The complex relationship that developed between Du Yuesheng's Shanghai Green Gang group and the Guomindang regime in the mid-1930s provides useful insights into the nature of the Nanjing government's rule and, in particular, into the manner it exercised power in its Jiangnan bailiwick. Although the Shanghai Green Gang bosses, in particular Du Yuesheng, were coopted by the new Guomindang State, their full integration into the regime's power structure in Shanghai did not occur until after 1932. Despite their participation in Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist coup of 1927, they enjoyed a somewhat unstable relationship with the Guomindang regime in the period 1927–31. The context of their incorporation into the Guomindang's system of power in Shanghai was the new accommodation between the Nanjing Government and the leadership of the Shanghai bourgeoisie following the political and economic crisis of 1932. In other words, the cooption of the Green Gang bosses was part of the new structures of state corporatism that were forged by the Guomindang regime in the wake of the Shanghai Incident.

The first emergence of modern Chinese nationalism is usually placed in the A period just after China's defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. It was in 1895 that the youthful Sun Yat-sen made his initial revolutionary attempt to destroy the Manchu house. In the same year the nationalist-minded interpreter of Western political and social thought, Yen Fu, published a series of important essays which brought him for the first time before the public eye. Something of the spirit of the gathering tide of nationalism could be seen in the forceful editorials of Wang K'ang-nien (1860–1911) in Shih-wu pao (“The Chinese Progress”), a newspaper which he founded in August 1896 with Liang Chʻi-chʻao as chief editor. In one of his editorials (1896) Wang listed the components of China's national sovereignty that had been whittled away by the West and implored his countrymen to view this as the common shame of China's four hundred millions, rather than the shame of one or two persons alone. Wang struck a similar chord in another piece in which he argued that since the interests of all members of society were linked together, people should look upon the whole of society as one family and identify the common interest as their own.

Studies on social and political change tend to emphasize factors promoting change rather than factors maintaining or reenforcing an existing or a “traditional” social and political system. Among the topics studied from this point of view in Ceylon are the “disintegrating village” (Sarkar and Tambiah 1957), the caste system, a “system in transition” (Ryan 1953), the impact of population growth and colonial legislation on “land tenure in Village Ceylon” (Obeyesekere 1966 and Leach 1961), the development of a western political system and the newly “emerging elite” (Singer 1964), and the impact of industrialization and economic development on the Ceylonese community and caste structure and the “emergence of a class of industrial entrepreneurs” (Evers 1964). In all these booklength studies traditional Sinhalese institutions and values are depicted as distintegrating under the pressure of various factors of change and only limited attention is paid to institutions which effectively counteract westernization, modernization, and possibly change. It is perhaps interesting to note that in line with this way of arguing, the renaissance of Buddhism and the emergence of a strong Buddhist Sinhalese nationalism is viewed as a reaction to western influences rather than an autonomous development of Sinhalese society and culture.

The linguistic history of the Chinese of Java sketched here focuses on two periods of creative linguistic effort by the Chinese in the development of varieties of Malay/Indonesian. The first period is from 1880–1910, when the Peranakan Chinese—together with Dutch and Eurasians who were writing in Malay at the time—developed a literary language from Low Malay that was primarily an oral language with many regional and social variants. Soon after this period, the Dutch (and many Eurasians and some Chinese) abandoned Malay as a literary language in preference for Dutch. Only later, in the 1920s and 1930s, did Indonesian nationalists become interested in developing Malay as the national language. The second period of creative linguistic activity among the Peranakan Chinese is the period that followed Indonesian independence in 1945, which is characterized by the departure of the Dutch, the almost complete disappearance of the Dutch and Low Malay languages on Java, and the increased prominence of Javanese as the language of power and politics. During this period Peranakan of the Javanesespeaking areas of Java developed a Javanese-based mixed language (Indonesianized-Javanese) as their home language. The switch from a Malay-based to a Javanese-based language was not a radical change because the Peranakan community had been bilingual for many centuries, but it points out new social uses of languages already in their linguistic repertoire. This last period of linguistic creativity is significant because it is a break in the pattern of acceptance of another's language by the Chinese of Java, and it demonstrates their desire to create a distinctive dialect, a phenomenon reflecting the social reality of an unassimilated minority that has lived in the midst of the Javanese majority for centuries.

Studies of peasant rebellions in China are significant because of the key role such disturbances have played in Chinese history. Merely from the point of view of numbers one is impressed by the many references to agrarian violence in the historical records of the various dynasties. To be sure, usually these outbreaks were short-lived, but at times they reached such serious proportions as to become one of the major causes for the fall of a dynasty. Furthermore, as is well known, two major dynasties, the Han and the Ming, were founded by peasant rebels.

Historians have continued to view the Indian Civil Service (i.e., the British Indian bureaucracy or the “Covenanted Civil Service”) of the late nineteenth century as a highly popular and exclusive career for university-trained men in England. This is one specific aspect of the I.C.S. mydiology which views the nineteenth century British administrators in India as a superior body of highly efficient administrators. The sources, however, do not support the notions of exdusiveness and popularity. Even in the early years of the competition system, inaugurated in 1855, the caliber and educational background of the candidates failed to reach the high expectations of the Civil Service Commissioners. In the years between 1855 and 1874, both the number of nonuniversity candidates and nonuniversity recruits increased steadily. By 1874, nonuniversity men constituted over 74 percent of the competition candidates and approximately 55 percent of the selected recruits. In the same period, the representation of the Great English universities (Oxford and Cambridge) in the competition fell dramatically. Oxbridge students took 60 percent of the available positions in 1858, but only 18 percent of those offered in 1871. A disappointed British aristocracy (i.e., ruling class) became increasingly critical and apprehensive as to the future of the service. The secretary of state for India instituted a new system of recruitment in 1876, lowering the age limit for examination to 19 in hopes that the best students from the public schools would seek admittance. According to eminent spokesmen, such as Benjamin Jowett and Lord Ripon, the Viceroy Salisbury's reforms proved unsuccessful. The better students did not enter die competition, and a majority of the candidates came from unpretentious social and educational backgrounds. Authorities introduced other devices diroughout the remainder of the century to improve recruitment, but none achieved any improvement.

The reasons for the relative unpopularity of the I.C.S. careers were legion and included a complex mixture of the following factors: arrogant criticism voiced by the aristocracy concerning alleged low social origins of the civilian recruits; the general stigma attached to any close connection with India among the British aristocracy; the several and increasing grievances of the civilians, which the aristocratic ruling class did little to ameliorate; the pressures of Indian educated elements for employment in the I.C.S.; the declining value of the rupee; the widening spheres of professional employment in England; and what may be called the “natural” disadvantages of an Indian career.

This essay casts light on the alternative but unrealized futures imagined through the Indian Muslim encounter with Japan in the inter-war period. Echoing other attempts to destabilize the empire-to-nation teleology of Indo-Pakistani independence, the essay uncovers a set of aspirations, actors, and spaces of comparison by which Indian Muslims sought an independent future for Muslim-ruled princely states such as Hyderabad. Through comparison with similar patterns in other Asian princely states, a case study of Urdu writings on Japan shows how East Asia became a place to imagine for Hyderabad a future that never came to fruition. By locating India in a trans-Islamic pattern of engaging Japan, the essay shows how, between the Russo-Japanese War and the Second World War, Japan provided newly globalized intellectuals with a template for empowering Muslim-ruled polities that either never came into existence or were subsumed by Asia's postcolonial nations.

The development of commerce and the rise of a merchant class in Tokugawa Japan have deservedly received considerable attention from both Japanese and Western scholars. In Japan that interest would seem to have been prompted by the problem of the rôle of the pre-Restoration merchant class in the development of the modern capitalist Japanese economy. The study of this problem was characterized by a long controversy in which the Tokugawa merchants were depicted as either “progressive” or “feudalistic,” depending on the historical philosophy of the participants. The argument was conducted at a high level of generality and on both sides within frameworks derived from the leading European (mainly German) schools of economic history. For some time neither side seems to have doubted the applicability of these frameworks to Japan's experience, but the controversy did eventually lead to valuable detailed studies of Tokugawa commerce and to attempts to interpret Japan's economic development in its own terms. Among the first to do this were the members of the so-called “Kyoto School” under Professor E. Honjō.

In recent years, historians associated with the school of Indo-Muslim history at Aligarh Muslim University have developed a persuasive, now widely accepted, view of imperial decline. Satish Chandra and M. Athar Ali have argued that a primary cause of the collapse of the Mughal empire in the early eighteenth century was the rise of intense factionalism among the Mughal nobility. Conflict within this imperial elite (i.e., the body of amirs or mansabdars holding ranks of 1000 zat or above) resulted from a rapid rise to nearly double the number of nobles during the latter portion of the reign of the Emperor Aurangzeb (1658–1707). This growth in the number of nobles was not matched by a corresponding increase in the resources available to pay them and their followers. Consequently, the system of alienation of the land-tax proceeds for salary payments (the jagir system) broke down simply because not enough lands could be found to meet a sharply enhanced demand.

The evolution of China into a modern nation-state has seen few episodes more meaningful than the Taiping Rebellion occurring in the latter half of the last century. In the leader of this rebellion, Hung Hsiu-ch'üan, there is much that is of special interest to the sociologist and the psychiatrist. In the origin of this vast movement can be seen the great importance of individualpsychological factors which elevate a leader and help to precipitate a revolutionary social transformation—for Hung is known to have suffered an acute mental disturbance which undoubtedly moulded his destiny.

The rebellion has been interpreted variously as a peasant uprising against official corruption, a protest against intolerable economic distress, or simply a nationalistic revolt against the Manchu dynasty. Be that as it may, there is general agreement that it was a movement unique in Chinese history because it instituted a radical change in the political system which existed for more than two thousand years, and brought about economic, social, cultural, and religious reforms over the greater part of Central and South China between 1851 and 1864.

In social and political discourse in contemporary Indonesia, the use of hadīth texts serves social and political as well as more narrowly religious ends. Among the purposes of the translation and exegesis of Arabic texts are the definition of an ideal Islamic society and indications of the ways Indonesia falls short of this ideal. In a narrow sense, contemporary translations are examples of what Bernard Lewis (1988:92) calls the “authoritarian and quietist” mode of Muslim political thought because they refrain from calling for an Islamic state. But in the context of Indonesian political culture they approach what he terms the “radical activist” mode, and seek to reshape society, if not the state, in the image of the Qur’ān and hadīth.

The name of Liang Sou-ming is perhaps most familiar in connection with his controversial published lectures of the early 1920's, The Cultures of East and West, and Their Philosophies. It is less well known that Liang had an extensive career in the field of rural reconstruction during the 1930's, that he was one of the prime movers of the political coalition which ultimately became the China Democratic League, and that, more recently, he has been under severe attack by communist thinkers for his continuing rejection of Marxism-Leninism as applied to China. Particularly during the time when he was active in rural reconstruction and in national politics, Liang represented movements which stood, or seemed to stand, as alternatives to both the Kuomintang and the Communist solutions to China's problems. The failure of these movements to prevent antagonistic polarization and civil war in China raises some of the most important problems to which a study of Liang Sou-ming gives entry. Here we shall be concerned primarily with the first of these efforts—rural reconstruction.

Among more than 100,000 prisoners captured by United Nations forces in the Korean War, there was just one Japanese prisoner of war (POW). Matsushita Kazutoshi, Prisoner Number 600,001, had served in the Japanese army in China, both Nationalist and Communist armies in the Chinese Civil War, and in the Chinese People's Volunteers in North Korea, and was to end his military career in the ranks of the South Korean army. Using his forgotten story as a prism, this article explores neglected transborder dimensions of the Korean War. It argues the need to pay closer attention to the historical continuities linking the Asia-Pacific War and Chinese Civil War to the Korean War; it reconsiders the nature of Japan's connections to the conflict in Korea and reconceptualizes the UN POW camps as sites of ongoing Chinese and Korean civil wars.

The treatment of thunder and lightning in traditional Chinese writings demonstrates that many modern intellectuals have exaggerated the Neo-Confucian tendencies toward rational explanations and careful classification. The Chinese literati from traditional through modern times accepted as a self-evident fact the notion that thunder rather than lightning was the destructive force in thunderstorms. Moreover, captivated by popular beliefs that linked thunder with divine powers (Hammond 1992), few Chinese scholars were prepared to take the truly modern step of suggesting that thunder and lightning might be examples of natural forces acting randomly. This misunderstanding was compounded by the literati's indifference toward empirical investigation, which meant that they were unable to question the mistaken assumptions underlying this belief.

Following the october revolution, the Soviet Union regained majority control over the strategically located Chinese Eastern Railway, which ran through Manchuria, by signing two previously unpublished secret agreements: the first with the Beijing government on May 31, 1924, and the second with Zhang Zuolin's government in Manchuria on September 20, 1924. These secret agreements were signed despite the Soviet government's repeated promise that it would never resort to secret diplomacy. The Soviet Union also renewed control over the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway despite a 1919 Soviet manifesto promising that this railway would be turned over to China without compensation. To consolidate Soviet power over this railway, the USSR then signed the January 20, 1925, convention with Japan that recognized Japan's authority over the South Manchurian Railway in return for Japan's acquiescence to full Soviet authority over the Chinese Eastern Railway.

The accession to power of the Kuomintang in 1927–1928 marked the end of the era in which revolutionary strains had been dominant in the party's program and the beginning of one of the most interesting and instructive of the many efforts in history to make a revolution the heir of ancient tradition. The Kuomintang effort was noteworthy for four reasons: (1) the rapidity with which its course was reversed; (2) the magnitude of the gulf between the Confucian political and social system which the Kuomintang sought to restore and the national and social revolution which the party had lately led to victory; (3) the full and uninhibited adherence of Chiang Kai-shek and other leaders not only to the values of the traditional society but to the specific institutions in which these had been embodied; and (4) a well-documented, persistent and selfconscious effort on the part of these leaders to win the competition with the Communists by detailed application in the mid-twentieth century of precisely the means which the Imperial Chinese Government had applied against the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth.

The Taiwanese Communist Party (TCP) was founded in April 1928 as a “Nationality Branch of the Japanese Communist Party” (JCP) by a small group of intellectuals trained in Japan and China. In its three years of existence, the small party confronted enormous difficulties in organizing a communist-led movement on the tightly controlled island. But the failure of the TCP to survive reflected more than just the efficiency of the Japanese police. Among the leadership of Xie Xuehong, Lin Rigao, Su Xin, and others, there was an incessant factionalism that was rooted in their own diverse political origins and in the often contradictory influence of Comintern, JCP, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies. By 1931, the party was disbanded, but, in its two “Political Theses,” the TCP had laid out a revolutionary strategy and a set of political goals that expressed the nationalistic aspirations of many of its leaders.