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After the withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), questions loomed about the future of U.S. involvement in the region’s trade affairs. Though the debate about the TPP continues, a new question has arisen: should the U.S. pursue a digital trade agreement (DTA) with Asian-Pacific partners? In this paper, Lee will explore the prospects of a U.S.-DTA in Asia, concluding that it is worth the Biden administration’s while to try.

Doan argues that medicine played an indispensable role in advancing the cause of Western diplomacy in China during the mission of William of Rubruck to Möngke Khan in 1253, the Jesuit mission to the Qing Court of the Kangxi Emperor in the 17th& 18th centuries, and the Protestant missions to the Qing Empire during the 19th century, which ultimately facilitated the entrenchment of Christianity within China and the subsequent encroachment by Western Imperial powers upon China during the latter half of the 19th century.

Zhang argues that Sorghaghtani Beki, the principal wife Chinggis Khan’s son, Tolui, was an integral part of the Mongol Empire and had a heavy hand in shaping subsequent governmental structure and succession. Though often ignored due to her sex, her agency is evidenced in multiple 13th century histories and record books.

Ong argues that the redirection of foreign direct investment (FDI) towards more skilled labor sectors and the correlated displacement of unskilled domestic workers have contributed to growing income disparities in Malaysia, and that the government’s policies to attract export-oriented, high-tech FDI, along with its pro-bumiputra nationalism, has resulted in inequitable FDI gains among skilled and skilled workers, thus failing to address this inequality while exacerbating it.

From 1960 to the early 1970s, the five core Metabolists—Kiyonori Kikutake, Noboru Kawazoe, Fumihiko Maki, Masato Ohtaka, and Kisho Kurokawa – theorized a new urban order that analogized a city with living organisms. Nakamachi theorizes that Metabolism’s legacy is not demonstrated in the movement’s initial fixation with the Japanese context, but rather in the theories’ adaptability to the rapidly changing global environment.

Nguyen analyzes motherhood and labor practices in a well-known Vietnamese enclave forged from a series of distinct migration waves beginning in the 1970s. Within Little Saigon, thousands of Vietnamese women made great sacrifices, forgoing their personal education, career, and time to raise their children and to uphold centuries-old Vietnamese ideals of motherhood.

Tao argues that the Silk Road stemmed primarily from the combined result of a Han Chinese military gambit to obtain Central Asian horses, and a Bactrian strategy to align commercial interests with political expediency during a period of dynastic decline. Evidence of those motivations can be sourced to both ancient literary texts and sculptural, osteological, and genetic research on Chinese horses.