Do Australians care about what their Asian neighbours think of them — and does it matter if they don’t? This collection of essays reveals that admiration for Australia is not widespread, particularly among Japanese and Chinese commentators. And how our Asian neighbours perceive Australia is important: perceptions have a powerful effect on the way different societies respond to one another.

This book tells the story of Michi, one of 650 Japanese war brides who arrived in Australia in the early 1950s. The women met Australian servicemen in post-war Japan and decided to migrate to Australia as wives and fiancées to start a new life. In 1953, when Michi reached Sydney Harbour by boat with her two Japanese-born children, she knew only one person in Australia: her husband. She did not know any English so she quickly learned her first English phrase, “I like Australia”, in the car on the way from the harbour to meet her Australian family.

The chapters in this book offer concrete examples from all over the world to show how community livelihoods in mineral-rich tracts can be more sustainable by fully integrating gender concerns into all aspects of the relationship between mining practices and mine affected communities. By looking at the mining industry and the mine-affected communities through a gender lens, the authors indicate a variety of practical strategies to mitigate the impacts of mining on women’s livelihoods without undermining women’s voice and status within the mine-affected communities.

Since September 11, 2001, our newspapers have been filled with the ‘war on terror’; our governments have mobilised their resources for ‘homeland security’; and people everywhere are braced for more terrorist attacks.

The latter years of the first decade of the twenty-first century were characterised by an enormous amount of challenge and change to Australia and Australians. Australia’s part in these challenges and changes is borne of our domestic and global ties, our orientation towards ourselves and others, and an ever increasing awareness of the interdependency of our world. Challenges and changes such as terrorism, climate change, human rights, community breakdown, work and livelihood, and crime are not new but they take on new variations and impact on us in different ways in times such as these.

Although the immense process of economic and social transformation currently underway in China and Vietnam is well known, less attention has been devoted to the process of Chinese and Vietnamese legal change.

Asian Socialism and Legal Change brings together experts to analyse recent developments in the legal sphere, representing the diversity and dynamism of this process. This book is the first systematic analysis of legal change in Asian transitional economies.

China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has had profound consequences for the structure of its economy, and there will many more before the full benefits of an open trading regime will be realised.

We cannot expect in East Asia over the foreseeable future to see the sort of conflation of sovereign states that has occurred in Europe. We must anticipate that, for the foreseeable future, the requirement will be for the sensible management and containment of competitive instincts.

The establishment of a multilateral security body in East Asia that includes all the key players, and which the major powers invest with the authority to tackle the shaping of the regional security order, remains a critical piece of unfinished business.

“China is so large that its trading interests and influence are global. But its interests are disproportionately powerful in its immediate Western Pacific and Asia Pacific partners. The evolution of China’s economic relationships with its Asia Pacific partners, in which APEC came to play a significant role in the 1990s, is thus a central part of the story of China’s rapidly growing and changing interaction with the global economy.”

- Ross Garnaut

In this collection of essays, we reflect on what it means to practise the social sciences in the twenty-first century. The book brings together leading social scientists from the Asia-Pacific region. We argue for the benefit of dialogue between the diverse theories and methods of social sciences in the region, the role of the social sciences in addressing real-world problems, the need to transcend national boundaries in addressing regional problems, and the challenges for an increasingly globalised higher education sector in the twenty-first century.