Labour Unrest in Vietnam and China: Insurgency or Contained Contention?

This article reviews three recent books on labour politics in Vietnam and China: Angie Tran’s Ties That Bind: Cultural Identity, Class and Law in Vietnam’s Labor Resistance; Jeffrey Becker’s Social Ties, Resources and Migrant Labor Contention in Contemporary China: From Peasants to Protesters, and Eli Friedman’s Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Post-Socialist China. These three books capture the changing patterns of labour unrest and labour institutions in Vietnam and China, which are accounted for by the social foundation of resistance as well as the political economy of capitalist development. Their main contribution to the existing literature is that they draw out the new dynamics and new venues within the state that can both enable and constrain labour resistance and struggle in these countries. However, this article also argues that these works have not adequately theorised the nature of change within the state and the role of the law in labour resistance. It therefore suggests that bringing in the law to socio-political institutions is essential to a research agenda that explores continuity and change in labour politics in Vietnam and China as transitional economies.     

冷战后的越美关系

冷战后,经过艰难的谈判,越南与美国实现了关系正常化,之后两国关系快速发展。本文着重分析了在两国关系快速发展背后各自的战略意图及其对东亚格局的影响,并对越美关系发展的前景进行了展望。     

Managing the Re‐Entry Process of Returnee Government Scholars in an Emerging Transition Economy – An Embeddedness Perspective

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the factors affecting the re‐entry and readjustment process of returnee government scholars in Vietnam. These returnee scholars were originally sent overseas to study as part of changes introduced by the Vietnamese government to develop its domestic talent pool. Using the perspective of home country embeddedness, we find that career and community embeddedness factors, together with readjustment factors, have an effect on returnee scholars’ career and life satisfaction in their home country. These factors subsequently affected their intention to stay or re‐expatriate. The study contributes to public sector change management theory by examining factors affecting the re‐entry process of returnees within an emerging transition economy. It also adds to the limited studies on understanding and managing the re‐entry processes and state‐led diaspora strategies among returnee government scholars from emerging transition economies and their effectiveness.     

Rural-urban migration in Vietnam and China: gendered householding,production of space and the state

The transition from state socialism to market socialism in Vietnam and China has been characterized by unprecedented rural-urban migration. We argue that this migration is integral rather than incidental to the gendered reproduction of state and society. A review of the emerging literature on trans-local householding explores the process whereby the reflexive engagement of the state and the household remakes rural-urban differentiation in ways that are deeply gendered and classed. As such, state regulation and control of migrants are part of a process of reconfiguring state-society relations in which the production of space and the symbolic valuation of ruralness and urbanness have become a central trope.     

Behind Harold's Bloomsday Book: Gothic Secrets in Literary History

Harold Bloom's influential theory of literary influence has been widely regarded as utterly patriarchal, and yet some feminist critics have adapted rather than attacked it. The theory argues that a great poem aggressively rewrites and thereby conceals its precursor in order to appear as completely original. Bloom's theory of precursors invites in its turn an application of itself to itself, and his Anxiety of Influence seems to trail several possible antecedents, such as Shakespeare and Freud. A more powerful precursor, however, is a novel written by a woman: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . Just as Bloom's theory postulates only fathers replicating themselves through generational struggle and identification, so Mary Shelley's Gothic shocker represses the mother as both a source and an object of desire. What Bloom's theory thus represses behind its model of masculine sublime poets is a feminine Gothic novel. There is, however, a crucial difference: whereas Shelley's novel is profoundly critical of Victor Frankenstein's paternal shortcomings, such overweening Gothic masculinity provides the very basis of Bloom's Anxiety of Influence (1973), conceived as it is in the immediate post-Vietnam era. Such strong revision notwithstanding, behind the strong critic who re-asserts American masculinity after Vietnam stands the madman in the laboratory, and behind him stands the repressed mother, otherwise known to literary history as the Madwoman in the Attic. What she reveals is that literary history is Gothic rather than sublime, and that it will not ultimately cover and compensate for the worst creation of men: war itself. Even the enquiring spirit of the New Historicism emerges as a function of this Gothic exposure.     

Labor control regimes and worker resistance in global supply chains

This article seeks to examine two inter-related dynamics, the relationship between the international dispersion of apparel production and labor control regimes, and the relationship between labor control regimes and patterns of worker resistance. The article argues that where apparel production has concentrated in the last decade has as much to do with labor control regimes as with wages and other economic factors. It suggests that there are three main labor control regimes in the sector: state control, market despotism, and employer repression. The article then argues that these systems of labor control are conducive to three patterns of worker resistance: wildcat strikes, international accords, and cross-border campaigns. The article explores these arguments by examining examples of apparel global supply chains in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Honduras.     

Taiwanizing female immigrant spouses and materializing differential citizenship

Taiwan holds the Asian record for the proportion of families that involve so-called ‘foreign brides’. Marriage migration has brought close to half a million immigrant spouses into the country over the past decades. Most of these women come from Mainland China, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. This paper discusses how the Taiwanese state and society have actively pursued the integration of immigrant spouses since 2002, with a set of policies that acknowledge the massive migration of ‘foreign brides’ and the impact of this phenomenon on society. It argues that the attempt to integrate new immigrants is fraught with a discourse that serves to further stigmatize these women, discriminate against them, and, therefore, create an ‘Other’ that is used to erect the ideology of nation-building in Taiwan. The paper provides a critical analysis of policies, academic discourse and NGOs fundraising strategies to show how these institutions reinforce the idea that immigrant spouses are problematic and, therefore, need to be ‘Taiwanized’. This results in a system of differential legal and social citizenship in which immigrant spouses are at the bottom of the social hierarchy in Taiwanese society.     

殖民历史的叙述方法与文化政治——日本的台湾文学研究

在从20世纪60年代以来日本台湾文学研究的学术发展脉络来看,当今日本观察台湾文学的两种学术路径。一是20世纪80年代以来反省日本殖民历史,将台湾文学视为大陆五四新文学的一个嫡系,在压迫与抵抗的殖民语境下生成发展的研究方法。另一个是20世纪90年代以后通过引入西方文化研究、语言民族主义、民族国家等理论,强调日据时代"国语"(殖民地宗主国日语)的推广"形成以台湾皇民文学为核心的民族主义"。通过这一学术史的清理,我们可以解决近年来在日本学者与台湾作家之间发生论争的殖民历史的叙述方法与文化政治。     

改善结构提高功能充分利用文献资源

开发利用文献信息资源,开展深层次的信息服务,是图书馆的服务宗旨和发展目标.要做到这一点,必须优化图书馆结构和图书馆功能,扩大图书馆系统的功能,特别是信息功能,改善信息的存储方式,改善馆员队伍结构,提高馆员业务水平,加强信息深加工功能.     

Discovering sources of inequality in transition economies: a case study of rural Vietnam

Applying the recently developed inequality accounting framework, we quantify contributions of fundamental variables to consumption inequality in rural Vietnam. It is found that major determinants of the inequality include location, education, infrastructures. From 1993 to 1998, the contributions of education, physical capital, labour and community infrastructure to total inequality increased while those of land and credit access declined. Ethnicity is found to play a decreasing role in composing total inequality. Policy implications are discussed.