IIAS Newsletter 48 - Director's note

By the time you read this, the world’s Olympians will be competing for glory and perhaps a place in the record books in Beijing. The Games are not only of interest to sportsmen and women, of course, but also to scholars studying the tournament as a social and political event. And with China as the host, this is arguably the most controversial sporting event of modern times. Issues of PR, human rights, media coverage, the ‘greenness’ of the games, have the keen attention of critical researchers. Among them our guest columnist, Kerry Brown, whose piece Will the Olympics change China, or will China change the Olympics? (Network Asia, p. 40) raises the spectre of whether the Games will bring China closer to the rest of the world or just serve to highlight the differences.

Olympic glory has long been a goal of the PRC, as the 1986 poster ‘I strive to bring glory to the mother country’ featured on our back cover shows. Stefan Landsberger gives us privileged access to some of his rare collection of propaganda art which ‘gave concrete expression to the abstract policies and the many different grandiose visions of the future that the CCP entertained’. See ‘Life as it ought to be’: propaganda art of the PRC (Portrait, pp. 26-27)

And I hope you will enjoy our theme for this issue - Women Warriors in Asia. We are no longer surprised to learn about female suicide-bombers and women in guerilla groups, but this is not just a modern development. As the articles we have brought together here show, there is a history and a tradition of Asian women in warfare and activism. And yet, to date, there has been no systematic or comparative study undertaken that examines these warrior women across the region. Tobias Rettig and Vina Lanzona’s theme surely goes some way to address this. (pp. 1-15)

Max Sparreboom, director