The 1953 Chinese census reported a total population on the Chinese mainland of 582.6 million. This figure came as a surprise to Western observers, since the population figures most frequently quoted for China during the preceding twenty years had been on the order of magnitude of “about 450 million,” the 1933 estimate of the League of Nations. Although the inadequacies of Chinese population statistics and their controversial nature are well known, some understanding of the latest figure is possible by viewing it in historical perspective. Such an analysis is here presented, and is confined to the 1953 census data referring to the size of the population and its distribution among the provinces.

The Japanese campaign in the Shan States was a shrewd tactical maneuver in the battle for Burma. It hastened the fall of Burma by weeks, if not months, and increased greatly the amount of materiel captured by the invaders or which had to be destroyed by the British and Chinese. The righting began in that area in mid-March with patrol action on the Thailand border of Karenni, a small British protectorate adjoining the Shan States on the south; but it was not until April, following the fall of Toungoo, Burma, that serious fighting occurred. Previously the only approach the Japanese had to this mountainous district was by boat up the swift, treacherous Salween river, or over jungle trails from Thailand. But with the capture of Toungoo at the end of March, they had a road from Burma to Karenni and on to the Shan States.

As studies of technology in modern Asia move from production to consumption, and from big machines to small, so they confront increasingly complex and nuanced issues about the relationship between the local, the regional, and the global; between political economy and culture; and, perhaps most crucially, between technology and modernity. From a South Asian perspective (and perhaps from a Southeast Asian one as well), many of these issues are inescapably bound up with the Western colonial presence, decolonization, and the post-independence quest for national self-sufficiency and economic autarky. In East Asia, as the articles by Antonia Finnane and Thomas Mullaney demonstrate, the issues play out somewhat differently, not least because of the pivotal role of Japan as a major regional force, an industrial nation, and an imperial power. In South Asia in the period covered by these essays, Japan was a far more marginal presence, with only some industrial goods—such as textiles, bicycles, or umbrella fittings—finding a market there by the mid-1930s. At their height in 1933–34, some 17,000 Japanese bicycles were imported into India (out of nearly 90,000 overall), and in 1934–35, barely 1,400 sewing machines (out of 83,000); within three years this had fallen to less than 700. However, as Nira Wickramasinghe has recently demonstrated with respect to Ceylon (colonial Sri Lanka), Japan had a significance that ranged well beyond its limited commercial impact: it inspired admiration for the speed of its industrialization, for its scientific and technological prowess, and as the foremost exemplar of an “Asian modern” (Wickramasinghe 2014, chap. 5). One other way in which Japan figured in postwar regional history was through demands for compensation made in 1946 for sewing machines destroyed by Japanese bombing (or the looting that accompanied it) and the occupation of the Andaman Islands. And yet, relatively remote though Japan and China might be from South Asia's consumer history, across much of the Asian continent there was a common chronology to this unfolding techno-history, beginning in the 1880s and 1890s and dictated less evidently by the politics of war and peace than by the influx of small machines, of which sewing machines and typewriters were but two conspicuous examples.

Korea is well recognized as a distinct political unit. The country has a definite area on the surface of the earth and is delimited from the surrounding areas by definite boundaries. These boundaries of water and land have certain characteristics and functions which merit description. Moreover, within Korea geographic divisions are recognized. The provinces have well defined physical boundaries which have been important in compartmentalizing Korea. With the collapse of Japan, Korea was divided between American and Russian military zones by a purely artificial line, the thirty-eighth parallel, North. This imposition of a new boundary within Korea may affect the future activities of the people. The description of its physical character reveals its inadequacies as a boundary.