1958 was the year of collapse for democratic constitutionalism in the new countries. Although some, following the example of Latin America, had already abandoned their brave new experiments, hopes were still high for the rest. The major defectors from the democratic ranks in 1958 were Pakistan, Burma, and the Sudan, in all three of which the military took over, but other countries underwent similar experiences which emphasized the nature and extent of the crisis. In Indonesia the existing regime was pushed further toward an unstable combination of disintegration and authoritarian rule by the proclamation in Sumatra of a provisional revolutionary government, claiming to supplant the government headed by President Sukarno. In Thailand, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who had replaced Field Marshal Pibul Song-gram, reasserted and tightened his dictatorial control. In the Middle East the United Arab Republic was established under the firm authoritarian rule of Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser; Iraq was taken over by General Abdul Karim Kassim; and Lebanon and Jordan were both threatened by upheavals. In Africa south of the Sahara the military had not yet come to prominence but Nkrumah and his Convention People's Party tightened their grip on Ghana; and Guinea, voting its independence from France, set up an explicit one-party system under the leadership of Sékou Touré.

The Korean Communists face a troublesome problem in recording their hiswtory. The first years of the Korean Communist movement are now regarded as a gigantic skeleton in the closet. Official party publications brush over them in a few paragraphs. Individual Communist leaders are almost all identified as petty bourgeois intellectuals, sectarians, deviationists, or factional wreckers. The Communist movement itself is recorded as a “failure” and a “disgrace” by contemporary Kim Il-sŏngists. When praise is meted out, it generally goes to the broader nationalist movement, and the only truly “good guys” turn out to be “the people.” Only when the omniscient Kim arrives on the scene in 1931, do Korean Communist historians begin to panegyrize their past.

The Nationalist unification of China was nominally completed on December 29, 1928. On that day Manchuria, under the leadership of Chang Hsüeh-liang, accepted and hoisted the Revolutionary flag. Historians have tended to emphasize the role of nationalism in the union of the Three Eastern Provinces with the Kuomintang domain after the death of Chang Tso-lin on June 4, 1928. According to the general view, Chang Hsüeh-liang, having grown up in the period of the May Fourth Movement, shared many of the national aspirations of the younger generation, and desired to stop civil warfare in China and assist the Kuomintang in the policy of unification. Moreover, he is represented as being violently hostile to Japan, suspicious of the Japanese in the killing of his father, and determined to put forth every effort to bring Manchuria and Nationalist China together, so that the unified nation could resist the ambitions of its imperialistic neighbor. Japan, under the “positive policy” of the Tanaka ministry, is pictured as attempting to keep the Three Eastern Provinces separate from the Nationalist South; to delay, if not halt, an eventual union.

To be forced to make a choice of nationality following a revolutionary upheaval is a trying experience. It becomes traumatic when one is, or feels oneself to be, part of the “privileged class” in a plural society in which the “natives” are about to achieve supreme political power. The Eurasians of Indonesia are a group of mixed descent closely tied to the land of their birth, but culturally and politically oriented to a society thousands of miles away along the shores of the North Sea. F. H. de Hoog, charismatic chairman of the powerful Eurasian League from 1928 to 1939, referred to the Eurasians as the “vanguard” of the Dutch population in the Netherlands. He emphasized that Eurasians were imbued with Dutch culture and would stand or fall with Dutch rule.1 In 1949, the “vanguard” was cut off.

The William Elliot Griffis Collection in the Rutgers University Library, New Brunswick, New Jersey, embraces material on Japan, Korea, and China. It is contained in twenty-nine legal-size manuscript file cases: twenty relate to Japan; four to Korea; three to China; and one contains miscellaneous data. The collection is now in shelf order and the following is a summary of the arrangement of the Griffis papers.

In the thirty years since the appearance of K. S. Latourette's A History of Christian Missions in China the published materials in this vast field have been accumulating at a good pace, and an increasing number of mission-society archives have been opened to research. However, very little such research has been done. While Professor Latourette's work provides a matchless foundation for further contributions, few aspects of the subject have received thorough monographic treatment.