A major issue in modernization theory, and in the study of the relationship between the expanding West and the “Third World,” has been the dynamism or lack of dynamism present in the indigenously idiosyncratic patterns of non-Western cultures. The concept of modernization was born and bred in the West, and seems to have reached full maturity in the late 1950s under the tender care of American social scientists. The bulk of the literature it generated assumed that modernizing cultures, following the West in their patterns of development, would become increasingly alike and eventually “converge.” Although Marxist theories of imperialism do not see Western influence as an unmitigated good, they too view the Third World nations as essentially passive.

The main contention of this essay is that railways in Malaya were constructed specifically to serve the tin and rubber industries which were dominated by Western capitalist enterprise. The railroads were concentrated in the west coast states, reinforcing the trend toward economic specialization that had already begun. The pattern of subsequent capital investment which was related to railroad development produced wide regional inequalities. It gave rise to a spatial dualism that was most evident in the emergence of export-oriented enclaves and the associated infrastructure in the western states, leaving the eastern states outside the mainstream of capitalist development. The railways did not stimulate well-rounded economic development in the country because they had little or no multiplier effect on the local economy. The benefits of railroad construction accrued largely to the British economy. I seek to make clear the links between railway development in Malaya, the emergence of an extractive-colonial economy heavily specialized in tin and rubber, and the incorporation of the country into the international capitalist system.

Using contemporary Western philosophic ideas, this essay examines Hsün Tzu's view of the mind as both a director of action and a spectator of action. In analyzing the mind as director, Hsün Tzu argues against Mencius's idea that the mind simply extends one's natural tendencies. Hsün Tzu's presentation of the mind as spectator— an idea developed chiefly in his discussion of obsession—accepts Chuang Tzu's stress on the importance of detachment, but argues that such detachment need not necessitate withdrawal from normal action. Hsün Tzu's two views of the mind can be reconciled by examining the mind's relationship to desires and to moral judgments. That examination also leads to the conclusion that Hsün Tzu thinks moral judgments have only a conventional and not a universal basis.

Any discussion of Thomas Metzger's book, Escape from Predicament, must begin with an evaluation of its possible meanings, not exegetical arguments over his specific reading and selection of texts. Most exegeses are reduced to quibbling over the interpretation of texts and the decision to use certain writings over others. This is possible because of a mistaken belief that the whole—the thesis or argument—is reducible to its parts. Moreover, it is precisely because of a tacit agreement with the general argument that critics usually resort to the form of a commentary. But, it is important to note, the overall effect of such a mode is to confirm the study under examination in its broad outline. It is my intention to concentrate on some of the terms which made this book possible and gave it a specific orientation. Yet, in so doing, I should say at the outset that I will focus on three large areas of discussion: the construal of history and its function for the discourse on modernization; the problematik informing this construing; and the problem of reading texts.

Our resources for the analysis and dissemination of information on Asia have expanded greatly since the beginning of World War II. The record reveals an astounding amount of popular and scholarly publication on almost every aspect of the continent's civilizations, with the quality rising over the decades. It is doubtful, however, that these contributions have had a meaningful impact either on public opinion or on the attitudes of those key persons who determine policy. The critical cases of China, Korea, and Indochina are the most vivid examples of recent failures in effective communication. Although in recent times no Asian country has escaped violent power struggles arising from internal or external causes, or their combined effects, in none of these conflicts has professional reporting been adequate. If readily available information and a carefully considered interpretation of that information can ameliorate conditions leading to conflict, we students of Asia, among others, cannot be proud of our achievements. The common academic response that scholarship must be disinterested and thus must bear little or no relationship to public policy is, to my mind, quite unacceptable.

Introducing these three critical essays on Edward Said's Orientalism† raises perplexing questions of scholarly and professional definition. In the case of the recent JAS symposium on Thomas A. Metzger's Escape from Predicament, the organizer of the group effort came to the Journal with a proposal which the editor ultimately encouraged, accepted, and brought to publication; this time the editor initiated the Said symposium himself, persuaded his colleagues to participate, and then subjected them to varying degrees of editorial suggestion before sending the whole package off to the printer. It might well be suggested that editors should stick to processing and avoid initiating; that there is a built-in conflict of interest, a potential for abuse of editorial discretion, if the editor not only decides what ought to be accepted for publication but also dabbles in what ought to be written about in the first place. As is obvious from this symposium's appearance in the Journal, I would hold that occasionally crossing the line from processing to initiating—in the case of a work like Said's, for example, which does not fall within the ordinary domain of the Journal's primary readership—can be constructive.

This article attempts an assessment of the putative similarities between generic fascism and the revolutionary nationalism of Sun Yat-sen. Whatever characteristics the two ideologies have in common can be traced to similarities between Sun's thought and pre-Fascist Italian Nationalism. The latter was only one of the elements that contributed to Italian Fascism. A distinction is then drawn between Sun's ideology and that of the Italian Nationalists by identifying the latter nationalism as “exacerbated.” Further distinctions are attempted between such nationalisms and the mature ideology of Italian Fascism. Italian Fascism is viewed as a subspecies of revolutionary nationalism, while revolutionary nationalism itself is understood to include a relatively pacific and potentially democratic species and an exacerbated, potentially authoritarian one.

As Harry Harootunian has noted, Metzger's Escape from Predicament represents an attempt to transpose the Weberian project onto the Chinese scene, even though its announced aim is to challenge and provide an alternative to Weber's interpretation of Chinese religion. This project may be viewed as uniquely Weberian in terms of its specific formulation of the problematik of modernity and modernization, but it is not exclusively Weberian in terms of its belief in the centrality of a divided consciousness as the agent of change. Long before Weber postulated the thesis that Confucian China was stagnant because Confucianism was characterized by a complete absence of “tension … between ethical demand and human shortcoming” (The Religion of China, H. H. Gerth, trans. [New York: Macmillan, 1964], p. 235), Hegel had already concluded that China lay “still outside the World's History”; for, Hegel stated, “as the contrast between objective existence and subjective freedom of movement in it is still wanting, every change is excluded and the fixedness of a character which recurs perpetually takes the place of what we should call the truly historical” (The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree, trans. [New York: Dover, 1965], p. 116) In a sense, therefore, Metzger's work on “Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture” marks the latest phase in a continuing discourse on social evolution, which presupposes “uniformity” in the “fundamental causes” of change (Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History [New York: Oxford University Press, 1969], p. 182), and of which Hegel is a spokesman.

The weakening of Japan's position in China following the Washington Conference led to the establishment of the Sino-Japanese Luda Company to run the Zichuan coal mines, operated by the Japanese army since 1915. The inability of the Chinese promoters to raise sufficient funds for the company, however, allowed the Japanese investors the major say in company policy. As a Sino-foreign company, Luda enjoyed special privileges which were zealously upheld by the Japanese consuls. Though these practices eroded Chinese sovereignty, they did not make the company a financial success. This failure resulted partly from the Japanese investors' greater concern with their country's long-term fuel supply than with Luda's short-term profits; but this paper also stresses both the ways in which the Chinese, in their attempts to reassert China's sovereignty, harrassed and restricted privileged foreign companies, and the overriding importance of locational and geological factors in determining a mining company's success.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, European colonial powers established economic and political control over most of Southeast Asia. The entrenchment of colonialism affected the lives of coastal merchants as well as those of peasants in interior villages. Yet how indigenous coastal merchants responded to the new situation has been a relatively neglected question in studies of this region. Based on the autobiography of Muhammad Saleh, a self-made Minangkabau merchant, this paper details the world and distinctive outlook of Minangkabau coastal merchants, and how Saleh successfully responded to changing political and economic conditions in West Sumatra in the late nineteenth century. Far from being the story of a helpless native merchant at the mercy of the Dutch governing power and Chinese merchants, the life of Muhammad Saleh reveals the adaptability of a certain sector of the indigenous merchant class in the Dutch East Indies. It also reflects the profound changes taking place within the world of Minangkabau merchants.

In his trail-blazing book, Escape from Predicament, Thomas Metzger opens up new vistas on both Neo-Confucianism and modern Chinese thought. In this article I intend to engage not so much in a critique of his book as in a dialogue that he and I have carried on for a number of years.

Devotees of operatic silliness will recall how Anna Russell, in her music hall routine explaining the convoluted plot of Wagner's Ring, prepares her audience for the reappearance of that disgusting dwarf Allllberic (“ten hours after the damned opera begins”), and leans forward conspiratorially to deliver her long-awaited line: “I'm not making this UP, you know!” And anyone who supposes that Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, is simply fabricating something in his book Orientalism; is taking oblique potshots at the academic establishment out of misdirected political dissatisfaction with the situation in the eastern Mediterranean; is presuming to speak of what he does not know professionally; is fulminating about a nastiness peculiar to Islamic studies; is attributing to innocent scholars the unlikely or unintended motive to control the object of their scholarship; or, finally, is saying nothing of relevance to practitioners of other disciplines or students of other areas—anyone who harbors such suspicions may wish to consider the manner and substance of the following two passages, chosen from among documents that I happen to have seen in the past several weeks:

In Japan we have no Nineveh or Babylon to disentomb, no Jerusalem to uncover of its superincumbent debris, in order to identify its ancient topography, no Ilium that was, to bring to light, after the oblivion of the ages, nor ancient ruins of any kind whatever to interest the antiquary.

Using the concept of fascism for analyzing political developments in early Shōwa Japan has become a controversial topic, and a lively debate about a general definition of fascism has raged among scholars of modern European history. This article presents a new interpretation of Japanese fascism and a modification of Ernst Nolte's definition of fascism as anti-modernism. The author argues that while Japan was not fascist during the 1930s, the original New Order Movement, which was planned by the Shōwa Research Association and promoted by Premier Konoe Fumimaro in 1940, did constitute a fascist movement. It was modeled on policies of European fascism and, fitting Nolte's definition, aimed at creating an anti-modern society. In addition, the New Order Movement revealed a polarity in its basic goals—the advocacy of anti-modernism and the simultaneous quest for a strong military and industrial state—that is central to fascist movements. The author also rejects the previously held image of Japanese intellectuals as passive resisters against the rise of authoritarianism in Japan by emphasizing the leading roles of three prominent writers—Miki Kiyoshi, Ryū Shintarō, and Rōyama Masamichi—in planning the New Order Movement.