Confrontation with the British during the years 1839 to 1842 jolted the Chinese into a more realistic perception of the wider world. Before the Opium War, the Chinese took little notice of the world beyond the traditional Chinese realm; during the course of the war China's inadequate knowledge of overseas countries proved to be a strategic disadvantage. In the 1840s, knowledge of the wider world was important to China's defense against Western intrusion, and a handful of Chinese scholar-officials who shared this view engaged in the serious study of foreign nations. A small but influential group of Chinese set out to expand China's knowledge of the West; they did so in the belief that this was essential to China's survival. The comprehensive accounts put together by Wei Yüan (1794–1857) and Hsü Chi-yü (1795–1873) and shorter works by other authors suggest the importance of this new perspective in the decade after the Treaty of Nanking.

Historians have attached a great deal of importance to Wei Yüan's geopolitical work, the Hai-kuo t'u-chih (The illustrated treatise on the maritime kingdoms), because of its use of Western source materials and its treatment of the West. While its importance as the first major Chinese study of the West should not be minimized, this should not obscure the fact that the Treatise was primarily a reassessment of the history of China's relations with the Asian maritime world, particularly South-east Asia and India.It was as much a rediscovery of China'spast involvement in this tributary sphere as it was a discovery of the West. This paper will attempt to describe the way in which Wei Yuan became involved in the problem of the West and to analyze and describe his view of the traditional Asian maritime world and the implications of Western expansion into this sphere.

Three other articles in this issue of Modern Asian Studies endeavour to trace conceptual changes in the years surrounding the Opium War, and particularly those arising out of works appearing in Chinese on world geography and related Western knowledge. One such work, the Hai-kuo t'u-chih (Illustrated Gazetteer of Maritime Nations), has received mixed reviews since its original publication in 1844. Although read in its various editions by many late Ch'ing modernizers, it provoked sharp criticism on its suggested methods of handling foreign affairs and the outdatedness of its materials. Feng Kuei-fen (1809–74), for example, maintained that ‘only one sentence of Wei Yuan is correct: Learn the strong techniques of the barbarians in order to control them.’ Despite such criticism—generally less totally condemnatory than Feng's—this work not only influenced early modernizers in China but also proved popular among Japanese of the Bakumatsu period, illustrative of its importance in studies on initial East Asian reaction to Western in-trusion. The previous paper dealt with the Hai-kuo t'u-chih's perception of European imperialist expansion in South and South-east Asia. This paper will briefly analyze its significance in a different vein, namely through a more intensive examination of its place in the career and thought of its compiler, Wei Yüan (1794-1857). The acknowledgement that he was less typical than illustrative of his times must accompany the choice of Wei Yüan as a subject for study. A number of the scholargentry minority, he belonged to that even smaller group which rose above mediocrity by serious dedication to the political-intellectual roles traditionally accorded that class. He was specifically untypical in his combination of radical views on Confucian orthodoxy, intense concern for domestic administrative problems and finally relatively enlightened perspectives on the new Western presence in China. Though untypical, this very combination of unique qualities suggests Wei's significance. Tracing his relationship to domestic intellectual and political developments will provide a convenient approach to analyzing, again through this one individual example, the actual interplay between Western intrusion and conceptual change in mid-nineteenth-century China.

Four years after the publication of Wei Yuan's Hai-kuo t'u-chih, Hsu Chi-yü (1795–1873), while governor of Fukien, composed the preface to his ten-chüan history-geography of the non-Chinese world. A product of the immediate post-Opium War period, Hsu's Ying-huan chih-lueh (A short account of the maritime circuit, 1848) is another example of Chinese intellectual response to Western intrusion and the challenges of a new era. Indeed, while Hsu and Wei agreed on the fundamental necessity to learn more about the outside world in order to protect China, the tone of their books, the Ying-huan chih-lueh and the Hai-kuo t'u-chih, differed to such an extent that the former came to represent the views of Chinese ‘moderates’, while the latter did likewise for the ‘conservatives’.

Before embarking on an analysis of Indonesia's attempt at democracy, a working definition of this term is required. This is particularly necessary in view of Herbert Feith's contention in his monumental work, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia, that the period of democracy stretched from December 1949 till March 1957.