This paper focuses on the majority population in the People's Republic of China—the Han—and their various collective identities. The Han play a pivotal role in consolidating the Chinese territory and the multiethnic Chinese nation. Therefore, the governments in the twentieth century have invested substantial efforts in promoting a unitary Han identity. In spite of that, powerful local identities related to native place, occupation, and family histories persist. This essay traces these identities and analyzes their intertwinement. Further, it discusses the question of ethnicity of both the Han and local identity categories, and concludes that while Han enact ethnicity in their relations to other minzu, local identity categories are more social than ethnic. It further posits that moments of confrontation, “degree” of ethnicity, scales of categorization, and relationality of identities are notions that should be given particular attention in the studies of ethnicity in China and elsewhere.

I am greatly honored to have had the opportunity to serve as president of the Association for Asian Studies during the past year, and I am cognizant of the distinction of this afternoon's occasion. This being Washington, where everything is “political”—even more so perhaps than in Beijing—my original thought was to deliver a political sermon on a theme something like “Bush in China.” In fact, I found a possible text for my homily: a book published in Philadelphia in 1865 by a Presbyterian minister, Charles P. Bush, entitled Five Years in China; or, The Factory Boy Made a Missionary: The Life and Observations of Rev. W. Aitchison. But the Reverend Mr. Bush's hagiographical account of the life of William Aitchison, once a missionary to heathen China, was of little help; and I quickly decided that my talents as a fabulist of this variety were exceedingly limited. Hence the quite different fables to which I shall expose you today.

This article explains why the Chosŏn government and the military in particular expanded state control over forests in the seventeenth century and analyzes the implications of forest administration in a preindustrial polity. From 1592 to 1598, the Chosŏn dynasty suffered invasions from Japan that displaced much of the Korean population and devastated the economy and environment. The crucial role of the navy during the war, along with a dire postwar situation, heightened government anxieties about deforestation and timber scarcity. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the Chosŏn government expanded administration over forests, particularly pine forests, across the coasts and islands of southwestern Korea. The key vehicle for the expansion was the military. Due to wartime and postwar exigencies, the military became the late Chosŏn state's primary organ for management of wood resources for state purposes. Furthermore, the growth of pine-centric state forests and shifts in military priorities would significantly reshape Korean ecologies.

After more than thirty years of economic reforms, China appears to have settled into a form of state capitalism that is likely to endure as long as the Communist Party retains power. This essay provides a critical overview of some of the key features and contradictions that characterize this particular form of capitalism and reviews some recent influential critiques of this system. Many observers have viewed the resurgence of the state-controlled economy as a shift away from policies more hospitable to both indigenous entrepreneurs and foreign capital in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the author's own research with entrepreneurs in China, however, this essay argues for the importance of moving beyond the dichotomy of the controlling state and the free market.

Historians have pondered over the phenomenon of the propitious appearance in Japan of numerous statesmen in the critical mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps more startling is the number of able leaders who came from Kagoshima, a modest-sized city of the Satsuma fief. Men who played a major role in the history of modern Japan such as Saigō Takamori, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Matsukata Masayoshi, and Admiral Tōgo Heihachiro grew up together in Kagoshima almost within a stone's throw of each other.

Japan possessed a sophisticated network of institutions of higher education before World War II. There was repression on the campuses of colleges and universities, but it was less severe than that in the totalitarian countries of the time. The war placed great demands on higher education and forced it to change. New universities, colleges, and research institutes were established; more students were enrolled; and more women entered colleges. The war also spurred a great shift toward science and technology, which was to be instrumental in Japan's economic recovery in the postwar era.

Mobilization for military duty or for work made the students feel that they were responsible for the fate of their country. However, their youthful outburst of patriotism came to an end with Japan's defeat. Feelings of betrayal and disillusionment nurtured the extreme patriotism and militancy of the postwar student movement.

In reinterpreting traditional history according to the Marxist world view, the question of periodization is vitally important. This article examines the controversies surrounding the periodization and the nature of the new interpretation of traditional history in North Korea. One characteristic that stands out prominently in North Korean historiography is the nationalistic emphasis placed on the uniqueness and the superiority of the Korean civilization unaffected by any external influence. Also noteworthy is the attempt to reinterpret modern history largely in terms of glorifying the immediate forefathers of Kim Il-sŏng at the expense of historical objectivity.

An assault upon the massive problem of economic stagnation fundamentally requires the pursuit of three kinds of basic social and economic changes. First, and perhaps most important, a society must either mobilize domestic savings or attract foreign financing in order substantially to raise its level of investment. This is the problem of financing. Second, these resources must be employed to change production functions in important sectors of the economy to provide increased yields from the utilization of the country's economic endowments. This is the problem of technology. Third, the society must revamp its institutions in such fashion that high levels of savings and investment are perpetuated and the search for new and more productive techniques of production—innovation—becomes a basic social propensity. This is the problem of institutional change.

In 1920 about 18 per cent of the total population of Japan lived in the 81 cities which existed then. By 1950 the percentage had increased markedly but still amounted to only 37.5 per cent while the number of cities had grown to 248. On April 1, 1954 not less than 383 entities had the legal denomination of a city. In 1950 of Japan's 46 prefectures there were five in which the population living in cities outnumbered the populations of towns and villages; in April 1953 their number had risen to seven.

In the Boane district of Mozambique, about halfway between Maputo and the border with Swaziland, the National Agrarian Research Institute in Umbeluzi hosts two experiments in development cooperation provided by fellow developing countries. Behind a gated wall, the Agricultural Technology Demonstration Center—built in record time by China—experiments with different techniques of vegetable cultivation. Barely 500 meters away, technicians from the Brazilian Corporation of Agricultural Research, known as EMBRAPA, work with Mozambican counterparts from a food security program, installing an irrigation system along an open field. Taken together, the two projects are emblematic of an emerging tension within Brazil's and China's presence in Africa: does development cooperation in Boane represent competition or complementarity between these providers of development cooperation? In addition, does their proximity suggest a possibility of collaboration between these two providers?

In the nineteenth century Taiwan's economy depended mainly upon agriculture, and its social customs resembled those of South China from which most of its population originated. As both population and cultivated land steadily expanded during the century, aggregate output undoubtedly increased, but whether or not per capita income improved significantly is uncertain. During the third quarter of the century the island began to trade and enter into various contacts with the West; yet, like the mainland, Taiwan did not respond to this stimulus in a sustained, positive manner. Therefore, at the end of the nineteenth century Taiwan, by any criterion, still remained an underdeveloped economy: the few small cities on the island were poorly integrated with villages by transport and markets; unsanitary health conditions prevailed; economic activities depended entirely upon an uncertain harvest. If past performance was a guide to its future, the economic outlook for Taiwan appeared to be more of the same patterns of the past. Yet, a few years after Taiwan's cession to Japan in 1895, the economy began to grow and to change, and such development continued steadily until World War II.

This essay attempts to discover patterns of communicative and hermeneutic practices in the Analects, as well as in the commentary tradition, known as jingxue (classicism). The Analects contains at least two distinctive paradigms showing different ways of interpreting speech: One is Confucius's pragmatic approach, which emphasizes the intention and purpose of the speaker, and the other is Gongxi Hua's approach, which focuses on the literal meaning of the speech. Examples of each paradigm can be found in the long history of the exegeses of the Analects. Commentaries by two groups of scholars are discussed: those whose approach is similar to that of Confucius (Sima Qian, Zheng Xuan, Mouzi, Huang Kan, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi) and those whose approach is similar to that of Gongxi Hua (Xianqiu Meng, Han Fei, Wing-tsit Chan, Ya Hanzhang, and Wang Yousan).

This paper addresses the development of scholastic medical traditions in Tibet through an examination of lists of physicians. I consider the debates that such lists and their accompanying narratives engender for Tibetan historians and reflect on the contributions they make to the identity of the medical tradition. By examining the structure and content of classificatory methods in medical histories, I argue that temporally organized lists document the place of medicine across time, geographically organized lists document the reach of medical knowledge across space, and thematically organized lists document the intertwining of medical knowledge and skill with other aspects of intellectual and civil life. In making these lists, medical historians paint a portrait of the Tibetan medical tradition that evokes connections to Buddhism and the strength and cosmopolitanism of the imperial period. Medical histories thus emphasize a picture of Tibet in the broader context of Asia—a Tibet whose empire lives on culturally or intellectually, if not militarily.

The tenacity of family-farming households in agrarian economies experiencing capitalist penetration has long figured in a debate about the ultimate consequences of such penetration for agrarian social structure. On the one hand are those who argue that, while various forces may work to speed or delay the process, the most likely long-term outcome of the capitalization of agriculture is that envisioned by Lenin: polarization of the countryside into two opposing classes, capitalist farmers and landless laborers, linked by wage relations (Bartra 1974; de Janvry 1981). On the other hand are those who claim that, at least under some conditions, capitalist farming can stimulate small-scale entrepreneurship and socioeconomic differentiation, with the attendant persistence of small family farms (Goodman and Redclift 1982:109–12; Maclachlan 1987:16–23).

The only aspect of this bizarre famine that historians really know for sure is that the Hachinohe chroniclers of the day remembered it as the “wild boar famine” (inoshishi kegachi) of 1749. From what can be pieced together from the few available sources, thousands of peasants from Hachinohe died when an intensification of slash-and-burn farming, fueled by economic growth during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), combined with terrestrial and climatological environmental changes and converged on this small northeastern domain. This convergence disrupted local agricultural cycles, caused food shortages, and, ultimately, pitted the human population against wild boar in a life-or-death struggle for survival. Like other domains, Hachinohe had faced worsening economic conditions throughout the eighteenth century, and so it took advantage of the commercialization of the economy by sponsoring cash-crop farming in the form of soybean cultivation to meet the growing financial demands of doling out retainer stipends and paying the other high costs of life in the Tokugawa polity. As peasants cleared new swaths of land for soybean cultivation, however, they in turn sparked changes in the land that led to an explosion of the wild boar population. Wild boar thrived in the newly deforested terrain—a terrain that, with its ample brush and many tuberous plants, supplied them with shelter and food.

My comments in this essay focus on recent scholarship on gender, sexuality, and the state in Southeast Asia and include brief remarks on some of the literature regarding Southeast Asians in the diaspora. In the interests of transparency, I begin by noting that I am an anthropologist by trade and that many of my observations pertain to writings by anthropologists and historians, though I also engage work in other disciplines.

In recent analyses of nationalism in colonial South Asia, Partha Chatterjee and Tanika Sarkar, among others, have argued that as a result of colonial domination in the “public sphere”—the realm of the state and civil society—Indian male nationalists deployed the “private sphere”—the realm of the home—as the discursive site of anticolonial nationalist imaginaries. The internal space of the home was “the one sphere where improvement could be made through [Indian men's] own initiative, changes could be wrought, where education would bring forth concrete, manipulable, desired results” (Sarkar 1992, 224; Chatterjee 1989) and it therefore took on “compensatory significance” in the experience of modernity in India (Chakrabarty 2000, 215–18).

The Journal's May 1995 issue (54.2) carried an error in the Japan section of Other Books Received (p. 650). The second citation should have read: Van Staaveren, Jacob. An American in Japan, 1945–1948: A Civilian View of the Occupation. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. xvii, 286 pp.

The Journal's November 1995 issue (54.4) carried an error in the obituary for J. Henry Korson (p. 1165). Professor Korson was born in 1910, not in 1930 as stated in the Journal.