This year academic circles in the Netherlands are celebrating the centennial of the birth of C. Snouck Hurgronje; Arabist, scholar of Indonesian affairs, and formateur of Dutch colonial policy. Most Dutch scholars and many students of Indonesian affairs would readily agree that few men have had as intimate acquaintance with the Indonesian archipelago and its people and have had as wide a reputation as an expert on this part of the world as the late Snouck Hurgronje. Unfortunately his writings and policies are known to English-reading scholars only at second hand. Except for a few brief articles, only his books, Mekka and The Achehnese, and his lectures in Mohammedanism have appeared in English. Other important writings have appeared in German and French, but the great bulk are in Dutch. There are presently plans to translate some parts of Snouck Hurgronje's collected works and also to make available certain writings which were done after the collected works were published, but the publication plans for these translations and reprints are still indefinite.

Chinese have been immigrating to Siam for at least six centuries. We are concerned here with the process whereby the descendants of Chinese immigrants become full members of Thai society. Assimilation is, of course, a social process. For the descendants of a given immigrant, its progress is defined by increasing social intercourse with members of Thai society, first public and then private and intimate; and by self-identification in an ever larger proportion of social situations as Thai rather than Chinese. Since social interaction is based on linguistic communication, assimilation perforce involves a command of the Thai language. Taking over the language of the society with which immigrants are in contact is but one part of acculturation, that is, the progressive incorporation of the way of life of the other society. While extensive acculturation can take place without complete assimilation, complete assimilation is inevitably accompanied or closely followed by fairly full acculturation. For our purposes here, assimilation is considered complete when the immigrant's descendant identifies himself in almost all social situations as a Thai, speaks the Thai language habitually and with native fluency, and interacts by choice with Thai more often than with Chinese.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 constitutes one of the great turning points in Japanese history. Standing as the culminating events of the political struggle which agitated Japan in the years following the forcible “opening” of the country to the Western world, it signaled the end of the Tokugawa hegemony and the establishment of a new central authority under which Japan was to embark upon an era of unprecedented national development. Few episodes in Japanese history have been so voluminously recorded or so thoroughly studied as the Meiji Restoration. The events of the several decades on either side of 1868 have been traced and retraced, and their implications analyzed by succeeding generations of historians both Japanese and Western.

Most of the discussion regarding the language issue in India so far has revolved about two problems. One of these concerns the spread of Hindi knowledge in those areas or fields of endeavor where other regional languages or English are now used; the other, the enrichment of Hindi vocabulary (or, as is usually stated, the development of the Hindi language), so as to make it possible to use it for dealing with topics related to modern science and technology. The Central Government and several of the state governments have devoted much effort towards the solution of these problems by setting up special departments for the creation of vocabulary lists to deal with new subjects, encouraging attempts to introduce Hindi in universities and legislative bodies, and fostering the growth of societies for the propagation of Hindi learning. These activities have aroused a great deal of controversy, and so much has been written about the pros and cons of the issues involved that the above two problems seem to be the only ones associated with language in the public mind.

This paper is an analysis of certain aspects of recent Communist thought in China. By “recent” thought is meant that of the last two decades, and in fact this study is concerned essentially with developments from 1937 to 1949. The study is not based on an appraisal of the whole body of Chinese Communist writing in this period, nor even on a representative selection of it, but it does bring together for analysis some very interesting examples of Chinese Communist treatment of problems germane to the Confucian ethical tradition. The analysis thus, perhaps, indicates ways in which the Peking regime in the future may relate its ideology to the great corpus of traditional Chinese thought. My assumption has been that writers of the new regime, at least some of them, show a tendency, in developing the new thought, to incorporate into it, and synthesize with it wherever possible, native Chinese intellectual traditions and doctrines. This traditional intellectual background is often of extraordinary antiquity; but while writers such as Liu Shao-ch'i quote the words of Confucius because this has been the idiom of Chinese philosophy, there has nonetheless been a sophisticated effort to mesh a new Communist ethic with those aspects of Confucian thought which are especially characteristic of the last three or four centuries, and to present Communism as in effect the latest stage of this thought. This has been done deliberately and as part of a well-understood world-wide tactic in Communism to strike local roots and to fit Communist “theory” to national situations.

The Chinese Communist program of szu-hsiang kai-tsao or “thought reform”is unique both as a social experiment and as a laboratory for cross-cultural psychiatric study. Applied to Westerners and Chinese, to professors, students, and peasants, it combines a remarkably widespread dissemination with impressive emotional force and depth.

The second national or parliamentary elections in Burma for the Chamber Deputies were held on April 27, 1956. The Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, the majority coalition party in power since independence, predominantly socialist in orientation, ran against the Communist-led National Unity Front and several right-wing opposition coalitions. The AFPFL and allied vote did not measure up to pre-election predictions but it again overwhelmingly captured control of the Chamber. The AFPFL, whose president was Prime Minister U Nu, conducted a vigorous campaign, running on its record. During the campaign rally U Nu urged his party to acquaint “the people with our activities.” In fact, he went on to say, “we have not been successful in putting across even one tenth of our accomplishments to the people. In the short period of seven or eight years since independence, the AFPFL have made very remarkable achievements in the fields of education, health, national economy, national unity, public morality and rehabilitation, while at the same time we are busily engaged in the suppression of the general insurrection.” Toward the conclusion of his address he spoke of foreign policy. On this issue he scored the opposition parties as “advocates of one bloc or other [which] will plunge Burma into a holocaust of war as in the case of Indo-China and Korea.” He defined the elements of this policy as “not aligning Burma with any power bloc…establishing friendly relations with all countries…pursuing the cause of world peace…a line of action receiving the approbation of even those persons and those countries which had in past criticised our neutral policy and suspected our motives.”