The Ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has aroused increasing international attention. The demands of the Sri Lankan Tamil ethnoregional movement for greater independence from the Sinhalese-dominated center developed through various stages into a call for a separate state in the mid-1970s. This was followed by an increase in the use of organized violence by both sides in the conflict. Most recently, the continued resistance of core Tamil militants to Indian attempts to institute a solution within a united SriLanka has emphasized the independent indigenous roots and powerful motivating vision of the call for a separate state.

The process of state-building in the Chinese revolution was confounded, and remains obscured, by a contest between rival claimants to state power in the Nationalist and Communist parties. There is a natural temptation to trace conflict in the state-building process to ideological differences between the two parties, as they did themselves, and to overlook their similarities and downplay the potential for political conflict and social resistance inherent in state-building generally. This is the case with histories of the Nationalist Revolution of the 1920s, when the two parties came together briefly to fight for national unification and independence. Each party is assigned an irreconcilable difference of purpose, the Nationalists aiming for cohesive national revolution and the Communists for divisive social revolution, and their combined efforts are represented as the historical working through of this conflict of purpose (Rankin, Fairbank, and Feuerwerker 1986:10; Wilbur 1984). The clash of aims seems to be not far removed from a clash of ideologies, and the collapse of this First United Front is portrayed as the historical resolution to a philosophical contradiction. In the definitive words of C. Martin Wilbur, “The main weakness was disagreement among the leaders concerning the social goals of the national revolution,” traceable to “competing ideologies among intellectuals throughout China” (Wilbur 1968:223). Conflict between the parties and within society boils down, in the end, to an ideological dispute.

For two and a half months in the spring of 1989, China's student actors dominated the world stage of modern telecommunications. Their massive demonstrations, the hunger strike during Gorbachev's visit, and the dramatic appearance of the Goddess of Democracy captured the attention of an audience that spanned the globe. As we write in mid-1990, the movement and its bloody suppression have already produced an enormous body of literature—from eyewitness accounts by journalists (Morrison 1989; Zhaoqiang, Gejing and Siyuan 1989) and special issues of scholarly journals (Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs Nos. 23, 24; The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 14.4), to pictorial histories (Turnley and Turnley 1989) and documentary collections (Han 1990; Wu 1989), and, most recently, textbook chapters (Spence 1990) and analytical works (Feigon 1990; Nathan 1990)—tracing the development of China's crisis. Despite a flood of material too massive to review in the present context, we still lack a convincing interpretive framework that places the events within the context of China's modern political evolution, and also provides a way to compare China's experience to that of Eastern Europe. Such an interpretation should help us to understand why massive public demonstrations spurred an evolution toward democratic governance in Eastern Europe, but in China led only to the massacre of June 3–4 and the present era of political repression.

Until recently, modern Chinese art attracted little scholarly attention, either in China or in the West. Western art historians might occasionally glance at the more traditional kinds of painting in the twentieth century, but their serious publications were on the great periods of Chinese art, Ming or before. The contemporary China-watchers—social scientists and modern period historians—trained their gaze on the harder stuff of politics and economics, ideology and organization. In the United States and the West in general, art seemed to slip through the crack between ACLS- and SSRC-funded research projects. In China, anything on the twentieth century, even art, was too sensitive politically for safe handling. The result was that throughout the Maoist years modern Chinese art could occasionally pique the interest of collectors or dealers outside China or draw carefully calculated praise from critics and publicists within, but it was not a promising area for critical scholarship. Michael Sullivan's pioneering survey, Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, London and Berkeley, 1959—strong on developments in the later Guomindang period when he was in China, but understandably rather out of touch with the main currents in the People's Republic—remained for almost thirty years the sole monument in a neglected field.

As a result of an editing error, the word “and” is missing from the third sentence of the first paragraph of Myron L. Cohen's article, “Lineage Organization in North China” [49.3 (August): 509]. The sentence should read, “The characteristics of the lineages in Yangmansa, a village approximately seventy-five kilometers south of Beijing, appear to have been typical of this broader pattern and considerably different from those associated with the southeastern model that has dominated the anthropological literature.” Without the “and,” the sentence implies that these lineages differ only from the southeastern model, whereas Professor Cohen intended to say the lineages are both typical and different. The editor regrets the error.

In the same year (1968) that students blockaded the streets of Paris, the formerly somnolent Jaffna Peninsula—the center of Tamil culture in Sri Lanka—was rocked by its own version of civil unrest. Led by an activist affiliated with the “Peking wing” of the Ceylon Communist party, several hundred “Minority Tamils” (mainly of the traditionally “untouchable” Paḷḷar and Naḻavar castes) sat in nonviolent protest (satyagrãha) before the gates of Jaffna's most orthodox Hindu temple, the temple of Lord Kandacami (Skanda) in the village called Maviddapuram. Hindus believe this large and beautiful structure represents the very ideal of the reformed Śaivite temple advocated by Arumuka Navalar (1822–79), Jaffna's champion Hindu reformer. Traditionally closed to untouchables, the Brahman-owned temple provided the setting for a two-week campaign to gain admittance that was timed to coincide with the temple's summer festival. After days of tense but peaceful confrontation, the demonstration turned violent as dozens of self-styled “Defenders of Saivism,” Hindus of high-caste rank (Veḷḷāḷars and their domestic servants, the Kōviyars), beat back the Minority Tamils with iron rods and sand-filled bottles. Feelings ran very high throughout the peninsula, and there were many incidents of violence, some lethal. To many Tamils and outside observers, it seemed as though Jaffna was poised on the brink of an all-out war between the castes (see, for example, Fontgalland 1968). Yet the conflict abated, and although there were temple-entry skirmishes in Jaffna as late as 1978, the Maviddapuram fracas was followed by a process of political unification as the Tamil community—Veḷḷāḷars and Minority Tamils alike—joined hands to contest the declining fortunes of Tamils in a country dominated by Sinhalese.