It is no easy undertaking to make significant and, at the same time, unprejudicial comments on a book of the sort under review when the author is a person of total religious commitment and the reviewer a glaubensloser Philolog. It is doubly difficult to do justice to the book while saying something meaningful to a body of readers most of whom view the issue with the eye of the social scientist, which is that neither of the author nor of the reviewer.

The Chinese Materials and Research Aids Center has rendered a valuable service to students of late Ch'ing Chinese history in publishing this typeset edition of Weng T'ung-ho's diary, based on the facsimile edition printed by the Shanghai Commercial Press in 1925. The Center has made this important source material easier to use in several ways. The text is punctuated and printed in standard type, a boon to scholars not accustomed to unpunctuated, cursive writing; interlinear marks are inserted throughout, rendering proper names readily identifiable; corresponding Western dates (years and months but not days) are given alongside the Chinese; pages are numbered consecutively throughout the five volumes. And further to enhance the usefulness of the typeset edition, an index to essential proper nouns, geographical and personal, is to form volume 6 which, unfortunately, is not available to this reviewer.

Richard A. Solomon's book, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), suffers especially from a faulty approach to the political culture of traditional China. Neglecting documentary sources, Solomon fails to understand the role of legitimated protest in traditional China, and this failure in turn limits his understanding of how values have changed in China under Mao. His book, however, contains much interesting factual material about Chinese attitudes toward authority and about politics in the CPR.

The Earliest Vinaya and the Beginnings of Buddhist Literature. By Erich Frauwallner. Volume VIII of Serie Orientate Roma. Edited by Giuseppe Tucci. Rome: Institute per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1956.

Richard Solomon's book Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture is a pioneering effort to interpret the Chinese Communist revolution and its revolutionary social policy by using the emergent methodology of “political culture.” Although it poses several valuable questions, the author's command of the traditional Chinese civilization is inadequate to inform his judgment. Information about literacy in traditional China is mis-used, and the extent and content of education is misunderstood. Various cultural features, e.g. the Chinese counterpart to the West's Oedipal myth, are introduced but their import is erroneously explained. Family values are mistakenly interpreted in relation to the Confucian Great Tradition. The inadequacy of Solomon's handling of such cultural information casts doubts on the validity of the entire book.

This is a most important volume of seventeen essays,* each written by an important scholar in the field. Largely bibliographical in nature, the essays cover American-East Asian relations from the earliest meetings through the 1960s. The approach is largely chronological, but important topical essays include Robert S. Schwantes’ “America and Japan,” (although this is limited chronologically), and Peter W. Stanley's “The Forgotten Philippines, 1790–1946.”

A critical review of four recent works which examine the role of the United States in Southeast Asia; its policies, goals and interrelationships with the several successor states of French Indochina: Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.