Emphasis on descent and kinship in analysis of traditional Chinese corporations, a legacy of structural-functional theory, mistakes the analyst's theoretical categories for native culture. In this paper, the author attempts to sort out some of the resulting conceptual muddles, and he proposes a more rigorous analytical framework for discussing the range of organizational variation in traditional Chinese corporations. Analysis of ten representative cases from Ta-ch'i, Taiwan, reveals greater flexibility of corporate form and function than structural-functional theories would predict. Close attention to the cases also reveals the absence of any compelling reason to treat the “Chinese lineage” as analytically or culturally distinct from the entire range of Chinese formal associations (hui). To understand what is uniquely Chinese in Chinese corporations, past emphasis on differences in formal group-membership requirements must be complemented by attention to the cultural values and norms of operation that transcend such differences.

During the past year I have traveled to the regional associations, from Santa Cruz to Denton, to Albany, and to points in between, such as Ann Arbor, Boulder, and Boone. I have been impressed by the generosity and good will of our members, but above all, I have been impressed by the sense that we have special relationships through sharing in a common cause. For that reason I have chosen an elliptical and somewhat odd title for this address, which is one of the otherwise not very onerous duties required of the president. The title is “The Tradition of Mission—Asian Studies in the United States, 1783 and 1983.”

The new materialism underlying economic modernization in post-Mao China rests on the principles of the primacy of productivity over ideology, use of incentives based on material interests, and acknowledgment of economic and social complexity. An impressive array of political reforms has accompanied the vast changes in economic policies that these principles have inspired. These include legal and constitutional reform, a decrease in public interference in the private lives of citizens, an increase in mass voice in most organizations, and a strengthening of the people's congress system. The reforms are intended to contribute to modernization by institutionalizing orderly participation by intellectuals and the masses. The capacity of such reforms to limit arbitrary power through institutional and electoral checks is rendered ambiguous by the continued hegemony of the Chinese Communist Party.

The rigors of the transition from Ming to Qing imposed harrowing moral choices upon Chinese elites during the 1600s. Some chose to collaborate uneasily with their Manchu conquerors. Others remained loyal to the Ming, even after all hope was lost for a restoration in the South. Yet a third group transferred its support from the fallen dynasty to the rising one, becoming so fiercely attached to the new rulers that its members were willing to endure martyrdom rather than turn against the Manchus during the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories. Although such choices were often situational and not always mutually exclusive, they were associated in contemporaries' eyes with distinct aesthetic tastes, specific philosophical positions, and particular political commitments. This essay attempts to identify those distinctions in the biographical trajectories of several eminent seventeenth-century literati, scholar-officials, and military statesmen.

The values and premises underlying the Chinese family system can be seen as an amalgam of several partially contradictory strains of thought, each with its own history and vocabulary. While ideas tied to the classical tsung model remained at the level of high ideals, seldom even emulated, notions related to the family (chid) and the continuity of the patriline were highly pervasive and would seem to account for much of the uniformity in Chinese family practices. In this article the ways these strains of thought reinforced or countered each other is examined through an analysis of texts written in the Sung (960–1279) period, a time of social and intellectual ferment when it was common to write on family matters with considerable candor.

Studies of twentieth-century Japanese politics have largely ignored the impressive continuities between the prewar and postwar periods. Most accounts of the Occupation emphasize external American initiatives while dealing with the established Japanese leadership in rather one-dimensional terms. This article focuses on a dynamic group of prewar Japanese bureaucrats who survived the Occupation purge to play a key role in the postwar government's controversial labor policies. As higher civil servants of the Home Ministry (and the Ministry of Welfare after 1938), they had been responsible for formulating a policy toward the interwar labor union movement that mixed social reform and control. The author describes the ways in which these “social bureaucrats” perpetuated themselves and their distinctive approach to social stability in the postwar era. Their influence continues not only in the postwar Ministry of Labor but, more surprisingly, within the highest ranks of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

The role of patrilineal ideology in Chinese village social organization varies more widely than the orthodox paradigm would predict. In minor multilineage communities closely interspersed among dominant elite lineages, interlineage rivalry and competition may indeed prevail. But in the many similar villages somewhat removed from the pressures of dominant lineage expansionism, lineage solidarity may coexist harmoniously with community solidarity, legitimized through a liberal extension of the kinship idiom. This article reviews several village studies and describes in detail a multilineage alliance that complements rather than supplants lineage unity, suggesting that principles of segmentary opposition and solidarity can provide positive means of integration among separate lineages in a shared territory as effectively as among branches of a single lineage.

The linguistic history of the Chinese of Java sketched here focuses on two periods of creative linguistic effort by the Chinese in the development of varieties of Malay/Indonesian. The first period is from 1880–1910, when the Peranakan Chinese—together with Dutch and Eurasians who were writing in Malay at the time—developed a literary language from Low Malay that was primarily an oral language with many regional and social variants. Soon after this period, the Dutch (and many Eurasians and some Chinese) abandoned Malay as a literary language in preference for Dutch. Only later, in the 1920s and 1930s, did Indonesian nationalists become interested in developing Malay as the national language. The second period of creative linguistic activity among the Peranakan Chinese is the period that followed Indonesian independence in 1945, which is characterized by the departure of the Dutch, the almost complete disappearance of the Dutch and Low Malay languages on Java, and the increased prominence of Javanese as the language of power and politics. During this period Peranakan of the Javanesespeaking areas of Java developed a Javanese-based mixed language (Indonesianized-Javanese) as their home language. The switch from a Malay-based to a Javanese-based language was not a radical change because the Peranakan community had been bilingual for many centuries, but it points out new social uses of languages already in their linguistic repertoire. This last period of linguistic creativity is significant because it is a break in the pattern of acceptance of another's language by the Chinese of Java, and it demonstrates their desire to create a distinctive dialect, a phenomenon reflecting the social reality of an unassimilated minority that has lived in the midst of the Javanese majority for centuries.

The author identifies three meanings of individualism (kojinshugi) in Japanese journalism during the Taishō period. They were: first, individual character and talent should be cultivated for the purpose of strengthening the state and fostering the active commitment of individuals to state policies; second, personal autonomy and self-expression were legitimate within a restricted “private” sphere that coexisted uneasily with the dominant values of the “public” sphere; and third, the development of free, autonomous individuals was the most fundamental value by which state and society should be judged. Proponents of individualism were unable to alter the state structure established by the Meiji Constitution or the state ideology of submission; their innovative thinking did serve as a leavening agent within state structure by demanding new relationships between elite and masses and by sustaining a high degree of elite pluralism.

The author of this article examines the role of Sinhalese Buddhist deities within the long Sinhalese tradition of using Buddhism to support political authority. Extensive contemporary information on deity territories suggests that because state political integration involves territorial integration localized deities have both reflected and been used to bring about an integration of local people into state administrative structures. However, this integration is not brought about by having the territories of the deities parallel administrative units (which they do not); it is brought about by having people think that they do, think that the territories of the gods correspond level by level to the administrative villages, districts, and provinces. As the relationship between these levels and the state has changed historically, that is, when center-hinterland integration has gone from strong to weak to strong again, people's understanding of the pantheon appears to have changed as well.

This article discusses two collections (seventy-seven titles) of reprints edited by Ramon H. Myers. He does not provide an interpretative essay for either collection; his choices for inclusion are reviewed in terms of the opinions that he has expressed in a textbook and in other works. The choices reveal that Myers, along with other specialists, views 1895 to 1937 as a key period in which the old socioeconomic order disintegrated and a new order took shape. Scholarly interest concerning those years has focused on the nature of the agrarian crisis, the impact of foreign trade and investment, the contribution of the Chinese bourgeoisie, and the role of the new Nationalist government. The author discusses the views of Myers and others on these topics, and, in addition, the author points out that these collections suggest that another topic—the expanded control of foreign governments over the economic affairs of the Chinese state—is worthy of investigation.

In this article the author examines what he terms an “institutional culture of authority” that has come to characterize postrevolution Chinese industrial enterprises. This institutional culture is shaped by a pattern of organized dependency that is inherent in the economic relationship of employees to enterprises, and also in systems of reward and control that link the opportunities of employees to their behavior and attitudes. This institutional culture is manifested in widespread ritualism in political meetings, low exercise of voice by subordinates, the creation of patron-client networks linking the Party to selected employees, and the everyday cultivation of personal connections for individual gain.

In 1881, the Japanese introduced the newspaper as a means of public communication into Korea. Publication of the Chōsen shinpō in the open port of Pusan is related to the political and economic circumstances in which the Japanese found themselves there. Elsewhere in East Asia, a comparable role was played by Westerners. In addition to viewing the Chōsen shinpō in the context of Japanese efforts to influence Korea's modernization, the author suggests studying this newspaper as a component of the comparative history of the press in East Asia.