“Rule by man” and “rule by law” are frequently invoked categories in Chinese political discourse past and present, but their theoretical scope and possible interpretation remain highly controversial. Seeking to gain analytical traction on these categories, the author revisits an early Republican debate over whether virtuous men or well-designed institutions were more essential to securing political stability and social transformation in the aftermath of China's 1911 Republican Revolution. Focusing on the work of Liang Qichao, Zhang Shizhao, and their interlocutors, the author shows how “man” and “law” not only play roles in legitimizing one or another form of rule, but also help formulate questions about the interaction between individual effort and institutional influence. Viewed from this theoretical rather than historical angle, the debates become important not only for understanding wider issues in early Republican political discourse, but also for critically interrogating their contemporary variants from Chinese—rather than Western liberal-democratic—perspectives.

Dumont's essay “World Renunciation in Indian Religions,” given as the Frazer lecture at Oxford in 1958, has achieved a considerable reputation; it inspired, for example, J. C. Heesterman's article “Brahmin, Ritual and Renouncer.” Dumont's article is not easy to understand; I feel that the rather naive and hasty general comments: “The renouncer thinks as an individual, and this is the distinctive trait which opposes him to the man-in-the-world and brings him closer to the western thinker” are unfortunate. I also feel that greater historical and linguistic rigor is mandatory. But more important than questions of scholarship and of method, it seems to me that something crucial is missing from Dumont's essay. It is certainly useful to emphasize, as Dumont does, both in this essay and in his more recent Homo Hierarchicus, the structures evident in saṃnyāsa as an institution (“[H]e does not really leave society …”). Even here I could not help but feel that a Marxist approach would have yielded greater theoretical gains. (Cf. the remarkable essays by the late D. D. Kosambi.) I am sorry to see that Dumont has failed to come to terms with renunciation as a psychological event; I shall attempt to focus more closely than has hitherto been done on the psychological characteristics of asceticism.

Pigs have played a central role in the subsistence and culture of China for millennia. The close relationship between pigs and people began when humans gradually domesticated wild pigs over 8,000 years ago. While pigs initially foraged around settlements, population growth led people to pen their pigs, which made them household trash processors and fertilizer producers. Household pigs were in daily contact with people, who bred them to fatten quickly and produce larger litters. Early modern Europeans found Chinese pigs far superior to their own and bred the two to create the breeds now employed in industrial pork production around the world, including China. In recent decades, industrial farms that scientifically control every aspect of pigs’ lives have spread rapidly. Until recently, most Chinese people ate pork only on special occasions; their ability in recent decades to eat it regularly exemplifies China's increasing prosperity. Meanwhile, vast areas of North and South American farmland are now devoted to growing soybeans to feed hundreds of millions of pigs in China, and the methane, manure, and antibiotic resistance they produce creates environmental and health problems on a global scale.

Amid the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations, the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry finds its authority over the forested areas (kawasan hutan) under pressure and continues to pursue strategies to legally maintain the areas within its jurisdiction. Combining insights from legal studies with political economy, this article applies the concept of “political forests” to contemporary contestations and the development of “rule of law” in relation to Indonesia's forested areas. Establishing legal certainty and “rule of law” are widely asserted to be important but never fully achieved. Two cases demonstrate this: the first focuses on the negotiated resolution of overlapping permits in the kawasan hutan between the center and the region in Central Kalimantan Province. The second examines the maneuvers of the Ministry of Forestry to (re)assert its authority over kawasan hutan by classifying palm oil as a tree crop. The article concludes that the widespread quest for certainty and rule of law is quixotic because it ignores the realities of political economy, including social conflict, beneath the veneer of law.

Despite the impact of the Allied occupation (1945–52), Japanese photography in the immediate postwar period was neither “art” nor “documentary” by American definitions. Instead, as the vigorous 1953 debate over “realism” shows, photographers such as Domon Ken and critics such as Tanaka Masao and Watanabe Kosho insisted that photography—at least real photography—was a political practice. It was political not because its aesthetic accomplishments bolstered national prestige in the arts nor because it provided visual evidence for public policies by documenting social conditions. A real photograph, whether of a beauty, a beggar, or a bourgeois, attempted to make manifest a reality often invisible to the naked eye: the reality of power and how power ought to work after Japan's defeat. These photographic practices show us that postwar conditions were so unsettled that the very nature of social reality—what it was, how one should see it, what one could hope for—was still undefined. By participating in the ideological effort to “constitute reality,” photography in Japan sought to establish political, social, and aesthetic norms that were taken for granted elsewhere.

This paper uses the concept of the “rule of law” to compare Qing China and British India. Rather than using the rule of law instrumentally, the paper embeds it in the histories of state power and sovereignty in China and India. Three themes, all framed by the rule of law and the rule of man as oppositional yet paradoxically intertwined notions, organize the paper's comparisons: the role of a discourse of law in simultaneously legitimizing and constraining the political authority of the state; the role of law and legal procedures in shaping and defining society; and the role of law in defining an economic and social order based on contract, property, and rights. A fourth section considers the implications of these findings for the historical trajectories of China and India in the twentieth century. Taking law as an instrument of power and an imagined realm that nonetheless also transcended power and operated outside its ambit, the paper seeks to broaden the history of the “rule of law” beyond Euro-America.

As one means of uniting the people behind the new regime, Japanese government authorities employed a series of ethics (shushin) textbooks in the schools during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and beyond. With the appearance of fully government-produced texts in 1903 and their first revision in 1910, ideological patterns were established which were influential down to the last revision of the series in 1941. The 1910 revision fused old and new socio-ideological patterns and values under the designation of “national morals,” retrospectively known as the “family state” (kazoku kokka) ideology. This was comprised of (1) a German “state organism” theory of state sovereignty, as the intellectual superstructure; (2) Confucian-like familyism, as the ethical base; and (3) ancient Shinto imperial mythology as the religious sanction. Progression of thought in the textbooks placed crucial emphasis on the extension of loyalty from home and parents to nation and emperor through the absolute equation of filial piety and emperor-loyalty. The frondine soldier, however, found difficulty reconciling the call to die for the emperor with his filial obligation to live for his parents. This may be one reason why in successive revisions (especially 1941) the familial approach to national loyalty was downgraded in favor of a direct national-imperial appeal.

In the last three decades, a number of Asian thinkers supportive of, or opposed to, authoritarian rule have developed culture-based theories of democracy that challenge, or buttress, a liberal, “Western” understanding of democratic rule. The most famous expression was the “Asian values” discourse of government-linked intellectuals in Singapore and Malaysia, but there has also been a “political Confucianist” critique of “Western democracy” in China as well as claims that only “Thai-style democracy” is appropriate in Thailand. Less well known is a pro-democratic stance in Asia rooted in the region's major religious traditions. These apparently contradictory discourses have been dialectically related in the post–Cold War era: authoritarian rulers reacted to universalist claims about democracy with assertions of cultural particularism which, in turn, triggered a reaction by Asian democrats who pointed to the liberal character of world religions practiced in the region. While the civilizational critique of “Western” democracy (the origins of which can be traced to Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan) has contributed to democratic decline in the region, there has also been push back by offering an interpretation based on East Asia's major religious traditions to show that “Asian values” are not incompatible with democracy.

In China, the period from 1979 to 1989 was one of thawing and awakening. Moving away from the rigors of the “political winters” in Mao's time, Chinese society revived its diversity and vigor that had been harshly depressed for a long time by a revolutionary-totalitarian regime (Tsou 1986). One of the tremendous changes occurred in the cultural realm. In the mid and late 1980s thousands of Chinese cultural intellectuals, from well-known professors to junior university students, were caught up in a nonofficially initiated cultural movement, which has been widely called the “culture fever” (wenhua re). They engaged with great eagerness in searching for an alternative intellectual framework, derived from modern Western theories in social sciences and humanities, to replace the official ideology. They undertook a passionate reexamination of the virtues, weaknesses, and possibilities of Chinese traditional culture. They warmly debated what should make up the cultural prerequisites for China's modernization and whether or how Chinese traditional culture could be relevant to China's present and future. With the alteration of the structure of ideological alternatives, the legitimacy of the Party's orthodox ideology—Marxism-Leninism and the Thought of Mao Zedong—became marginalized. As many China scholars have pointed out, the legitimacy crisis was one of the most important historically contextual factors to play a key role in the events leading to the 1989 Tiananmen movement (see, for example, Tsou 1991, 277–80; and Ding 1994, 145–48).

In examining post-war south korea, we cannot but be struck by the rapid decrease of farm work and the dizzying increases in urban production and petty-entrepreneurial work over the course of a single generation. It is remarkable, for example, that from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s the farming population declined by almost 50 percent. Indeed, South Korea is an exemplar in the development industry and a popular example in the annals of development studies (Amsden 1989). Sociologists, however, have reached little consensus about the meaning of these structural transformations and the nature of their effects on individual and familial trajectories. In consideration of the reorganization of the labor market, even some of the most basic numbers are debated because analysts do not agree on how to characterize and classify post–Korean War jobs.

The six countries of the association of southeast asian nations, ASEAN (comprising Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand), together constitute only about 1.5 percent of the world economy. In the East Asian context, they tend to be overshadowed by the larger, more industrialized Northeast Asian NIEs (newly industrializing economies), and the recent extraordinary growth of China. But ASEAN is far more important than its economic share might suggest. First, most of the economies are growing much faster than the rest of the world. This means their share of the world economy is rising. It also means that, unless the good performance is due wholly to luck or good fortune, there must be something about these economies, their organization, and their public policies, that other, poorer performing countries could well emulate. Second, ASEAN is more important according to other yardsticks. Its share of the world's population, 6 percent, is four times its share of the economy. Moreover, most of these economies are outwardlooking in orientation, with the result that the region's trade share is about three times its share of the world economy.

Studies of twentieth-century Japanese politics have largely ignored the impressive continuities between the prewar and postwar periods. Most accounts of the Occupation emphasize external American initiatives while dealing with the established Japanese leadership in rather one-dimensional terms. This article focuses on a dynamic group of prewar Japanese bureaucrats who survived the Occupation purge to play a key role in the postwar government's controversial labor policies. As higher civil servants of the Home Ministry (and the Ministry of Welfare after 1938), they had been responsible for formulating a policy toward the interwar labor union movement that mixed social reform and control. The author describes the ways in which these “social bureaucrats” perpetuated themselves and their distinctive approach to social stability in the postwar era. Their influence continues not only in the postwar Ministry of Labor but, more surprisingly, within the highest ranks of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

On China's web, networked actors ranging from state agencies to private Internet users engage in highly active online discourse. Yet as diverse as this discourse may be, political content remains highly regulated, particularly on issues that affect the legitimacy of the ruling party. A prominent issue in this regard has been modern Chinese history, particularly the “national humiliation” that Japan inflicted on China's populace during events like the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. This article asks how the discourse on this particular event is structured on China's web, and what such practices of digital “remembering” can tell us about nationalism in the information age. Combining content analysis and digital tools, the article shows how the mass-media model that the Chinese authorities and various commercial actors apply to the web ultimately reproduces the very logic of “imagined communities” that makes reconciliation of historical disputes in East Asia so protracted.

Since 1978 dramatic changes have occurred in Chinese rural societal policies with respect to the three levels of collective agricultural production; the parameters for family sideline occupations and village markets; and the extension and allocation of private plots. In general, these changes reflected a distinct retreat from the former emphasis on collective production. The author describes the changes that have taken place in rural societal policies and discusses the difficulties that have arisen in implementing the new policies. He also comments on statements by the current leadership used to support and justify new policies.

While all variants of Chinese religion assume the existence of one or more “souls” (ling-hun), very little has been said about what these “souls” are or how the concept varies from one religious tradition to another. This article explores the “soul” in the folk variant of Chinese religion, arguing that while the “soul” may be conceived as multiple in abstract, theoretical discussions, people actually behave as if the “soul” were a single entity. To show what this entity is, the contexts in which the “soul” can be described clearly, i.e., those contexts in which it is separated from the body, are enumerated. The image that emerges of the “soul” indicates that the Chinese concept ling-hun has a dual nature that incorporates the cultural aspect of being human and the individual personality.