Chinese universities have actively engaged in knowledge production about other countries and played crucial roles in training professionals for the country’s foreign policy community since the founding of the People’s Republic (PRC). For decades, the transformations of the PRC’s international and area studies programs have not only reflected the shifting demands of top decision-makers but also influenced the interactions among scholars, academic institutions, government agencies, business elites, and the general public. This article analyzes the ups and downs of China’s international and area studies programs in the second half of the 20th century and how they were closely intertwined with the country’s shifting priorities in foreign policy, overseas Chinese affairs, and higher education. Primarily focusing on the case of Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS), this paper explores how the PRC’s area studies programs interacted with the country’s foreign policy during the 1955–1965 and post-1978 periods. Despite the changing geopolitical dynamics after 2000, the academic infrastructure and particular institutional culture formed in these two phases remain essential to our understanding of China’s area studies initiatives today.

1926年底，印度尼西亚共产党发动了一连串起义，但很快就被荷兰殖民当局扑灭，印尼共亦在镇压中解体。长期以来，学界将此次起义视作印尼民族解放运动中的一座里程碑，并认为它由殖民地内部矛盾引发，国际因素的影响相对有限。基于共产国际档案，本研究试图透过全球视角重新审视共产国际与印尼共的互动，探讨国际共运和地方革命的相关话语是如何相互建构的。本文探究了国际共运的话语构建机制，揭示了尽管国际因素对印尼共起义的作用不甚明显，但共产国际对印尼革命的认知却受到了同一时期中国革命、斯大林—托洛茨基论战等事件的影响；共产国际的相关会议由擅长理论而不了解印尼实情的高级官员主导，讨论流于形式，最终导致该组织对印尼革命形势缺乏判断，对荷兰殖民政府的镇压反应迟缓。

Language and language education are central to studies of Chinese diasporic culture. However, existing scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on how overseas Chinese populations navigate language politics in their host societies. This research adopts a different perspective by examining the crucial roles overseas Chinese played in establishing Indonesian language programs in mainland China between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s. Specifically, overseas Chinese “returnees” were indispensable in founding the National College of Oriental Studies during World War II and launching several Indonesian language programs in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. While these programs served vastly different political purposes over time, they also reveal critical yet often overlooked aspects of—and surprising continuities in—China-Indonesia cultural exchange amid decolonization, domestic conflicts, and the Cold War. Although the primary aim of these programs was to fulfill the operational needs of state agencies and government-affiliated organizations, returnee networks played essential roles in promoting Indonesian culture in China. They actively participated in circulatory cultural diplomacy between the two countries, contributing significantly to China’s long-term knowledge production on Indonesia.

自 1974 年 5 月 31 日中国与马来西亚建立正式外交关系以来，两国关系历经多个发展阶段，不断深化发展。在 50 年的演进历程中，中马关系经历几个不同历史时期，两国通过互动达成共识，构建彼此认可的身份与利益认知，进而推动双边关系的稳定发展。然而，仅从双边互动视角出发，难以全面解释复杂国际环境下中马关系的发展历程。因此，从系统层面探讨国际体系在不同时期对中马关系的制约，以及相关赋能因素的影响，是十分必要和重要的。尽管国际体系的结构性限制会影响国家行为体的互动，但行为体的能动性仍能部分突破这些限制，自主选择发展路径并塑造战略取向。这一系统视角不仅深化对中马关系本质的理解，也为探讨双边关系在不断变动的国际环境中的韧性提供一种新思路。

More than three decades after the release of his seminal work An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926, Takashi Shiraishi finally published the long-awaited sequel, The Phantom World of Digul. Initially conceived with the self-explanatory title An Age of Normalcy, the monograph draws a sharp contrast with its prequel by investigating the interplay of the colonial regime’s political policing and the concurrent nationalist movement in the final years of the Dutch East Indies. While scholars commonly see the late 1920s and 1930s as a period of “peace and order” under the relatively stable rule of the Dutch Beambtenstaat—an “apolitical, administrative polity par excellence,” Shiraishi demonstrates that the colonial authority achieved such “normalcy” by “reducing the problem of nationalism to the question of police” (p. 16). Boven Digul, a remote penal colony established to intern recalcitrant communists and radical nationalists, stood out as a jarring antithesis to such “normalcy.” The mass internment camp served as both a metaphor and ground for the colonial regime’s policing and surveillance practices, epitomizing Dutch repressive colonial strategies that aimed to confine Indonesians’ political life within an extremely narrow space.

In 1623, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) beheaded twenty-one men on charges of conspiracy and treason in a public execution. Ten of the condemned were employees of the English East India Company (EIC) who had been trading in the Moluccas, better known as the Spice Islands, alongside their Dutch counterparts since the beginning of the century. The incident was hardly the most outrageous mass violence in the region’s tumultuous past. Nevertheless, the EIC dubbed the episode the “Amboyna Massacre,” which gained remarkable significance in various historical writings and unexpected longevity in the British culture in the following centuries. Alison Games’s monograph Inventing the English Massacre is the latest scholarly inquiry into the ambiguous conspiracy and the episode’s long afterlife, spanning British imperial history.

A panel discussion on "Empire and Regional Order", in which I discussed two related issues: 1. how to do research on the history of regional politics? 2. how to make sense of the unwritten by following what Ann Laura Stoler called “archival grains”.

荷兰殖民帝国的日常运作和印尼各种反殖民势力的活动都大大超越了“荷属东印度”这一地理范畴，而印度洋则是两者进行政治角力的重要场域。本文从海洋视角切入，对二十世纪上半叶的印尼反殖民运动进行反思。本文旨在跳出把陆地空间作为基本框架的传统叙事模式，思考反殖民运动中的去地域化因素。本文指出，高速发展的全球航运网络促进了人员、思想、商品的跨洋流动，对各地民族主义的产生及反殖民运动的发展产生了巨大的推动作用，但对这种影响的探讨却长期淹没于把殖民地或民族国家陆地疆域作为分析单位、且带有强烈的目的论倾向的历史书写之中。对跨洋网络等去地域化因素加以研究，有助于突破殖民地与民族国家的“束身衣”，重新审视二十世纪民族主义在殖民世界兴起与发展的历史进程。

China's resistance to Japanese aggression escalated into a full-scale war in 1937. The continuously deteriorating situation stimulated the rise of Chinese nationalism in the diaspora communities worldwide. The Japanese invasion of China, accompanied by the emergence of the National Salvation Movement (NSM) in Southeast Asia, provided the overseas Chinese with a rare opportunity to re-examine their ‘Chineseness’, as well as their relationships with the colonial states and the increasingly self-aware indigenous populations. This research problematises traditional approaches that tend to regard the NSM as primarily driven by Chinese patriotism. Juxtaposing Malaya and Java at the same historical moment, the article argues that the emergence of the NSM was more than just a natural result of the rising Chinese nationalism. Local politics and the shifting political orientations of overseas Chinese communities also profoundly shaped how the NSM played out in different colonial states.

Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS) in China has experienced significant changes in the past twenty years. China's rising political and economic power has stimulated growing demands for better understanding of the wider world, resulting in the rapid development of area studies in recent years. Although SEAS in China predated the relatively recent notion of ‘area studies’ by at least half a century, the boom in area studies has profoundly transformed the field, most notably by attracting a large number of scholars to conduct policy-relevant research. Not only does the ‘policy turn’ reflect shifts of research paradigms in the field of SEAS, but it is also consistent with some larger trends prevailing in China's higher education sector and rapidly changing society in general. This article shows that SEAS in China has grown even more imbalanced, as indicated by the rapid growth of language programmes, absolute domination of short-term policy research, and further marginalisation of humanistic subjects. To respond, Chinese universities have adopted new approaches to SEAS depending on their distinct disciplinary foundations, language coverage, faculty interests, and local governments’ policy preferences.

The Dutch East Indies government adopted the so-called Ethical Policy in the early 20th century, resulting in complex repercussions for Chinese minorities. Education was among the most contended battleground between Dutch authorities and the Chinese community and within the Chinese community itself. While the establishment of the Tiong Hoa Hwe Koan schools galvanized the rise of Chinese nationalistic sentiment, the colonial government also founded a Dutch-language school system specifically tailored for the Chinese to counterweight the potential ideological threat. By exploring the competitions and intricacies between the two systems, this paper seeks to problematize the existing literature that predominantly focuses on only one side of the story. The paper argues that the emergence of the two systems was neither a natural result of the Dutch Ethical Policy nor merely driven by the Indies Chinese’s desperate demand for education. Instead, it vividly reflects various tensions within the heterogeneous Chinese community and its entangled relationships with the transforming colonial state and the ancestral homeland.

This chapter assesses the 1926-1927 Uprising in Indonesia across several interconnected geographic and institutional scales: In the Comintern, where exiled leaders of the Partai Komunis Indonesia conferred with Comintern representatives about the situation at home; in the highest levels of the Politburo, where disagreements over revolutionary tactics in China exacerbated the power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky; and in Indonesia itself, where colonial repression inspired the abortive uprising. In so doing, this chapter shows how the Uprising demonstrated the limits of internationalism. As PKI leaders were unable to maintain effective contact with the movement in Indonesia, gaps in information undermined decision-making and led to conflict over the applicability of Russian models to the Indonesian context. Debates over Moscow’s China policy diverted attention from other territories and drew PKI members into the Stalin-Trotsky feud. Comintern support for the Uprising, therefore, did not materialize, further undermining the communist movement in Indonesia.