Among the cardinal weaknesses of existing studies on British land policy in Ceylon is the almost total neglect of any reference to the theoretical foundations of this policy, and the tendency to study the situation in Ceylon in isolation instead of against the background and within the wider context of a colonial land policy. These weaknesses are all the more glaring for the years from c. 1830 to 1855 when a common land policy was gradually but systematically imposed throughout the British Empire, and an institutional apparatus controlling land policy and emigration was built up. The basis of the land policy of these years was an adherence to some of the fundamental principles of the theories of Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

Narendranath Bhattacharya, later known as M. N. Roy, was in his youth a devoted revolutionary and lieutenant to a famous Bengali revolutionary leader, Jatin Mukherjee. A description of the revolutionary career of Roy is useful and appropriate for several reasons. First, Roy is one of the few revolutionary Bengalis about whom interesting data is available. Second, Roy followed a pattern oft-repeated among Bengali political workers during the twentieth century: from terrorist and insurrectionary activity to Communism and then open Congress work. Third, both the data collected about Roy and some of his own writings give graphic pictures of two important features of Bengali revolutionary politics: the dal or faction and the dādā or leader of such a group.

Historians on the Chinese mainland maintain that the self-strengthening movement became “bankrupt” after the Sino-French War of 1884–1885. Their phraseology is typically value-laden, and contains the usual quotient of exaggeration. Yet these Communist scholars do point to a development in the late Ch'ing period that is usually overlooked by students in the West. During the Sino-French War, French forces had sailed almost at will along the entire coast of the empire, had temporarily occupied a part of Taiwan, and finally had snuffed out the dynasty's last pretensions to sovereignty in Vietnam. In the wake of this conflict, growing threats of Russian and Japanese aggression further raised doubts that the self-strengthening policy was effective as a means of securing the defense of the empire.

Whatever else the nineteen sixties may be remembered for—the proliferation of macroweapons, microstates or miniskirts—historians of the decade might allot a footnote to the more modest, but less disconcerting, proliferation of English language studies of Chinese law. Thirty years ago a survey of then recent research on Chinese law revealed “an increased interest on the part of Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars.” The author noted that, although “[t]he amount of work achieved … constitutes as yet but a slight beginning in what is still a largely unworked field,” it “clearly indicates the potential contributions which further researches can make to our understanding of the evolution of Chinese social, economic and political life and institutions.” No one rose to dispute the author's conclusion that Chinese law offers “a rich source from which to derive a more realistic appraisal of the forces actually at work in Chinese society at different epochs.…” Yet, except in Japan, where all scholars of things Chinese received additional stimulus from the adventitious circumstances of international politics, the cumulative impact of the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the Chinese Civil War and the triumph of Communism slowed the development of what had been a promising academic field.

Mao Tse-tung and his associates in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appear to have a penchant for reducing an important and complex policy or strategy to a relatively simple set of rules that their followers can easily understand and implement without undue deviation. In the military field, for example, Mao laid down, at a very early stage of his revolutionary career, the now well-known rules governing guerrilla warfare which read in part:

… The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.

To extend stable base areas, employ the policy of advancing in waves; pursued by a powerful enemy, employ the policy of circling around.

Arouse the largest numbers of the masses in the shortest possible time and by the best possible methods.

In 1951, the Chinese delegate to the United Nations proposed to the General Assembly that the Chinese text of the Genocide Convention be revised. The reason for revision, as stated in the Chinese proposal, was that there existed a number of discrepancies between the Chinese text originally prepared by the United Nations Secretariat and the other official texts. The Chinese delegate included in his proposal a new Chinese text for consideration by the General Assembly. Of the proposed changes the most important one related to the Chinese translation of the term “genocide.” The term had originally been translated by the Secretariat as “wei-hai chung-tsu” (lit., “to cause harm or to destroy racial groups”), while the new Chinese text translated the term as “ts'an-hai jen-ch'ün” (lit., “to cause harm to or to destroy human groups in a ruthless manner”). The new translation is closer to the meaning of the term “genocide” which, as defined in Article 2 of the Convention, encompasses any act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The Chinese proposal was adopted by the General Assembly on December 21, 1952, by Resolution 691 (VII).

One aspect of the intellectual upheaval which accompanied the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was the phenomenon of bummei kaika, “civilization and enlightenment.” Although it may be useful to think of the early Meiji years as a Japanese siècle de lumières, it is significant that the country's most progressive scholars derived their main inspiration from such contemporaneous Western social philosophies as positivism and utilitarianism, not the European enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It is natural that the proponents of bummei kaika turned for guidance to John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte rather than Diderot or Rousseau, because their goal was to expose Japan to those urbane modes of thought from abroad which would bring her to the “civilized” stage of development envisaged by European social philosophy. The means to be employed consisted of empiricism, not abstract reasoning: “what we should call the truly enlightened world,” wrote Tsuda Mamichi in 1874, “is when practical studies become popular in our country and each person attains an understanding of truth.” Similarly, Fukuzawa Yukichi took nineteenth century England, not eighteenth century France, as the model for Japan's efforts to achieve “enlightenment.”

Our Association has met this year in Philadelphia, a city of historic memories, an appropriate place in which to contemplate anniversaries. There are several which come to mind.

First, the Association for Asian Studies is itself twenty years old this spring, a fact in which we can all take pride; for we have grown as a professional society from a mere handful of scholars in 1948 to an organization of over 4000 members today.

Next there is Japan, which in its modern incarnation is one hundred years old this year—a memorable national and even international event.

And finally, I am put in mind by our presence in Philadelphia, that by a bit of stretching we can think of the United States as being roughly 200 years old. (In fact it was just 200 years ago that the citizens of this city banded together to prevent imports from Britain. And in 8 more years we shall be able to celebrate the bicentennial of the moment when Philadelphia's Liberty Bell rang out the news of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.)

In this paper, I shall try to examine and identify the factors responsible for the increase in agricultural output in Communist China in the nineteen fifties. Then I shall try to discuss the implications of my findings in relation to future agricultural growth.

Agricultural Output 1949–1957. Agricultural statistics remain the Achilles' heel in evaluating the performance of the Chinese economy in quantitative terms. For foodgrains, the official statistics show an increase of nearly 43 percent from 1949 to 1952, and nearly 20 percent from 1952 to 1957. These claims are generally regarded as exaggerated. Based on per capita consumption requirements, Liu and Yeh regard the pre-1956 official figures as gross understatements. They accept, however, the official figure for 1957. They allow for no more than 5 percent increase from 1952 to 1957 for the production of food crops. After adjustment of reported cultivated area has been made, Wu's estimate shows virtually no increase in foodgrains from 1952 to 1957. Hollister, after suggesting official understatements for earlier years, accepts the official 1955 figure and estimates that the 1957 production of basic food crops and animal products was 14 percent higher than that of 1952. Jones and Poleman also maintain that the official estimates of grain production were underestimates for 1952–54; they accept the 1955–57 figures. Their estimates put the 1957 level about 12 percent higher than that in 1952. Choh-ming Li, though without making any independent estimates of his own, regards the official figure for 1955 as more reliable or least unsatisfactory for the whole period 1949–57, while considering the pre-1955 years as underestimates and the post-1955 years (that is, 1956 and 1957) as overestimates.

One of the historical generalizations one can make about politics in the past several hundred years is that an increasing proportion of the adult population is participating politically everywhere. A group which has gained the right to vote in recent times is women. Political scientists have paid relatively little attention to this largest minority in the world of politics. Women constitute more than one half of the total population in many parts of the world today, yet the differences in sex is treated along with other demographic variables and receives little specific attention by political scientists.

One of the striking differences between the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions was the Chinese use of rural bases (Soviet Areas) to capture national political control—surrounding the cities with the countryside. Remarkably, these bases, their evolution, characteristics, and role in the various intra-Party struggles remain one of the least studied or understood elements in our knowledge of Chinese Communist history.

It is no wonder that the world is baffled by Communist China's “cultural Revolution.” Not only do the specialists who are skilled in reading between the lines of Chinese Communist utterances disagree about many aspects of the present upheaval, those whose task it is merely to read the. plain lines themselves also seem unable to agree even on the basic meaning of what they are reading. We are informed, for instance, that “eight Red Guards and a member of the Pioneers … had been killed by ‘class enemies,’ according to a Red Guard announcement.” Later we are told of “doubts about a report that nine youths were killed last week. Chinese-language experts said the characters on a poster reporting the incident could mean also that the nine young Chinese had been injured.” There were more doubts about whether Lo Jui-ch'ing was “taken away” or was “arrested” and still more about whether T'ao Chu was “led” or “dragged” through the streets.

On May 25, 1895, amid a festive atmosphere at the governor's yamen in Taipei, China's island province of Taiwan (Formosa) was declared a republic. News of this extraordinary event was received in Peking and elsewhere with reactions of dismay and skepticism. Most Ch'ing authorities and foreign observers suspected that the creation of a republic was merely a desperate scheme to keep Taiwan from being ceded to Japan as an outcome of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Nevertheless, to a few witnesses the unprecedented move of establishing a republic in an area of imperial China suggested at first more hopeful signs for the future. James W. Davidson, then a Taipei news correspondent, initially surmised, “If it has been conceived and carried out altogether by Celestial minds we are emboldened to believe that there is, after all, a new China in the nursery from whom great things may eventually be expected.”

One of the most controversial interpretations of recent Indian history is that the British governed the subcontinent through a strategy of divide and rule which led to Hindu-Muslim conflict and ultimately the 1947 partition. Divide et Impera has often been portrayed in vernacular tracts, Congress publications, and scholarly works as a fundamental cause of communal tension.

The similar assumptions, methodology, and sources upon which these assessments rest, however, have resulted in a clouding of key issues and a misreading of the historical record. The studies generally focus upon twentieth-century developments such as Hindu and Muslim political parties or communal riots and then project their findings backward to earlier periods. Because British attempts to play Hindu and Muslim against one another apparently intensified antagonism following the Morley-Minto reforms, it is argued that similar policies prior to 1900 helped create the initial estrangement between the two communities. Communal activities are admittedly easier to examine once Hindus and Muslims began to organize for elections and legislative proceedings, but preoccupation with formal competition and a concomitant simplistic explanation of the origins of communalism have postponed a much-needed investigation of the formative period in the nineteenth-century when British rule and changes within Indian society set the stage for subsequent communal organization.

Chinese geomancy (feng shui) holds that if a man is buried in a properly sited grave, his descendants will prosper; and that the siting of houses, cities, and whole regions similarly works good or ill for their inhabitants. Although taken seriously by many eminent thinkers of traditional China (the philosopher Chu Hsi, for example), it is likely to impress us today on first encounter as a baffling and silly mishmash of things better sorted out as physical science, religion, esthetics, psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Understanding is easier if we can look on it as first, a kind of integral experience, and second, certain meanings given to such experience.

When the Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850, Tseng Kuo-fan (1811–1872) had been residing in Peking for more than a decade. He earned a distinguished scholarly reputation as a member of the Hanlin Academy, and between 1847 and 1852 he was a high official of the metropolitan administration; he was Acting Senior Vice-president of the Board of Civil Appointments when he left the capital in 1852. Particularly in the three years 1850–1852, his official duties gave him many opportunities to express himself on the urgent problems of his time. While Tseng's later career is well known and while studies have been done on his scholarship and philosophy, his early political ideas have so far not been analyzed in detail. Yet surely Tseng's views on government before he became involved in the campaigns against the Taiping Rebellion would have a bearing on his remarkable performance as military and administrative leader after he became so involved.