Liu Shaoqi, the highest-ranking Chinese Communist leader to fall victim to China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was posthumously rehabilitated in spring 1980. His rehabilitation was accompanied by the publication of new materials on his life and career, enabling us to fill in various lacunae and to attempt a more comprehensive assessment of his political import. If the vindication is successful among China's still somewhat skeptical masses, Liu may come to serve as a popular symbol of the folly of spontaneous mass participation in politics and the essential continuity of China's Marxist-Leninist tradition from the 1950s to the 1980s. To China's officialdom, Liu will represent the ultimate integrity of the Party apparatus, an avatar of the self-cultivated rectitude of the “clean official.”

Each upsurge of Hindu-Muslim tension in India brings in its wake scholarly and journalistic articles that highlight the frustrations of Indian Muslims and that raise serious questions about their commitment to India's secular democracy. The philosophical and empirical bases of these accounts are challenged by findings that suggest that region, poverty, illiteracy, and the working-class position of Indian Muslims are more significant in shaping their political outlook than religion. In contrast with the “orientalist” orthodoxy, this study finds the views of Indian Muslims to be diverse, complex, and well-integrated into the political perspectives of the linguistic regions in which they reside.

In reinterpreting traditional history according to the Marxist world view, the question of periodization is vitally important. This article examines the controversies surrounding the periodization and the nature of the new interpretation of traditional history in North Korea. One characteristic that stands out prominently in North Korean historiography is the nationalistic emphasis placed on the uniqueness and the superiority of the Korean civilization unaffected by any external influence. Also noteworthy is the attempt to reinterpret modern history largely in terms of glorifying the immediate forefathers of Kim Il-sŏng at the expense of historical objectivity.

The publication of A Historical Atlas of South Asia, edited by Joseph E. Schwartzberg, represents a major achievement of modern scholarship on South Asia. Its maps and text offer useful perspectives on important geographical and historical relationships in the subcontinent. The geographer, Rhoads Murphey, the archaeologist, Gregory L. Possehl, the economist, Morris D. Morris, and three historians, N. Gerald Barrier, Richard J. Cohen, and John F. Richards present a set of critical essays on the Atlas, emphasizing its many contributions in their fields of interest and identifying subject areas in which they wished there had been more extensive coverage. The symposium is edited and introduced by Frank F. Conlon.

Four recent studies of the modern Chinese economy show how the disciplines of economics and history have produced different judgments about the economic changes of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. These differences are overridden, however, by shared disciplinary concerns with problems of inequality and the growth of the modern state. Economists have demonstrated statistically that regional variations (particularly urban-rural differences), coupled with the size of the Chinese polity, continue to pose many of the same administrative problems for the modern state that they posed during the late empire and in turn have produced some similar strategies for ruling. These enduring problems are located squarely in the order of production in China's agrarian peasant communities and in the logistical problems of distributing what is produced there through an integrated political and economic system.

Korea's historical roles as a cultural intermediary and military buffer between China and Japan have been frequently noted, yet as the exhibition “5,000 Years of Korean Art” makes apparent, Korea is also a nation whose distinctive social history Korea's historical roles as a cultural intermediary and military buffer between China and Japan have been frequently noted, yet as the exhibition “5,000 Years of Korean Art” makes apparent, Korea is also a nation whose distinctive social history fostered an equally distinctive art history. Although Korea's arts have repeatedly incorporated influences emanating from China and elsewhere, these influences have always been modified by the unique historical conditions prevailing on the peninsula. It follows, therefore, that the objects appearing in the exhibit—and in its comprehensively illustrated catalogue—can fruitfully be viewed both as lessons in history and essays in art.