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| 1 |
ID:
077805
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2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this brief of an international fact-finding mission to the Philippines, Jennifer Franco reports on the killings of peasants demanding the implementation of agrarian reform allegedly by members of the military. In early June 2006, Franco took part in a fact-finding mission to investigate such killings in Bondoc Peninsula in the southern part of the island of Luzon and in Davao del Norte in the eastern portion of the southern island of Mindanao
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| 2 |
ID:
077800
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2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Since the late 1980s, Taiwan's manufacturing and construction employers have pressured the state to increase substantially guest worker intakes in order to reduce labor shortages, to expand the supply of cheap accessible labor, and to weaken upward pressures on wage costs. This article describes the origins and development of the guest labor system and analyzes the effects it has had on Taiwan's economy and on workers both guest and local. The author analyzes the economic dimensions of migrant labor in the context of state efforts to promote employers' interests within a framework of class compromises and examines the response of Tai-wan's labor unions to the growing availability of cheaper foreign labor. Opposition to the mandatory food and accommodation fees imposed on guest workers led the state to encourage employers to recruit guest workers directly from the countries of origin in order to eliminate brokers' fees, the greatest source of migrant hardship. The author shows, however, that direct hiring has failed due to kickback arrangements involving employers, brokers, and state officials. This has brought the class basis of Taiwan's guest worker policy into sharp focus and engendered an intense struggle by guest workers
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| 3 |
ID:
077801
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2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
A territorial dispute deriving from nineteenth-century treaties imposed on China by an ascendant Russia became an integral element of the falling-out between the two great communist powers, the USSR and the People's Republic of China, in the second half of the twentieth century. That dispute, which came to be concentrated on the issue of the exact boundary alignment within the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, was made more intractable by the ideological estrangement between Moscow and Beijing. The dispute, in turn, fed back to embitter that estrangement. Contradictory interpretations of the nineteenth-century treaties taken by the two sides were compounded by their different approaches to the problem of boundary settlement: Beijing sought settlement on the basis of compromise, but insisted that could be achieved only through full renegotiation. Moscow read into Beijing's approach covert irredentism, refused to negotiate, and exerted military force to impose its own interpretation of the treaties. China resisted, meeting force with force, and in the 1969 clashes on the Ussuri River prevailed, bringing the conflict to the brink of all-out war. In 1986 Moscow broke a protracted deadlock by reversing its approach and agreeing to negotiate. By 2005 the full extent of the Sino-Russian boundary had been agreed and legitimized in new treaties.
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| 4 |
ID:
077799
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| Publication |
2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Through an analysis of public responses to two separate but related events in contemporary Singapore - a church's claim that "homosexuals can change" and a former prime minister's published comments about openly gay civil servants in his administration - this article explores how a "gay community" has been imagined in Singapore, where homosexual acts remain illegal and where a "conservative majority" has been ideologically mobilized by the state and moral-reli-gious entrepreneurs. A close reading of the debates within SiGNeL (the Singapore Gay News List) and the local mass media reveals ideological struggles - and, in particular, gay activists' role in these struggles - surrounding a basic contradiction between Singapore's exclusionary laws and practices and official state rhetoric about active citizenship, social diversity, and gradual liberalization. This rhetoric is aimed primarily at attracting foreign talent and retaining mobile Singaporean talent in a globally integrated economy that is increasingly dependent upon creativity and innovation
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| 5 |
ID:
077803
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| 6 |
ID:
077802
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| Publication |
2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article addresses the ways in which the leading Chinese TV Education provider, CETV, negotiates its role within the parameters of government policy, media industry constraints, media mandates, technological innovation, program reform, public ratings, and increasing audience participation. The author argues that mainly as a result of a radically new horizon of audience expectations, a new kind of participatory citizen is gradually emerging in China. In this process, the article submits, TV programming and program reform can be taken as a reliable indicator of change, since they must balance top-down government directives and bottom-up, popular demand that is measurable in direct audience input and public ratings. The author corroborates this claim through a brief analysis of documentary programs that are being designed more and more to maximize public participation, concluding that while we cannot yet speak of a proper public media sphere in China, there is ample evidence of the training of dialogic and polyphonic interaction that will be able to serve as a formal and practical precondition for more extended public debate. Certainly, the trend toward a participatory style in much recent CETV programming, and at many other TV stations, is unlikely to be reversible. What we are seeing is the birth of a new, TV-trained citizen who will aim to extend the privileges of participation toward contributing to a more fully political forum
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| 7 |
ID:
077804
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| Publication |
2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
China has entered a new information age that calls for a reconsideration of some key presuppositions about the relationship between Chinese media, communication, society, and culture. These include stereotypes that dominate representations and understandings of China such as the appealing, though too simple, model of propaganda versus free speech and political repression versus democracy or those anticipating the emergence of a more or less Habermasian "public sphere." Taking the example of mobile phone short messaging services (SMS), this article investigates the transforming relationships between Chinese media, power, political subjectivity, and citizenship. SMS now constitutes an important new set of communication practices in China. It is more widely used than the Internet and by a more diverse section of the population. In early 2005 per person, fifteen times more SMS messages than emails were being sent in China. Putting forward the idea of "orderly" and "disorderly" media it is suggested that while the Party voices its own rhetorics from the past, many people, particularly in the large metropolitan centres, are driving their own alternative visions of the future and forcing the authorities to engage with entirely new kinds of media practices that pose quite different challenges to those of the past.
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