The reform movement of 1898 sought to move the Qing empire toward comprehensive and unprecedented institutional change and thus was a critical event in modern Chinese history. Had it succeeded, China could have, like Meiji Japan, entered the modern era without revolutions. Yet, however determined and daring its leaders, the historic effort was suddenly and tragically cut short by a coup.

The standard view of the Reform Movement has been that, in reaction to China's repeated defeats and humiliation as well as the inadequacy of the Self-strengthening Movement, the reform-minded Kang Youwei (illustration 1) and Liang Qichao finally won support for change from a sympathetic Guangxu Emperor. The reformers then managed to put into effect a nationwide reform program through imperial decrees. But the movement, which lasted barely over one hundred days, came to an abrupt end when the Empress Dowager Cixi and her conservative supporters recaptured political power, executed or imprisoned many of the reformers, and placed the emperor under permanent house arrest.

Netherlands indies occupies a position somewhat unique in the sphere of colonial administration, or at least did so until its conquest by the Japanese. For one thing, it is not a dependency of the ‘mother country’ for it forms a component part, along with the Netherlands, Curacao and Surinam, of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. As such its nationals are Dutch subjects and stand on an equal footing, legally, with the citizens of other sovereign nations. In the event of legal controversy involving a resident of the Netherlands Indies and a citizen of another nation, the principles of private international law, better known in this country as conflict of laws, come into play to determine what body of legal rules, which of the two legal systems shall be applied in the particular case. The position of the Indies with respect to Holland—or Curacao or Surinam—introduces another, somewhat different, aspect of conflict of laws. For interregional law, as it has been termed, does not involve diverse sovereignties but concerns controversies that arise between subjects of the same state, controversies that flow from the fact that Indies private law is not identical to that of the Netherlands.

The longevity of Chinese civilization is generally conceded to be a unique phenomenon in world history; as such it has evoked explanations ranging from the plausible to the esoteric. A search for the roots of its longevity is now feasible, thanks to the massive archaeological and scientific data pouring out of China since 1949. A preliminary integration of such multifarious new data with rich archaic Chinese literary records has enabled me to reach the conclusion that the trait-complex of each of the major Chinese cultural elements—field agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, metallurgy, script, language, religion including the system of divination, social and political thought—is marked at once by a regionally distinctive Sinitic character and by a pattern of centrifugal geographic spread from the southeastern portion of the loess highlands of North China. The detailed evidence and argument that the Chinese civilization, in spite of its later coalescence and articulation, was just as pristine as the Mesopotamian, have been presented in my recent book, The Cradle of the East: An Inquiry into the Indigenous Origins of Techniques and Ideas of Neolithic and Early Historic China, 5000–1000 B.C. In the course of my research I have uncovered three basic factors that may provide a fresh interpretation as to why the Chinese civilization is the only major civilization of ancient origin that is still distinctive and vital today.

By the spring of 1966, it was abundantly clear in New Delhi that the Third Five Year Plan was a failure. Over the five year period (1961–66), the rate of increase in national income was less than half the projected level. Per capita income showed no increase at all. At the same time, prices for all commodities rose by over one half. The price index for foodgrains climbed by more than 56 per cent. By 1966, food shortages were so severe that some thirty million persons in major cities and towns were placed under statutory rationing. Another two hundred million—over one-third the population—were brought under partial rationing schemes. Even so, the general price index rose by another 38 per cent in 1967. Once again, foodgrains took the lead with a price increase of 44 per cent.

The primary unit in the hierarchy of Philippine local government is the barrio. The term, barrio, is employed to describe any and all sub-units of the municipalities which lie outside the poblacion (municipal center) as well as sub-divisions of some of the smaller chartered cities. This double use of the term leads to confusion, for the rural barrio differs considerably from a barrio located within an urban or semi-urban area. The latter closely resembles a ward or precinct in a small American city, while the former is more akin to the prototype of an Asian village. In this paper, barrio will be used only in reference to the rural units and where mentioned is made of barrios which are city units, the distinction will be made.

To have a proper appreciation of the return of the territory of Battambang and Angkor to Cambodia as a consequence of the treaty of March 23, 1907 between France and Siam, it is necessary to know something of the history of the ancient Khmer Empire or at least that of the peoples of the Mékong and Ménam valleys since the appearance of the so-called Tai people in the middle Ménam in the eartly part of the twelfth century.

During the half century before the Communist take-over of 1949, there occurred twice in China a large scale opposition to Christianity: the Boxer Uprising of 1900 and the anti-Christian movement of 1922–1927. Both these movements were crises of East-West contact, and Chinese reactions against foreign culture. They can be understood only in the context of the modern changes in Chinese culture and society. This study of the anti-Christian agitation of 1922–27 seeks to clarify the nature and constituent forces of this movement in the rapidly changing and complicated history of China in the 1920s.

Takabatake Motoyuki was one of several prewar Japanese socialists who combined the Marxian ideal of proletarian socialism with nationalism. The first to produce a full Japanese translation of Karl Marx's Capital in 1919, Takabatake formulated a doctrine of national or state socialism that same year and dedicated the rest of his life to the promotion of that ideal. While Takabatake continued to call himself a Marxist, he criticized Marx's understanding of the state and drew on the work of Western political theorists such as Thomas Hobbes to construct his own functionalist interpretation of the state. Takabatake's work not only exposes some important lacunae in Marxist-Leninism, but his continued appeal to Marxism while embracing an ideology usually associated with the political Right defies analysis on the basis of conventional Left-Right distinctions. As his treatment of contemporary domestic and international problems demonstrates, both socialist and nationalist movements of this era constituted impassioned responses to social, economic, and political crises that were already apparent in the Taishō years.

Contrary to accepted scholarly opinion, Ssu-Ma Kuang was not a leading spokesman for monarchical absolutism during the Sung dynasty. He conceived of “non-action” as a practical technique of government in which the various strata of the administration had their own unique areas of competence. The emperor, in his view, had only limited powers of decision-making. The outline of Ssu-Ma's theory of the proper relationship between bureaucracy and monarchy is that the bureaucracy is the official interpreter of the classical tradition, which was the criterion for the legitimacy of imperial decisions, and that the bureaucracy was to have wide-ranging discretionary power and delegated authority. The emperor was to rule through “non-action” by turning over authority to qualified subordinates.

Since 1979, China has changed its rural policies from emphasis on the collective economy to the support of a variety of household and individual contract systems. The forms of economic organization introduced between 1954 and the late 1970s have been criticized in the Chinese media and blamed for slow rates of development. However, in retrospect, it is not completely clear that the form itself was to blame. Three of the four books under review are in part defenses of the past and critiques of present-day policies. Basing their work on interviews with peasants and rural cadres, these authors present both the achievements and the failures stemming from state policies during the collective years, and some of the peasant reactions to them. They also raise questions about the long-term implications of the new system. The fourth author is uniformly critical of the collective decades and the present readjustments. The extent to which rural socialism was a failure and the advantages or disadvantages of the household economy are matters that scholars of China and economic development will continue to argue in coming decades.

Sets of narrative pictures portraying the life of Confucius (Fig. 1; all figures appear at the end of the text) first appeared in considerable numbers in the late Ming period, typically under the title Sheng-chi t'u (Pictures of the Sage's Traces; hereafter SCT) or some close variant. Produced at varying levels of expense, these illustrated biographies or hagiographies were made in a variety of media, such as woodblock prints, paintings on silk, and incised stone tablets. The various examples also exhibit a wide range of artistic quality. These differences in quality and form suggest that pictorial biographies were made for multiple purposes and for diverse audiences. Furthermore, the pictorial biographies differ in total numbers of scenes and in specific episodes selected for inclusion. These differences in content imply disparate conceptions of Confucius and the significance of his life.

This paper, a study of the career of Yii Chi (1272–1348), explores the nature of Chinese literati support of Mongol rulers during the Yiian period. Yii Chi served as the leading apologist for the usurper Tugh Temiir (Wen-tsung, r. 1328 and 1329–1332). The most prominent court scholar of his time, Yii Chi devoted himself to the enhancement of Tugh Temiir's prestige, authority, and legitimacy. The paper explores Yii's activities in detail and speculates on his motivations in serving his Mongol emperor. In particular, it suggests that Yii Chi's ultimate aim in bolstering the usurper's claims to the throne, as well as in encouraging imperial support of Chinese cultural symbols and values, was to make Mongol rule more predictable and stable and thus to benefit the Mongols' Chinese subjects.

In recent decades, highly heterogeneous literary and artistic articulations harking back to China's classical past have gained increasing currency in the global Sinophone space and cyberspace. Instead of dismissing them as “fetishisms” or authenticating them as “Chinese traditions,” I propose “Sinophone classicism” as a new critical expression for conceptualizing this diverse array of articulations. It refers to the appropriation, redeployment, and reconfiguration of cultural memories evoking Chinese aesthetic and intellectual traditions for local, contemporary, and vernacular uses, by agents identified or self-identified as Chinese. This essay proposes a subjective, intimate, and reflexive way to experience an individual's culturally acquired “Chineseness” that is temporal, mnemonic, and often mediated by digital media. It joins recent scholarly efforts to dismantle the view of “Chinese modernity” as a monocentric and homogenous experience by refocusing on classicism as a kind of “antimodern modernism.” It also joins the post-Eurocentric turn in global academia by hinting at a future of “global classicisms.”

The complex relationship that developed between Du Yuesheng's Shanghai Green Gang group and the Guomindang regime in the mid-1930s provides useful insights into the nature of the Nanjing government's rule and, in particular, into the manner it exercised power in its Jiangnan bailiwick. Although the Shanghai Green Gang bosses, in particular Du Yuesheng, were coopted by the new Guomindang State, their full integration into the regime's power structure in Shanghai did not occur until after 1932. Despite their participation in Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist coup of 1927, they enjoyed a somewhat unstable relationship with the Guomindang regime in the period 1927–31. The context of their incorporation into the Guomindang's system of power in Shanghai was the new accommodation between the Nanjing Government and the leadership of the Shanghai bourgeoisie following the political and economic crisis of 1932. In other words, the cooption of the Green Gang bosses was part of the new structures of state corporatism that were forged by the Guomindang regime in the wake of the Shanghai Incident.

Marriage migration has developed as a discursive field and a new direction of governing practices in the relations of post-Mao China with Russia and Vietnam. This article examines China's developing governing regime for international marriages from the perspective of its sovereign concerns related to border stability, population management, and national security. These concerns are considered through the analysis of material and affective processes informing and shaping the regulations and representations of marriage migration to China. This discussion not only shows how the Chinese state revises its administrative and legal terms of international marriage, but also highlights the historical, racialized, and gendered forces that shape the process. The regulatory framework of marriage migration is informed by the shifting structures of feeling shaping the contours of belonging in Chinese society. These intersecting spheres of state affective and regulatory practices signal new relations of power and inequality coalescing in China's relations with its neighbors.

In popular religious traditions in Korea, Vietnam, and Myanmar, spirits (or gods) become visible through their material realization in the corporeal bodies of shamans and spirit mediums and via ensouled statues and paintings that give the gods or spirits presence on altars. This discussion concerns a basic problem of material religion, that even ensouled, numinous, or otherwise empowered materials are subject to material decay. In the three cases presented and in many other places as well, the images are produced in commercial workshops where knowing craftsmanship entangles (what we commonly call) technique with what we might (more cautiously) call magic to produce an efficacious or agentive image. Questions of object efficacy are also linked to the prospect of decay, which may be hastened or postponed in relation to both individual choices and enveloping circumstance, from questions of climate to political economy.

The article describes the types of written records available to scholars of late Yi dynasty Korea, in particular, daily chronicles compiled under official auspices. Koreans were indebted to the Chinese for the chronological format of compilation, the Confucian moralistic purpose for historical writing, the respect for bare fact, and the necessity for truthful reporting. These objectives were often violated, however, because the recorders were also active bureaucrats involved in political disputes.

For the modern historian, these sources have certain advantages and disadvantages. They are good for institutional and administrative history, and they provide raw data for political history. On the other hand, they reflect the biases of the recorders, they do not reveal the really private thoughts of kings and officials, they are confined to the formal apparatus of the official communication and the court conference, and they are comprised over much of moralistic exhortation and general preachment, rather than with concrete discussion of the problems of economy, society, and policy. They do, however, represent an enormous body of material hitherto neglected by Western scholars.

This paper examines the role of the Hindu Epic Rāmāyaṇa in the historical and cultural contact between India and the rest of Asia. The Rama legend—rather legends—are prevalent in almost all countries of Asia, namely China, Tibet, East Turkestan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaya, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Burma. The contact was not only close but it was also general and widespread. By no means was it confined to the Brahmanical values which were upheld by Vālmīki in the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and shared by the upper strata of Hindu society. The Rama legends prevalent in Asia, except those in China, do not agree in content and emphasis with the Vālmīki version. A close examination of the Rama story in India itself reveals that in addition to the Vālmīki version, a number of Rama legends, differing from the Valmiki story, were prevalent in vernacular and Jain Literature all over the country. All diese versions provided the diverse and complex source material for the Ramayanic legends of Asia. Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical elements appeared in different mixtures and emphasis. While China accepted the more orthodox ethical values, the countries of Soudieast Asia adopted Rāmāyaṇa mostly for the epic qualities of romance, adventure, and valor.

The Ethic that produced a Ben Franklin or a John D. Rockefeller has imbued relatively few persons in Ceylon. There is no doubt that Ceylonese are as ambitious as other peoples, but their historic value systems have been quite different from that of Western society. Their status-achievement-work value matrix has been nurtured by institutions of government, education, marriage, social class, and caste—particularly by education in modern times. The major characteristics of this set of values are: (1) Employment in government service is of higher status than equivalent work in private enterprise; (2) Neither work itself nor idleness has much moral flavor, i.e., productive employment is not a value in and of itself; (3) Except for agriculture, manual employments of any type are denigrated, as are, to a lesser extent, entrepreneurial activities; (4) Thrift and savings are typically viewed as serving the purposes of consumption rather than of investment; (5) Wealth in land is more highly esteemed and secure than is any alternative form of investment. Although elements of this value set are shared by Sinhalese and Tamils, the present analysis has more explicit reference to the Sinhalese.

With this one sentence paragraph Jawaharlal Nehru began a description of his visit to and subsequent arrest and trial in the Punjab state of Nabha during the agitation over the abdication of its princely ruler, Maharaja Ripudaman Singh. Though Nehru treated his experiences as an alarming but politically insignificant initiation into Indian state politics, the abdication of Nabha and concomitant events came to have major repercussions on political developments within the Sikh community and on the evolution of British policies within the Punjab. This incident at Nabha originated in a senseless but bitter personal feud between Ripudaman Singh and his neighbor, Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala. It assumed wider ramifications when each rival sought support for his respective position from such varied groups as the British government, Sikh organizations like the newly formed Shiromani Gurdawara Parbandhak Committee (the Central Gurdwara Management Committee which will hereafter be referred to as the S.G.P.C.) and the Akali Dal, the Indian National Congress and assorted Indian nationalist and Sikh religious leaders. As these new forces entered the dispute, the area of controversy was broadened and issues of political significance were raised.