia’s more developed countries a certain gender imbalance remained, partly due to Confucian traditions. But, with the changes in the local job markets, the women in East Asia became more independent than their counterparts in Southeast Asia (Booth 2016). Albeit far from ideal, in these societies, the position of women in society, politics, and the economy improved to the degree that many of them currently choose to live out of wedlock, and thus, men are forced to seek their spouses in neighboring countries (Raymo et al. 2015).

The list of social changes described above is not exhaustive. With the transformation of these economies to more capital-oriented modes of production, the job markets experienced a structural lack of workforce in the labor-intensive sectors (Litsareva 2017, 77). This, together with the traditional gender imbalance in some East Asian countries and political changes in the region, opened up a space for political, marriage-related, and economic migration within and beyond Asia (Ruhs and Martin 2008; Sun 2017; Asis et al. 2019). Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian migrants currently form substantial immigrant communities in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan or in the US, Australia, and many European countries (Chan and Koh 2017). The presence of the Asian diaspora is especially discernible in France, the US, Germany, and Australia, and can also be found in smaller

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Filip Kraus, Kateřina Šamajová, Renata Westlake, and Blanka Ferklová

countries, such as the Czech Republic, where Vietnamese migrants used to make up the third biggest migrant community (Nožina and Kraus 2020).

In Max Weber’s view, the various facets of changes described in the preceding section can be perceived as actions that trigger reactions of various social agents (Weber in Runciman 1991). In the present book, these reactions are regarded as a type of continuity, i.e., as a discursively expressed desire for social, economic or cultural stability that may be manifested as political and social conservatism or economic protectionism. This book will also demonstrate a much finer discursive deployment of power in a very Foucauldian sense (1978, 92–93). The chapters in the present book will not only analyze the major economic, political, and social changes, but will also analyze the much finer networks in which the relation of power is practiced. To demonstrate the discursive aspect of continuity and change in Asia, the book provides analyses of name-giving in Japan and its previous colony, Taiwan. There will also be a depiction of how women changed in the Korean movie industry and Japanese literature, or how socio-cultural values are preserved (or changed) in the Vietnamese diaspora. But the present book aims to demonstrate that there is always an inherent continuity entailed in changes, whose various facets will be detailed below.

Asia is undoubtedly well-known for its strong emphasis on the preservation of its cultural heritage and various traditions. In terms of nationhood, Asian societies take pride in their long history, the antiquity of their culture, and their vibrant religiosity (Illeto 2009). Chinese historiography portrays Chinese civilization as being 5,000 years old, which approximately corresponds with the Vietnamese worldview (Wu 2018). Other countries in the region also commonly put great emphasis on their traditional values. As a result of Asian traditionalism, Japanese Emperors, Cambodian, Thai, and Bhutan Kings, or the Sultan in Brunei, are still considered heads of their respective states, at least in the nominal sense.

Traditions in Asia are valued to such an extent that they become a political ideology itself (Nury 1996). In a more recent example from the 1990s, the leaders of Singapore established so-called ”Asian values” as a political ideology, the primary aim of which was to define shared social norms for the whole of Asia (Cauquelin et al. 1998). The common perception that Asian nations possess similar values evaporated after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. The concept was utilized, however, to serve various purposes in different states. While in Singapore, the concept was used to ”uphold the virtue of clean government, […] in Indonesia, they have been used implicitly to defend nepotism and crony capitalism” (Hoon 2004). It has also been used by authoritatively inclined leaders to suppress political opposition and restrict human rights in their respective countries (Sen 1997; Thompson 2004). Even in economically developed Singapore, so-called traditional Asian values were used to suppress the Western notion of human rights and legitimize the