The launching of this journal of Modern Asian Studies, on the initiative of the Hayter Asian Centres in co-operation with the School of Oriental and African Studies, provides a good opportunity to review the progress being made in these studies in the universities of the United Kingdom. We have nearly reached the half-way stage of a ten-year programme of development which was put forward in the Hayter Committee Report of 1961, and are approaching the new quinquennium in which what has already been started should be consolidated and the new pattern for the future established.

The death of Nehru did less to change the Indian political system than the talk about his charismatic leadership might have led us to expect. But one simplification is not to be replaced by another; the assessment of his influence is a matter of real difficulty. Most delicate of all the tasks perhaps is that of distinguishing between his influence on the actual behaviour of political actors and institutions and his influence on the views taken by observers of such behaviour. How much, that is, of what appears novel in the post-Nehru period is merely the coming to light of features which were already present but obscured or unnoticed by virtue of the attention focused on the great man himself? In no area of the Indian political system is this question more important than in the Congress Party.

After nearly two decades of revolutionary rule in China, the break with the past which Communist direction has seemed to represent is increasingly being seen in a wider perspective. Few scholars would attempt to argue that the Communists have not brought a genuine revolution or that their ascendancy is merely the equivalent of a new dynasty. But as the character of the new order has become clearer with time and as an analysis both more detailed and less concerned with short-term matters has become possible, many scholars have been as much impressed by continuities with the pre-Communist past as by discontinuities. To take perhaps the clearest example, the current Chinese view of their relation to the rest of the world appears to represent little change from the traditional Sinocentric image. Ideological absolutism is also not new to China with Mao Tse-tung, nor is the conception of individual subsevience to public good, the unquestioned rightness of close social limits on individual actions. And contemporary China retains, for all its professed egalitarianism, a strongly elitist and hierarchial pattern.

A Member of Parliament, representing Orissa State, once said in the course of a debate: ‘My first ambition is the glory of Mother India. I know it in my heart of hearts that I am an Indian first and an Indian last. But when you say you are a Bihari, I say I am an Oriya. When you say you are a Bengali, I say I am an Oriya. Otherwise I am an Indian’ (cited in Harrison, 1960). The same words could plausibly be spoken by a Ceylonese or Burmese with other labels substituted. If we succeed in unravelling the meaning of this statement we shall understand a major aspect of South Asian politics.

In the late autumn of 1868 political events in Japan were no longer focused exclusively on Edo, Ōsaka and the lands of the south-western han; all of which could be easily visited by British sailors and diplomats. The Imperial armies had won important victories at Fushimi and Ueno but they had still not gained control of the whole of Japan. The last Shōgun had retired from the conifict but his supporters still mounted stubborn military resistance in Northern Honshū. At this stage it was important for Britain to know the state of this civil war and its likely outcome.

The Chung-hua min-kuo tzu-yu tang or tzu-yu tang was named after the Japanese Jiyūtō which was conventionally known as the ‘Liberal Party’. However, in both Japanese and Chinese the word Jiyū/tzu-yu retained strong connotations of ‘liberty’ which have been lost by the word ‘Liberal’. It seems best therefore to leave the title untranslated.

The observer who travelled in India in early 1965 found no one lower in public estimation than the late Pundit Jawarharlal Nehru. Not yet dead a year, it seemed that there was nothing that he had done which was right. Population?—he should have taken steps to control it. Language?—he had failed to control the Hindi faction and had weakly compromised. Corruption?—he had denounced but failed to act, had even shielded guilty parties. Non-involvement?—it had led India into isolation, and as for China, the less said about that painful subject the better. If Mahatma Gandhi was the forgotten man of early 1965, Nehru was the rejected man.

In the opinions of J. A. Hobson and Lenin European imperial expansion during several decades following 1870 was caused by the need to export surplus capital, and aimed at expediting this process. Hobson saw this necessity as arising from over-production (or under-consumption), a curable defect of capitalism; Lenin as an inherent quality of ‘monopoly-capitalism’ which was directed principally by bankers and was heading for revolution.

This paper was first presented by Academician Natsagdorj at the XIV International Congress of Orientalists at New Delhi in 1964. As it was presented in Russian, one of the internationally recognized languages at the conference, I have translated it here from the Russian text rather than the underlying Mongol original. The translation has been approved by the author.

Throughout the twenty years which followed 17 August 1945 when, as President of the newly proclaimed Republic of Indonesia, Sukarno first stepped into the limelight, he has provided the most flamboyant example of the ‘charismatic leader’ who, by personifying the aspirations of a formerly subject people, enables them both to establish and to project their identity as a nation. During this time Western well-wishers of the Indonesian people have been increasingly fascinated by his performance, which they have watched, often at first with sympathy and even admiration, later with disappointment and anxiety, and finally with astonishment verging upon incredulity.

Two major factors determined the growth of Indian nationalism: developments within Indian society and indigenous political organizations and the British response to agitation and the demands of Indian politicians and interest groups. Current studies of Indian nationalism generally focus upon the former, while the relation of British rule to political development is either ignored or misunderstood. Frequently the British are portrayed as inept bureaucrats, or the government as a monolithic structure run on inflexible bureaucratic principles and bent upon a policy of repression. While the shoe often fits, this caricature ignores the basic fact that, despite mounting pressure from 1904 onwards, the British rulers managed to keep order and to choose their hour of departure. They were able to continue governing primarily because they were adroit in handling agitation, minimizing serious grievances, and retreating from policies or measures which threatened to inflame the subcontinent. Professor Anthony Low of the University of Sussex has shown graphically how the Government of India manipulated Gandhi's first and second civil disobedience campaigns to its own political advantage. This paper explores the background and the British response to an earlier but equally volatile situation, the 1907 rural disturbances in the Punjab.

Malaya has a plural society in which Malays form 49·8 per cent of the total population, Chinese 37·2 per cent and Indians 11·2 per cent. Apart from this racial diversity, there is the added fact that the Malays tend to live in the rural areas whereas the immigrant groups tend to live in the urban areas or on the plantations, and only to a much lesser extent in the rural areas. For example, of the rural population of Malaya, Malays form 70 per cent, Chinese 17 per cent and Indians 11 per cent. In the urban areas of Malaya, Malays make up 23 per cent of the population, Chinese 65 per cent and Indians 10 per cent. In 1957 the average annual income of the adult male in the Malay community was $1,463, as against $3,223 in the Chinese community and $2,031 in the Indian. From these figures it is clear that the Malays have lagged behind the immigrant communities in respect of economic development.

All historians would agree that one decisive factor in the overthrow of the Tokugawa Bakufu was the alignment against it in 1867 of several of the great domains (han), and the failure of the Shōgun to rally any comparable support among the rest. In the wider sense the reasons for this are complex, as well as being a matter of some controversy. Nevertheless, the proximate causes are obvious enough. In the anti-Bakufu domains, notably Satsuma and Chōshū, power had fallen into the hands of samurai groups which sought the destruction of the régime. In a number of others, similar groups wielded sufficient influence to prevent the daimyō or his senior officials from giving whole-hearted backing to the Tokugawa. Clearly, therefore, the study of how this came about, that is, of the nature and processes of domain politics, is important to an understanding of the Meiji Restoration.

There are several reasons for taking a special interest in Hao Ran's Yan Yang Tian (Bright Skies), a novel about the Chinese countryside of which Part One was brought out by the author's Publishing House, Peking, in late 1964 and Part Two by the People's Literature Publishing House in March 1966. The third and final part has yet to be issued. It is the first published novel by Hao Ran, a writer born in 1932 and chiefly known for his short stories. It shows that gloom about the state of contemporary Chinese writing is not always justifiable and, perhaps more significantly, gives a reasonably full and frank account of some critical days in the history of a Chinese village. In providing a very detailed record of the behaviour of a number of peasants in the collectivization movement, it does much to supplement the official reports in the Chinese press and the interpretations of outside observers. Not the least of the book's achievements is the creation in the village boss, Ma Zhiyue, of one of the most significant villains in modern Chinese fiction.

Research on the Japanese electoral process has quite legitimately focused on a broad range of topics. Elections in Japan have been studied from the perspective of national issues and evaluation of their popular appeal, description and analysis of voting behaviour patterns, and identification of the support mobilization efforts and campaign postures of individual candidates. Of the various kinds of electoral contests, those of the House of Representatives and local elections have received the greatest attention.

In September 1963, with the formation of Malaysia, British military establishments situated on either side of the Johore Straits were brought within the compass of a single polity. Within less than two years the Malaysian union was put asunder and those military establishments were divided by national frontiers. Such a situation was viewed with displeasure by the British Government which had supported the establishment of Malaysia in part to avoid such a prospect. To add to the problem of dealing with two governments, there was the complicating factor of the unhappy relationship between them and with it the danger of Britain being caught up in the interplay of differences to the extent of prejudicing the value of her military presence.

Discussion of the minority problem in India has been largely concerned with the relations between the two major communities of Hindu and Muslim, an emphasis justified by the less important part played by non-Muslim minorities in the communal conflict that preceded independence. The Indian Christians repay close study, however, for a number of reasons.