Institut d'Asie Orientale

In recent years, ``smart cities'' have rapidly increased in discourses as well as in their real number, and raise various issues. While citizen engagement is a key element of most definitions of smart cities, information and communication technologies (ICTs) would also have great potential for faci litating public participation. However, scholars have highlighted that little research has focused on actual practices of citizen involvement in smart cities so far. In this respect, the authors analyse public participation in Japanese ``Smart Communities'', paying attention to both official discourses and actual practices. Smart Communities were selected in 2010 by the Japanese government which defines them as ``smart city'' projects and imposed criteria such as focus on energy issues, participation and lifestyle innovation. Drawing on analysis of official documents as well as on interviews with each of the four Smart Communities' stakeholders, the paper explains that very little input is expected from Japanese citizens. Instead, ICTs are used by municipalities and electric utilities to steer project participants and to change their behaviour. The objective of Smart Communities would not be to involve citizens in city governance, but rather to make them participate in the co-production of public services, mainly energy production and distribution.

Abstract The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages—that is, Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic—is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history 1–3 . A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements 4,5 . Here we address this question by ‘triangulating’ genetics, archaeology and linguistics in a unified perspective. We report wide-ranging datasets from these disciplines, including a comprehensive Transeurasian agropastoral and basic vocabulary; an archaeological database of 255 Neolithic–Bronze Age sites from Northeast Asia; and a collection of ancient genomes from Korea, the Ryukyu islands and early cereal farmers in Japan, complementing previously published genomes from East Asia. Challenging the traditional ‘pastoralist hypothesis’ 6–8 , we show that the common ancestry and primary dispersals of Transeurasian languages can be traced back to the first farmers moving across Northeast Asia from the Early Neolithic onwards, but that this shared heritage has been masked by extensive cultural interaction since the Bronze Age. As well as marking considerable progress in the three individual disciplines, by combining their converging evidence we show that the early spread of Transeurasian speakers was driven by agriculture.

ISBN 978-0-674-02773-2

More than a quarter of century after the end of the war in 1975, the Lao leadership is still in search for a compelling nationalist narration. Its politics of culture and representation appear to be caught between the rhetoric of preservation and the desire for modernity. Meanwhile, originating from the periphery where ethnic minorities had hitherto been symbolically, politically and administratively confined, the participation of some of their members in the Indochina Wars (1945-75) exposed these individuals to socialization and politicization processes.This rigorously researched and cogently argued book is a fine-grained analysis of substantial ethnographic material, showing the politics of identity, the geographies of memory and the power of narratives of some members of ethnic minority groups who fought during the Vietnam War in the Lao People's Liberation Army and/or were educated within the revolutionary administration. No study has ever been conducted on the latter's views on the national(ist) project of the late socialist era. Their own perceptions of their membership of the nation have been overlooked.Post-War Laos is a set to be a landmark study, and an original contribution which refines established theories of nationalism, such as Anderson's 'imagined community', by addressing a common weakness: namely, their tendency to deny agency to individuals, who in fact interpret their relationship to, and place within, the nation in a variety of ways that may change according to time and circumstance.

L'objectif de cet article est de clarifier et d'approfondir le concept de co-branding, et de proposer un cadre de réflexion face à ce type d'alliance de marques. Dans cette optique, la problématique générale du co-marquage est présentée. Puis, sur la base des travaux relatifs aux extensions de marques, et plus spécifiquement ceux fondés sur la théorie de la catégorisation et celle des représentations sociales, des éléments d'évaluation d'une stratégie de co-marquage sont proposés.

BACKGROUND: Whole lung lavage is the current standard therapy for pulmonary alveolar proteinosis (PAP) that is characterized by the alveolar accumulation of surfactant. Rituximab showed promising results in auto-immune PAP (aPAP) related to anti-GM-CSF antibody. METHODS: We aimed to assess efficacy of rituximab in aPAP in real life and all patients with aPAP in France that received rituximab were retrospectively analyzed. RESULTS: Thirteen patients were included. No patients showed improvement 6 months after treatment, but, 4 patients (30%) presented a significant decrease of alveolar-arterial difference in oxygen after 1 year. One patient received lung transplantation and one patient was lost of follow-up within one year. Although a spontaneous improvement cannot be excluded in these 4 patients, improvement was more frequent in patients naïve to prior specific therapy and with higher level of anti-GM-CSF antibodies evaluated by ELISA. No serious adverse event was evidenced. CONCLUSIONS: These data do not support rituximab as a second line therapy for patients with refractory aPAP.

Hunter-gatherer occupations of small islands are rare in world prehistory and it is widely accepted that island settlement is facilitated by agriculture. The Ryukyu Islands contradict that understanding on two counts: not only did they have a long history of hunter-gatherer settlement, but they also have a very late date for the onset of agriculture, which only reached the archipelago between the eighth and thirteenth centuries AD. Here, we combine archaeology and linguistics to propose a tripartite model for the spread of agriculture and Ryukyuan languages to the Ryukyu Islands. Employing demographic growth, trade/piracy and the political influence of neighbouring states, this model provides a synthetic yet flexible understanding of farming/language dispersals in the Ryukyus within the complex historical background of medieval East Asia.

Electromagnetic radiations are named according to frequency or to wavelength (which is inversely proportional to frequency) and create electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Frequencies widely vary according to sources: high-voltage power lines, electrically heated beds, MRI, VDTs, microwave ovens, satellite, and radio/TV transmissions or cellular phone transmitters/receivers. Public concern has increased about the potential health effects of EMFs. There are arguments in favour of EMFs being biologically active, but no mechanism has been identified that explains the link between EMFs and bioeffects. Human data reviewed concern the potential reproductive effects (mainly spontaneous abortions, low birthweight and congenital malformations) of exposure to sources of EMFs: maternal residence, electrically heated beds, occupational exposure (mainly video display terminals), and medical exposures. The available epidemiologic studies all have limitations that prevent to draw clearcut conclusions on the effects of EMFs on human reproduction. EMFs are ubiquitous and unavoidable exposures. The matter of possible effects cannot be considered closed, but until our understanding of the biologic important parameters of EMFs exposures is stronger,design of new studies will be difficult and small epidemiologic studies are unlikely to provide definitive answers and should not be given high priority. No conclusion can be drawn for radiofrequencies and microwaves because of lack of data. There is no convincing evidence today that EMFs of the sort pregnant women or potential fathers meet in occupational or daily life exposures does any harm to the human reproductive process.

Abstract Although many scholars date the onset of the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution or the post-1945 ‘Great Acceleration’, there is growing interest in understanding earlier human impacts on the earth system. Research on the ‘Palaeoanthropocene’ has investigated the role of fire, agriculture, trade, urbanisation and other anthropogenic impacts. While there is increasing consensus that such impacts were more important than previously realised, geographical variation during the Palaeoanthropocene remains poorly understood. Here, we present a preliminary comparative analysis of claims that pre-industrial anthropogenic impacts in Japan were significantly reduced by four factors: the late arrival of agriculture, an emphasis on wet-rice farming limited to alluvial plains, a reliance on seafood rather than domesticated animals as a primary source of dietary protein, and cultural ideologies of environmental stewardship. We find that none of these claims of Japanese exceptionalism can be supported by the archaeological and historical records. We make some suggestions for further research but conclude that the Japanese sequence appears consistent with global trends towards increased anthropogenic impacts over the course of the Palaeoanthropocene.

This article aims to comprehend the physical suffering that occurs when bodies face the experiences of war and death, or the "decay of bodies," as we call it, in particular on the Hồ Chíí Minh Trail. The study focuses on a specific group of so-called wartime volunteers, the Youth Shock Brigades [Thanh Niêên Xung Phong], established in July 1950 and mainly composed of young girls and women between 13 and 22 years old, who were often sent to the front line. The objective is to investigate these young people's tragic fate, caught between barbarism and heroism, by stressing how their sacrifices were, and have been, entrenched in individual bodies and collective memory. Confronted with an official historiography that is positivist and "male," the singular history of those young women is crucial to our understanding of the mechanisms of the thirty-year-old war led by the Lao Động Party.

The liberation of women has been one of the priorities of the Chinese Communist Party since its foundation, with its sources in the evolution of ideas and the struggles that developed in urban China after the May Fourth movement. The Party, however, has put this ideal into practice only when it did not contradict the imperatives of revolution. The same holds true for prostitution: in 1949 the Party was eager to eliminate the most obvious forms of the exploitation of women, but practical measures were only carried out over several years. Article 6 of the Common Programme stated that “the People's Republic of China abolishes the feudal system that maintains women in slavery.” Prostitution appears in the discourse of the Party as the worst form of exploitation, as exemplified in an editorial of Xin Zhongguo funii in December 1949: “Prostitution is a sequel to the savage and bestial system of former exploiters and power holders to ruin the spirit and the body of women and to tarnish their dignity.”

Innovations in horse equipment during the early Middle Ages provided advantages to societies from the steppes, reshaping the social landscape of Eurasia. Comparatively little is known about the precise origin of these crucial advances, although the available evidence points to early adoption in East Asia. The authors present new archaeological discoveries from western and northern Mongolia, dating to the fourth and fifth centuries AD, including a wooden frame saddle with horse hide components from Urd Ulaan Uneet and an iron stirrup from Khukh Nuur. Together, these finds suggest that Mongolian groups were early adopters of stirrups and saddles, facilitating the expansion of nomadic hegemony across Eurasia and shaping the conduct of medieval mounted warfare.

Abstract In a recent study we used an interdisciplinary approach combining linguistics, archaeology and genetics to analyse the Transeurasian languages 1 . Our analysis concluded that the early dispersals of these languages were driven by agriculture. A preprint published on this server presents objections to the Transeurasian hypothesis and its association with farming dispersals 2 . However, close inspection of that text reveals numerous misinterpretations and inconsistencies. In the interest of furthering scientific debate over Transeurasian language and population history, we address the critiques, revising datasets and fine-tuning approaches. The linguistic critique questions the quantity and quality of our datasets. Here we show that the number of surviving cognate sets for Transeurasian is in line with that for well-established language families. In addition, we find that Tian et al.’s failure to reject a core of regularly corresponding cognates in the basic vocabulary creates ground for a consensus about the genealogical relatability of the Transeurasian languages. The archaeological critique attempts a re-analysis of one Bayesian test using re-scored data only for northern China. Over half of the suggested re-scorings contain inconsistencies and it is not explained why the re-analysis retains the original data for sites outside northern China, comprising almost 60% of the total. More importantly, the sweeping claim that there is no evidence supporting the prehistoric migrations analysed in our study is not backed by any discussion of the archaeological record. With respect to genetics, the preprint claims a re-analysis showing that the data ‘do not conclusively support the farming-driven dispersal of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, nor the two-wave spread of farming to Korea.’ In fact, the only genetic re-analysis presented is limited to samples from Korea and Japan and does not contradict our original conservative modelling of Neolithic individuals with Hongshan and our Bronze Age ones with Upper Xiajiadian. In sum, in bringing multiple lines of evidence together through triangulation, we gained a more balanced and richer understanding of Transeurasian dispersals than each discipline could provide individually. Our research doubtless leaves room for improvement but we remain confident that triangulation did not ‘fail’, but rather brought us a step closer to understanding the history of the Transeurasian languages.

Abstract The study of historic ecological exchange is a multidisciplinary pursuit between paleoecology, history, and archaeology. This special collection and introduction explore ecological exchange between approximately 1500 and 1700 CE in the West Pacific, specifically in the Japanese and Philippine Archipelagos as well as littoral China. Rather than focusing exclusively on the introduction of exotic flora and fauna, the introduction and collection emphasize the dispersal, adoption, and—at times—rejection of imported species. In the process, the collection exhibits the array of techniques available to study past exchanges and the need for further research on this topic and region.

La condition de chômeur est marquée par l'obligation de recherche d'emploi, mais cette définition internationale dissimule des réalités hétérogènes. L'objectif de ce livre est d'explorer la diversité des significations du chômage : comment les chômeurs vivent-ils et interprètent-ils leur situation à Paris, à São Paulo et à Tokyo ? Le chômage a-t-il le même sens partout ? L’ouvrage retrace les manières dont le chômage est vécu par des hommes et des femmes de milieux sociaux et d’âges différents dans ces trois métropoles. Cette démarche comparative permet de repérer plusieurs échelles de variation: internationale, avec un univers de significations commun aux chômeurs des trois pays ; nationale, avec l’affirmation de modèles de référence spécifiques à chaque territoire; transnationale, avec des expériences qui se recoupent selon le sexe, l’âge et la catégorie sociale, quel que soit le pays. Fruit d’enquêtes par entretiens biographiques approfondis et d’une méthode inédite de comparaison internationale, ce livre renouvelle les connaissances sur le chômage d’une façon aussi originale que passionnante.

Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections.

International audience

Industrial districts, clusters, innovation policies, regional economies, SMEs, China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam

Gilles Guiheux The Political "Participation" of Entrepreneurs: Challenge or Opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party? IN 1 9 7 8 , D U R IN G TH E T H IR D PLEN U M OF TH E ELEV EN TH NATIO N AL party congress, Deng Xiaoping initiated a new economic policy that was to have dramatic economic and social effects. Turning his back on Mao Zedong egalitarianism (pingjun zhuyi), Deng claimed "poverty is not socialism. Socialism means eliminating poverty." From then on, people would be allowed to pursue material wealth and endeavor to improve their well-being, even if that meant that some might become richer than others. The new slogan was "Let certain regions, certain enterprises, certain people become rich first" (yibufen diqu, yibufen qiye, yibufen ren xianfuyu qilai). More than a quarter of a century later, rapid economic growth has dramatically improved the material well-being of the Chinese people, but it has also widened the gap between rich and poor—to such a level that it gives rise to spirited debates.1 Among those who have greatly benefited from economic growth and the transition from a planned to a market economy are private entrepreneurs. Almost nonexistent in Maoist China, private entrepre­ neurs form today a significant part of the Chinese society. Some observ­ social research Vol 73 : No 1 : Spring 2006 219 ers have gone so far as to suggest that China is moving from an "economy of employees" (dagongxingjingji) to an "economy of bosses" (laobanxing jingi). Though private entrepreneurs are still a tiny minority (according to one scholar, they represented 5 percent of the population in 1999),2they have accumulated significant economic power. Inrural China, they some­ times provide jobs and means of subsistence to villagers, a position that gives them clear influence over local affairs. In Chinese cities, because of their high level of income, they can afford to live in gated communities that are producing new forms of urban residential segregation. Of course, situations vaiy. Individuals owning a private business (that is registered as such) can run a small restaurant at the comer of the street or operate several factories all over the country; they can have zero to hundreds or thousands of employees; they can sell their product or service to clients from the neighborhood or export to world markets. Variety aside, this article aims to analyze the means ofpolitical influence that private entrepreneurs have accumulated over the years. The issue came to the frontline of Chinese and foreign media when the former president and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, formulated his "Three Represents" theory in a speech on the eightieth anniversary of the party on July 1, 2001. The theory has been widely touted as a call for private entrepreneurs to join the Communist Party. For the party state, which wishes to main­ tain (or even strengthen) its monopoly on political activities, the chal­ lenge is clearly to adjust to the fast-changing shape of Chinese society. The question being addressed is therefore how, in a still authoritarian regime, the emergence of a new social group or stratum, economically and socially influential, affects the political realm. In the first section, this article reviews the conditions of the reemergence of private entrepreneurship in Communist China, which should be credited both to initiatives coming from society and the setting up of a new legal framework, and how this development led to the Three Represents theory. In the second, it looks at the various ways entrepreneurs take part in the political arena. Finally, the third section tries to assess the consequences of this participation. 220 social research 1. THE RETURN OF PRIVATE ENTREPRENEURS Over the last 27 years of reforms and opening up (gaigeyukaifang), entre­ preneurs have moved from the fringe to the center of the economic and political arenas. People engaging themselves in independent economic endeavors were being blamed and socially marginalized in the late 1970s. More than a quarter of century later, they are being praised for their contribution to the well-being of the whole Chinese society. It is not only that the structure of the Chinese economy has changed and that the private sector is playing...

Co-éditeurs scientifiques: François Robinne et Mandy Sadan