This article will revisit the beginnings of the spread of Korean popular entertainment in China in the mid-1990s to early 2000s by examining the contents of previously untapped Chinese language popular entertainment magazines and public recollections on internet forums. Considered here as critical archival resources, the authors argue that these materials are instrumental in offering both new chronologies and insights to the circulatory process of the regionalization of Korean popular cultures or Hallyu. Korean popular music (hereafter K-pop) entered China after the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Instead of the often singularized, culturalist argument of “shared traditions,” this article offers a more dynamic historiography of the Korean Wave in China that is termed here as “Analog Hallyu.”

The evolution of moral panics is dependent on the particular social context and the ability of certain issues to trigger concern within society. In this paper, the authors have employed a cross-comparative study of the heavy metal music subcultures in Singapore and Malaysia to understand the differences in the issues that generate such panics based on the sociopolitical context of each country and its current concerns. Although the youth involved in both cases are marginalised male Malays, the framing of their alleged deviance and criminality permits, in the case of Singapore, only a limited possibility for moral panic creation given the conservative socio-political governance that limits allegations such as 'Satanism'. In the case of Malaysia, where a 'large-scale' moral panic involving black metal emerged in 2001, the recent trend towards Islamisation gave fodder for the condemnation of black metal based on the allegations of the anti-Islamic behaviour of Muslim youth involved in the black metal scene. In both cases, such groups were exploited by parties claiming to defend the social fabric of the moral majority, but in the latter case it took on grave implications due to the extent of the state and public response. This paper thus argues that the framing of these moral panics is an important component determining the relative 'success' of the panic or its ability to capture public and state imaginings.

The influenza epidemic swept through our midst in September and October, unhappily with fatal consequences to a number of friends in the Tamil community. We are glad to say that though terribly severe while it lasted, its duration was mercifully short. On the other hand, the great news that the armistice has been signed filled us with unaccustomed joy.

This paper argues that the move towards a neoliberal vision of the city-state in the postindustrial era in Singapore has not gone unchallenged. With alternative resources of collective memory, the innovations of the social media and openings within the state dominated press, the authors seek to illustrate the process of counter-mapping of Singapore’s cityscape by conservation groups. The relationship between technological affordances and citizen aspirations are discussed informed by the ethnomethodological approach, where the focus of analysis is to understand the methods by which social actors use, interpret and make sense of their own actions. In this context, we draw on a series of case studies where citizens have counter-mapped to reflect their urban aspirations, and in the process, construct meanings around the actions of counter-mapping. In the hygienic futuristic neoliberal vision of a globally connected Singapore, conservationists are pushing for a post-capitalist and localized geo-cultural topographical imagination.

This article explores the interactions and tensions arising from a vibrant Canto-pop industry exported from Hong Kong to an interventionist nation-state of Singapore bent on discouraging the use of dialects by its ethnic Chinese population. Aside from highlighting the roles of technological and commercial factors behind the regional music networks, it seeks further to position this contemporary relationship within the larger historical and cultural context. The cultural politics involved here is not just an isolated phenomenon between two different cities. More importantly, the language policies of the Singapore government represent a haunting replication of the perennial attempts by central authorities in China to impose a more standardised linguistic and cultural identity on its dialect-speaking peripheries. This identity is based on not just the court language of Mandarin, but notions of ‘Chineseness’. This article goes on to question the extent to which Canto-pop could help foster a more hybridised identity transcending both the current dictates of the modern Singaporean state and the imagined cultural boundaries of a more historically entrenched Sino-centric realm.