Marriage migration has developed as a discursive field and a new direction of governing practices in the relations of post-Mao China with Russia and Vietnam. This article examines China's developing governing regime for international marriages from the perspective of its sovereign concerns related to border stability, population management, and national security. These concerns are considered through the analysis of material and affective processes informing and shaping the regulations and representations of marriage migration to China. This discussion not only shows how the Chinese state revises its administrative and legal terms of international marriage, but also highlights the historical, racialized, and gendered forces that shape the process. The regulatory framework of marriage migration is informed by the shifting structures of feeling shaping the contours of belonging in Chinese society. These intersecting spheres of state affective and regulatory practices signal new relations of power and inequality coalescing in China's relations with its neighbors.

The political, economic and social changes experienced by China over the past decade have been mirrored by transformations in the literary realm. Writers, editors, critics and readers have contended with the acceleration of commercialisation, the rise of the Internet, and the Communist Party's subtly changing attitude to creative freedom. This essay examines the creative responses of three critically acclaimed generations of novelists – born between the 1950s and 1980s – to this new climate. It considers the way in which writers have become entrepreneurs, managing their own personality cults over the Internet and through media spin. It discusses widespread corruption in literary reviewing; the weaknesses in editorial standards that affect the work of even the most mature voices writing today; and the fluid way in which novelists often abandon fiction for other professions or expressive forms, such as film. Finally, it considers the limits of literary freedom in China's one-party cultural system.

The Political Histories of Western Europe and the United States over the past three hundred years illustrate powerfully how the evolution of fully functioning liberal democratic politics has been linked intimately to the presence of vigorous thinkers and activists dedicated to the pursuit of a liberal polity. The social contract theory of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the constitutionalism of Baron Charles de Montesquieu, the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith, and the reflections of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton on the challenges of competitive politics all helped to lay the groundwork for the achievement of liberal democratic politics in France, England, and the United States. Particular strains of political thought found in these and other thinkers help to account for the similarities and differences among the world's historic experiments in bourgeois democracy. French liberalism, which had no Thomas Hobbes seeking eloquently to defend monarchical absolutism, ultimately could not accommodate royal prerogative to democratic politics; and, lacking an Adam Smith to assert the primacy of economic laissez-faire, it showed no fundamental antipathy to the centralized state in its political practice. A more dramatic contrast is afforded by the fragile and short-lived democracy of Weimar Germany, nurtured in soil where G. W. F. Hegel's organic conception of the state and the doctrines of state sovereignty that legitimated the regime of Otto von Bismarck overwhelmed the contributions of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt to liberal theory. In the final analysis, to be sure, the presence or absence of absolutism and its defenders, of laissez-faire economics and its rationalizers is attributable to other factors deep in the history and culture of each society. Yet, in all these cases, the historical relationship between thought and politics is clear and striking.

A sense of grievance over a “lost territory” may come to dominate the internal and external politics of a country. France's mourning over Alsace-Lorraine from 1870 to 1918, West German sensitiveness over the Oder-Neisser line in the 1950s and 60s, the Arab obsession with Israel—all are examples of states and peoples who will not forget the lands that have been torn from them. Pakistan is unique as a country with a sense of bitterness and grievance for territories that have never formed part of its polity. The concern with Kashmir needs no discussion here; it is not difficult to understand why Pakistanis believe they have been wronged. But this major, this massive, grievance leads to the perpetuation of a legend of injustice regarding the frontier line in the Punjab. Pakistanis believe that the Indian occupation of Kashmir was made possible by the allocation of Gurdaspur District to India, which afforded access to the state. Inasmuch as Gurdaspur appeared in the Second Schedule of the Indian Independence Act as part of the territories of the new West Punjab (Pakistan), being a district with a majority—even if a small majority—of Muslim inhabitants, there appears to be no good reason why it should have been given to India under the decision of Sir Cyril Radcliffe.

Of all the political personalities in the era between 1928 and 1949, Tu Yuehsheng was perhaps the most colorful, certainly the most unusual. Born into the lowest ranks of society, he rose to dazzling heights of power and exercised a political influence no gang leader had ever known before. The intimate relationship between Tu and the Kuomintang regime was a most unusual phenomenon in Chinese politics and deserves careful attention. Even though documentary materials are scarce by the very nature of the case, an investigation may shed important light on contemporary political mechanisms.

The problem of Buddhist councils has haunted western Buddhological research through almost all of its last one hundred years. At once, we see that a twopronged approach is necessary if we are to ever have any hope of arriving at a resolution. The first of these involves a consideration of the relationship between the Vinaya council accounts and the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, this latter text preserved in the Sūtra Piṭakas of the various schools and providing a detailed account of [1] the Buddha's travels immediately prior to his death, [2] the actual passing into parinirvāṇa, and [3] the funeral arrangements. Here the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra account concludes, but the details which are associated with the next allegedly historical events, namely, the council narratives, are found in the Skandhakas of the various Vinayas. Scholars began to question why the council proceedings, logically following the Buddha's death and funeral, are preserved in a separate text.

This essay is a first attempt at examining the origins and development of Chinese complaint systems before 1900, so as to understand the nature and character of this institution in historical perspective. The essay argues that the Chinese complaint system originated as an informal system in the pre-Han period and developed gradually from the late Han to the Sui. The Tang first institutionalized such a system and distinguished three major forms of complaints: direct, jumping, and gradual appeals. Subsequent states generally followed the Tang model but also made significant changes. Chinese rulers, deeply influenced by the Confucian concept of minben (people as the foundation of the state) and by notions of heaven–human interaction (tianren ganying), tended to accept illegal appeals no matter how annoying they were for fear that any grievance might prompt heavenly punishments, while complainants regarded their appeals as a natural right no matter how useless they were. In this way, the complaint system become a hot potato for rulers that was too hot to hold but too valuable to drop.

This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group before the construction of the “Uyghur” identity. In the absence of a national history, separate histories of local heroes were linked together through custom anthology production and networked travel to shrines, yielding a modular historical tradition that accommodated local interests in regional narratives. Central to the operation of this system were community authorship in the manuscript tradition, the creation of a new genre for local history, and the publicly recorded circulation of pilgrims who heard performances of historical texts. This constellation of phenomena underpinned an alternative type of imagined community: a reasonably homogeneous, regional, writing-facilitated identity system flourishing in a nonmodern context.

The growth of the Indian National Congress traditionally has been discussed in terms of the spread of nationalism as a sentiment. The development of the Congress movement in Punjab, however, suggests it may owe less to nationalism than to specific changes within the provincial political systems. Communal politics denied to the Congress much Hindu support in Punjab until the late 1930's. It was not until efforts to organize a Hindu communal party ceased and one faction within the Congress sought Hindu communal support that a large proportion of the Punjabi Hindu community joined the Congress movement.

The first part of this project was published in the February 1995 issue of this journal, with the title “Early Religious Traditions from the Neolithic through the Han (circa. 4000 b.c.e.-220 c.e.).” It included essays by Constance A. Cook, Donald Harper, David N. Keightley and Edward L. Shaughnessy. The introduction to Part I noted the rapid growth of studies of Chinese religious traditions and discussed some of the continuities between earlier and later practices and beliefs. It emphasized the importance of a knowledge of religious activities for our understanding of Chinese culture. Part II continues the story with surveys of recent studies of traditions that are still active today. As was the case for Part I, the present essays are focussed primarily on Western language studies, though some work by Chinese and Japanese scholars is also discussed. The reason for this focus is that this project is intended to introduce this broad field of study to nonspecialists in the West, taking into account recent materials published through 1994.

On September 26, 1792, George Lord Viscount Macartney, the first British envoy ever to reach China, sailed from Portsmouth with a commission as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China. The aims of the mission were to put Sino-British relations upon a treaty basis, redress various grievances in the existing commercial arrangements at Canton, open new ports to trade in north and central China, and, if possible, establish a permanent legation in China. As the objectives of the embassy were important and as it would establish precedents for future British missions to China, the government had planned it with care, and had placed at its head an especially competent diplomat and colonial administrator. The British were well aware that the Chinese considered foreign embassies as tribute-bearing missions and generally, if not always, demanded that the ambassador perform the kotow before the Emperor.

This paper traces a side story to the well-known tale of the poligar rebel Kattabomman, who was hanged in 1799 for his refusal to accept the authority of the emerging colonial state in south India. Specifically, it draws on the story of seventy-three poligars who survived the brutal Poligar Wars and were transported to Penang in Southeast Asia in 1801, an episode that highlights the workings of the coercive power and moral authority of the new regime in early colonial India. The paper illustrates the variety of forms that resistance to the regime took and the extent to which the colonial state in south Asia strengthened and was strengthened by the rising British Empire across the Indian Ocean. The poligars' lives in exile are reconstructed as a story of their struggle for status and dignity in a settlement where they were initially lumped together with convicts brought there from Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay.

This article explores the representation of chigo—adolescent males attached to Buddhist temples or aristocratic households who were educated, fed, and housed in exchange for personal, including sexual, services—in medieval Japan. The author discusses how chigo were depicted in historical records, in contemporary short fictional narratives, and in a “Chinese” legend invented by Japanese Tendai monks; the chigo are also compared to the Tang consort Yang Guifei. Fictional and real chigo tend to fall victim to violence, and it is argued that the chigo functions as a surrogate sacrificial victim, a cultural figure whose role is outlined most prominently in the works of René Girard.

According to standard reference works, the Meiji leader Saigō Takamori committed ritual suicide in 1877. A close reading of primary sources, however, reveals that Saigō could not have killed himself as commonly described; instead, he was crippled by a bullet wound and beheaded by his followers. Saigō's suicide became an established part of Japanese history only in the early 1900s, with the rise of bushidō as a national ideology. By contrast, in the 1870s and 1880s, the story of Saigō's suicide was just one of many fantastic accounts of his demise, which also included legends that he ascended to Mars or escaped to Russia. Remarkably, historians have treated Saigō's suicide as an unproblematic account of his death, rather than as a legend codified some four decades later. This essay links the story of Saigō's suicide to the rise of modern Japanese nationalism, and examines other Saigō legends as counternarratives for modern Japan.

In 1933 and 1934, the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway Company and the government of the newly formed nation-state, Manchukuo, sponsored a Manchuria pavilion on the Japanese exhibition grounds of Chicago's A Century of Progress World Exposition. Though small, this pavilion bore immense political weight. Opening a year after the Japanese Kwantung Army declared the formation of the new state in Northeast Asia and just three months after the Japanese delegation announced Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Manchuria exhibit demonstrates how Japanese military and corporate interests attempted to sway international public opinion on the cultural world stage. This paper examines the ways in which the Manchuria displays functioned during this crucial diplomatic moment and how the visually dazzling American exhibit, the Golden Temple of Jehol, upset Japanese claims of dominance in the region.

This article argues that the establishment of anatomo-power in China preceded and set the foundation for biopower. Anatomo-power is disciplinary power over live bodies in the military, schools, and hospitals, but also the power of the medical profession over dead bodies to investigate pathology through dissection. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese conceptions of political anatomy were used to advocate anatomical knowledge, and an anatomy law in 1913 made routinized dissection possible. Chinese society began to be transformed as old taboos were broken, and thousands of new terms allowed the scientific worldview to take root among professionals and the public. Anatomical researchers addressed both microscopic pathology to cure individuals and macroscopic questions that grouped individuals into a population to be managed, or that sought data to tell new narratives about the origins and future of humanity—a new political anatomy based on the practice of human dissection.

Writers in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) apparently experienced writing in weaving terms. Such an imaginaire of writing as weaving was probably fully manifested in the first or second century BCE and crystallized in the coining of literary terminologies such as classics (jing), weft-writings (weishu), and literature/texts (wen). Situating the Huainanzi and its intertextual writing practice within this imaginaire enables us to reassess both the Huainanzi's widespread dismissal as a miscellaneous, encyclopedic behemoth in the first half of the twentieth century and its reappreciation over the last few decades. According to the Huainanzi's self-depictions, Liu An and his erudite courtiers apparently created the scripture in such an intertextual way in order to textually mimic the process of weaving. Since the Huainanzi commonly associates weaving with the Way's connective powers, the text's extraordinary design might be the result of a literary attempt to create an efficacious, textual artifact that embodies the Way by incorporating the act of weaving in its textual design.

It is a commonplace that the great majority of the world's inhabitants are concentrated within a few demographic areas covering only a small portion of the surface of the earth. Of these, perhaps only three are of a first order of magnitude, while easily the greatest of these, the agglomeration in Monsoon Asia, may contain as much as 50 per cent and certainly more than 40 per cent of the world's population. Within this crescent of favored littorals and archipelagoes, certain areas – Japan, China, Java, India, and Tonkin in particular – demonstrate the most delicate and potentially disastrous balance between the physical endowment of an area and the ability of men to win a livelihood and to increase their numbers.