Nightmares and Prospects in Bangladesh

Worldview ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (7) ◽  
pp. 40-42
Author(s):  
Kai Bird ◽  
Susan Goldmark
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Early Morning ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
The West ◽  
Relief Organization

It was a warm, humid Bengal evening when a small party of resident foreigners gathered in the Dacca home of an American diplomat. Two journalists, two American diplomats, a French diplomat and the director of a private relief organization in Bangladesh spent five hours talking about the country's bleak economic and political future. The discussion was heated, and the conclusions drawn in the early morning hours ought to evoke nightmares worthy of the cheapest horror film. The evening's host, a diplomat seasoned in the conflicts of Southeast Asia, reluctantly admitted that Bangladesh's rapid decline into absolute economic chaos might be averted only by a dedicated and ruthless party of Maoists. In any case, after more than two years of independence and $2 billion of international aid, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Bangladesh has nothing to expect from the West.

‘Strangers’ and ‘stranger-kings’: The sayyid in eighteenth-century maritime Southeast Asia

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 567-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Charismatic Leadership ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
The West ◽  
New Era ◽  
Asian State ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
Western Expansion

Sayyidi ‘strangers’ and ‘stranger-kings’, borne on the eighteenth-century wave of Hadhrami migration to the Malay-Indonesian region, boosted indigenous traditions of charismatic leadership at a time of intense political challenge posed by Western expansion. The extemporary credentials and personal talents which made for sāda exceptionalism and lent continuity to Southeast Asian state-making traditions are discussed with particular reference to Perak, Siak and Pontianak. These case studies, representative of discrete sāda responses to specific circumstances, mark them out as lead actors in guiding the transition from ‘the last stand of autonomies’ to a new era of pragmatic collaboration with the West.

scholarly journals Changes in the perception of values of cultural areas in the world

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-61
Author(s):  
Them Ngoc Tran
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Values ◽  
Subjective Aspect ◽  
And Behavior

The paper presents the changes of values in three cultural areas the West, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia through two aspects: (i) behavior’s aspect and (ii) subjective aspect. From behavior’s aspect, the paper presents the changes in ways of cognition, organization and behavior. From subjective aspect, the paper presents the changes in countries in the West, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia. Due to the main domination of Western values in the process of globalization and integration, the more different from the West in terms of cultural values are, the stronger and more difficult the changes in values become. For this reason,Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia are more interested in building their own values.

After the Wall: Pride before the Fall, 1961–89

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
John G. Rodden
Keyword(s):  
Early Morning ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sunday Morning ◽  
The West ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
West Berlin ◽  
Service Jobs ◽  
Subway Stations ◽  
Identity Cards ◽  
The City

East Berlin. August 13, 1961. As the sun peeks over the horizon on this beautiful Sunday morning, most East Berliners sleep on, but some rise for work; a few thousand of them are Grenzgänger, who cross town—quite legally—to work in the “other” Berlin, mostly as hotel and restaurant employees and in other service jobs made lucrative by the uneven exchange rate. Each day they make the trip to West Berlin—by foot, by bicycle, by S-Bahn and U-Bahn, showing their DDR identity cards and special work permits to the bored Grepos (Grenzpolizei, border police) stationed at the gates. But this morning the Grepos are not bored; today, as the would-be commuters discover as they reach streets and subway stations along the East Berlin border, no Grenzgänger will cross. “Die Grenze ist geschlossen!” people scream to each other in the early-morning stillness. “The border is closed!” No subway cars are running westward; Grepos guard the U-Bahn tunnels to prevent subway commuters from fleeing to the West on foot; Vopos turn back Grenzgänger at every checkpoint. The SED has apparently found a way to secure its future and halt the flight of DDR and skilled labor—by walling them in. WHO HAS THE YOUTH, HAS THE FUTURE! As the Grenzgänger stumble home and the DDR capital—“die Hauptstadt der DDR”—awakens to the nightmare, it is as if a tremendous howl—the anguished wail of cornered, trapped, desperate animals—has gone up throughout East Berlin— as it soon will over the DDR. For almost a decade, East Germany’s 600-mile border has been sealed by barbed wire and 12-foot electrified fencing; just inside the fence is a strip of land about 50 yards wide that is cleared of brush, dotted with mines, and covered by machine guns in high watchtowers. And so, most aspiring refugees make their way to East Berlin, where many of the streets and subway stations along the city border are guarded casually, if at all.

‘Lapita colonists leave boats unburned!’ The question of Lapita links with Island Southeast Asia

Antiquity ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 63 (240) ◽  
pp. 613-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Bellwood ◽  
Peter Koon
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Source Zone ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Complex ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
New Britain

‘Not another trendy and incomprehensible title,’ some will sigh. No, the title means what it states, albeit with metaphorical flourish. The Lapita cultural complex of Melanesia and western Polynesia, an entity beloved of a generation of Pacific prehistorians and ever a hot source of debate, can now be shown to have retained at least some links with contemporary populations far to the west of its known distribution. This is significant, not least because some scholars identify the immediate source zone for Lapita as having existed somewhere in the islands of Southeast Asia. At the same time, the obsidian quarried by Lapita artisans from Talasea on the Melanesian island of New Britain can be shown to have been among the most far-traded commodities of the Neolithic world.

British Policy and Spanish America, 1783–1808

1969 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lynch
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
The West ◽  
Potential Market ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
The World ◽  
British Policy

‘The liberation of South America’, wrote Castlereagh in 1807, ‘must be accomplished through the wishes and exertions of the inhabitants; but the change can only be operated…under the protection and with the support of an auxiliary British force’. The argument, familiar in political debate, was rare in official policy. Britain, it is true, had long regarded Spanish America as a source of strength for her rivals and a potential market for her manufactures. After the Peace of 1783 interest became more intense as British observers, impressed by the vulnerability of empires, claimed to see signs of rapid decline in the empire of Spain. Intelligence reports on Spanish America accumulated in government departments; plans for British attacks flowed from official and private sources; and a section of merchant opinion increased its agitation for military intervention in the area. Yet, apart from the conquest of Trinidad in 1797 and the attempted conquest of the Río de la Plata in 1806–7, British policy towards Spanish America was diffident in its approach and vague in its intent. There were, indeed, compelling reasons why Spanish America should remain on the margin of British policy. Britain's existing European and imperial interests necessarily dominated her policy and absorbed her resources. Until 1806, moreover, existing channels of trade in Europe and the rest of the world were sufficient to take the bulk of British industrial production. And military resources were usually insufficient to release troops either from Europe or the West Indies for major operations in a new theatre of war.

Ships, Shipwrecks, and Archaeological Recoveries as Sources of Southeast Asian History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Heng
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Construction Materials ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Critical Component ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Exchanges ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Shipping Networks ◽  
Knowledge Usage ◽  
The Last Two Millennia

Ships form a critical component of the study of Southeast Asia’s interaction both within itself as well as with the major centers of Asia and the West. Shipwreck data, accrued from archaeologically excavated shipwreck sites, provide information on the evolving maritime traditions that traversed Southeast Asian waters over the last two millennia, including shipbuilding and navigational technologies and knowledge, usage of construction materials and techniques, types of commodities carried by the shipping networks, shipping passages developed through Southeast Asia, and the key ports of call that vessels would arrive at as part of the network of economic and social exchanges that came to characterize maritime interactions.

scholarly journals The Human Wallace Line: Racial Science and Political Afterlife

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-329
Author(s):  
Fenneke Sysling
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Human Body ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
The West ◽  
Alfred Russel Wallace ◽  
Racial Science ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
The Difference

This paper examines racial science and its political uses in Southeast Asia. It follows several anthropologists who travelled to east Nusa Tenggara (the Timor Archipelago, including the islands of Timor, Flores and Sumba), where Alfred Russel Wallace had drawn a dividing line between the races of the east and the west of the archipelago. These medically trained anthropologists aimed to find out if the Wallace Line could be more precisely defined with measurements of the human body. The paper shows how anthropologists failed to find definite markers to quantify the difference between Malay and Papuan/Melanesian. This, however, did not diminish the conceptual power of the Wallace Line, as the idea of a boundary between Malays and Papuans was taken up in the political arena during the West New Guinea dispute and was employed as a political tool by all parties involved. It shows how colonial and racial concepts can be appropriated by local actors and dismissed or emphasised depending on political perspectives.

Ch'ing Changing Images of the Overseas Chinese (1644–1912)

1981 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yen Ching-Hwang
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
North China ◽  
Han Chinese ◽  
Overseas Chinese ◽  
The West ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
Southeast Coast ◽  
The Government ◽  
Resistance Movement

The Manchus inherited from the Ming Dynasty the images of the overseas Chinese as well as the policy towards them. The tarnished images of the overseas Chinese as ‘deserters’, ‘criminals’, and ‘potential traitors’ of the Ming were taken over by the early Ch'ing rulers. These images were soon transformed into new images of ‘political criminals’, ‘conspirators’ and ‘rebels’, for in the first four decades after the Manchu conquest of North China in 1644, the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia were directly involved in the resistance movement on the southeast coast of China. The leader of the movement, Cheng Ch'eng-kung (known in the West as Koxinga), seems to have enlisted the support of the overseas Chinese, particularly from Vietnam, Cambodia and Siam, for his resistance. It is claimed that Koxinga's naval power was partly drawn from Nanyang (Southeast Asia) shipping, and financed from the profits of the Nanyang trade. Of course those overseas Chinese who supported Koxinga made no apology for their involvement. They saw the Manchus as alien usurpers and as the oppressors of the Han Chinese, and the support for Koxinga's resistance movement was seen as an act of patriotism to save Han Chinese from the oppressive Manchu rule. The government countered the overseas Chinese involvement by introducing stringent laws against private overseas trade. In 1656 (13th year of the Emperor Shun-chih), a decree was proclaimed that‘….any traders who go overseas privately and trade or supply the rebels with provisions will be beheaded, and their goods confiscated.

China’s View of the West, A Comparison of the Historical Geographies of Wei Yuan and Xu Jiyu

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 35-52
Author(s):  
Jessie G. Lutz
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
The West ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Xu Wei ◽  
Wei Yuan

Wei Yuan and Xu Jiyu, civil servants in mid 19th century China, were deeply disturbed by British expansion into Asia. On the theory that one should know one's enemies, both wrote pioneer historical geographies designed to introduce Chinese officials to the sources of Western power. They both made extensive use of missionary sources; however, there were significant differences between the works of Wei and Xu. Wei never abandoned the Middle Kingdom concept whereas Xu came to realize that the West had developed its own civilization, and he encouraged China's development of trade and commerce, especially in Southeast Asia. Wei and Xu's works circulated among a small number of Chinese officials on China's east coast, but it was not until after China's defeat in the Opium War, 1839-42, and the near over throw of the Qing dynasty by the Taipings that the works were reprinted and served as introductions to the West.

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