Life of a Nation's Text: The Travels and Travails of the Indian Constitution

This review essay briefly discusses Granville Austin's landmark study of the working of the Indian Constitution and its critics, reviews three recent books on that Constitution, and evaluates the extent to which these new works have been able to take constitutional studies in new directions. All three books shine a light on the critical role of the Constitution and the courts in Indian democracy. While the authors are well aware of contemporary challenges to constitutionalism and have written on them elsewhere, this does not fully come through in their books. Despite this shortcoming, these recent studies are indispensable in making sense of the Constitution and its role in Indian democracy.

"China's Chernobyl": COVID-19 Narratives of Collapse and Global Domination

In COVID-19's first months, US politicians and media forecast that a contrast between Chinese deception and incapability and Western success against the pandemic might fatally sink internal confidence in China's party-state. They also predicted that it would diminish China externally, as it came to be seen as endangering the world by spreading biological pollution. A "China's Chernobyl" prediction became the latest "China collapse" wish-fulfillment. This speculation rests on two contradictory yet co-existing Yellow Peril tropes: "deceit and incompetence" and "world domination." However, no empirical basis exists for either notion: China prevailed against the pandemic and lacks the capacity for global hegemony. "China's Chernobyl" is most relevant then as a wish that creates a belief, that China should and could collapse. That in turn bolsters the US-led mobilization to counter China as a "strong competitor" and frames China as the common enemy, thereby promoting Western transnational and US internal cohesion.

Finding a Chulu (Way Out): Rural-origin Chinese Students Studying Abroad in South Korea

Based on multi-site research in China and South Korea, this paper examines the motivations for rural-origin Chinese students to study abroad in South Korea and how their overseas experiences are mediated by both internal and international educational hierarchies. Existing literature on transnational student mobility from Asia mainly focuses on students from urban middle-class backgrounds, while little attention has been paid to students from less advantaged backgrounds. Scholars have noted that China's seemingly meritocratic gaokao (national college entrance exam) policy in reality functions to perpetuate the structural marginalization of rural students in its educational system. This research moves beyond the internal migration paradigm by examining how social inequalities associated with the rural/urban divide are reproduced and re-articulated by the intersection of class, gender, place of origin, and time management at the transnational scale.

Are Economic Sanctions against North Korea Effective? Assessing Nighttime Light in 25 Major Cities

This study analyzes the effects of the economic sanctions against North Korea since 2016 on the economic well-being of North Korean cities. As a proxy for economic well-being, we use nighttime light (NTL), which we estimate from 1992 to 2019 through an inter-calibration process for DMSP/OLS and SNPP/VIIRS. We found that NTL in North Korea was getting brighter up until 2009, but that the growth rate of total NTL in 25 major North Korean cities began to decrease from 2016. The decline in the NTL growth rate of Pyongyang, the capital city, as well as in cities bordering China and in self-regenerating cities, was relatively slight. By contrast, the declines in the NTL growth rate of coal-mining cities and inland cities without sufficient production bases were greater than those in other cities, and some cities experienced negative growth in 2019. Cities in regions relying on coal mining have traditionally accounted for a large portion of North Korea's exports, and since these cities have been heavily affected by sanctions, coal mining could become a vulnerable sector, which would threaten North Korea's economic well-being.

Economic Policy Uncertainty, Bilateral Investment Treaties, and Chinese Outward Foreign Direct Investment

This paper examines the effect of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) in promoting Chinese outward foreign direct investment (COFDI) in the presence of rising economic policy uncertainty in China's partner countries. We postulate that the signing of BITs should help stimulate COFDI because the treaties send a credible signal to foreign investors about the host country's intent to protect Chinese investment, and make it more difficult for the host country to violate its treaty obligations. BITs that contain rigorous investment protection and liberalization provisions, in particular, should be more likely to encourage COFDI as they directly influence Chinese investors' expectations about the stability, predictability, and security of the host market. However, while BITs generally promote COFDI, host country economic policy uncertainty may also limit their effectiveness. This is because uncertainty tends to undermine investor confidence, trigger capital flows from high- to low-risk countries, and dampen commercial activities. Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation models of the determinants of COFDI to 188 countries between 2003 and 2017 lend substantial support to our conjectures.

The Politics of Claim-Making in India

How do Indian citizens access the state? While a standard answer would be "through patronage," three recent books show that clientelism, while important, is just part of the story. Not just passive clients at the mercy of their political patrons, Indian citizens actively engage the state and their representatives to make claims and secure what is due to them. Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner's Claiming the State—Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India shows how rural dwellers navigate the local government system to access social welfare. Adam Auerbach's Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India's Urban Slums documents how local political workers make claims on behalf of their neighbours and provide their settlements with essential services. Jennifer Bussell's Clients and Constituents: Political Responsiveness in Patronage Democracies persuasively demonstrates the importance of higher-level representatives in providing assistance to their constituencies. Together, these books not only demonstrate how political the daily life of ordinary citizens is, but also how the Indian state, while far from its Weberian ideal, is much more inclusive than previously thought.

Understanding Election Violence in the Philippines: Beware the Unknown Assassins of May

Despite election violence being a commonly agreed upon phenomena in the Philippines, there has been a dearth in academic research on the topic in recent years, largely due to a lack of reliable information. To address this, our article adapts recognized methods from studies such as Lindsay Shorr Newman's 2013 paper, together with Stephen McGrath and Paul Gill's 2014 research on terrorism and elections. To expose the timing of election violence, we tracked incidents relative to election dates for the period from 2004 to 2017, with the results indicating that violence increased closer to an election date, and frequency substantially increased during the 14-year period. This is the first academic journal article since John Linantud in 1998 to focus on the issue of election violence in the Philippines but through adaptive methodologies goes further, enabling national analysis. Furthermore, our findings reveal statistically significant differences regarding the types of terrorist attacks and targets when comparing election and non-election periods. We highlight complicating factors such as the majority of attacks being attributed to "unknown" actors and the complex situation during elections. The results also demonstrate that election violence in the Philippines is dominated by the New People's Army and the use of assassination. The paper makes the case for further research and the creation of a dedicated database of election violence in the Philippines and elsewhere, and evaluates the measures implemented by the government that have failed to stem election violence.

Network Monarchy as Euphoric Couplet

Since the publication of my article "Network monarchy and crises of legitimacy in Thailand" (Pacific Review, 2005), network monarchy has become an influential concept in the analysis of Thailand's politics. Though widely adopted, the argument has also spawned rival or complementary coinings, ranging from "autonomous political networks" (Joseph Harris) to "working towards the monarchy" (Serhat Uenaldi), and the "deep state" (Eugenie Mérieau), as well as the "parallel state" and the "monarchized military" (Paul Chambers and Napisa Waitoolkiat ). This article revisits the argument, elaborates on the meanings of the original term, and makes a case for network monarchy's continuing salience in the Tenth Reign.

"To Be a Little More Realistic": The Ethical Labour of Suspension among Nightclub Hostesses in Southeast China

This article explores the "ethical labour" of suspension––the conscious effort of deferring one's ethical judgement and reflections in order to avoid irreconcilable ethical conflicts between one's present activities and long-term goals. While people engage in ethical judgement and reflections in everyday social interactions, it is the laborious aspect of regulating one's ethical dispositions that I highlight in the concept of "ethical labour." Although it cannot be directly commodified, ethical labour is a form of labour as it consumes energy and is integral to the performance of other forms of labour, particularly intimate and emotional ones. This formulation of ethical labour draws on my long-term ethnographic research with a group of young women migrants working as hostesses in high-end nightclubs in southeast China. Many of them perform socially stigmatized work with the goal of contributing to their family and saving money for a dignified life in the future. Ethical labour is essential to their hostess work because it enables them to juggle multiple affective relationships and defer the fundamental ethical conflict. They express ethical labour through the phrase "to be a little more realistic," making sure that they obtain what they want at a particular moment. But ethical labour does not simply mean pushing ethical questions aside. It is sustained by conscious effort and is overshadowed by fears of ageing and failure to achieve long-term life goals. Prolonged ethical labour often fails to resolve ethical conflict and may intensify one's stress. My analysis of these women migrants' situation contributes to the sex-as-work debate regarding women's agency in work and their subjection to exploitation.

Suspension: Seeking Agency for Change in the Hypermobile World

"Suspension" is the translation of the Chinese term xuanfu, which has been widely used in public discussions in China since the mid-2010s. Suspension indicates a state of being in which people move frequently, conduct intensive labour, and pause routine life—in order to benefit fast and then quickly escape. People keep moving, with no end in sight, instead of changing their current conditions, of which they disapprove. As a result, frantic entrepreneurial energy coexists with political resignation. Suspension is a life strategy, a multitude of experiences, a feeling—and now, a keyword: a crystallized consciousness with which the public problematize their experiences. This special issue develops this term into an analytical approach based on ethnographic research involving labour migrants in and from China. This approach turns migration into a basis for critical analyses on issues far beyond it; enables co-research between researchers, migrants, and the broader public; and seeks to cultivate agency for change among actors. This introductory essay, based on the author's long-term field research and public engagement, outlines why we need such an approach, and how we might develop it.