Abstract The paper presents an analysis of the economic relationship between the two most important economies in Asia. Over the last decades, the Chinese and Japanese economies have become more economically interdependent, a development which will, in the long run, impact the countries’ political relationship. The paper seeks to answer the question: How can China and Japan gain from the current economic situation, further enhance their relationship and increase their synergies for regional economic development? Data on trade and Foreign Direct Investment are used in combination with primary data from interviews with Japanese and Chinese companies on how they perceive the current business situation and future potential. The result of the data analysis shows that the countries have much to gain from their economic interdependence. The firms see great potential in their respective markets but are concerned about political turbulence. Three possible scenarios for the future economic relationship are presented, including fierce competition on all markets and a leveraging of resources for mutual development between Chinese and Japanese companies.

This paper investigates how tour guides position themselves in Vietnam's transition from a command economy to market socialism. The case study of the Dalat Easy Riders motorcycle guides demonstrates that tour guides take advantage of, personify and contribute to the economic, political and social transitions in the country. Relatedly, we argue that Vietnam's transition (known as d?i m?i) is a key component of the Easy Riders' promotional narratives. In sum, we analyse how tour guides become tourist products in a transitional society.

Focusing on the coexistence of competing and contested interests in intercultural natural resource management (NRM) systems in Australia and Malaysia, this paper explores the ways in which ontological pluralism and the interplay of socio-cultural, political-economic and biophysical influences shape NRM systems. We aim to foster a discursive space in which to reframe the challenges of capacity building in the rapidly changing spaces of intercultural NRM systems. The paper synthesizes the conceptual arguments of field research to conclude that capacity deficits of dominant institutions, processes and knowledge systems drive many systemic failures in land and sea management affecting Indigenous peoples. We advocate urgent action to build intercultural competence and new capacities and competencies in those institutions. The paper reframes intercultural NRM in terms of coexistence and invites wider debate about these ` new geographies of coexistence' in intercultural NRM systems.

Over the past decades Vietnam has seen striking efforts to reinvent the exercise of democratic rural development. Promotion of grassroots democracy, notably under the Grassroots Democracy Decree (GDD), has been an acute response by Communist Party and government to large scale unrest among the rural populace owing to dissatisfactions with a felt mismatch between espoused commitments to ‘good governance’ and its actual practice. Through evidence from field work, this paper assesses the implications of the GDD in the central and northern highlands, analyzing how the promotion of grassroots democracy is discursively constructed by rural development professionals. The results outline three dominant discourses, which center on their respective interests in liberalist democratization, improved efficiency in state renovation, and enhanced accountability in governing local policy ambiguities. It argues that ‘grassroots democracy’ is serving as a conceptual mediator, supporting learning between diverging interests associated with rural development and different ideological positions shrouding the notion of democracy itself. Yet, given the extent that discourses are reflective of how professionals relate to grassroots aspirations, grassroots movements, which originally ushered the Party and central government to pass the GDD, have a significant struggle ahead of them to affect concrete changes in professionals' practices.

Vietnam has a long tradition of social engineering through which the ordering of urban space haseffectively been used to enforce the state’s vision of political and social order. With the country currently in tran-sition from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy, the ordering of urban spaces is currently all themore important. This is prominently manifested in the numerous beautification projects that are being implemen-ted in Vietnamese cities. This article explores recent ordering endeavours and considers the way they are legiti-mated and contested in Vietnam’s new socio-political context. Three beautification projects in Hanoi areexamined using materials from policy documents, professional journals and media coverage. The article arguesthat state ordering actions and the ‘exemplary’ urban spaces they seek to create are embodiments of a complexsystem of orders of powers in transitional Vietnam, in which political visions of modernist socialism and the newmarket-oriented agenda are sometimes in alignment and sometimes clash. Overall, the state’s failure in sustain-ing these ‘exemplary’ urban spaces is emblematic of this hybrid system.