Although it is under the rule and administration of the British, Hong Kong is geographically, socially, economically and politically linked with China. The part played by Hong Kong in the 1911 Revolution has been noted in a number of works, published or unpublished. This paper, however, proposes to examine the role of the Hong Kong educated Chinese in the modernization of China, limiting the study to those who had attended schools in Hong Kong before 1911 and their activities in China during the late Ch'ing and early republican years. During these decades, the English education afforded in the Anglo-Chinese schools in Hong Kong succeeded not only in turning out people who later became leading citizens of the local community but also in producing Western-educated young men who went to China to be engaged in the imperial service, participating directly or indirectly in the various reform programmes in China; while still a greater number, having received some English education in Hong Kong, were recruited into the various modern schools in China to receive training for new careers—modern diplomacy, warfare, engineering, medicine, as well as modern communication and transportation. A number, however, played leading roles in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and in the establishment of the Republic of China—among them Dr Sun Yat-sen , father of the Republic and its first President, and Wang Ch'ung-hui , its first Foreign Minister.

As the universality of political economy has receded before the myriad instances of particular economic rationalities, it has become increasingly clear that most non-capitalist structures are organized around a multi-centric set of dynamics. In this regard one would expect to find that the economic as a category possesses less univocal clarity and its precise sense is only vouchsafed through a cognisance of the broader, integrating set of validating principles. This would be true as much in Mauss's analysis of the Gift as it would be in relation to the dynamics of a feudal economy. In the first instance the transactional medium and symbolic sense of the act contains within it the premises of an entire system, while in the second example the implied free-play of economic indices rests, in reality, on the intervention of extra-economic factors, in this case, the intervention of the seigneury. From the case of one transactional exchange to the dynamics of an entire system, common to both is the reallocation of the category ‘economic’ and its merger with criteria and principles of a wider and more diffuse nature.

Merchants in the Tokugawa period were placed at the bottom of the shinōkōshōhierarchy of samurai-peasants-artisans-merchants. This social hierarchy was produced by a combination of social reality at the time Japan was unified in the late sixteenth century and an ancient Chinese physiocratic theory, never taken very seriously, in practical ways, in China. Once the country was unified, the social mobility of the previous years, of a kind which permitted men of ability to climb from the lowest ranks to join the military nobility—Hideyoshi is the prime example of this mobility—was viewed, by Hideyoshi above all others, as a cause of prolonged chaos and internecine warfare. With the argument that war had been abolished and common people therefore no longer needed weapons, Hideyoshi carried out his ‘sword-hunt’. He thus established the most fundamental of the class distinctions, between the samurai, the ruling class, who now enjoyed a monopoly of bearing arms, and the common people, who were henceforth expected simply to produce the food and other necessities of life, and to pay their taxes, which remained high even though warfare was supposedly ended.

Unlike the State Department Officials of the United States who were subjected by the Senate to postwar Congressional investigation in the Pearl-Harbor hearing, British Far Eastern policy-makers were saved such parliamentary ordeals. The loss of the whole British position in the Far-East at the hands of the Japanese between December 1941 and May 1942 was humiliating enough. It was, as Winston Churchill later claimed, ‘the worst disaster and the largest capitulation of British history’.

If it is true that under the mantle of respectability accorded to the Indian epics and Purāāas one finds all manner of ribaldry and indecorous behavior, then perhaps when one delves into the ill-famed world of nauṭankī one will find a much more straightlaced and conservative view of reality than one might expect. Nauṭankī is the popular theatre tradition of the Hindi and Urdu speaking regions of North India, and in particular of Uttar Pradesh. For anyone beginning research on nauṭankī, the issue of its reputation is unavoidable. Hiraman, the innocent cartdriver in Phanishwarnath Renu's Hindi short story The Third Vow, knew from hearsay that nauṭankī shows were not a proper pastime, though he didn't quite know why, and the knowledge didn't prevent him from falling in love with a nauṭankī actress. Similarly, the Hindi drama critics, if they mention nauṭankī at all, repeat vague warnings; the form is crude and debased, not much can be expected from it. Rām Nārāyaā Agravāl, author of Sāngīt, the leading Hindi monograph on the subject, describes its current state as one of commercial ruin, artistic bankruptcy, and sexual display. Female Indian friends simply comment, ‘We were never allowed to see those plays,’ or ‘Why don't you study something nice?’