Problems concerning the emergence and geographical diffusion of food production in East Asia have long interested archaeologists and historians. However, attempts to reconstruct the chronology and diffusion routes from the so-called nuclear zones of both North and South China through the Korean peninsula and Japan have been less than convincing. In North China, the crops involved were millet (Setaria italica) and kaoliang (Sorghum vulgare); in South China, rice (Oryza sativa japonica and indica).

The initial reaction of the foreigner upon his first contact with Chinese law and legal system is one of frustration and noncomprehension. Those given to facile generalization are apt to declare either that China is devoid of any serious juridical tradition or that it is still in a primitive state of legal development. But both of these conclusions are clearly false since the Middle Kingdom has a long and complex legal history, and, while certain jural notions of responsibility which characterize Western law have not come into being in the East, their absence is not proof of arrested growth but merely that jural problems are envisaged in another fashion in the Sinitic body politic. The basic fact which the foreigner slowly comes to recognize is that, while the need for justice is constant in any culture, in Chinese society it is attained in a unique fashion.

The world's greatest repository of historical information is to be found in the twenty-five officially approved Chinese standard histories. This collection begins with legendary ages and continues to the beginning of the Tsing or Manchu period. Because only parts of a very few histories have been translated, this collection remains almost completely unavailable, except to expert sinologists. Altogether the histories have well over twenty million characters, the equivalent of at least forty-five million English words. If this series were translated with appropriate notes and printed in the same format as the parts of the first two that have appeared, there would be about 225,000 pages, making about 450 volumes of 500 pages each. This translation is the greatest single task awaiting sinologfcal scholarship today.

Historians have overstated the role of adoption as a channel of upward social mobility for poor but bright young samurai in Tokugawa Japan. An analysis of family histories and public service records of four han shows that adoption helped to preserve both samurai lineages and the political system of daimyo rule. It also created opportunities for younger sons to remain in the elite class under a system of primogeniture. Adoption in the middle and upper (shi) ranks of the class was normally between related families of roughly the same social status. Where status differences were involved, the adopted son usually represented a higher status than the adopting family. The few records available for lower ranks (sotsu) reveal some marriage and adoption with commoners, but none with the higher ranks of the samurai class. In sum, adoption clearly supported the system of hereditary status, but rarely provided opportunities for poor but bright samurai to get ahead in society.

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.

Editor's Note: The essay that follows is based on a conference paper by Dilip K. Basu that has long circulated informally, in the process exercising an unusually high degree of influence for an unpublished commentary. Most notably, some ideas embedded in it have been spread via literary scholar Lydia Liu's engagement with and quoting of the paper in The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Liu 2006), a provocative and much-cited book that calls for a radical rethinking of some of the standard terms and concepts used in the past to refer to the Qing Empire's ties to and conflicts with other political and territorial units. Those familiar with Liu's work will find here an essay that complements some arguments in her book; those who have not read it will be introduced to those ideas for the first time. Beyond this, though, all readers will find a discussion of various ideas and events—visions of China's place in the world, how the story of the Opium War is thought about in different settings, the history of Sinology—shaped by personal as well as scholarly concerns.

The essay's ties to the author's life and associations, which come into play more as the essay proceeds, make it a good fit with the goals of our recently introduced and still evolving “Reflections” genre. In addition, since it revisits critically ideas about China associated with the work of John K. Fairbank, it can be placed well beside some of the essays published in the “Legacies” series launched by Kenneth George, in his time as editor of the journal. And regular attendees of the Association for Asian Studies annual meetings may notice that much that follows resonates with the keynote address by Amitav Ghosh, one of those familiar with Basu's essay in draft form, when that conference was held in Toronto in 2012. The pages that follow are tightly focused on China, but Basu's discussion of “xenology” (a term for the ways that cultures think about those deemed “others,” which has, of course, the same root as the more familiar term “xenophobia”) clearly has implications for widely varied times and places, just as the handling of Fairbank's distinctive role in Chinese studies may bring to mind parallels to the influence that other prominent Western academics from the last century once shaped and via their legacies can continue to shape academic work on other parts of Asia. While focused tightly on China, in other words, it has much to offer readers whose primary interest is not in that country.

Two and a half thousand years ago, long before Lakshman Sena ruled Bengal, there was a monster who came out of its cave every night and ate people. The people could not kill him because they feared him so much. They finally put a plan together and made a mirror. When the monster came out that night and saw his reflection, he was so startled to see another creature as big and powerful as himself that he lashed out at the mirror, shattering the glass. But, each broken piece reflected himself back at him. As he turned, these creatures seemed to surround him. He felt they had multiplied. So in his fear and rage, he hit his head and wept himself to death. The people came back the next morning and saw the splintered glass and the dead monster. Now, how to tell all the other villages the news that they could live without fear? So, the same man who had come up with the scheme to kill the monster was asked to devise a second plan. A big leaf was used to paint the picture of the monster. This image was circulated from village to village, and the man was packed off to tell the story. Wherever he told the tale, they gave him rice and, of course, food to eat. Soon it transformed his livelihood. He no longer cultivated land. Then they wanted new stories, so he went to the Ramayana and Mahabharata and added songs to storytelling and pictures on cloth.

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.

This study presents an overview of attempts by Chinese literati during the twentieth century to articulate a coherent Chinese mythology, primarily based on ancient texts but eventually to some extent drawing from ethnographic materials and folklore as well, and all much beholden to Western examples such as Greek and Norse mythology. This examination of text-based activities sets the stage for an inquiry into a wave of monument building during the Reform Era, much of which has celebrated China's ancient myth, history, and legend. A recent park in Wuhan dedicated to the legendary sage ruler and conqueror of floods, Yu the Great, serves as a case study of how, over the last three decades, old Chinese myths have been inscribed on the new Chinese landscape, and allows exploration of this phenomenon in relation to deeper issues concerning the role of myth in Chinese society, particularly its unexpected marriage with modernity.

The author analyzes some of the empirical data contained in the local archives of farmland in three provinces from Ming-Ch'ing times: these data have heretofore not been used by scholars. The new data show the wide dispersion of land ownership, the absence of big landlords, the high degree of land fragmentation, the slow speed of land accumulation in land-owning families, the low turnover rate of land transactions, the substantial bargaining power of tenants, the high frequency of rental defaults by tenants, the remarkable stability of land value between 1500 and 1760, and the steadily rising trend of land value thereafter. All these findings appear to be inconsistent with the traditional views based on nonempirical historical materials. In view of the new evidence, the land problems in Chinese history will have to be reexamined.

Whether the story about the Ch'ên Kuang-jui, the father of Tripitaka, belongs to the “original” version of the Hsi-yu chi (chapter 9 in modern editions of the novel) is a problem which has occupied the attention of scholars and editors for at least two and a half centuries. If we accept the conclusions of Professor Glen Dudbridge, who has done in recent years the most intensive and impressive examination of the novel's textual history, it would appear that the best textual support is lacking for this segment of the Hsi-yu chi to be considered authentic, as it is not found in the earliest known version of the hundred-chapter novel: the edition published by Shih-tê-t'ang of Chin-ling in 1592. The numerous clashes of details between this version and later ones, most notably the glaring inconsistency found in the later editions which put Ch‘ên Kuang-jui’s assumption of his public career in the thirteenth year of the reign of the T'ang Emperor, T'ai-tsung, the same year when Ch‘ên’s son, Hsiian-tsang, was to have been commissioned to begin his westward journey, further evidence editorial changes and faulty re-arrangements. In the judgment of Dudbridge, chapter nine of the novel may well have been introduced by the late Ming compilerfrom Canton, Chu Ting-ch'ên.

The analysis of change and stability in voting behavior is an important component of contemporary political behavior research. Because of implications for continuity and discontinuity in national political leadership, both stability and change in aggregate electoral choices are of special importance in present-day Japan. Also, because there have been tendencies toward stability in some sectors of the Japanese electorate and great fluidity elsewhere, the nature and sources of consistent and fluid voting behavior are of special interest. In the ensuing discussion, two kinds of basic analysis are presented: one deals with the question of the degree and location of stable voting trends and fluid behavior; the second seeks to identify the sources of both shifting and constant choices.

The interest that the Far East holds for Henry A. Wallace has been concretely manifested in recent years by the trip which he took to eastern Siberia and China in the early summer of 1944, and by a pamphlet which he wrote at about the same time. Less well known is the fact that this interest, at least along certain lines, is of long standing, and has played an important part in shaping one aspect of his social thinking.

During the past several years I had heard vaguely that among the agricultural measures carried out by Mr. Wallace while Secretary of Agriculture (1933–40), those grouped under the title of “The Ever-Normal Granary” had been inspired by ancient Chinese practice. Because of the importance of Wang An-shih (1021–86) in Chinese economic thought, and because of the existence of a considerable literature on Wang in English, I had supposed that it was he who might have stimulated these measures. On writing to Mr. Wallace for confirmation, however, he very kindly replied to me as follows (letter of August 24, 1945):

Prior to the October I, 1965 coup attempt, the leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) controlled the largest Communist organization in any non-Communist state. The Party itself, with some three million members, was the center of a web of mass organizations claiming 15 million members and seeking to mobilize specific segments of the population: workers, peasants, youth, women, students, cultural workers, university teachers, and even village officials. D. N. Aidit, M. H. Lukman and Njoto, the triumvirate that had led the Party since January 1951, were honored by President Sukarno at home and by the major Communist parties abroad. A Djakarta-Peking axis was the base of a vociferous confrontation against the West, and Communist youths spearheaded government-sponsored demonstrations against “neo-colonial” establishments within the country. Meanwhile, several non-Communist politicians and military officers appeared to be plotting their own opening to the left in preparation for a Communist takeover.

The privilege of addressing this audience is one I never expected to have. That it contains so many of my teachers and students, as well as past, present, and perhaps future colleagues, makes the occasion a particularly happy one for me. Something of a summing up seems in order. I shall make it brief.

Ted Robert Gurr's hypotheses on political violence and James C. Scott's on patron-client relations are used to explain why modernizing policies of the Siamese government provoked rebellions in Chiang Mai in 1889 and in Phrae in 1902. The article suggests that the rebellions resulted from Siamese government attempts to increase its revenues and control in the North. In Chiang Mai and Phrae these attempts simultaneously threatened the livelihood and security of ordinary peasants, who formed the base of the rebellions, and groups outside the ranks of ordinary peasants, who provided leadership. Modifications of Gurr's and Scott's work are suggested which can be tested and further refined, or rejected, in the study of other rebellions.

The proliferation of hindu temples now spread over the North American religious landscape appear at first glance to be part of a new process of globalization for Hinduism in an era of transnational religions. South India, long a bastion of temple culture, is simultaneously in the midst of a new boom in temple construction. The present resurgence of “Hinduism” in north India, steeped in ideology, nonetheless is written in terms of the alleged destruction of thousands of temples in north India by Muslim rulers and calls for their reconstruction. “My gods are crying,” writes one “angry” Hindu; “They are demanding restatement in all their original glory” (quoted in Bhattacharya 1991, 127).