This study presents an overview of attempts by Chinese literati during the twentieth century to articulate a coherent Chinese mythology, primarily based on ancient texts but eventually to some extent drawing from ethnographic materials and folklore as well, and all much beholden to Western examples such as Greek and Norse mythology. This examination of text-based activities sets the stage for an inquiry into a wave of monument building during the Reform Era, much of which has celebrated China's ancient myth, history, and legend. A recent park in Wuhan dedicated to the legendary sage ruler and conqueror of floods, Yu the Great, serves as a case study of how, over the last three decades, old Chinese myths have been inscribed on the new Chinese landscape, and allows exploration of this phenomenon in relation to deeper issues concerning the role of myth in Chinese society, particularly its unexpected marriage with modernity.

Writers in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) apparently experienced writing in weaving terms. Such an imaginaire of writing as weaving was probably fully manifested in the first or second century BCE and crystallized in the coining of literary terminologies such as classics (jing), weft-writings (weishu), and literature/texts (wen). Situating the Huainanzi and its intertextual writing practice within this imaginaire enables us to reassess both the Huainanzi's widespread dismissal as a miscellaneous, encyclopedic behemoth in the first half of the twentieth century and its reappreciation over the last few decades. According to the Huainanzi's self-depictions, Liu An and his erudite courtiers apparently created the scripture in such an intertextual way in order to textually mimic the process of weaving. Since the Huainanzi commonly associates weaving with the Way's connective powers, the text's extraordinary design might be the result of a literary attempt to create an efficacious, textual artifact that embodies the Way by incorporating the act of weaving in its textual design.

The conventional views of road construction in late developing countries are not very positive. Scholars of provincial Thai politics, in particular, dismiss road-building projects as dirty pork-barrel politics. Using the case of Suphanburi Province, this essay argues that roads can constitute sources of collective prestige and pride. Suphanburi was once a remote province, and Suphanburians spoke pitifully of its backwardness. At present, however, Suphanburi boasts many roads of unmatched quality, thanks to massive road construction projects that Banharn Silpa-archa, Suphanburi's member of Parliament (1976–present), has channeled from the central state. In a global context that attaches a social stigma to backwardness, the appearance of these roads symbolizes Suphanburi's “modernity,” which non-Suphanburians admire, envy, and resent. Consequently, Suphanburians have come to take immense pride in their province. To understand why Banharn commands fervent local-level support, we must understand how he has transformed Suphanburians' social identity.

The use of oral histories is embedded in the interplay of archival limitations and shifting historiographical questions. This essay begins with a preliminary historiography of oral history usage in Asia, exploring its contrasting usages among scholars of China, Japan, India, and Thailand. However, more than filling in archival gaps, oral histories can challenge broader historiographies. Arrested multiple times, Kruba Srivichai (1878–1939) is northern Thailand's most famous monk. Illustrating a pointillist approach that draws upon hundreds of oral histories and dividing the palimpsest of Srivichai's controversial life into four time periods, this essay shows how oral histories challenge four corresponding paradigms and thereby force a reengagement with the overall narrative of Thai nation-state formation. This essay argues for the importance of oral history, not merely in “filling in gaps” in archival sources, but in challenging hegemonic historiographical paradigms.

Japanese literature of the war years (1941–45) has hardly been discussed abroad, and in Japan the tendency, until very recently, was to dismiss the entire production as “sterile,” or even to deny that any existed. Obviously more than strictly literary criteria have occasioned this reluctance to consider a most important though painful period in modern Japanese writing. Foreign scholars have hesitated to uncover dirty linen; the Japanese, embarrassed by old remembrances, naturally prefer to allude to the war in terms of its suffering, rather than in terms of the joy which most people had experienced when sharing certain ideals. On occasion, polemicists have attempted to discredit an opponent by quoting his wartime publications, but the sting of their attacks is dulled by the unspoken awareness that almost everybody was involved and, if guilty, equally so.

The proliferation of hindu temples now spread over the North American religious landscape appear at first glance to be part of a new process of globalization for Hinduism in an era of transnational religions. South India, long a bastion of temple culture, is simultaneously in the midst of a new boom in temple construction. The present resurgence of “Hinduism” in north India, steeped in ideology, nonetheless is written in terms of the alleged destruction of thousands of temples in north India by Muslim rulers and calls for their reconstruction. “My gods are crying,” writes one “angry” Hindu; “They are demanding restatement in all their original glory” (quoted in Bhattacharya 1991, 127).

The privilege of addressing this audience is one I never expected to have. That it contains so many of my teachers and students, as well as past, present, and perhaps future colleagues, makes the occasion a particularly happy one for me. Something of a summing up seems in order. I shall make it brief.

Using contemporary Western philosophic ideas, this essay examines Hsün Tzu's view of the mind as both a director of action and a spectator of action. In analyzing the mind as director, Hsün Tzu argues against Mencius's idea that the mind simply extends one's natural tendencies. Hsün Tzu's presentation of the mind as spectator— an idea developed chiefly in his discussion of obsession—accepts Chuang Tzu's stress on the importance of detachment, but argues that such detachment need not necessitate withdrawal from normal action. Hsün Tzu's two views of the mind can be reconciled by examining the mind's relationship to desires and to moral judgments. That examination also leads to the conclusion that Hsün Tzu thinks moral judgments have only a conventional and not a universal basis.

The analysis of change and stability in voting behavior is an important component of contemporary political behavior research. Because of implications for continuity and discontinuity in national political leadership, both stability and change in aggregate electoral choices are of special importance in present-day Japan. Also, because there have been tendencies toward stability in some sectors of the Japanese electorate and great fluidity elsewhere, the nature and sources of consistent and fluid voting behavior are of special interest. In the ensuing discussion, two kinds of basic analysis are presented: one deals with the question of the degree and location of stable voting trends and fluid behavior; the second seeks to identify the sources of both shifting and constant choices.

Whether the story about the Ch'ên Kuang-jui, the father of Tripitaka, belongs to the “original” version of the Hsi-yu chi (chapter 9 in modern editions of the novel) is a problem which has occupied the attention of scholars and editors for at least two and a half centuries. If we accept the conclusions of Professor Glen Dudbridge, who has done in recent years the most intensive and impressive examination of the novel's textual history, it would appear that the best textual support is lacking for this segment of the Hsi-yu chi to be considered authentic, as it is not found in the earliest known version of the hundred-chapter novel: the edition published by Shih-tê-t'ang of Chin-ling in 1592. The numerous clashes of details between this version and later ones, most notably the glaring inconsistency found in the later editions which put Ch‘ên Kuang-jui’s assumption of his public career in the thirteenth year of the reign of the T'ang Emperor, T'ai-tsung, the same year when Ch‘ên’s son, Hsiian-tsang, was to have been commissioned to begin his westward journey, further evidence editorial changes and faulty re-arrangements. In the judgment of Dudbridge, chapter nine of the novel may well have been introduced by the late Ming compilerfrom Canton, Chu Ting-ch'ên.

The author analyzes some of the empirical data contained in the local archives of farmland in three provinces from Ming-Ch'ing times: these data have heretofore not been used by scholars. The new data show the wide dispersion of land ownership, the absence of big landlords, the high degree of land fragmentation, the slow speed of land accumulation in land-owning families, the low turnover rate of land transactions, the substantial bargaining power of tenants, the high frequency of rental defaults by tenants, the remarkable stability of land value between 1500 and 1760, and the steadily rising trend of land value thereafter. All these findings appear to be inconsistent with the traditional views based on nonempirical historical materials. In view of the new evidence, the land problems in Chinese history will have to be reexamined.

The interest that the Far East holds for Henry A. Wallace has been concretely manifested in recent years by the trip which he took to eastern Siberia and China in the early summer of 1944, and by a pamphlet which he wrote at about the same time. Less well known is the fact that this interest, at least along certain lines, is of long standing, and has played an important part in shaping one aspect of his social thinking.

During the past several years I had heard vaguely that among the agricultural measures carried out by Mr. Wallace while Secretary of Agriculture (1933–40), those grouped under the title of “The Ever-Normal Granary” had been inspired by ancient Chinese practice. Because of the importance of Wang An-shih (1021–86) in Chinese economic thought, and because of the existence of a considerable literature on Wang in English, I had supposed that it was he who might have stimulated these measures. On writing to Mr. Wallace for confirmation, however, he very kindly replied to me as follows (letter of August 24, 1945):

Ted Robert Gurr's hypotheses on political violence and James C. Scott's on patron-client relations are used to explain why modernizing policies of the Siamese government provoked rebellions in Chiang Mai in 1889 and in Phrae in 1902. The article suggests that the rebellions resulted from Siamese government attempts to increase its revenues and control in the North. In Chiang Mai and Phrae these attempts simultaneously threatened the livelihood and security of ordinary peasants, who formed the base of the rebellions, and groups outside the ranks of ordinary peasants, who provided leadership. Modifications of Gurr's and Scott's work are suggested which can be tested and further refined, or rejected, in the study of other rebellions.

Once upon a time, long before the rise of the modern nation, a language named Tamil wandered about in a world inhabited by divinities and extraordinary beings. This was an enchanted world of miraculous events and wondrous deeds, where the dead were brought back to life, and deserts transformed into fragrant groves; and where verses in Tamil cured fevers, stopped floods, and impaled enemies. It was a world in which poets, because of their mastery of Tamil, lorded over the gods themselves, and in which celestials vied with each other to win the affections of the language. There were even those who insisted that devotees of Tamil could look forward to a life amongst the gods, while its enemies were destined to languish in hell.

This essay traces the development of China–India studies from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in order to take stock of the field, which has witnessed a surge in publication over the past two decades. The assessment presented here weaves the main shifts in China–India political relations with the emergence of various strands of China–India scholarship, since the two aspects often intersect. The major lacuna in the field, this essay argues, is a framework needed to analyze the complex connections and the pertinent comparisons between China and India. It contends that research on China–India topics should ideally attempt to combine comparative and connective frameworks with analyses that transcend geographic, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries to address this lacuna.

In this article, I interrogate the exhaustive “inbetweenness” through which Bhutan is understood and located on a map (“inbetween India and China”). I argue that this understanding naturalizes a contemporary geopolitics with little depth about how this inbetweenness has shifted over the centuries, thereby constructing a timeless, obscure, and remote Bhutan that is “naturally” oriented southward. I trace how the construction of Bhutan's asymmetrical inbetweenness is nested in the larger story of the formation and consolidation of imperial British India and its dissolution, and the emergence of post-colonial India as a successor state. I identify and analyze the key economic dynamics of three phases marked by commercial, production, and security interests, through which this asymmetrical inbetweenness was consolidated. Bringing together sources from different disciplines and archival work, this account also challenges some of the dominant historical scholarship on Bhutan in each phase. I conclude by emphasizing that critical work at the intersection of geographical/political/historical contingencies is important to the subalternizing of geopolitics, which recognizes the myriad ways in which dominant powers have shaped both the geopolitical environment as well as knowledge-making that has constrained small states.

One of the most recurrent themes in the descriptions and analyses of political development in Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912) is the emergence of the genrō as the primary decision and policy-making group. Surprisingly, however, while a great deal has been written by both Japanese and Western scholars concerning the individual members of the genrō, very few attempts have been made to explain the origins of the group and especially the form which it took. A major obstacle to the analysis of this problem appears to be the failure to distinguish clearly between the genrō as an informal collegial decision and policy-making body and membership or participation in the organization. Failure to view membership and organizational structure as two separate aspects of the development of the genrō has had serious consequences for those attempting to explain the place of the genrō in Japanese political development. The emphasis placed on the nine men who are usually designated as the genrō has diverted attention from the more important problem, from the viewpoint of political development, of why the genrō as a decision-making structure emerged at a particular time and took a particular form. Absence of serious concern over the origins of the genrō structure on the part of historians has led them to ignore the question completely or to assign the informal collegial character of the genrō to the general tendency in Japanese society to make decisions through group consensus. The latter is too general an explanation since it does not tell us why consensus in this case should be arrived at through an informal collegial body rather than through some other structural form.