The study of the Tibetan religious institution, usually regarded as the province of Orientalists, Sanskritists, and students of comparative religion, has much of value to offer the social scientist. The institution represents a striking demonstration of a cultural force that has defied the dominant cultural patterns of China and India, under whose political authority a major portion of the religion's followers live. Simultaneously, the institution has united in a distinctively Tibetan cultural pattern many disparate groups, such as the Lepcha of Sikkim and to an extent even the revitalized Buddhist Newars of Nepal, whose original cultures resembled that of either their tribal or Hindu neighbors. Into this institution are woven nomadic pastoralists and urban craftsmen, slash-and-burn agriculturalists and people engaged in international trade, world-travellers and serfs bound to the land, brigands and saintly mystics. Rather than Tibet and its monasteries being an isolated geographic and cultural “refuge” area, the study of this key institution reveals a far more dynamic picture.

Mao Tse-tung and his associates in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appear to have a penchant for reducing an important and complex policy or strategy to a relatively simple set of rules that their followers can easily understand and implement without undue deviation. In the military field, for example, Mao laid down, at a very early stage of his revolutionary career, the now well-known rules governing guerrilla warfare which read in part:

… The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.

To extend stable base areas, employ the policy of advancing in waves; pursued by a powerful enemy, employ the policy of circling around.

Arouse the largest numbers of the masses in the shortest possible time and by the best possible methods.

During the mid-1870s, fearing the legal innovations of a “civilized” state, geisha and their employers recast Tokugawa-era practices of civic engagement and educational attainment in the language of enlightenment. Proprietors built schools intended to transform geisha into productive and moral mothers, and geisha donated to local educational institutions and suggested that their own studies would lead to self-sufficiency and freedom. These efforts associated geisha with the values of productivity and enlightenment, although similar strategies proved less successful for prostitutes. However, by the 1880s, both geisha and prostitutes were increasingly denied access to education and excluded from ideals of enlightened femininity that were predicated on marriage. This article considers how a group of unlikely actors deployed the Tokugawa past to become civilized, and in the process promoted ideas about the purpose of women's education that would later be expressed by an icon of Meiji modernity: the “good wife, wise mother.”

Public health in China has become a global concern as a consequence of the outbreak and worldwide spread of COVID-19. This article examines the historical place of China in international and global health. Contrary to prevalent narratives in the history of medicine, China and Chinese historical actors played key roles in this field throughout the twentieth century. Several episodes illustrate this argument: the Qing organization of the International Plague Conference in 1911; the role of China in the work of the interwar League of Nations Health Organization and postwar establishment of the World Health Organization; Cold War medical diplomacy; and Chinese models of primary health care during the 1970s. These case studies together show that Chinese physicians and administrators helped shape concepts and practices of “global health” even before that term rose to prominence in the 1990s, and current events are best understood in the context of this history.

Japanese imperialism relentlessly besieged the Nationalist government of China during the Nanking decade. Chiang Kai-shek, believing that China was not ready to confront Japanese military power and obsessed with the desire to eliminate the Communists, adopted a policy of consistent appeasement toward the.Japanese. This enraged public opinion in urban China, and Zou Tao-fen, a popular journalist, led the cry for resistance to Japan. He and his associates were continually suppressed by the Nanking government; nevertheless, they published several journals in succession, each of which denounced Chiang's policy toward Japan and all of which achieved enormous circulation. Late in 1935 Zou and his followers helped organize the National Salvation Movement, which demanded that Chiang suspend the civil war against the Communists and fight the Japanese. When Chiang Kai-shek, acting under Japanese pressure, arrested Zou and the leaders of the association in 1936, they became national heroes, the legendary “Seven Gentlemen.” Zou's martyrdom and that of his associates transformed their movement into a powerful political force, one that opposed Chiang and increasingly favored the Chinese Communists.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, European colonial powers established economic and political control over most of Southeast Asia. The entrenchment of colonialism affected the lives of coastal merchants as well as those of peasants in interior villages. Yet how indigenous coastal merchants responded to the new situation has been a relatively neglected question in studies of this region. Based on the autobiography of Muhammad Saleh, a self-made Minangkabau merchant, this paper details the world and distinctive outlook of Minangkabau coastal merchants, and how Saleh successfully responded to changing political and economic conditions in West Sumatra in the late nineteenth century. Far from being the story of a helpless native merchant at the mercy of the Dutch governing power and Chinese merchants, the life of Muhammad Saleh reveals the adaptability of a certain sector of the indigenous merchant class in the Dutch East Indies. It also reflects the profound changes taking place within the world of Minangkabau merchants.

During the Second World War, a small group of Vietnamese émigrés in Vichy France drew powerful inspiration from the ideological and material possibilities of the Nazi occupation. Their history reveals the colonial dimensions of a process of collaboration too often cast as solely European. It also sheds light on the transnational migrations and intellectual circulations that made European experiences an important part of Asian wartime political choices. Finally, their myriad trajectories after the war are a powerful example of the ideological reconfigurations and reversals of Asian politics during decolonization.

In 1951, the Chinese delegate to the United Nations proposed to the General Assembly that the Chinese text of the Genocide Convention be revised. The reason for revision, as stated in the Chinese proposal, was that there existed a number of discrepancies between the Chinese text originally prepared by the United Nations Secretariat and the other official texts. The Chinese delegate included in his proposal a new Chinese text for consideration by the General Assembly. Of the proposed changes the most important one related to the Chinese translation of the term “genocide.” The term had originally been translated by the Secretariat as “wei-hai chung-tsu” (lit., “to cause harm or to destroy racial groups”), while the new Chinese text translated the term as “ts'an-hai jen-ch'ün” (lit., “to cause harm to or to destroy human groups in a ruthless manner”). The new translation is closer to the meaning of the term “genocide” which, as defined in Article 2 of the Convention, encompasses any act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The Chinese proposal was adopted by the General Assembly on December 21, 1952, by Resolution 691 (VII).

This comment on Leon Hollerman's stimulating article on international economic controls adopted during the Occupation of Japan focuses on his thesis that a contradiction existed between SCAP's professed policy and its actions. After a brief discussion of some problems of Occupation research and the need to integrate the period more fully into Japanese and American history, the comment attempts not to challenge Hollerman's thesis but to explore it in other spheres of SCAP's activities. It is argued that the inconsistency noted by Hollerman ran through many Occupation reform policies, and that its origins are to be found in the sharp divergence of views among American policy makers in the summer of 1945 concerning pre-war Japan and Japanese militarism, and different assumptions about the extent of change necessary to achieve American objectives in the postwar period.

Unlike edward cameron dimock, Henry David Thoreau never traveled to India, but he imagined Yankee merchant ships transporting ice blocks from Walden Pond to New Orleans and Calcutta, where the pure Walden water would mingle with the sacred water of the Ganges. Less romantically, one can imagine the Walden ice mingling with British gin and tonic in clubs of the East India Company. In our own time, Ed Dimock has brought America and India together in more significant ways. I'm delighted that he is in New Orleans today—honoring him seems a wonderful way of celebrating ourselves on this fiftieth anniversary of the Association for Asian Studies.

Among the railway concessions obtained by Britain from the Chinese government during the battle for concessions in 1898 was one covering a line that would branch off from the Shanghai-Nanking Railway (another British concession) at Soochow, run southwestward to Hangchow, at the head of the Ch'ien-t'ang estuary, and turn southeastward to terminate at the treaty port of Ningpo. Traversing the coastal areas of Kiangsu and Chekiang provinces, a fertile and well-populated region, the economic possibilities of this railway had been long recognized by the British. After an unsuccessful attempt to make it an Anglo-German enterprise in 1897-98, the concession was granted to the British and Chinese Corporation, a British syndicate formed that year by the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and Jardine, Matheson and Company for the furtherance of British railway interest in China. The line was to be financed and constructed by the corporation under the nominal ownership of the Chinese Imperial Railway Administration.

After her disastrous defeat by Japan in the war 1894–95, China turned tardily to introduce such economic reforms as would facilitate her defense. She was pressed by concession hunters of many nationalities, who desired economic and political advantages which she was nearly helpless to withhold. Obliged to look abroad for capital to finance needed railway construction, Chinese leaders at the same time saw their empire's dominions threatened by their potential creditors: by Russia in Manchuria, by France in the South, by Germany in Shantung, by Japan in Fukien, and by England in the Yangtze Valley. That Americans claimed no political accommodations in return for monetary advances was an inducement to the Chinese to seek money in the United States. Furthermore, in the railway field, Americans had gained valuable experience through the construction of their own great transcontinental lines.

This article examines one of the earliest Gujarati travelogues concerning China, written by Damodar Ishwardas—a Hindu resident of Bombay and a clerk for a Sunni Khoja commercial firm—and published in Bombay in 1868. Based on a three-year trip to the port cities of southern China, Ishwardas's text runs close to 400 pages and was patronized by a prominent stratum of Bombay's Gujarati-speaking commercial and bureaucratic elite. The primary intervention in this article is to analyze Ishwardas's account as a neglected relic of vernacular capitalism and vernacular intellectual history. Furthermore, the text presents an opportunity to reexamine the history of the Indian intellectual and mercantile engagement with late Qing China, especially before anticolonial nationalism and pan-Asianism supplied new paradigms for Indian writing on East Asia beginning around 1900. It further points to the many unstudied Indian materials that have yet to be integrated into the study of modern capitalism in the regions from the South China Sea to the western Indian Ocean.

The intensity of cultural investment that South Asian societies have channeled into their languages and literatures, whether gauged in a globally comparative perspective or in absolute terms, is truly remarkable. The intellectual energies poured into linguistic and aesthetic expositions, the assiduous maintenance and temporal depth of written and oral traditions, or the complexity and consequence of sociolinguistic relations, both locally and in interactions of regional diversity, would each suffice on its own to underscore South Asia's marked preoccupation with language. Their combined effect, however, has at times produced a civilizational sphere whose very self-definition rested with foundational claims to achievement in language. Yet despite the richness of this linguistic and literary history (or, perhaps, because of it), relatively few studies combine substantive textual analyses with theoretical agenda adequate to a treatment of the multiplex roles and articulations of specific languages and their interactions in the constitution of particular South Asian societies.

All forms of nationalism profess belief in the uniqueness and value of their particular national quintessence. But not all nationalist sentiments germinate in the decay of a tradition convinced of the cultural superiority and universality of its values. Chinese nationalism did. It developed, moreover, in a context in which the bungling monopoly of power of the alien Manchus as well as foreign aggression constantly tempted its exponents to appeal to racial distinctiveness. And it matured amidst the frustrations of prolonged political and societal chaos surrounding the Republican period, which provoked many nationalists eventually to resurrect the old assumption that a country's greatness should be defined in cultural terms, and to reassert the conviction that Confucian values were cosmic. Tai Chi-t‘ao was such a pioneer nationalist, whose career in politics was spent trying to create national unity through revolution, and whose efforts as an ideologue were directed at defining national unity in terms of Confucian universals. This made him a “conservative revolutionary,” whose commitment to nation found expression alternatively in militant action and in rationalizations for action in the name of traditional values.

One wonders what the general reading public has made of the translations of traditional Chinese fiction which have recently appeared in bookstores, in several instances in paper-bound series usually devoted to up-to-date novels of violence and vampires. Chinese colloquial fiction before the coming of Western influences certainly contains enough of both murder and adultery to give the average reader a sense of literary familiarity; but the thoughtful reader must be puzzled by an undefinable inadequacy, by a feeling of literary promise unfulfilled, to which even the student of Chinese stories and novels must confess. Unconsciously conditioned as are we all to the premises and achievements of European fiction, we cannot fail to weigh this fiction of another culture in the same balance and find it vaguely wanting. In the following pages I intend to isolate several of the factors which contribute to our impression of disappointment upon reading those works which have long been a source of delight to the Chinese.

The Moros are those natives of the Philippines who are Mohammedans. They did not give themselves this name, nor do they use it among themselves; but they recognize it when applied to them by others.

Misnomers are often validated by time or history. The ancient Romans took a small community of the Hellenes for the whole population and called them Greeks. A Mediterranean sailor thought the New World was India and called its people Indians. In extreme western Europe the Christian Iberians, in seven bitter centuries, drove their Mohammedanized Berber cousins back to their native Mauretania, and in the process made Mohammedan a synonym for Moro, or Mauretanian. And so, although the appearance of the Iberians two-fifths of the world around in the extreme fringes of eastern Asia in the 16th Century was a remarkable feat, it was not strange that they called the Mohammedans they found here, Moros.