Pre-Han philosophical tradition did not address issues for which the concept of truth was central. Classical Chinese philosophy had virtually no metaphysical theory. The theory of language was mainly pragmatic. The semantic doctrines that were developed focused on terms rather than sentences or sententials. The Chinese theory of knowledge was primarily a theory of know-how and was not based on contrast between knowledge and belief. Chinese philosophy of mind treated heart-mind as a cluster of dispositional attitudes to make distinctions and to act upon, not as a repository of cognitive content about the world. Discussions of inference and semantic paradoxes used explicitly pragmatic terms rather than semantic ones. These differences can be partially explained by features of classical Chinese language in which compositional sentencehood is not important or syntactically obvious, and in which the counterparts of propositional attitudes take terms rather than sentences as objects.

The developmental trajectories of North China and the Southeast Coast during the middle and late imperial periods are surveyed to illustrate the recurrence of regional macrocycles of development and decline and to show that such cycles may be unsynchronized as between regions. These cases provide a basis for arguing that economic macrocycles are a systemic property—not of provinces or of the empire as a whole but of regional economies viewed as internally differentiated and interdependent systems of human interaction. An exploration of the relation between regional developmental cycles and the Chinese dynastic cycle concludes that the latter was mediated by the former. It is suggested that regional developmental cycles are cycles not only of economic prosperity and depression but also of population growth and decline, of social development and devolution, and of peace and disorder. China's historical structure, then, is seen as an internested hierarchy of local and regional histories whose scope in each case is grounded in the spatial patterning of human interaction, and whose critical temporal structures are successive cyclical episodes. The uses of such an historiographic model are briefly explored.

The breakup of Pakistan in 1971 can be explained in pt by a failure of understanding on the part of the West Pakistani leadership of Pakistan, a seeming inability to recognize what the meaning of Pakistan was for Bengalis, and thus the cause of the demand for Bengali as a state language equal to Urdu. Exploration of the language issue in the period before and afterndependence helps to illuminate the divergence of belief about the form of the new state and the meaning of parity in representation between east and west wings of the country. The final tragedy of the attempted crushing of the movement for an autonomous Bangladesh is also in part an outcome of this pattern of belief, in particular the belief about the role of Hindus in the expression of Bengali identity.

Japanese imperialism relentlessly besieged the Nationalist government of China during the Nanking decade. Chiang Kai-shek, believing that China was not ready to confront Japanese military power and obsessed with the desire to eliminate the Communists, adopted a policy of consistent appeasement toward the.Japanese. This enraged public opinion in urban China, and Zou Tao-fen, a popular journalist, led the cry for resistance to Japan. He and his associates were continually suppressed by the Nanking government; nevertheless, they published several journals in succession, each of which denounced Chiang's policy toward Japan and all of which achieved enormous circulation. Late in 1935 Zou and his followers helped organize the National Salvation Movement, which demanded that Chiang suspend the civil war against the Communists and fight the Japanese. When Chiang Kai-shek, acting under Japanese pressure, arrested Zou and the leaders of the association in 1936, they became national heroes, the legendary “Seven Gentlemen.” Zou's martyrdom and that of his associates transformed their movement into a powerful political force, one that opposed Chiang and increasingly favored the Chinese Communists.

The introduction to the symposium sets out a methodological framework for the apprehension of Southeast Asian rituals, languages, and literary texts so that they are at once open to cross-cultural comparative analysis and recorded in social and symbolic contextual detail. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur's use of the term “interpretation” is central here: he urges students of cultures to combine attention to structural features of language and culture (for example, grammatical patterns) with inquiries into social contextual features (for example, speech usage in real communities). Moving back and forth between the two sorts of analysis allows researchers to bring the insights of the one pole to the investigation of the other; the full hermeneutic process constitutes interpretation. This style of inquiry, a modification of the sort of interpretive social science developed by Geertz and Becker, allows Southeast Asianists to draw on careful ethnography to make crucial “course corrections” in anthropological and linguistic theory building in general.

Due to the inadequacies of the surviving sources, this study of the highly controversial issue of Sung land tenure focuses on variations in land tenure practices in six regions of South China during the Southern Sung. It finds that large private landholdings predominated in only a few areas of South China, that they usually did not possess the contiguity and size some have attributed to a supposed Sung manorial order, and that most peasant households owned some land. Of those who worked another's land, three types are studied in detail—the land guest, the field servant, and the tenant guest. Normally the land guest was bound to the land, the field servant hired as a temporary indentured servant, and the tenant guest obliged to provide little more than rent. Working conditions south of the Yangtze generally grew less subservient the closer the area was located to the Lower Yangtze Valley.

Savariraya Pillai (1801–1874), a teacher whose entire life was spent in villages and towns of Tinnevelly District, never learned English. Moreover, in his writing, he never departed from the local Tamil. For this reason, the record of his observations upon social life and public affairs is a priceless source for historical investigation. His diaries and journals which span a period of forty years, can be compared with those of Ananda Ranga Pillai, the astute agent (dubash) of Joseph-François Dupleix, the French governor of Pondicherry whose observations were recorded a full century earlier. Nothing quite like the Pillai source material for the local history of this agrarian society has hitherto been available to scholars. The translation and publication of materials such as those discussed in this article would make a significant contribution to historiography.

The industrial Patriotic Movement (Sampō) symbolized the suppression of labor unions in prewar Japan, but it also shaped the development of Japan's postwar system of industrial relations. When first launched by officials of the Home Ministry in 1938, Sampō was intended to be a constructive reform movement for reducing conflict and for maintaining an efficient labor market. With the support of the police and of some labor leaders, Sampō encouraged formation of factory committees with elected worker representatives for negotiating wages and working conditions. The resistance of business leaders led to the assertion of direct bureaucratic control over the movement, and with army interference in civil administration after 1940, Sampō eventually led to the suppression of unions. Nevertheless, the foundations were laid for the spread of enterprise unionism on a national scale in the postwar era even under military rule.

Takabatake Motoyuki was one of several prewar Japanese socialists who combined the Marxian ideal of proletarian socialism with nationalism. The first to produce a full Japanese translation of Karl Marx's Capital in 1919, Takabatake formulated a doctrine of national or state socialism that same year and dedicated the rest of his life to the promotion of that ideal. While Takabatake continued to call himself a Marxist, he criticized Marx's understanding of the state and drew on the work of Western political theorists such as Thomas Hobbes to construct his own functionalist interpretation of the state. Takabatake's work not only exposes some important lacunae in Marxist-Leninism, but his continued appeal to Marxism while embracing an ideology usually associated with the political Right defies analysis on the basis of conventional Left-Right distinctions. As his treatment of contemporary domestic and international problems demonstrates, both socialist and nationalist movements of this era constituted impassioned responses to social, economic, and political crises that were already apparent in the Taishō years.

Indonesians, like other Southeast Asians, have been extensive users of mild narcotic analgesics throughout history. Until a century ago the most widespread narcotic was the chewed quid of betel, comprising the areca nut, betel leaves, lime, and sundry optional additives. Europeans introduced both tobacco and opium around 1600, and Indonesians quickly took up the growing of tobacco. Initially smoked by a relatively small elite, tobacco became used almost universally as part of the betel chew by the end of the eighteenth century. At the end of the nineteenth century cigarette-smoking for men became associated with the transformation to “modern” attitudes, and it rapidly replaced betel-chewing. Today virtually all Indonesian men smoke and virtually none chew betel. Among women betel-chewing has no such substitute and is disappearing more slowly.

Tobacco has relaxant and sedative effects similar to betel. Whereas the betel ingredients were very cheap, tobacco now consumes about 5 percent of the incomes of Indonesian families, including the poorest. Although betel-chewing provided protection against tooth decay, intestinal parasites, and bacteria, tobacco-smoking is injurious to health in a variety of ways.

The logic of Indonesian subjectless and tenseless expressions appears to have cultural implications, just as the use of tenses in English scientific writing entails much more than grammatical minutiae. A. L. Becker has pointed out that tense in English functions in a “coherence system” that pervades and transcends grammar. A parallel coherence system is suggested for Indonesian, based not on tense but on topic. Paul Ricoeur's distinction between LANGUAGE and DISCOURSE is the basis of the claim that Indonesian sentences cohere on the bond between grammatical subject and discourse topic. Examples are drawn from a number of contexts that call forth passive sentences in Indonesian. The article concludes on another suggestion by Becker. The Indonesian topic may be part of a larger deictic category of person, which may be related in discourse to orientation in space—both physical and social—of participants in the speech event. If this suggestion is correct, then the contrast between English and Indonesian coherence systems may be found in the opposition tense/time vs. person/space.

The political integration of British India and princely India is generally assumed to be an accomplished fact, but in contemporary Indian states that contain both ex-British and ex-princely territory and population the different legacies of British and princely rule remained influential long after independence and merger. Analysis of the de facto political integration of Gujarat between 1943 and 1969 reveals five stages of bargaining between ex-British and ex-princely nationalist elites. At each stage the interests of these elites—schooled in contrasting historical-political traditions—had to be consulted and compensated; the results can be discerned in the differential electoral behavior of the ex-British-dominated Mainland and ex-princely Saurashtra regions. Eventually, the political resources and training of Mainland politicians proved more appropriate for universal franchise politics than did those of the exprincely Saurashtrians. However, as of. 1969, the objective of an integrated political community in Gujarat was still to be achieved.

It was once popular for Western scholars to view the liberation of women as one of the most dramatic accomplishments of the Chinese revolution. This article reviews three recently published studies that present a more sanguine view of the impact of the policies adopted by the Chinese Communist party on women's lives. Throughout its history (with the possible exception of the 1920s) the CCP has failed to commit itself to the achievement of gender equality. To have done so, the new scholarship suggests, would have alienated male peasants, the most important constituency of the CCP Patriarchy, rather than being dismantled, has thus been perpetuated and reinforced in China. This argument is substantiated in the three volumes under review by an analysis of Party policy and political campaigns. The extent to which these policies and campaigns reflect social reality is a task that future scholars will have to confront.

Opium smoking has long since disappeared as a social phenomenon in Java. But in the last century, and during the early decades of this one, smoking opium was a widespread custom in much of the island—the daily habit of hundreds of thousands, a routine part of social life among men in many regions, and a source of considerable profit to the Dutch colonial state. This article addresses the subject of opium in Java; it concentrates on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the historical period during which opium smoking was most widespread in Java and for which the most abundant documentary resources exist.

This article suggests that two distinct modes of text-building constraints co-incide in the Indonesian novel “Surabaya.” The first set of constraints consists of narrative functions that shape sentence-level grammar within the story; the second level of text-building constraints shapes the thematic structure of the story. The author argues that, unlike its narrative structure, which is bound by the linearity of time, the thematic structure, of “Surabaya” is denned by a hierarchy of “heavier” and “lighter” themes, the “heavier” themes being evoked more often than are the “lighter” themes. He suggests that heaviness of theme is a strategy of text building found in classical Malaysian (Hikayat) texts, gamelan orchestra musical organization, and in calendric reckoning in much of Indonesia. He argues, in sum, for a method of writing that encourages grammatical description from two or more perspectives. “Binocular vision,” to use Gregory Bateson's words, is necessary in writing to provide a more honest, richer description of a text than a single mode of grammatical description can provide; it makes available to readers more than one means of access to the text.