The second arrival of Christianity in China went hand in hand with the Mongol conquest of Eurasia. Although the Mongols themselves were not Christian missionaries, they did create a special political, social and religious atmosphere, which happened to be favourable to the spread of religions like Buddhism, Islam and Christianity in China in the Mongol …

WPS 63 Mongol Responses to Christianity in China: A Yuan Dynasty Phenomenon Read More »

Disease regimes were one of the factors keeping Southeast Asian populations low, particularly in moist lowland areas, until the nineteenth century. Concentrations of population sufficient to maintain an endemic pattern of diseases such as smallpox and measles emerged relatively late, beginning with agricultural systems associated with Pagan, Angkor, and northern Vietnam around the 8th-11th centuries. …

WPS 62 The Battle of the Microbes: Smallpox, Malaria and Cholera in Southeast Asia Read More »

A revised version of this paper has now been published in an academic journal. The citation is as follows: Jones, Gavin W., 2007, “Delayed marriage and very low fertility in Pacific Asia”, Population and Development Review, 33(3): 453-478.

In an era of rapid economic globalization, many national governments have been actively attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), ostensibly for purposes of encouraging local economic and social development. The proliferation of these strategies has generated intense inter-governmental competition for FDI. This paper examines the case of Singapore, a country that was relatively successful in attracting …

WPS 60 Running Just to Stay Still: Singapore’s FDI-Attraction Strategies (1965-2005) Read More »

This paper (which forms a chapter of a study of south Indian film stars and politics) deals with the period stretching from the early 1970s to the mid01980s, during which time the three film stars who are at the centre of the study — M.G. Ramachandran, N.T. Rama Rao and Rajkumar — either enter the …

WPS 59 From Virtual to Real Political Power: Film Stars Enter Electoral Politics Read More »

The subject of migrants’ rights typically conjures up a legalistic understanding as it relates to international human rights law. By contrast, this paper attempts to contribute to the debate on migrants’ human rights by focusing not only on normative and legal aspects of international human rights law, but also on the issue of political participation …

WPS 58 Economic Migration and the Transnationalisation of the Rights of Foreign Workers – A Concept Note Read More »

The management of foreign manpower is vital for any labor import country as failure to ensure efficacy in the achievement of labor migration policies and program goals often generates a whole range of unintended consequences like xenophobia, politicization of migration, irregular migration, and eventually, cessation of labor migration programs. Despite the abundance of research on …

WPS 57 Foreign Manpower in Singapore: Classes, Policies and Management Read More »

This paper is about the social and cultural significance of hotels in the Nepal Himalaya. Through a socio-semiotic approach, I analyse how the hotel in Himalayan tourism functions as an architectural form that mediates different social domains, and through the process embeds the ideology of ‘development’ in everyday life, producing the power relations that would …

WPS 56 Hotels as Sites of Power: Tourism, Status and Politics In the Himalaya Read More »