Under the Confucian government of men, the Sino-barbarian dyarchy of the Ch'ing dynasty could be preserved only by a careful balancing of Chinese and Manchu personnel. Once the half-and-half division of posts had been set up at the capital after the Manchu conquest, the maintenance of this rough proportion became a guaranty both of Chinese participation in the central government and of Manchu control over it. The problem of Manchu control cut into the usual problems of personnel management in a clique-ridden bureaucracy. The imperial government was a political labyrinth of personal, provincial, regional, racial, ideological and functional groupings and relationships—confusing to the novice and baffling to the foreigner. Manchu domination of this bureaucracy was an exacting and delicate task: it was essential both to use the best Chinese talent and to keep it diluted with a proper proportion of Manchus. If the official hierarchy at the capital contained too many Manchu incompetents, the régime might become dangerously inefficient. If the hierarchy in the provinces became all Chinese, Manchu rule might soon collapse.

The opening of Japanese ports to Western trade and thought at the end of the Tokugawa period necessarily involved a readjustment of the official policy toward Christianity. Since the early seventeenth century Christian beliefs and observances had been rigidly proscribed. Now the country was assailed by bands of missionaries, principally American Protestants, persistently evangelistic in purpose. Beyond that, the legal system, literature, and whole culture of the West were so permeated tjy religious elements that many thinking Japanese reluctantly concluded that it was impossible to become modern without becoming Christian. Escape from this dilemma was to be provided, by Western thought itself, through new materialistic philosophies based upon science, and through the historical relativism of the higher Biblical criticism. The battle between science and theology, evolution and revelation, then raging in England and America was fought again in the Japanese press and lecture hall. This controversy involved intimately only a small minority of the Japanese people, principally students and intellectuals, and was definitely secondary to the broader conflict between conservative nationalism and all foreign religion. It was, however, a significant aspect of Japan's response to the West, of her process of acculturation.

It is useful to assess the effect of Nanking fiscal policy on the Chinese economy since we are once again in the strategic position of rendering aid and advice to under-developed areas. (Nanking fiscal policies were predominantly repressive of economic development; they were not designed to alleviate the traditional economic burden on the peasant nor to promote the growth of industry.)

During the half century before the Communist take-over of 1949, there occurred twice in China a large scale opposition to Christianity: the Boxer Uprising of 1900 and the anti-Christian movement of 1922–1927. Both these movements were crises of East-West contact, and Chinese reactions against foreign culture. They can be understood only in the context of the modern changes in Chinese culture and society. This study of the anti-Christian agitation of 1922–27 seeks to clarify the nature and constituent forces of this movement in the rapidly changing and complicated history of China in the 1920s.

In the area under consideration in this paper, eight countries with a population of 600 million people or about 30% of the world's total population have acquired their independence since the end of World War II. National governments in this area are faced with serious economic, social and other problems, many of them long-standing but of more compelling current importance because of the raised expectations of the Asian peoples. The technical and financial resources of these governments for meeting their problems are limited and, in some cases, ineffectively and inefficiently used. Their ability to develop, in the short-term future, solutions to these problems judged effective by their people will determine the survival of these or similarly-oriented governments, or their replacement by chaos or extremism.

During 1951, with the release of all but a handful of Japanese business leaders from purge designation, one of the more dramatic episodes in the occupation of Japan reached its conclusion. Like the broader Zaibatsu dissolution program, to which it was related, the economic purge represented an unusual experiment in the redirection of a nation's political life through measures impinging on business power.

One of the most important problems which independent Burma faces is how to establish a basis for constructive cooperation between politics and religion in meeting the needs of the new state. The youthful political leaders; who dominated the immediate post-war period, were for the most part, disdainful of religion, and enamoured of Socialist or Communist ideas. They were acutely conscious of their country's relative backwardness in terms of education, health, and economic development, and wanted to move forward rapidly with their modernizing program and social reforms. They were by the same token impatient of popular apathy and resistance, which were strongly reinforced by religious traditionalism. The viewpoint of the influential Buddhist monastic community (Sangha) was poles removed from that of the sophisticated radicals. The traditionalist lore of the Buddhist teachers (Sayadaws) was pre-scientific, obscurantist in terms of modern learning, and unrelated to technological needs. The Sangha, furthermore, at the end of the war, was itself rent by factionalism and demoralized by its heavy involvement over the preceding quarter of a century in political matters which were not properly the concern of the monks.

The Institute of History and Philology was the only one among the 13 research institutes of the Academia Sinica which evacuated Nanking and moved to Formosa in the winter of 1948. Under the able direction of the late Director Fu Ssu-nien, the entire collection of Anyang finds, the valuable library, the documents from the former Imperial Archives, the collection of ethnological material, as well as the most complete phonetic and linguistic records were shipped intact to Formosa and installed at its new headquarters at Yang Mei, Taipeh.

Mr. Paauw's paper on Chinese government expenditures during the Nanking period and Mr. Wolf's paper on contemporary development problems in South and Southeast Asia differ appreciably in scope and emphasis. In a sense however Mr. Wolf's paper picks up the discussion where Mr. Paauw leaves it. For Mr. Paauw concludes in his last paragraph that in China between 1928 and 1937 loan-financed government expenditures did not stimulate investment and output because “… the whole political, cultural, and economic milieu of Nanking China … discouraged the expansion of output in response to increased monetary demand. The repressive influence of each of these factors remains to be investigated in detail.” Mr. Wolf's paper is essentially an analysis of these factors which inhibit and restrict productive investment and economic development in Southeast Asia and what might be done through MSA to improve matters. Consequently Mr. Paauw's paper is perhaps more easily discussed against the analysis put forward by Mr. Wolf rather than the other way about.

No phase of the contemporary history of the interaction between the peoples of Eastern and Southern Asia and the carriers of European civilization is likely to be more rewarding than the study of religion. Fortunately the chronological record of Christian missionary activity is extraordinarily detailed. We know who the missionaries were, where they came from, what their social background was, how they were recruited, trained, organized and financed; how much time they devoted to preaching, teaching, healing, building, publishing, and the like; how they conceived the strategy of selecting audiences and the tactics of approach. In a word we are remarkably well informed about who said and did what to whom in the name of Christ. We know when they did it and the “why” that they gave themselves for doing it. Granting that there are many more chronologies to be filled in, the point remains valid that research effort is sufficiently well endowed with information to justify the scholar in directing his attention toward more ambitious tasks than the calendar of missions. The most attractive problem is that of providing the materials on the basis of which an ever-improving answer can be given to the ultimate question of effect: What of it? What were the impacts of Christian missionary work or indeed of Christianity? What factors have conditioned successes and failures?

Arthur Henderson Smith, writing near the end of the previous century, characterized the Chinese village organization as “the self-government of the small communities” and asserted that “the management of the village was in the hands of the people themselves.” His enthusiasm was shared in varying degrees by other writers, both native and foreign. For good reasons, however, this encouraging view is no longer supported by students of Chinese society. Among other shortcomings, it ignored the existence of a considerable number of tiny villages, especially in north China, and the fact that the inhabitants of such villages were usually too impoverished to be able to afford organization.