There has always been a sizeable gap between public and national interests and needs and the capacities of a society's educational system to respond adequately thereto. Both teaching and scholarship are by their very nature conserving disciplines heavily involved with the preservation, elaboration, and passing on of a heritage of experience and knowledge acquired over great lengths of time. When one considers the degree to which our own national intellectual heritage is derived from the classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions, therefore, it is not at all surprising that our educational system should be profoundly Eurocentric in both form and content. But if it should persist in so confining a bias at a time when the central tendencies of the major technological, economic, and political developments of the past several centuries have been the compacting of global space, the convergence of cultures, and the emergence to positions of increasing salience and importance of an ever-expanding array of non-Western people, states, and interests, is this not cause for serious national concern?

The Peiyang Army was the most significant military development in China between the Hsiang and Huai Armies which suppressed the Taiping and Nien rebellions in the 1860's and the army that Chiang Kai-shek raised and employed in the northern expedition of 1926–27. The Peiyang was the first Chinese army to be comparatively modern in training and discipline as well as in weaponry. Formed for the most part by Yuan Shih-k'ai while he was governor-general of Chihli province from 1901 to 1907, the Peiyang Army grew to six divisions of about 10,000 men each. Size alone gave the army a major role in politics during the last decade of the Ch'ing dynasty and the early years of the Republic.

THE superior in Thailand has been described as unquestioned and domineering. Inferiors stand in awe of (fy-eng) the superior. Yet, the superior is expected to act to his inferiors in a concerned and benevolent fashion. He should aid his inferiors yet not dominate them to such an extent as to destroy their sense of autonomy. In this paper I shall extend previous discussions of Thai superior-inferior behavior by showing the compatibility of the Thai concepts of benevolence and awe. This sense of awe felt towards a superior permits him to undertake actions considered benevolent by his inferiors. To illustrate this situation I shall describe certain types of contact that occurred between rural Thai officials, as superiors, and villagers as their inferiors.

One of the most salient features of traditional political life in Tibet was the intense and pervasive competition for power and prestige that took place within the ranks of the politically relevant, particularly within the aristocratic lay-official segment of the government. Plots, disputes, and confiscations were key elements in the dynamics of the system. Although this competition appears, synchronically, to be part of a stable circular process, when the Tibetan political system is viewed diachronically, the apparent stability is seen to be part of a larger, ongoing process of change. Thus, while it is possible to analyze the “structure” of this competition from a synchronic point of view, a diachronic perspective is necessary to understand the forces which have generated it, as well as the overall nature of the system.

South Asian scholars have long viewed communal competition in terms of majority-minority struggle, of Hindu versus Muslim, leading to the final partition of the British Raj into two antagonistic states. Punjab history offers a dramatic case of religious competitiveness between two minority communities, concerned more with their own sense of identity than with questions of power and dominance. Attempts among Punjabi Hindus to create a new, modernized and respectable religious tradition could not be contained within their community but inevitably altered existing relations with all other religions in Punjab, Muslim, Sikh, and Christian. As newly anglicized elites came into existence, they provided a growing class of alienated and marginal men. Unable to relate to the orthodox world around them, they sought to redefine that world, and in so doing created new ideological systems encompassing a reinterpretation of the past and present, plus a new vision of the future. Elaboration, defense, and dissemination of these ideologies produced both group consciousness and a heightened awareness of separation, of distance between those who accepted the new beliefs and all others. This process of identity reformation created in late nineteenth century Punjab a period of intense dynamism, of ideological and religious conflict amidst an increasingly polemical atmosphere, as each group within a given religious community, Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim, sought to project its own concepts and in the process struggled with others within their own community and beyond. This process of questioning, and its resultant answers permanently altered relations among Punjabi religious communities and, at a more fundamental level, the conceptualizations undergirding many of the groups within them.

The Chinese Materials and Research Aids Center has rendered a valuable service to students of late Ch'ing Chinese history in publishing this typeset edition of Weng T'ung-ho's diary, based on the facsimile edition printed by the Shanghai Commercial Press in 1925. The Center has made this important source material easier to use in several ways. The text is punctuated and printed in standard type, a boon to scholars not accustomed to unpunctuated, cursive writing; interlinear marks are inserted throughout, rendering proper names readily identifiable; corresponding Western dates (years and months but not days) are given alongside the Chinese; pages are numbered consecutively throughout the five volumes. And further to enhance the usefulness of the typeset edition, an index to essential proper nouns, geographical and personal, is to form volume 6 which, unfortunately, is not available to this reviewer.