Despite the rapid growth of Chinese historical studies in the United States, a crucial epoch in the background of modern China has for a long time received the attention of comparatively few scholars. I refer to the early and middle Ch'ing period-the two centuries before the Opium War that saw the consolidation and the heyday of the Manchu rule in China. In the nineteen thirties American sinology was fascinated by the period. It was then that Pritchard published his books on the early relations between England and China, and Goodrich his study of the literary inquisition under Ch'ien-lung; that the great biographical dictionary, Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, was prepared; that Fairbank and Teng were working on the Ch'ing documents and on the tributary system, and Michael on early Manchu military and political organization.1 But the Pacific War and the events in China that followed focused scholarly interest on that country's more recent experience. While many took up the study of “modern China,” inquiry into the Ch'ing before the nineteenth century was continued by only a few. Only in the last twelve years have we again seen the appearance of major studies touching upon the China of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Ho's works on commercial capitalism, population, social mobility, and voluntary associations; books on the shen-shih, the bureaucracy, and local government by Chang, Hsiao, Marsh, and Ch'ü; an analysis of rural social structure by Skinner; writings by de Bary, Nivison, and Wilhelm on intellectual history.

Although the Ch'ing period is generally regarded as one of the better studied and understood periods of Chinese history, the existing fund of our knowledge is actually far from adequate. A systematic discussion of the significance of the entire period from 1644 to 1912 would require a large number of articles, monographs, and fresh syntheses. Since the purpose of this paper is merely to stimulate further discussion and research, I hope to be excused for making a few highly tentative generalizations.

The mid-Ch'ing monarchs are usually considered to have been hard-headed realists, acting the way they did because they had the personal and institutional power to do so. The corollary of this, however, appears to be that they were also moral hypocrites: time-serving Confucianists who trotted out the higher ethical values only to justify their actions or to camouflage them. This part of the theorum, I believe, is at once too simple and too modern. It reduces imperial action to the level of the Big Lie and makes of the monarch either a calculating schizophrenic, able to turn his Confucianism on and off at will, or a political pervert, checked in his Legalist promiscuity only by the intermittent remonstrances of a closed orthodox community. Worse, this view makes the monarch a philistine, working the system to his advantage but somehow standing outside it, as if he were exempt from the values he was manipulating.

In a recent essay on “Some Mid-Ch'ing Views of the Monarchy,” Harold Kahn announced that he was moving past “the one-dimensional, simple cliché” and “the two-dimensional, complex stereotype” to add a third dimension so that he could show Ch'ien-lung as “a composite figure made up of several images.” Talk of three dimensions immediately prompts any healthy layman to try to add a fourth: to the three spatial dimensions which are historiographical, perhaps we can add a fourth dimension of time which is more positively historical.

In 1881, the Japanese government was headed by a single President, Sanjō, assisted by two vice-presidents, Iwakura and Arisugawa. These men alone had direct access to the Emperor on state affairs. Beyond giving advice of their own, their principal task was to mediate in disputes between the councillors and to advise the Emperor on which was the stronger side when his decision was necessary to resolve a deadlock. Sanjō and Iwakura were court nobles with long ties with Satsuma and Chōshū, whose armies had fought and won the Restoration war of 1868–9, and whose leaders thereafter held the key posts in the council, the executive and the Armed Forces. While deeply conscious of their primary loyalty to the Emperor and anxious to prevent his domination by powerful factions, Sanjo and Iwakura in the last analysis, and with some regret, regarded Satsuma and Chōshū as the essential pillars of the new regime. Arisugawa was a Prince Imperial, who had been raised to the position of vice-president in 1880. He had been chairman of the legislative Genrōin that included several prominent members antipathetic to Satsuma and Chōshū dominance of the government. While Sanjō and Iwakura were basicallyagreed with the Sat-Chō leaders that Prussia provided the best model for a future constitution, Arisugawa as chairman of the Genrōin had presented the Emperor with a draft constitution in 1879 that drew heavily from the English model. It should be noted that there was therefore a possibility that Arisugawa would dissent from his presidential colleagues when the issue of the constitution was raised within the government in 1881.

Prior to the October I, 1965 coup attempt, the leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) controlled the largest Communist organization in any non-Communist state. The Party itself, with some three million members, was the center of a web of mass organizations claiming 15 million members and seeking to mobilize specific segments of the population: workers, peasants, youth, women, students, cultural workers, university teachers, and even village officials. D. N. Aidit, M. H. Lukman and Njoto, the triumvirate that had led the Party since January 1951, were honored by President Sukarno at home and by the major Communist parties abroad. A Djakarta-Peking axis was the base of a vociferous confrontation against the West, and Communist youths spearheaded government-sponsored demonstrations against “neo-colonial” establishments within the country. Meanwhile, several non-Communist politicians and military officers appeared to be plotting their own opening to the left in preparation for a Communist takeover.

No imperial power, from the Maurya in the fourth and third centuries B.C., to the British in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries A.D., could really simplify the political geography of the Indie world from the Himalaya to the sea, from the Hindukush to the Brahmaputra. At some stage of their growth and expansion, every great, or imperial, power in this vast land of diverse peoples found it necessary to reconcile themselves to the separate existence of numerous units of polity in various degrees of subordination and dependence to superior powers.

Accounts of the Indonesian nationalist movement customarily begin with the cultural and educational endeavors of westernized Javanese aristocrats in the first decades of this century. The enormous popular response generated by the first interinsular political movement, Sarekat Islam, in 1912–1920 is explained by a series of generalities about the social conditions of the Indonesian people. The importance of religion is acknowledged as a focus for opposition to colonial rule during the phase between the self-defense of traditional, relatively isolated, societies and modern nationalist movements. But information is lacking. As Berg regretted in 1932: “lack of data makes it almost impossible to define how deep this pan-Islamic current went in Indonesia.”