The typical internal structure of factions in a particular culture strongly influences the ability of factions to resolve conflict among themselves. This hypothesis is verified by examination of faction structure in India as contrasted to that in Japan. The argument draws on material from the broad range of contemporary studies of Indian and Japanese party politics and some studies of their bureaucracies as well. The major implication of the findings is that the “political culture” concept can be given a sounder empirical base when related to overt political behavior than when viewed as a matter of political psychology.

Liu Shaoqi, the highest-ranking Chinese Communist leader to fall victim to China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was posthumously rehabilitated in spring 1980. His rehabilitation was accompanied by the publication of new materials on his life and career, enabling us to fill in various lacunae and to attempt a more comprehensive assessment of his political import. If the vindication is successful among China's still somewhat skeptical masses, Liu may come to serve as a popular symbol of the folly of spontaneous mass participation in politics and the essential continuity of China's Marxist-Leninist tradition from the 1950s to the 1980s. To China's officialdom, Liu will represent the ultimate integrity of the Party apparatus, an avatar of the self-cultivated rectitude of the “clean official.”

The interconnected body of stories about Ch'un-ch'iu-Warring States times, known to most Chinese and embodied in a wide variety of verbal forms both oral and written, was a secular mythology—secular because it concerned men acting in the datable past, mythology because it was invested with a special authority for the culture at large. In my study of the sources and transmission of one small part of this mythology, the matter of Wu Tzu-hsii, I conclude that in the period down to the Former Han regional epics and hero stories were important vehicles for the transmission of Wu Tzu-hsü's story and of other stories like it. This part of Chinese verbal culture underwent a profound transformation during the imposition of centralized national rule in Ch'in and Han times. The epic tradition gradually disappeared and the old stories that survived were infused with a new meaning by historians who were driven by what can only be called a didactic imperative. Thus, epic was overwhelmed by history—China's secular scripture. The early literary versions of the matter of Wu Tzu-hsü provide compelling evidence of this.

This paper attempts to redefine the nature and conditions of bondservants in the late Ming, particularly in the highly productive T'ai-hu basin. It proposes that the great economic and social differences among bondservants obliges us to treat bondservitude as a legal status, not as a class. It discusses the many causes of bondservitude and its highly varied conditions. Agricultural bondservants accounted for no more than one-fifth of the rural population and usually had to pay rent and perform specific manual duties for their master. Bondservant managers are seen to have acquired far more wealth and power than their legal status would suggest and, along with other “brazen servants,” participated in the bondservant uprisings in the T'ai-hu basin during the late Ming and early Ch'ing.

As we all know, the modest, colorless, and ambiguous term “area studies” emerged during the course of World War II as a way of describing one minor enterprise in the war effort. It was an enterprise designed to achieve an encapsulated understanding of the unknown areas of the world in which we suddenly found ourselves engaged. During and after the war, most area studies were contemporary in orientation and, given the circumstances of their origin, extremely vulnerable to the charge of serving “nonscholarly” political or military interests.

Each upsurge of Hindu-Muslim tension in India brings in its wake scholarly and journalistic articles that highlight the frustrations of Indian Muslims and that raise serious questions about their commitment to India's secular democracy. The philosophical and empirical bases of these accounts are challenged by findings that suggest that region, poverty, illiteracy, and the working-class position of Indian Muslims are more significant in shaping their political outlook than religion. In contrast with the “orientalist” orthodoxy, this study finds the views of Indian Muslims to be diverse, complex, and well-integrated into the political perspectives of the linguistic regions in which they reside.

An adequate understanding of the complex connections between changes in the social relations of production and changes in the bases of group formation demands an historical approach in which consciousness and its ideological products are viewed dynamically, not as the mechanically determined superstructural reflections of material relations but as an active and constituent components of everyday social life. The concepts required for such an analysis are developed here, drawing on the seminal work of both Marx and Weber, as well as on more recent scholarship, and are applied to recent changes in agrarian relations and ideological practice in Anuradhapura District, Sri Lanka.

In reinterpreting traditional history according to the Marxist world view, the question of periodization is vitally important. This article examines the controversies surrounding the periodization and the nature of the new interpretation of traditional history in North Korea. One characteristic that stands out prominently in North Korean historiography is the nationalistic emphasis placed on the uniqueness and the superiority of the Korean civilization unaffected by any external influence. Also noteworthy is the attempt to reinterpret modern history largely in terms of glorifying the immediate forefathers of Kim Il-sŏng at the expense of historical objectivity.

The Buddhist monkhood in each of the Theravāda countries of Southern Asia—Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka—is segmented into smaller fraternities (nikāyas). In Sri Lanka these fraternities have proliferated since the early nineteenth century. This proliferation has been interpreted as evidence of a Buddhist reform or return to orthodoxy and portrayed against the background of Sinhalese society as a whole. In this essay I argue that the establishment of twenty-five such nikāyas in the Low Country of Sri Lanka can be better understood both as serving a variety of interests (of which reform is one) and in terms of regional groups of monks and lay people.

The modern Hindi writer Phanishwarnath Renu developed a distinctive “regional” style in his fiction, which Hindi critics have defined in terms of his focus on the way of life of a particular area, the Purnea region of northeastern Bihar. However, Renu's regionalism cannot be separated from his innovations in the language and form of fiction. He employed a variety of dialects and deviated from conventional spelling and grammar, to draw the reader into the rural universe of sound. He included indigenous genres, such as the folk song, folktale, and rural drama, within the frame of the modern novel, thereby creating a new structure for the regional novel.

The author analyzes some of the empirical data contained in the local archives of farmland in three provinces from Ming-Ch'ing times: these data have heretofore not been used by scholars. The new data show the wide dispersion of land ownership, the absence of big landlords, the high degree of land fragmentation, the slow speed of land accumulation in land-owning families, the low turnover rate of land transactions, the substantial bargaining power of tenants, the high frequency of rental defaults by tenants, the remarkable stability of land value between 1500 and 1760, and the steadily rising trend of land value thereafter. All these findings appear to be inconsistent with the traditional views based on nonempirical historical materials. In view of the new evidence, the land problems in Chinese history will have to be reexamined.

This article is based on academic journals published in the People's Republic of China (PRC) from 1978 to early 1980 and analyzes the trend in post-Mao historiography regarding peasant rebellions. Previous belief in the revolutionary nature of peasant rebellions is being reversed, and their “anti-feudal” character being questioned. The question now is whether peasant rebellions, or even class struggle itself, constitute an important motive force for progress in Chinese history. Conflicting views persist, but overall a more negative view of peasant behavior has led many PRC writers to view the small producers' “patriarchy,” which fosters hierarchy and particularism, as a source of current bureaucratic problems.

Three dimensions capture much of the variation in Western scholarly images of Southeast Asian history. Different works attribute to the region different combinations of relative unity or diversity, continuity or change, and originality or dependence. Each of these choices summarizes a major controversy in the study of Southeast Asia. Together they form a cube that can be used to review existing literature and to identify room for future interpretation. In the 1970s, the antithesis of original continuity (historicism) and dependent change (modernism) was orthodox. In the 1980s, scholars could transcend these alternatives by recasting them as an opposition of original change (microdynamism) to dependent continuity (macrosystemism). Historicist and modernist writings have relied too heavily on psychocultural and political explanations, as have the rationalizations of indigenous elites. Pursuing the proposed dialectic could therefore help to rescue economic differentiation and conflict from their present neglect as aids to understanding.

The publication of A Historical Atlas of South Asia, edited by Joseph E. Schwartzberg, represents a major achievement of modern scholarship on South Asia. Its maps and text offer useful perspectives on important geographical and historical relationships in the subcontinent. The geographer, Rhoads Murphey, the archaeologist, Gregory L. Possehl, the economist, Morris D. Morris, and three historians, N. Gerald Barrier, Richard J. Cohen, and John F. Richards present a set of critical essays on the Atlas, emphasizing its many contributions in their fields of interest and identifying subject areas in which they wished there had been more extensive coverage. The symposium is edited and introduced by Frank F. Conlon.