New Mandala

In the 1990s, China reportedly established a signals intelligence base on Great Coco Island, though it was never confirmed. And now, Burma’s tourism authorities intend to open the islands up to foreign and domestic tour groups with the first ferry of tourists due to sail on Friday…A return ticket price for the first tour has [...]

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As the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the PRC, China’s October 1st National Day this year was the centre of much media attention both within and beyond the country. But it’s interesting to reflect upon how this festival was viewed within China’s Tai-Kadai speaking minority communities. I was visiting Kam (known in Chinese as Dong [...]

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Today is the first anniversary of one of the more important days in recent Thai political history: 7 October 2008.
Soon after the bloody clashes of that day, a photographic chronicle of events was produced by regular New Mandala contributor Nick Nostitz.  It provides a graphic overview of the injuries that resulted when the People’s Alliance [...]

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New Mandala readers will be interested in the following announcement for the 2nd Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network.  The first of these conferences was held in 2008 in Guwahati, northeast India.  It was a very worthwhile conference and I imagine that the Chiang Mai iteration will be similarly good.
The details are:
Asian Borderlands: Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation [...]

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We rarely post job advertisements on New Mandala but given the very specific nature of this position, and our niche in mainland Southeast Asian Studies, I thought it best to make an exception.  I expect that for the right candidate this would be an amazing opportunity.
The advertisement sets out all of the details:
The University of [...]

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Web censorship regimes in mainland Southeast Asia are a regular topic of discussion here at New Mandala. Of course, anybody who spends time in Burma gets used to the government’s relatively consistent effort to block potentially subversive online material.  And, jokes aside, since the coup of 2006 Thailand has also beefed up resources to clamp [...]

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Lately I’ve been working on trying to place my detailed ethnographic observations of a village in northern Thailand into a broader national and regional context. I’ve been looking at data from both IRRI and FAO on agricultural productivity. Here are some results from my number crunching this morning. The first graph using data from IRRI (click [...]

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As China continues to have problems with its own internal ethnic tensions, some of those it faces in Burma are richly ironic, but the entire situation is becoming more complex and fraught by the day.
- Michael Sainsbury, “For China, Burma is thorny territory”, The Australian, 8 September 2009.  This old New Mandala picture provides some [...]

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[This post is an introductory comment to Doug Miles' detailed review of Hjorleifur Jonsson's Mien Relations: Mountain People and State Control in Thailand. The full review is available here.]
“Now where did I leave my jolly pith helmet?”
I commend this book for initiating a shift of paradigm in research concerning the Yao of southern China and the [...]

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