The reform movement led by Kʻang Yu-wei initiated a major change in the Chinese approach to international affairs by developing what can be considered to be a nationalistic foreign policy. It is important to examine this development because of the insight which an analysis of the reformers' attitude toward international relations can provide into the reform movement as a whole, as well as into the crucial era of the late 1890's. In addition, such an investigation is useful because it can further our understanding of traditional Chinese conceptions of foreign policy by illuminating their relationship to the new approach.

As one means of uniting the people behind the new regime, Japanese government authorities employed a series of ethics (shushin) textbooks in the schools during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and beyond. With the appearance of fully government-produced texts in 1903 and their first revision in 1910, ideological patterns were established which were influential down to the last revision of the series in 1941. The 1910 revision fused old and new socio-ideological patterns and values under the designation of “national morals,” retrospectively known as the “family state” (kazoku kokka) ideology. This was comprised of (1) a German “state organism” theory of state sovereignty, as the intellectual superstructure; (2) Confucian-like familyism, as the ethical base; and (3) ancient Shinto imperial mythology as the religious sanction. Progression of thought in the textbooks placed crucial emphasis on the extension of loyalty from home and parents to nation and emperor through the absolute equation of filial piety and emperor-loyalty. The frondine soldier, however, found difficulty reconciling the call to die for the emperor with his filial obligation to live for his parents. This may be one reason why in successive revisions (especially 1941) the familial approach to national loyalty was downgraded in favor of a direct national-imperial appeal.

The 1911 Revolution in China is usually considered a failure. Changing the perspective of judgement from the national level to the local level permits a reassessment. Enough information is available from Chinese memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and foreign consular reports to make the new judgement somewhat secure if attention is focused on one particular location—Swatow.

The old administration was overthrown by expeasants led by deracinated rural intellectuals. They took power in the name of modern merchants. These merchants easily pushed the young radicals out because the ideology of the radical prevented them from using force against the wealth and status of the merchants. Rural disorder of the ex-peasants and republican election victorier for the radicals forced the urban merchants to rely on foreign election victories for the radicals forced the urban merchants to rely on foreign wealth and rural power to maintain law and order needed for trade and to maintain their own urban power base. Armed peasants and the young radicals were suppressed or bought off. Power fell to rural warlords and other political allies in urban enclaves. Only a rejoining of radical intellectuals and ex-peasants could offer China a revolution instead of just another bloody cycle.

Historians have overstated the role of adoption as a channel of upward social mobility for poor but bright young samurai in Tokugawa Japan. An analysis of family histories and public service records of four han shows that adoption helped to preserve both samurai lineages and the political system of daimyo rule. It also created opportunities for younger sons to remain in the elite class under a system of primogeniture. Adoption in the middle and upper (shi) ranks of the class was normally between related families of roughly the same social status. Where status differences were involved, the adopted son usually represented a higher status than the adopting family. The few records available for lower ranks (sotsu) reveal some marriage and adoption with commoners, but none with the higher ranks of the samurai class. In sum, adoption clearly supported the system of hereditary status, but rarely provided opportunities for poor but bright samurai to get ahead in society.

In Marathi literature, the issue of obscenity is more alive today than it ever has been during the last sixty years. Several new novels and short stories have been criticized during the last few years by the so-called defenders of morality as obscene, raw, or sexual. Both readers and critics are divided on this issue, and as more such novels and short stories are being published every year, many by prominent young writers, the reactions get more and more mixed. This new fictional writing is an attempt at depicting what may, within the context of Indian culture, be called unconventional themes, such as slum life, deviant behavior, and physical love.

It has been said that poetry is the voice of the heart. In Mao Tse-tung's first poem Changsha, and Swimming written after his success, we have a picture of his aspiration and inspiration, his classical literary background, and the vicissitudes of his life and times.

This is a study of the role played by Ch'en Ch'eng, who for almost thirty years was Chiang Kai-shek's most trusted and powerful lieutenant, in the relations between Chiang's “Central” government and the so-called tsa-parh or noncentral military forces. The study illustrates both the complexity and importance of Chiang's dealings with the tsa-parh and suggests that Ch'en had the responsibility of coopting them into Chiang's service. This was especially true with respect to militarists from Kwangtung and Kwangsi, who felt that their leadership of the Nationalist movement had been usurped by the Chekiang-Kiangsu group, led by Chiang Kai-shek. Ch'en also emerges as an advocate of fundamental social and economic reform, as well as an important proponent of resisting Japan and, therefore, the united front with the Communists, although, after 1945, he became chief-of-staff to Chiang Kai-shek and, in this capacity, directed Nationalist efforts to destroy the Communists. The article concludes by suggesting that Nationalist efforts to impose a “modern,” meaning a unitary and organically centralized, state on what traditionally had been a politically fragmented society provoked unprecedented antagonism toward the central government on the part of the provinces and prevented Chiang Kai-shek from achieving even that degree of control enjoyed by China's emperors in the past.

North Korea is one of the most efficient totalitarian regimes existing in the world today. Especially after 1958 Premier Kim Il-song intensified the drive to heighten the cult of personality and to consolidate the control and administrative mechanisms in order to ensure the maintenance and operation of an efficient and effective power structure.

Between 1953 and 1958 the socioeconomic environment in North Korea underwent a radical change. Adjustments in the structure and function of local administrative and control mechanisms reflected these economic changes. The prefecture (the kun, or county) became the most important administrative unit. Through collectivization of farms and accompanying administrative reorganization, the ri (the precinct) was transformed from a purely administrative unit to a production unit. The functions traditionally performed by the People's Committees at the prefectural level were dispersed among different agencies, and the party structure at the prefectural level was expanded and given new powers. These measures were carried out between 1953 and 1964 for the purpose of increasing efficiency and efficacy in local administration. They were also designed to insure party control over the entire society. At the end of the reform period, the supremacy of the party was structurally guaranteed. The improvement in control, administration, and production, however, does not necessarily result from structural changes alone, and the problem of controlling and manipulating human beings still remains as an important problem.

The subject of this essay—better so labeled than as a research paper—is too broad to permit more than a sweeping as well as selective treatment in the short space of a journal article. It may nevertheless be worth presenting in those terms, painting with an overly broad brush on too large a canvas perhaps, but attempting through its scope to relate as parts of a common phenomenon events and patterns in separate areas. Such an effort may help to throw light on an aspect of the grand design of European colonialism in Asia and on some of its consequences. These were different in each area and some of the differences, notably between China and the rest of Asia, may be instructive as they can help us better to understand idiosyncratic aspects of the diverse history of modern Asia. But the similarities in events, patterns, and consequences which such a gross comparison can also illustrate may be equally instructive, and often overlooked. India's modern history and China's, Japan's, and Southeast Asia's, are for good reasons commonly examined separately by separate specialists. Many politically conscious Asians of the colonial or semi-colonial period, and most of the colonialists themselves, did not see Asia that way but more nearly as a single system, for all its regional variety, on which the overt and implicit force of the modern West as an alien system was attempting to impinge.

The article discusses recently published material on the subject of the author's book on Sino-Russian relations entitled The Expansion of Russia in East Asia 1857–60 (with an introductory chapter on 1792–1856). The two Chinese document collections Szu-kuo hsintang and Chou-pan i-wu shih-mo, edited by Kuo Ting-i, contain a number of hitherto unpublished Chinese government papers. One document in the Szu-kuo hsintang confirms that Putiatin defied Russian government orders when he negotiated for the Amur at Tientsin. Others throw light on the activities of the anti-Russian clique of princes and dignitaries, who influenced Ch'ing policy in these years, on Perovskii's mission to China and on the mutual present giving after the conclusion of the Sino-Russian treaties. The Soviet document collection Vneshnaia politika Rossii v XIX i nachale XX veka gives new facts about the Golovkin mission to China in 1805, but excludes all mention of the Amur. The extracts from K. A. Skachkov's Peking diary published in Moscow also exclude foreign affairs. Finally, the author's researches into the private papers of the 8th Earl of Elgin are described. They appear to confirm Ignatiev's claim that Elgin was ignorant of his negotiations with the Chinese in Peking in autumn 1860.

One hundred years of Brooke rule in Sarawak seem to present a stark contrast to the political and social foment in Burma, Indonesia and Vietnam. Cognizant of the ill effects of European domination in the archipelago, the Brookes established a paternalistic rule whose policies were designed to curtail European economic investment in the area and to protect the indigenous inhabitants from internal and external exploitation. However, despite the fact that Brooke rule was structured for maintaining traditional order, not development, the European interlude in north Bornean history may have been more of a deviation than is apparent. The suppression of “piracy” in the area and the political domination of the Brookes over most of the northeastern part of the island had several important results. First, the area trade patterns—if piracy can be seen as a form of luxury trade—were altered to the ultimate economic advantage of the Chinese who came to dominate retail trade. Second, the natural northeastern expansion of the Iban people was halted to the chief benefit of the indigenous Malays who gained significant political advantage under die Brookes. Finally, an inevitable depersonalization of rule occurred as the administration of the state became increasingly complex. If, in a “modern” world, a rule of law, not economic development per se, is the essential ingredient for political stability, Brooke rule made a significant contribution to the political viability of northern Borneo by fostering a White, civilized way of settling disputes.

Beginning in 1892 Prince Damrong as minister of the interior in King Chulalongkorn's reformed government began a reorganization of provincial administration. At that time the country was divided into provinces of four different classes and vassal states. The latter were recognized as quasi-independent under their own hereditary ruling families, and many of the former, although in theory completely subordinate to the capital were in fact ruled by local elite families in which the governorship remained from one generation to the next. Over this structure Prince Damrong established the monthon as a supra-provincial unit headed by an appointed official from the central government bureaucracy, and within a few years was able to replace the old-style hereditary governors with appointed officials changed at frequent intervals. The elite families of the different regions appear to have been affected in different ways. The old rulers of the vassal states kept their nominal positions until death. Many of the governing elite of the southern provinces maintained themselves in the national bureaucracy in positions of comparable rank. The greatest change was in the northeast where the governing elite families lost their old positions and were unable to integrate into the reformed bureaucracy.

In evaluating Mahatma Gandhi, Soviet scholars have always endeavored to identify him from a class viewpoint even though they frequently disagreed on the definitions of the various classes and on the attitude to be taken toward them. Mahatma Gandhi, although he came from the bourgeois class, always considered himself a socialist and a “true servant of the peasants and of the workers.” He was firmly of the opinion that “even a King can be a socialist by becoming a servant of the people.” He once told Nehru that “even when I die, you will have to admit that Gandhi was a true socialist.” Gandhi was a religious man. He believed not only in the basic philosophy of Hinduism, but also in its social structure. He deprecated the abolition of caste while opposing untouchability. He was unmodern by Western and Communist standards and he wanted India as a confederation of small village communities economically and politically self-sufficient. In the words of Nehru:

He looked back with yearning to the days of the old autonomous and more-or-less self-contained village community where there had been an automatic balance between production, distribution and consumption; where political or economic power was spread out and not concentrated as it is today; where a kind of simple democracy prevailed; where the evils of great cities were absent and people lived in contact with the life-giving soil and breathed the pure air of the open spaces.

One of the major problems facing modern Japanese historians is that of providing adequate explanations for the nature and timing of changes in the decision-making structure after 1868. The domination of the decision-making process and structure by the civil bureaucracy indicates that bureaucratic development was a major factor in determining such changes.

The civil bureaucracy underwent two dramatic changes in the period after 1868. The first occurred in the years 1868–78 and resulted in the integration, centralization and specialization of the bureaucratic structure. This was confirmed by an analysis of all increases and decreases in operations at the prefectural level—the level at which integration had been critical. The second major change occurred between 1884—1889 as the result of a series of reforms aimed at rationalizing the bureaucratic role. Analysis of the backgrounds and careers of a 25% random sample of all prefectural governors between 1868–1945 clearly indicates that by 1900 the norms of the bureaucratic role had changed drastically. From a role based on extra-bureaucratic norms—participation in the Restoration, possession of some Western knowledge and membership in the traditional elite—the “new” bureaucratic role was characterized by predominantly “legal-rational” norms. These changes had a number of consequences for the decisionmaking structure: 1) the centralization, integration and specialization of the bureaucracy placed decision-making in the hands of a small number of bureaucratic leaders thus laying the foundation for the oligarchic (genro) structure which now emerged. Decision-making roles were thus allocated on the same extra-bureaucratic criteria as upper civil service roles; 2) rationalization of the bureaucratic role undermined and finally eliminated the genro structure through elimination of the norms for selecting genro members. The resulting vacuum was filled by contention and conflict between the bureaucracy and the political parties both claiming legitimacy in the selection and allocation of decision-making roles. The result was a system of allocating decision-making roles which was informal, ambiguous and highly particularistic. The result was the instability of decision-making which characterized the post-1925 period. The hypothesis that bureaucratic development was a major factor in determining change in the decision-making structure thus appears to be confirmed.

This is a brief descriptive and explanatory paper about the use of the computer in Asian linguistic studies. Schemes for the use of autocovariance and fast Fourier transforms are presented, with their application to the question of literary structure and author identification. These results suggest that changes in the scale of resolution of the analyses could furnish the basis for the description of the human information emitter.

It is now more than twenty years ago that I was first introduced to the Urdu ghazal —the classical Urdu lyric—and found with something like dismay that there was almost nothing about it which I understood and liked. This was not because I had not an adequate command of the language. I had begun speaking Urdu in 1942, and from about 1945 had acquired some competence in the language of prose literature. Nor was it because I was not moderately well read in the love poetry of various cultures and civilizations, from Sappho and Catullus to Shakespeare and Burns, not to speak of later poets. But this was a new, strange experience. From that day to this I have been convinced that to understand and appreciate the ghazal is the most difficult task that confronts the modern Western student of Urdu literature; and as my own understanding increased I have become equally convinced that this is a task which, once accomplished, brings the greatest reward. Such conclusions of my own about the ghazal as I have put into writing fall short of a comprehensive study of the form, and I have never entirely ceased to hope that others more knowledgeable than I would, either in Urdu or in English, write something in which one would find at least most of the answers to the major problems which the ghazal presents to us who study it with the values of the modern West. Hitherto this hope has not been realized, and for that reason I now attempt to set out my own views—spurred on, I should confess, by Muhammad Sadiq's judgement in his History of Urdu Literature (Oxford University Press, 1964)—the latest, longest, and (so far) best history in English—that the ghazal stands “very low in the hierarchy of literary forms” (p. 19). This judgment could hardly be more completely opposed to my own.

Archeology in Asia during the past twenty years has taken great strides. The three main areas of new research have been in paleoanthropology, investigation of post-pleistocene neolithic sites, and ethnology. The population of Asia is now known to have been distributed over the entire mainland and Indonesia during the Paleolithic period which embraced the first million years of human evolution. There is growing evidence for the existence of many centers of plant domestication in Asia, each of which appears to have developed out of an indigenous “mesolithic” period of collecting and gathering. Recent research in linguistics and ethnology point the way to unravelling the separate histories of Asia's many cultures.