The ch'ing dynasty (1644–1911) was the last and most successful of the dynasties of alien rule in China. “The key to its success,” noted Professor Ping-ti Ho, “was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization.” The integration of the Manchu ruling class with their Chinese subjects was most striking in staffing the bureaucracy. Unlike preceding alien dynasties, the Manchus over the course of 268 years of rule shared a good proportion of key offices with Chinese. The system of dual appointments of Manchus and Chinese operated in the capital, while Chinese dominated the local officialdom.

In the winter of 1909, at the height of Japan's informal rule in Korea, the protectorate government sent the Korean emperor Sunjong on an extended tour of the provinces. Applying the nation-building techniques of Meiji Japan, the residency-general had intended to promote unity and cooperation through the Korean royal house. Instead, the progresses sparked anti-Japanese nationalism and culminated in expressions of resistance. This article explores the political context of the progresses, the role of the newspapers in Korea and Japan in shaping public opinion, and the contest of official and popular nationalisms in Korea, defined by the symbols of the throne and the national flag.

Popular music is a dynamic portal through which to gain a greater understanding of a vast array of social phenomena within Asia. In particular, the power of pop to actively shape conceptions of self and inform the ways in which we interact with others at the individual, communal, and even national and transnational levels has taken center stage, but understanding just how these identities are formed through the performance of popular music is quite complex in the current global moment. Through comparison of recent scholarship covering diverse types of popular music throughout Asia, this article explores how identity formation is informed by an increasingly nuanced understanding of globalization. Moving from a most intimate sense to broad transnational and inter-ethnic contexts, it not only expands the concept of identity in Asia, but also reveals how the study of popular music in general can illuminate other social issues important to Asianists.

The ubiquitous experience of wartime collaboration in East Asia has not yet undergone the analysis that its counterpart in Europe has received. The difficulty has to do with the political legacies that the denunciation of collaboration legitimized, as well as the continuing hegemony of the discourse of nationalism. Both inhibitors encourage the condemnation of collaboration rather than its historicization. Reflecting briefly on the 1946 trial of Liang Hongzhi, China's first head of state under the Japanese, this essay argues that the historian's task is not to create moral knowledge, but to probe the presuppositions that bring the moral subject of the collaborator into being for us, and then ask whether real collaborators correspond to this moral subject. In the face of the natural impulse to render judgment, this essay argues for the wisdom of hesitation.

This article argues that the study of China's history has long been caught in a teleological trap that presumes that history could have had only one evolutionary track. The author explains how he came to recognize the problems inherent in the teleological trap and to reconceptualize his approach. The article contrasts the history of the North China Plain, culturally rooted in dry-land grain agriculture and from time immemorial deeply intertwined with that of the adjacent grasslands, with that of the south, a culturally and linguistically diverse land of river valleys and riziculture. It concludes that the holistic empire we know today was not an inevitable outcome of these contrasting trajectories and that alternative paths are plausible, and asserts that scholars must recognize that until history is accomplished it does not follow a teleological trajectory.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, when internal disorder and the impact of Western influences began to work striking changes in the structure of Chinese governmental finance, the revenue of the Ch'ing dynasty may be divided into five main categories. The first and most important was the land tax, which was imposed on most agricultural land throughout the empire and provided the major portion of the funds with which the routine administrative operations of both the central and provincial governments were financed. The second, far smaller in amount than the first, was the grain tribute, which was imposed like the land tax on agricultural land but was levied only in certain areas and was devoted normally to the feeding of the official population of Peking, including the metropolitan garrison, the court, and the metropolitan bureaucracy. The third was the governmental monopoly of the production and distribution of salt. The fourth and fifth categories were respectively the regular (or “native”) customs and certain miscellaneous indirect taxes.

This article focuses on the 1935 discovery of what is now believed to be a selenium deficiency disorder in the Japanese client state of Manchukuo. The epicenter of this disease had served as pasture for Oirat Mongols until the late nineteenth century. Opening up the land for reclamation by Chinese migrants put greater pressure on each acre to produce food. With a limited supply of selenium in the soil, the intake of this mineral by crops decreased over time, especially under the extractive conditions of the soybean industry during the Japanese occupation. Japanese theories on climate and hygiene made legible the consequences of transforming this nomadic borderland into an agrarian heartland on colonized bodies. By bringing attention to the understudied Mongol territories in Manchukuo, this essay goes beyond environmental histories bound by the nation-state to reveal the corporeal costs of settler colonialism and ecological imperialism.

In the twentieth century, authoritarian states throughout Asia mobilized mass populations to adopt modern subjectivities and national identities. Literacy campaigns and the development of formal education systems were key strategies in shaping these subjectivities and identities, a social process that continues to have enormous material, affective, behavioral, and epistemological ramifications, even long after the eclipse of the authoritarian governments themselves. To contribute more to the understanding about how these massive social projects coerced and persuaded nonurban, pastoral, and semi-nomadic populations, this article explores the 1950s and 1960s Cultural Campaigns in the socialist Mongolian People's Republic (1924–90), which emphasized hygiene, health, literacy, and ideology. Oral history accounts document how the socialist Mongolian state infiltrated the private spaces of Mongolians and shaped their attitudes toward reading and writing and other desirable social goals. Additionally, these accounts suggest ways that pastoral Mongolians subtly resisted and challenged the authority of the socialist Mongolian state.

Historiography has long been concerned with the problem of determining standards for evidence. For traditional Chinese historians, it was Confucius who provided the model for historical writing. As the attributed author of the Springs and Autumns, Confucius demonstrated qualities of narratival restraint, historical factuality, moral profundity, and a refusal to engage in idle speculation. Of course, his model was not an easy one to emulate, and later historical writings have drawn on both the factual records of the imperial court (which were not always factual or free of ideological interests) and nonofficial sources, such as private accounts, anecdotal literature, and hearsay. The present essay focuses on this intersection between anecdotal sources and historiography. This is precisely the point when historiography must reflect on its narrative condition, as narrative has interests other than factuality or moral truth. The author shows how the historiographic anxiety over unreliable sources has often coexisted with a fascination with anecdotal stories and gossip.

This article describes the manner in which the English language took root in modern India. It does so by using gender as the unit of analysis. Building a feminist analysis on the symbolic role of culture, the author traces the history of English education in Bombay and Poona. The rise of English as the language of power in the nineteenth century was actively enabled—and further legitimated—by the patriarchal interests of Indian class and caste formation. The author analyzes English- and Marathi-language memoirs, school reports, debates in the “native” press on the content of the English education curriculum, and other cultural productions by men and women detailing their experiences and opinions of English education. Based on those sources, the author demonstrates that upper-caste masculine authority came to be yoked to the charisma of colonial English and, with that, subtly coded the English language as masculine. Consequently, the power of Indian English emerged from its ability to evade charges of cultural mimicry for certain classes, to organize native gender difference, and to express and orient (hetero)sexual desire.

Historical materialism entered Chinese thought as part of the new wave of socialism during the New Culture movement. By the late 1920's, during the ebb of communism as a political movement, it had gained a foothold in the consciousness of many Chinese intellectuals. Its application to the analysis of Chinese history reached its peak in the “social history controversy” of the late twenties and early thirties.1 After the mid-thirties interest in the Marxist discussion of history dwindled, not reaching a comparable degree of intensity until its revival after 1949.

In China, as in the West, fiction is a late development in the literary scene and serious fiction criticism is correspondingly a recent endeavor. The similarity goes further in the case of the historical novel, which critics of Chinese and Western fiction alike have either consciously avoided or customarily regarded with critical disfavor. In the Chinese case, the San-Kuo chih yen-i (The Three Kingdoms) is the only historical novel which has received constant serious attention, but many of its features are exceptions rather than rules.2 One will look in vain for anything as essential as a general survey of elements basic to works of this genre.3 For a genre so numerically significant, the unavoidable sketchiness of such a preliminary outline as the present one may be compensated for by a selective coverage. Here the main concerns are the most important themes and certain related contextual characteristics.

By the 1940's, China already had a well-established tradition of student activism. The most famous of the Chinese student movements had originated with the demonstration of May 4, 1919, against the Versailles Peace Settlement. Punctuating Chinese politics thereafter were numerous student demonstrations: the protest against the unequal treaties on May 30, 1925; the condemnation of Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931; and the demand for resistance to Japan on December 9, 1935. Youth leaders of the 1940's were conscious of the May 4th tradition, as they called it. They were proud of the tradition and felt an obligation to keep it alive. They accepted a role as a politicized elite with the right and duty to speak for the Chinese people. As the competition between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party for control of China's destiny entered its critical stage between 1945 and 1949, Chinese students sought active participation in China's revolution.

Because the so-called “three teachings” (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism) lost much of their separate identity and exclusivist appeal during the 300 years between mid-T'ang and Southern Sung, the syncretism developed by Chu Hsi and others in the 13th century represented not an explicit fusion of these three teachings, but an integration of several 11th and 12th century interpreters, of proliferated early Confucian canonical literature, and a revival of the tao, which served to confirm the legitimate position of the “contemporary” Sung with respect to their classical heritage. This new syncretism, called tao-hsüeh, was immediately vulnerable as the vain, unnecessary and fundamentally unacceptable effort of a few men to monopolize the true tao, both to solidify their own philosophical position and to gain political advantages. As the attack on tao-hsüeh turned to an attack on wei-hsüeh (“false learning”) in the 1190's, it became associated with a wave of anti-intellectualism generated in part by the exclusivism of serious (i.e., tao-hsüeh) philosophers, the simultaneous commonization of general learning, and the pretention of would-be intellectuals. Tao-hsüeh then became orthodox in the early 14th century primarily in an effort to reverse this anti-intellectual trend.

Loyalty is at present an agonizing question to many concerned Chinese who face either divisive circumstances or imposition of particular political lines. Few topics could be more relevant than their heritage of loyalty and its implications today. Never a simple matter in politics, loyalty often produced great tensions and even ironical tragedies that filled the pages in Chinese history. As early as the Shang period, according to the ancient legend, an official most loyal to the state was killed by the displeased last king for not being loyal to him. In the more recent period of the Ming, for example, Yü Chien (1398–1457) suffered the same fate. Having defended Peking and thus saved the realm during the emperor's brief captivity, he was later executed by the same emperor who returned and eventually retook the throne. Of all these ironical tragedies—loyal men condemned as disloyal—the case of Yüeh Fei has been highly significant. He was for centuries a much mythologized and even deified symbol of loyalty. With superstitious beliefs swept away by modern waves, many Chinese still identify his image with nationalism, anti-imperialistic stands, and attachment to the fatherland. This essay will analyze the following: pertinent points in Yüeh Fei's career, the neo-Confucian theory and practice of loyalty in political science terms, and his evolving myths in intellectual history with regard to both the elite heritage and the mass heritage.

Violence, non-violent civil disobedience, and mass demonstrations have been a part of Indian politics since independence; indeed, even before 1947. Occasionally these outbursts are truly spontaneous, and, when they are, they may be accounted for by the hypothesis that more discontent exists in Indian society than has been expressed by organized groups. But such anomic movements have been rare in India since 1947, although mob violence during the days of partition may be an illustration par excellence of this phenomenon in Indian life.

A distinctive feature of japanese society is its apparent eagerness to embrace various forms of voluntary death or suicide as legitimate, even positive, behavior with a potentially redemptive value. These forms include the samurai's ritualistic disembowelment (seppuku or harakiri), remonstration suicide (kanshi) in protest against a corrupt superior, and suicide out of devotion to a lord or superior (junsbi), all of which are surrounded by “a heroic, romantic, aesthetic, and moral aura” (Lebra 1976:190). Suicide is, of course, an extraordinary act in Japan as elsewhere in the world (Lifton 1979:24). Though it is not common, it is widely revered by Japanese if committed on the basis of authentic moral intentions in relation to societal pressure—that is, to exorcise shame (haji) and to highlight honor, dignity, and integrity. In a culture that esteems the tragic hero who embodies the “nobility of failure” (Morris 1975), and which regards voluntary death as an experiential transcendence for participants and observers alike, perhaps the most extreme and intriguing example of taking one's own life is the double suicide or love suicide (shinjū).