The basis of Thailand's political security has been altered from time to time to meet the changing stresses and strains created by great powers in the Far East. In the process of political evolution the Thai people and their politicians have shown a great deal of flexibility.

When the empire of Annam, by the treaty of June 5, 1862, ceded to France the three eastern provinces of Cochinchina, France acquired several new neighbors in the Far East. From 1862 on, she was constantly occupied by her political and economic relations with these neighbors. She was led inexorably by her will to protect her conquest to further and further territorial expansion. The first result of her policy was the establishment of a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863. The next consequence was the annexation of the three remaining provinces of Cochinchina in 1867.The third logical step in her Far Eastern progress was an arrangement with Siam in 1867 by which the latter recognized her protectorate over Cambodia at the price of territorial concessions. A further advance was registered in 1874 by the establishment of a French protectorate over Annam.

My intention is to discuss a particular approach to these problems rather than the problems themselves. This question of approach does seem of basic importance at a time when so many Americans are about to develop their wartime interest in Southeast Asia. Naturally this first interest has largely been focussed on political and economic issues. Now I think it is time that we bring to the fore the concept that in the longer view it is the matter of our cultural contacts with the East that is of most penetrating significance. I am going to show why I think that we must rid ourselves of the common impression that these contacts are going to be ruled by westernization, or acculturation, and that hence we absolutely must try to build our future relations with the East on a basis of sympathetic understanding.

Most Americans have observed individual Filipinos going about their business, as student, taxi driver, domestic servant, gardener, politician or journalist. Their acculturation to the principles and surface manifestations of modern western civilization is increasingly apparent, despite three centuries of indoctrination in Spanish customs and traditions and many centuries more of Arabic and Hindu influences. Indonesian culture survivals are, however, everywhere manifest in their daily life, beliefs, thoughts and actions.

It was from the Jesuits that the intelligentsia of Europe learned of the philosophy of Confucius. Many years before their sinophile propaganda had begun to affect the thinking of European scholars the members of the Society of Jesus had determined their attitude towards Chinese thought. It was, in fact, the simplification, to suit their own needs, of an ancient, complex and effective system of religion, ethics, and social philosophy. Faced with the coalescence of religious and moral teachings represented by the son chiao or three cults (of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism) the Jesuit missionaries found it expedient to oppose the social philosophy of Confucianism to the esoteric teachings of Buddhism and the mystico-magical thought of Taoism—creating a purely imaginary dualism in which the two latter were labelled heathen cults and the former was exalted to the position of a noble philosophic system, rivalling, if not surpassing, that of Greece and Rome.

Four hundred farm families were studied in 1927 by the Social Survey Department of the Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement in an effort to secure figures that would give a picture of the economic life and activities of the farm families of Tinghsien, Hopei Province. The families all lived in the eastern part of the hsien in the 62 villages included in the Movement's First Experimental District. Preliminary and experimental work was carried on in this limited area before the hsien-wide program of the Movement was inaugurated. Contact was made with the families studied, generally through the teachers of the Mass Education schools. Being a project of an educational group, the study was able to enlist the cooperation of nearly all of the families approached. Although we attempted by chance selection to make our group of families as nearly typical as possible, we recognize that our choice was necessarily affected by such factors as the families' willingness to cooperate in an unusual study, readiness to answer many intimate questions and that our group, therefore, probably had a higher than average intellectual and economic level and a more than average number of the larger and wealthier farms. We have attempted to overcome this difference by dividing the 400 families into several groups according to the size of their farms, thus giving several pictures of farm activity on different economic levels rather than just the averages for our particular group.

The prominence given to the British operations in Arakan during 1942–43 serves to remind us that the India-Buima coastal plain from Chitta-gong to Akyab and south to Ramree and Cheduba Islands was the scene of a difficult campaign during the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1824–25. In the current operations, as in the advance more than 100 years ago, the greatest difficulties are those of transport and supply. These are due to the fact that the entire region is highly malarious, deeply interlaced by a maze of tidal creeks and estuaries, and that it consists of a series of jungle clad parallel ridges and river valleys, which lie directly across the desired line of advance. In fact, except for the ridges, the area bears a striking resemblance to the Pearl River estuary between Canton and the sea.

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.

Many questions have been asked and are still being asked concerning the census which the Manchoukuo government conducted in 1940. It seems, therefore, that there is a need for a somewhat detailed statement of the background, aims, and methods of that census, and for a description of the results, in so far as they are available at present. No one familiar with the history of Manchuria will deny that it is one of the most vital and has been one of the most contested areas of the Far East. And though the vast majority of Americans, as well as the vast majority of Chinese, will deplore the auspices under which this census was conducted, it would be unrealistic to ignore the event, or to deny that the complete results, when they become available, will be of enormous value to those who must plan for the rehabilitation of Manchuria, and to those who hope to develop commercial relations with that area.

In may, 1942, The Far Eastern Quarterly published an article on Outstanding books on the Far East published in 1941. This article indicated twelve books of unusual value published during that year and gave comments on many others which for one reason or another seemed worthy of notice. Since Pearl Harbor, American interest in Asia and the Pacific has greatly increased and American publications about the Far East have become much more numerous. However, increase in quantity has not necessarily meant increase in quality. Many of those who might normally have produced reliable popular works or thorough research studies have been called on to do special war work and have had little time or opportunity for writing, while pseudo-experts and eye-witnesses without real background have burst into print. The layman who wishes to learn about Eastern Asia, as every American should and must, sorely needs a touchstone with which to tell gold from dross in the pile of recent publications on the Far East which confronts him. The editors of The Far Eastern Quarterly have therefore felt that an attempt to select the outstanding books published since the beginning of 1942 is decidedly in order.

Mr. Chang, who lived in Hopei Province in China, found himself in need of money to meet some special business expenses back in 1918. He might have gone to his relatives and asked them, as members of his family, to lend him the money. Or if there were not enough relatives to provide the sum needed, he might have persuaded one of his friends to introduce him to one of the well-to-do money lending families of the community, but that would have involved the payment of interest of two, two and a half or even three per cent a month. To save the heavy interest charge and to avoid putting too much burden on his relatives, Mr. Chang went to thirty of his friends and relatives, told them of his need for funds and invited them to join a mutual savings society. Such societies are very numerous in North China. They are popular because the members provide the capital sums that they use in turn and so avoid the expensive services of the money lender.

The great island of Mindanao—second in size of the Philippine group—is still but little known to the average American and Filipino. Many years of struggle between the Spanish and the followers of Islam made the Christianized people painfully aware of the Moro in the south yet a detailed description of these people still remains to be written. The studies of Saleeby have provided a glimpse of their law, religion and history while various writers have told of the struggle to bring the southern islands under the rule of Spain. The writings of Christie have given us an idea of the pagan peoples adjacent to the Mohammedans. Garvan's intensive study of the Manobo of the Agusan river valley is a classic of description, while the papers of Benedict and the author furnish a rather full picture of the tribes along the Gulf of Davao.

The Civil Code of the Republic of China was published during the years 1929–1931, the Criminal Code in 1935. A great number of other law codes were published before and during this period. Almost all of them have the legal systems of Continental European countries as their basis. The driving power behind this feverish legislative activity was the endeavor of the Republican regime to modernize China and to eliminate every pretext of Western powers to perpetuate extraterritoriality.

The Moros are those natives of the Philippines who are Mohammedans. They did not give themselves this name, nor do they use it among themselves; but they recognize it when applied to them by others.

Misnomers are often validated by time or history. The ancient Romans took a small community of the Hellenes for the whole population and called them Greeks. A Mediterranean sailor thought the New World was India and called its people Indians. In extreme western Europe the Christian Iberians, in seven bitter centuries, drove their Mohammedanized Berber cousins back to their native Mauretania, and in the process made Mohammedan a synonym for Moro, or Mauretanian. And so, although the appearance of the Iberians two-fifths of the world around in the extreme fringes of eastern Asia in the 16th Century was a remarkable feat, it was not strange that they called the Mohammedans they found here, Moros.

American participation in the war in the Pacific has led to the production of a steadily increasing pile of pamphlets intended for schools, adult study groups, and those many individuals who are unlikely to read books but may be tempted by something shorter and more palatable looking. This list attempts to point out some of the most useful series of pamphlets and individual items.

Anson Burlingame, lawyer and politician, was elected to the Congress of the United States from Massachusetts in 1855 as a member of the Know Nothing Party. Later he changed his allegiance to the new Republican Party of which he was one of the founders in Massachusetts. He served in the House for three successive terms winning some slight fame as a member of the House Committee on Foreign AiFairs and wide notoriety for his speech against Preston Brooks, assailant of Charles Sumner. An ardent supporter of Lincoln, Burlingame himself failed of re-election in 1860. In reward for his faithful party service, President Lincoln appointed him Minister to Austria. When it proved that he was persona nan grata to the Austrian Government, the President then offered him the post of Minister to China. Burlingame promptly accepted and arrived in China in October of 1861.

The present war has brought home the fact that even the most elementary freedom, the right to dispose over one's own person, cannot be taken for granted. Despotism backed by military force still rides roughshod over the rights of man. But whereas formerly a conqueror confiscated without hypocrisy the working power of his victims as well as their property, today world opinion forces him to use circumlocution, to pretend to purposes other than those of greed. Thus, labor in the Philippines has been recruited for compulsory services “in the interest of public safety, security and welfare.” And the compulsory nature of that recruitment is disguised by a pretense of voluntary enrollment which deceives few, least of all the victims. Actually, under a recent order in Manila all citizens between the ages of eighteen and fifty were eligible for labor conscription, and in other parts of the country more general enactments have been interpreted as permitting an almost unrestricted use of Filipino labor for the construction of defense works, roads, air fields and air raid shelters, and for other purposes. A false air of respectability has been given to some of these services by persuading leading citizens to lead parades, armed with spades, to the places where the “voluntary” and “patriotic” work was to be performed.