This essay tries to understand a particular pattern of the relation between social movement and political party. By analyzing the development of the anti-nuclear protest in Taiwan, the author puts forth the concept of party-dependent movement. This term denotes an awkward situation where the fate of a social movement is bound to the electoral performance of a certain political party. In Taiwan, the rise of anti-nuclear voice is closely related to the democratic opening. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) adopted an unequivocal anti-nuclear stand ever since its founding in 1986, thus helped to collect the increasing support from the broad movement constituents. But the growing DPP has other political priorities, which means the anti-nuclear goal is often shelved to the disappointment of movement activists. As a consequence of the early convergence, the movement has not been able to re-assert its autonomy.

This article is about one of the most depressing fieldwork situations I have ever encountered in China. Tiaoxi, basically, is dead. Some of the old artists are still alive, but the plays themselves were performed for the last time in 1987. There is video footage, taken by a professional team from the Ministry of Culture in Beijing, but the quality can only be described as execrable. There are abundant surviving libretti in manuscript, collected by field workers during the 1950s and again during the surveys of the 1980s, but they are almost all held in the Provincial Arts Research Institute in Xi'an, and no one is allowed to see them, not even the ‘old artists’ who donated them in the first place; not even photocopies are held by the county Cultural Bureau or by the artists themselves.

. . . There had always been some corner of the Empire where His Majesty's subjects were causing trouble . . .

J. G. Farrell, Troubles (London: Cape, 1990) p. 215.

J. G. Farrell has, in common with Paul Scott, an admiration for Joseph Conrad (obvious in their use of symbolism, topographical and otherwise), a fascination with the decline of Empire as a subject for fiction; a reputation that rests on a series of historical novels on this subject. Farrell died at the age of 44 whereas Paul Scott did so at 58; therefore it is not fair to compare their overall achievement. Yet it is necessary to observe that, whereas Scott portrayed one country during a single short period in his major work, Farrell's view was global and spanned virtually a century, lighting upon three important crises in three different countries during three different periods: Troubles (1970), set in the context of the Irish disturbances of 1919-21; The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), located during the 1857 ‘Mutiny’ in India; The Singapore Grip (1978), focusing on the period leading up to the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese during the Second World War, the first signal defeat of the might of the British Empire by an Asian power.

One of the more famous episodes in the narrative of British colonial expansion in India, and one that has been extensively mythologized, is the death in 1799 of Tipu Sultan and the fall of his capital, Srirangapattana. British troops, supported by their Indian allies—in particular, the forces of Hyderabad—stormed the island fortress on 4 May, bringing to an end the Mysore kingdom's role as the last significant indigenous power in the south. The old Hindu Wodeyar dynasty was reinstated and the kingdom itself was reduced to a landlocked state, with much of its territory redistributed among the victors. It is not the purpose of this article to attempt an analysis of why Tipu was defeated. Rather its aim is to underline the importance of returning to sources and re-examining evidence, even, or perhaps especially, if beliefs about a certain event have been held for so long. This is particularly true in the case of such an evocative and contentious figure as Tipu Sultan, whose life and legacy have been appropriated by interests in polemical debates over at least the last 150 years. As the following discussion will show, if one is to achieve a better understanding of an event such as the fall of Srirangapattana and its aftermath, a return to the sources is imperative.

For centuries, China has remained as a place in many Americans' shadowy dreams where fortunes and careers could be made through commerce, industry, religion, education, and adventure. American businessmen and their domestic backers appreciated China's richly endowed natural resources and its untapped market of 400 million customers, looking forward to making immense profits from business investment and commercial establishments. Since the arrival of the first American merchant ship, Empress of China, in Canton in 1784, generation after generation of American businessmen and adventurers landed in the Middle Kingdom to begin their enterprises by foreseeing a promising future for mercantile advantage. In this China drive, individual businessmen outside the U.S. government played a significant role in linking the two countries and peoples through a variety of activities. Some of them were particularly responsible for conveying their ideas, directly or indirectly, to government policy makers in Washington, exerting profound influence on the U.S. foreign policy toward East Asia. Some of them made great efforts to assist in the modernization of China by devoting their lives and resources, turning themselves into friends of China. Some of them, however, played games as adventurers seeking power and wealth in a fraudulent way and creating unexpected occasions for political confrontations and diplomatic conflicts in Sino-American relations. In all of these multi-dimensional interactions, China, a country too weak to control its own affairs in the nineteenth-century and the first half of the twentieth-century, provided a fantastic place for Americans to range freely, exercising their talents for good or evil to the fullest.

In the latter part of the 1990s, several of the major economies in South East Asia underwent one of the worst economic crises in living memory. It is thus not surprising that economic historians with an interest in the region are re-examining the experience of the 1930s. One crucial difference between the crisis of the late 1990s and that of the early 1930s is that the latter was preceded, and in large measure caused, by problems in the world economy. When the industrial world fell into a severe economic depression in the early 1930s, most parts of Asia were affected, mainly through falling export receipts which in turn affected colonial budgets. A second difference was that most parts of South East Asia in the 1930s were still under colonial rule, and had little autonomy in framing or implementing economic policy. Only Thailand remained nominally independent, but even there the influence of foreign, especially British, economic advisers was considerable. Given the very different economic interests which the colonial powers (Dutch, French, American and British) had in their South East Asian colonies, and given the widely differing nature of the economic links between colony and metropole, it was to be expected that the impact of the 1930s slump, and the policy responses which it provoked, would vary. This indeed turned out to be the case.

When he wrote his oft-cited work, Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (Freedman 1958), Maurice Freedman could say little about the nature of Chinese martial arts societies. ‘The boxing and music clubs were, as their names imply, groupings of recreation. The structural significance of these associations is not altogether clear’ (Freedman 1958:93). This paper aspires to make that situation somewhat less opaque. Chinese martial arts students under the same teacher are brothers. I don't mean this in a metaphorical sense, that they are ‘like’ brothers. They, at least in some Chinese martial arts groups, consider themselves to be kin.

The perceived resurgence of Hindu nationalist sentiments in India, particularly since the 1990s, occupies centre-stage in much of the current academic writing on contemporary Hinduism. This preoccupation with politicized Hinduism has meant that other developments in contemporary Hindu society, which run contrary to the dominant trend, have tended to go relatively unnoticed in recent academic literature. One such development has to do with religious belief and practice within some of the more popular modern guru organizations in India, many of which own and manage vast institutional and financial empires, command an international presence, and, within India, attract followers largely from educated, urban, ‘middle class’ sections of the country's population. Commentators in the past have tended to see the popularity of these guru organizations merely as a sign of intensified religiosity among urban middle class Indians. A closer look at these organizations and the place which many of them occupy in the lives of their followers, however, indicates that this apparently intensified religiosity also carries within it seeds of something quite different—trends towards the secularization of civil society.

Ever since the discovery of China by Western nations the West has continually tried to gain access to China, and sometime even to understand her. Conversely, many Eastern nations who came within China's reach have preferred to keep her at arms length. This dichotomy continues today, although the East/West division is less clear. The People's Republic of China's sheer geographical size, its location in the heart of Asia, its huge population and thus its potential as an economic and miitary superpower instils fear in many. Will the PRC become a ‘responsible power’, an irresponsible hegemon, or collapse into political disorder and chaos? In anticipation of the coming changes in the PRC, the foreign policy of those nations concerned with the PRC has oscillated between engagement and containment of China.

Conventional wisdom dictates that Chinese literati in the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), like their forerunners in previous dynasties, were politically active. Chinese Marxist historians tend to portray the Qing literati as politicians rather than scholars. Tang Zhiju, a China-based historian and the author of a book with an explicitly political title, Jindai Jingxue yu Zhengzhi (Modern Classical Learning and Politics), argues that the forefather of the Qing Evidential Research School, Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), used classical learning to maintain the Han people's national consciousness, and that the founders of the Gongyang New Text School, Zhuang Cunyu (1719–1788) and Liu Fenglu (1776–1829), applied the ‘sublime words with deep meaning’ in the Gongyang Chunqiu (Gongyang Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals) to justify the Manchu's tianming (mandate of heaven). In late Qing, Tang contends, the New Text scholars Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929) studied the classics with the intention of political reform, while the Old Text scholar Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936) developed the tradition in Confucianism of jingshi (managing the world) for anti-Manchu revolution.

Globalization has compelled state governments to embrace economic liberalization as a means to participate purposely in an increasingly ‘borderless’ world economy. At a general level, this is seen to enable the economies in their charge to engage more effectively in the integrated international linkages of production, finance, distribution and investment being created by transnational business activities. Economic liberalization refers to an opening up of markets to greater competition, which had previously been constricted by various forms of state regulation or intervention, e.g. import tariffs. Hence, liberalization can under many circumstances lead to a general retreat of the state's position in matters of economic governance. However, it is argued here that smart approaches to economic liberalization do not necessarily require a weakening of state capacity but rather its upgrading. As such, questions about `how much' state involvement or economic liberalization is required to meet the challenges posed by globalization need to be replaced with those of ‘what kind’.

The build-up and development of the Okinawan struggle for reversion to Japanese administration does not figure prominently in the English-language literature on the American occupation of Okinawa, nor does it occupy a central place in Japanese analyses of this subject. Rather there is a tendency to view Okinawa as a subset of US-Japanese postwar relations, and to explain reversion as a process carried through by senior American and Japanese officials, largely governed by high-level diplomatic and military-strategic considerations. There is often only passing mention of the rising tensions within Okinawa itself and, perhaps more importantly, the increasing effectiveness through the 1960s of the indigenous reversion movement centred on the Okinawa Teachers' Association (Okinawa kyōshokuinkai). For example, John Welfield's trenchant account of the ‘three years of tortuous negotiations’ that culminated in November 1969 in an American pledge to return the islands hardly mentions conflicts within Okinawa itself, remarking only that ‘the swing to the left’ in 1968 foreshadowed major problems for the US if Okinawan demands for reversion were not met.

Historians of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) have concentrated on rural China to explain how the Communists mobilized the peasantry as a revolutionary force. Although clarifying the CCP's ascension to power in 1949, this focus has impeded our understanding of social change and conflict in the Nationalist controlled territories, especially the wartime capital of Chongqing. Thus, it is difficult to understand how the Nationalists exacerbated the alienation of urban social groups during the 1940s or how the CCP began to find consensus in the cities after 1946. Even standard explanations for the Nationalist collapse—government factionalism, hyperinflation, military blunders, and malfeasance—with their focus on government elites and institutions have rendered invisible the role of social classes as agents of historical change. The few studies of wartime labor have instead emphasized the patriotic contributions of workers and their relative passivity under the four-class bloc envisioned by the united front.

Studies and reminiscences, which dissect the communities of the Baghdadi trade diaspora, have so far tended to over-emphasize the smooth Anglicization process experienced by Baghdadi Jews in British India, Singapore and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The myth of the Sassoons as the ‘Rothschilds of the East’ has, in particular, distorted and enhanced the representation of Baghdadi Jews as wealthy, Anglicized and thoroughly integrated in British social circles. In reality, if we want to unravel the multi-layered history of Baghdadi Jews from India to Japan we must not only analyse in depth the complexities of the westernization process of the Baghdadi upper classes but also reconstruct carefully class divisions within Baghdadi communities. With this aim in mind, this essay will investigate the various strands of identity developed by Baghdadis during their stay in Shanghai and will especially focus on the local allegiances forged between Baghdadi and British settlers, the so-called Shanghailanders. The following pages will, at the same time, delineate the social structure of the Baghdadi community in Shanghai and will indicate that westernized affluent Baghdadis were forced to confront painfully their own ‘other’: destitute vagrant co-religionists who hailed from the Middle East and India and roamed between the various nodes of the Baghdadi diaspora. The period considered in this essay stretches from 1845, the year the first Baghdadi trader set foot in the city, to the middle of the 1930s when large numbers of Jewish refugees from Europe started to flock to Shanghai in search of a safe haven.