On the Party. By Liu Shao-ch'i. Second Edition. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1950. 206 p.

When George Coedes writes a book on Southeast Asia, it is an event in the history of that region; for, in a lifetime spent in Indochina, he has come to be considered as one of the all-time authorities on that part of the world. His connection with l'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient has covered more than 40 years, and in his capacity as epigraphist it has been his task to decipher and translate the inscriptions of Champa and Cambodia — Sanskrit, Cham, Khmer, and Pali — and to fix the place of each in history; which inscriptions he has published, generally in the Bulletin of that institution under the title of “Etudes Cambodgiennes,” but also in other journals and in collections. During the twelve years (1918–30) when he was loaned to Siam as Secretary of the National Institute, in charge of the National Library and Museum, he collected, translated, and published the inscriptions of Siam— in Siamese, Tai, Mon, Khmer, Sanskrit, and Pali — and translated and edited important chronicles and other historical documents. He organized and classified the National Museum and founded there the Dvāravatī and Srivijaya Schools of Art. Nor has all his attention been given to French Indochina and Siam. One of his earliest tasks was to collect and publish the references to the Far East in the texts of Greek and Latin authors. While at Bangkok, he translated the inscriptions in Old Malay found within the former kingdom of Srivijaya and wrote several articles on that kingdom.

In the last two decades of the Qing dynasty, installment publication became the dominant mode of presentation for Chinese fiction, as it had been for European and Japanese literature for more than half a century. Whether printed daily as one feature in a newspaper, weekly in literary supplements, or monthly in the fiction journals that took off in the early 1900s, Chinese vernacular fiction of this period appeared in parts over time, just as the works of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Jippensha Ikku, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and even Henry James did (Link 1981; Lee and Nathan 1985; Chen 1988). As early as 1892, Shanghai author Han Bangqing praised the installment form for heightening suspense and forcing the reader to imagine what might happen next; by 1910 “addiction” to installment fiction could be understood as an aesthetic experience, and the popularity of the format would only increase in the decades to follow. This article seeks to trace the rise of the installment form in late Qing and early Republican China, investigate its ties with the contemporaneous cultural production of Shanghai as a metropolitan media center, and demonstrate the effects of its associated aesthetic.

There is a bewildering contrast between the superficial calm of the 1930s in Indonesia and the turbulence of the immediate post-war period. In addition to the enormous upsurge of anti-colonial militance, the years following the Japanese surrender were marked by an unprecedented degree of conflict amongst Indonesians, as society adjusted to the radically changed conditions of independence. In other countries occupied by Japan, notably Burma and Malaya, ethnic animosities were also unusually overt after the war. It seemed natural to ask, as Elsbree did in his pioneering essay of 1953:

did the [Japanese] occupation, with its dissolution of existing ties, aggravate the fissures of the old order? … Did the Japanese deliberately pursue a “divide and rule” tactic, and is their policy to be held responsible for the violent outbursts and the general increase in racial tension since the end of the war?

It is no easy matter for a government seeking to foster rapid economic and social changes to win acceptance of its programs. Too much control by the center assures local resistance; too much dispersal of authority empowers it. The dilemma is a familiar one today, but it is not, of course, a new one. The leaders of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan found it to be the knottiest problem in their efforts to construct a modern state. They needed to exert sufficient central control of local government to assure that their initiatives could be enacted in Japan's villages and that taxes would flow to the center in a predictable and orderly manner. But these goals required the central government to permit a measure of autonomy—to rely on pre-Meiji inter- and intravillage organizations originally devised to guard and insulate the village from the demands of higher authority. Their efforts to resolve the dilemma quickly took on a note of desperation: in the first twenty years of the Meiji era, the government radically altered the system of local administration four times.

Until recent times, and to a certain extent, even at the present, most historians have spoken of the movements which led to the Meiji Restoration as lower samurai movements. It is my aim in this article to show that they were not. First, negatively, I hope to show by a consideration of what is meant by the term “lower samurai” and by the application of this to the Chōshū scene that the early Restoration movement or sonō jōi (Honor the Emperor, Expel the Barbarian) movement cannot be described as a lower samurai movement. Second, positively, I will attempt an alternate characterization in terms of the different groups participating in this movement in Chōshū from its inception in 1858 until its culmination in the Chōshū Civil War in 1865.

Recent developments in Korean archaeology, especially the discovery of well-preserved rice grains in clear archaeological contexts, have caused a reassessment of the timing, distribution, causes, and effects of the beginning of rice agriculture in Korea. Kim puts the rice discoveries in historical perspective, discusses details of the recent evidence, and explores possible diffusion routes based on the new data. Choe focuses on semi-lunar knives—the agricultural tools believed to be associated with rice cultivation. The typology of the knives and the distribution and chronology of the types are used to propose a diffusion route directly into Korea from North China. Nelson examines the cultural changes from the preceding Chŭlmun period when rice grains and semi-lunar knives are found. Mechanisms to explain the change are proposed as hypotheses. Comments on the papers disclose an agreement on the likelihood of a northern diffusion route, but no consensus on the cultural processes.

This paper is a preliminary study of Kim Yuka, a seventeenth-century reformer and statesman, and his role in the introduction of the tribute tax reform in the two southern provinces of Ch'ungch'ŏng and Chŏlla. It is also intended as a case study of one aspect of the actual operation of seventeenth-century Yi government. Special attention is paid to the inter-relationship between the mode of operation of the Yi government and Kim Yuk's reform efforts.

Postwar Japanese scholarship, in its quest to explain Japan's modern history, has yet to deal adequately with the so-called right wing. Survey histories sometimes write it off as a lunatic fringe, or equate it simply with militarism and putschism. My purpose here is not to venture a total picture of the right but to present a microcosmic analysis of doctrines attributed to it through focusing on the theory of revolution formulated early in the Taishō period by Kita Ikki (1883–1937). Japanese writers regularly identify Kita as a leading rightist. Maruyama Masao refers to him as “the ideological father of Japanese fascism,” and his 1919 book on the “reorganization” of Japan (later published as Nihon kaizō hōan taikō) has been called by Kuno Osamu “the Mein Kampf of the Shõwa ultranationalist movement.”

Whatever else the nineteen sixties may be remembered for—the proliferation of macroweapons, microstates or miniskirts—historians of the decade might allot a footnote to the more modest, but less disconcerting, proliferation of English language studies of Chinese law. Thirty years ago a survey of then recent research on Chinese law revealed “an increased interest on the part of Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars.” The author noted that, although “[t]he amount of work achieved … constitutes as yet but a slight beginning in what is still a largely unworked field,” it “clearly indicates the potential contributions which further researches can make to our understanding of the evolution of Chinese social, economic and political life and institutions.” No one rose to dispute the author's conclusion that Chinese law offers “a rich source from which to derive a more realistic appraisal of the forces actually at work in Chinese society at different epochs.…” Yet, except in Japan, where all scholars of things Chinese received additional stimulus from the adventitious circumstances of international politics, the cumulative impact of the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the Chinese Civil War and the triumph of Communism slowed the development of what had been a promising academic field.

One often has the impression that young Japanese writers today are more eager to follow Western fads than to explore the Japanese tradition. Far from being devotees of Zen Buddhism, they are more likely to come to it through translations of Kerouac and other beatniks. In this paper, I propose to examine the cultural and psychological bases for this curious situation, which I suggest stem largely from the Japanese obsession with being up-to-date or Westernized. Young Japanese writers are never free from the pressure of the reading public that they should be au courant with the latest trend in Western literature, and this imposes such a heavy burden that it is no wonder that they have no time to go to a monastery and practice Zen.

The industrialization of Pakistan, which has proceeded at a fairly rapid pace in the decade since partition, has engendered new and growing problems for industrial labor. These problems have until recently received scant attention from either the Government of Pakistan or from scholars. Domestic and international political matters and concern for rapid industrialization have hitherto occupied government officials more than a rigorous analysis of the economic problems of the population. Even scholars concerned with economic problems may make only peripheral references to industrial labor, as does Dr. S. M. Akhtar in his fine new edition of Economics of Pakistan. Recently, with the growth of the industrial labor force and of trade unions, greater official and scholarly concern has been shown for industrial workers. Accurate information on Pakistan's labor problems and some suggestions for their solution may be found in three recent works dealing with different aspects of labor in Pakistan. Several other sources for a study of Pakistan labor now exist, and it is possible from these to assess the position of the industrial worker and the prospects for its improvement.

One hundred years of Brooke rule in Sarawak seem to present a stark contrast to the political and social foment in Burma, Indonesia and Vietnam. Cognizant of the ill effects of European domination in the archipelago, the Brookes established a paternalistic rule whose policies were designed to curtail European economic investment in the area and to protect the indigenous inhabitants from internal and external exploitation. However, despite the fact that Brooke rule was structured for maintaining traditional order, not development, the European interlude in north Bornean history may have been more of a deviation than is apparent. The suppression of “piracy” in the area and the political domination of the Brookes over most of the northeastern part of the island had several important results. First, the area trade patterns—if piracy can be seen as a form of luxury trade—were altered to the ultimate economic advantage of the Chinese who came to dominate retail trade. Second, the natural northeastern expansion of the Iban people was halted to the chief benefit of the indigenous Malays who gained significant political advantage under die Brookes. Finally, an inevitable depersonalization of rule occurred as the administration of the state became increasingly complex. If, in a “modern” world, a rule of law, not economic development per se, is the essential ingredient for political stability, Brooke rule made a significant contribution to the political viability of northern Borneo by fostering a White, civilized way of settling disputes.

As the tide of Japanese occupation recedes from the Philippines, one of the most unique experiments in modern nation building is being resumed. In a world where the aspirations of colonial peoples offer a major threat to peace and stability, what is happening in the new Commonwealth is of the greatest importance.