A longstanding and contentious issue in Chinese legal history is whether women had the legal right to inherit and own property. During the Southern Song in particular, certain historical and legal sources have been interpreted by scholars in such a way as to propose that they did, at least to a limited extent, as reflected, for example, in the “daughter's half-share law” (nüzi fenfa 女子分法), which stipulated that a daughter would receive half a son's portion upon the death of both parents. The current study, through an examination of documentary sources on the inheritance rights of daughters, clarifies the historical circumstances surrounding the phenomenon, and concludes that no fundamental legal right to inherit and own property such as that enjoyed by men was intended. Rather, laws specifying the inheritance rights of women were the result of legislative measures for the protection of orphaned daughters, out of a concern to ensure that they would not be deprived of property that they would have received (for example, as dowry) had their parents not died. The Song's uniqueness lay not in the elevation of women's property rights, but rather in the implementation of explicit policies for the social good. That similar laws were not continued in the Ming and Qing did not in itself mean that the principle of protecting orphaned daughters had been abandoned, but rather that this principle would be applied through the discretionary powers of magistrates, as records of actual legal judgments demonstrate.

From 1999 to 2004, communal violence between Christians and Muslims broke out in the Moluccas of northeastern Indonesia, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries, and displacing hundreds of thousands of others. Unlike previous studies and analyses that give much attention to the political economy of the conflict, the dynamics of national politics, and the role of security forces – particularly the army and the police – and non-Moluccas Muslim jihadists and combatants in initiating and orchestrating the violence, this article mainly focuses on the contributions of religion, especially Islam, the dynamics of the Moluccas' local history and politics, and the role of Ambonese or Moluccan Muslim social actors and jihadists during the carnage. Focusing mainly on Maluku province, this article discusses how the local militant religious leaders framed the violence, recruited, and mobilized the masses in the combat zone, and how the local ordinary Muslim fighters portrayed – and became involved in – the wars, used religious narratives, discourses, symbols, and teachings to give theological legitimacy to the battle, and transformed their everyday experiences through the fighting. Lastly, it examines factors that contributed to the militancy and radicalism of those involved in the violence and investigates a process of radicalization of various Muslim groupings in the Moluccas that could provide a rationale for the eruption of the interreligious violence.

The Western Capital (Sŏgyŏng) project was of ideological, cultural, and strategic significance for the Empire of Korea (1897–1910) struggling for survival in the age of imperialism. This study argues that Imperial Korea's understanding of its place in the civilized world of the past, present, and future inspired redeveloping P'yŏngyang as the secondary capital. The advocates cited the history of the city in particular and of the nation in general to legitimize the project. Also, status-conscious specialist chungin (“middle people”), a newly prominent social group with loyalist members, played active roles. Moreover, responding to the deteriorating Russo-Japanese relations, Korea began preparing the nation's secondary capital, located within a neutral zone that Russia proposed to Japan. From the outset, the critics of the project highlighted funding constraints, a heavy tax burden on the local population, and rapacious officials exploiting the situation. The Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 effectively ended the project, but the memory of P'yŏngyang's status as the secondary capital outlived the Empire of Korea and the subsequent Japanese colonial rule before the city became the national capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, established in 1948.

This article is an institutional study on the history of the ill-fated Wusong Railway, China's first operational railway. The nine-mile light railway was built by the British firm Jardine, Matheson & Co. without the Qing government's permission. After negotiations with British diplomats, the Qing government agreed to purchase the line but the reformist governor-general Shen Baozhen later ordered it to be removed to Taiwan. Unfortunately funds were never provided for the rebuilding work. This article argues that it was the Qing government's failure to raise funds for capital-intensive projects that led to the railway's final destruction.

In 1927, when the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek established a republic, they also established a list of urgent duties. One was to reform the government structure from top to bottom so as to show the rest of the world its capability to govern the country in a modern way. While big cities were the showplaces for modernization and state-building, down at the county level, Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed Zhongshan in Guangdong the “model county.” To maintain this honor and its benefits, the local authorities made special efforts to restructure the government; reforming and retraining the police force was one important aspect of this attempt. While it is commonly held today that in the 1930s and 1940s county governments in the Pearl River Delta had disintegrated and were dominated by “local bosses,” this article uses previously inaccessible local records to examine Zhongshan County government and reform to answer one particular question: whether Zhongshan was successful in forming a modern police force. It examines a number of problems related to inefficiency and ineffectiveness in government administration, but at the same time also discusses why many civilians were welcoming, rather than suspicious, of the police. The answers to these issues suggest that the overall structure and management of the Zhongshan government (and even social integration) was to some extent consolidated in this period.

This article focuses on the literary criticism of the Edo-period scholar, Seita Tansō (1719–1785). Although a historian by vocation, Tansō additionally lectured extensively on the Chinese vernacular novel, Shuihu zhuan (Jp. Suikoden, En. The Water Margin). While earlier generations of Chinese fiction aficionados in Japan had also discussed Shuihu zhuan, early eighteenth-century analysis was primarily limited to philological explication—a task necessitated by the extensive use of colloquial language in the novel. In contrast to this tradition of philological exegesis, Tansō turned his attention to the ethical content and literary structure of Shuihu zhuan. Tansō was heavily influenced by the writing of the Chinese fiction commentator Jin Shengtan (1608–1661), and in this article, I discuss Tansō's use of Jin's fiction criticism in the construction of his own interpretation of the novel. I argue that the dissemination of Chinese novels in Edo-period Japan cannot be discussed without an understanding of Japanese engagement with Chinese narrative theory, and I identify Seita Tansō as an important figure in a transition from philological to more purely narratological analysis of Chinese vernacular fiction.

The Kwong Tai Company (光大公司 1917–1960) holds a unique position in modern Chinese history as the first joint-stock company registered in British Hong Kong that originated as an ancestral tong in South China. Its history reflects how a traditional ancestral tong adjusted its operations in a unique historical setting and coped with a new identity. This case provides a missing chapter in the story of how traditional Chinese corporate institutions came to terms with Western ideas of the company and company law. By looking into the institutional and cultural transformations of the Yip Kwong Tai Tong, this article reveals how traditional Chinese institutions responded to political and economic changes in Republican China, when the state in China evolved into a different form, and the ritual-based society was in decline, especially when the world economic system entered coastal China.

This research deals with South Korea–Taiwan relations from 1949, when the concept of a “Pacific Pact” was first introduced, to 1954, when the Asian People's Anti-Communist League (APACL) was formed. Thus far, studies on the regional order of East Asia during the early Cold War period have focused on U.S. policies toward East Asia and U.S. relations with individual East Asian states. In contrast, this present work examines the multilateral nature of the international relations in the region at the time. The extended cooperation, conflict, and competition between South Korea (ROK) and Taiwan (ROC) over the Pacific Pact from 1949 to 1954 vividly show how actively the two nations attempted to engage in the international arena to ensure their own security. Certainly, the primary purpose of this pact was not to form an autonomous regional alliance independent of the United States. In post-World War II Asia, the United States sought to reorganize a new regional order in Asia, with Japan at the center of this proposed order. Under these circumstances, Taiwan and South Korea, standing at the front line of the Cold War, were desperate to attract the U.S.'s attention. Once the two new nations had secured U.S. military and economic aid, however, they no longer pursued their former aggressive and expansive diplomatic strategies. After the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, signed on December 2, 1954, Taiwan discarded the Pacific Pact as an offensive and defensive treaty and concentrated on the APACL. South Korea, for its part, did not further pursue the Pacific Pact after the ROK–U.S. Mutual Defense Agreement was concluded on October 1, 1953.

South Korea and Taiwan maintained an exceptionally close relationship even after signing individual treaties with the United States. At times, the two nations competed to play a leading role in the international relations of Asia. Yet, their differences of opinion did not cross the line of cooperation between the two countries until the collapse of the Soviet Union brought an end to the Cold War system: South Korea then normalized relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1992.