Loyalty is at present an agonizing question to many concerned Chinese who face either divisive circumstances or imposition of particular political lines. Few topics could be more relevant than their heritage of loyalty and its implications today. Never a simple matter in politics, loyalty often produced great tensions and even ironical tragedies that filled the pages in Chinese history. As early as the Shang period, according to the ancient legend, an official most loyal to the state was killed by the displeased last king for not being loyal to him. In the more recent period of the Ming, for example, Yü Chien (1398–1457) suffered the same fate. Having defended Peking and thus saved the realm during the emperor's brief captivity, he was later executed by the same emperor who returned and eventually retook the throne. Of all these ironical tragedies—loyal men condemned as disloyal—the case of Yüeh Fei has been highly significant. He was for centuries a much mythologized and even deified symbol of loyalty. With superstitious beliefs swept away by modern waves, many Chinese still identify his image with nationalism, anti-imperialistic stands, and attachment to the fatherland. This essay will analyze the following: pertinent points in Yüeh Fei's career, the neo-Confucian theory and practice of loyalty in political science terms, and his evolving myths in intellectual history with regard to both the elite heritage and the mass heritage.

It is useful to assess the effect of Nanking fiscal policy on the Chinese economy since we are once again in the strategic position of rendering aid and advice to under-developed areas. (Nanking fiscal policies were predominantly repressive of economic development; they were not designed to alleviate the traditional economic burden on the peasant nor to promote the growth of industry.)

The modern Hindi writer Phanishwarnath Renu developed a distinctive “regional” style in his fiction, which Hindi critics have defined in terms of his focus on the way of life of a particular area, the Purnea region of northeastern Bihar. However, Renu's regionalism cannot be separated from his innovations in the language and form of fiction. He employed a variety of dialects and deviated from conventional spelling and grammar, to draw the reader into the rural universe of sound. He included indigenous genres, such as the folk song, folktale, and rural drama, within the frame of the modern novel, thereby creating a new structure for the regional novel.

The second national or parliamentary elections in Burma for the Chamber Deputies were held on April 27, 1956. The Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, the majority coalition party in power since independence, predominantly socialist in orientation, ran against the Communist-led National Unity Front and several right-wing opposition coalitions. The AFPFL and allied vote did not measure up to pre-election predictions but it again overwhelmingly captured control of the Chamber. The AFPFL, whose president was Prime Minister U Nu, conducted a vigorous campaign, running on its record. During the campaign rally U Nu urged his party to acquaint “the people with our activities.” In fact, he went on to say, “we have not been successful in putting across even one tenth of our accomplishments to the people. In the short period of seven or eight years since independence, the AFPFL have made very remarkable achievements in the fields of education, health, national economy, national unity, public morality and rehabilitation, while at the same time we are busily engaged in the suppression of the general insurrection.” Toward the conclusion of his address he spoke of foreign policy. On this issue he scored the opposition parties as “advocates of one bloc or other [which] will plunge Burma into a holocaust of war as in the case of Indo-China and Korea.” He defined the elements of this policy as “not aligning Burma with any power bloc…establishing friendly relations with all countries…pursuing the cause of world peace…a line of action receiving the approbation of even those persons and those countries which had in past criticised our neutral policy and suspected our motives.”

Late eighteenth-century East Asia witnessed similar events with the Qianlong emperor's (r. 1736–96) literary inquisition in China, King Chŏngjo's (r. 1776–1800) fight against heterodoxy in Korea, and Matsudaira Sadanobu's (1759–1829) Ban on Heterodoxy (Igaku no kin, 1790) in Japan. As is well known, Qianlong sought to destroy anti-Manchu writings, whereas Matsudaira sought to impose order by mandating the neo-Confucian orthodoxy of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) in elite education. Chŏngjo's activities are less understood, but equally significant. His own literary inquisition developed around threats Catholicism posed to the centrality of neo-Confucian orthodoxy, but it encompassed wider concerns over heterodox books imported from Qing China (1644–1911). What Matsudaira desired, Chŏngjo took for granted as defining Chosŏn (1392–1910) Korea's historic claim to guard civilization, and his fears over the threats of barbarism intensified as Catholicism and other forms of heterodoxy arrived via Qing China. This study examines Chŏngjo's response to those threats.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, when internal disorder and the impact of Western influences began to work striking changes in the structure of Chinese governmental finance, the revenue of the Ch'ing dynasty may be divided into five main categories. The first and most important was the land tax, which was imposed on most agricultural land throughout the empire and provided the major portion of the funds with which the routine administrative operations of both the central and provincial governments were financed. The second, far smaller in amount than the first, was the grain tribute, which was imposed like the land tax on agricultural land but was levied only in certain areas and was devoted normally to the feeding of the official population of Peking, including the metropolitan garrison, the court, and the metropolitan bureaucracy. The third was the governmental monopoly of the production and distribution of salt. The fourth and fifth categories were respectively the regular (or “native”) customs and certain miscellaneous indirect taxes.

Traditionally, Chinese dynasties were characterized by the maintenance of a highly centralized bureaucracy whose prime objective was the preservation of central control over all important aspects of national life. The degree of effectiveness of the bureaucracy determined the degree of central power, the diminution and loss of which invariably led to the weakening and downfall of a dynasty. Since the economy of China was based on intensive farming, regulation of water, either for the positive purpose of irrigation or the Negative purpose of flood prevention, remained throughout Chinese history a matter of utmost importance and a principal concern of the state. The success or failure of a dynasty in handling this vital problem reflected the effectiveness of its bureaucracy, which in turn determined the fate of the dynasty itself.

Building on current research regarding constitutional migration, this article shows how constitutional provisions protecting religious freedom (“subject to public order”) arrived in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, not via colonial British or traditional Islamic sources—both explicitly rejected—but via deliberate constitutional borrowing from “anti-colonial” precursors in Ireland and, especially, India. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau's notion of “empty signifiers,” the article highlights the shifting political circumstances that transformed the meaning of Pakistan's borrowed constitutional provisions. Even as core texts guaranteeing an individual's right to peaceful religious practice were imported, political, legal, and conceptual modulations ensured that specific forms of peaceful religious practice were refashioned as a source of religious provocation and, therein, public disorder. Far from protecting religious freedom, this repurposing of imported constitutional clauses tied to “the politics of public order” underpinned the formal legal restriction of an otherwise explicit right.

This essay takes issue with the idea that the trade in remittance letters (qiaopi 侨批) was a modern form of “transnational capitalism” that relied on trust in a system of impersonal rules rather than “a distinctive form of ‘Chinese capitalism’” dependent on cultural or familial affinities, and that qiaopi traders used instrumental economic practices to transnationalize their businesses. The essay aims to identify alternatives to modern capitalism that are, at the same time, robustly cosmopolitan, and for which modernity is multiple rather than modular. Ethnicity and identity matter greatly in diasporic Chinese business culture, as sources of entrepreneurial resilience and creativity, especially in the early stages of diaspora formation. Far from forming an obstacle to economic growth and technological innovation, business familism, social networks, and their associated cultural values can be shown, at least in some periods and contexts, to have assisted economic development in Chinese societies at home and abroad, by enabling social mobility, furthering family interests, building partnerships, facilitating contracts, and promoting other practices proper to a modern market economy.

Biography in the People's Republic of China is not exempt from the ubiquitous slogan: “politics in command.” It is a highly purposeful craft, but rarely, if ever, is its primary purpose to portray an individual personality for his own sake, to inform objectively, or to entertain. The aim, instead, is to convince, enshrine, or inspire. Biography is didactic, hagiolatrous, or propagandistic. It is but one among many methods used in Communist China to support Marxist-Leninist views of history, provide sanction for the leaders of the Chinese Communist party, and fire enthusiasm for the acceptance and fulfillment of party programs. The accuracy, art, treatment of character, and probably even the quantity of biography published are limited by party preconceptions and enforced through party control over all media of information.

The problem of the relation of the individual to society and to the state was central to Gandhi's political thought and action. It has been said that Gandhi's “deliberate onslaught on the creed of individualism as it has been in operation during the last two or three centuries gave it a mortal blow.” How are statements like this to be reconciled with the fact that Gandhi appealed to individual conviction in his campaigns?

In analyzing this problem we should look at the main concepts of social and political philosophy which had an impact on Gandhi's life and thought. Indian philosophy is of special importance in this context and therefore a major part of this paper is devoted to the discussion of Indian concepts and ideas as they were understood and interpreted by Gandhi. Much of Gandhi's thought and action can be explained only in terms of the historical situation and the social setting of his day and age. But Gandhi's campaigns and his contribution to the Indian freedom movement have been described by many authors and therefore no attempt is made in this paper to outline the course of events.

Our Association has met this year in Philadelphia, a city of historic memories, an appropriate place in which to contemplate anniversaries. There are several which come to mind.

First, the Association for Asian Studies is itself twenty years old this spring, a fact in which we can all take pride; for we have grown as a professional society from a mere handful of scholars in 1948 to an organization of over 4000 members today.

Next there is Japan, which in its modern incarnation is one hundred years old this year—a memorable national and even international event.

And finally, I am put in mind by our presence in Philadelphia, that by a bit of stretching we can think of the United States as being roughly 200 years old. (In fact it was just 200 years ago that the citizens of this city banded together to prevent imports from Britain. And in 8 more years we shall be able to celebrate the bicentennial of the moment when Philadelphia's Liberty Bell rang out the news of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.)

The revolution that erupted in China in 1911 came as a shock to Japan. The Japanese had taken advantage of the opportunity created by their victory over Russia in 1905 to annex Korea and extend their influence into China. Their chief aim was to use the Korean peninsula as a base for an advance into Manchuria. Encouraged by various interests acquired through the Treaty of Portsmouth, Japan already had begun to exercise some control in Manchuria.

The great Chinese philosopher Ch'eng Hao (1032–1085) once set forth in a A memorial to the throne a three-point training program for statesmen. His formula for success is as valid today as it was for the Sung emperors nearly a thousand

years ago:

understand the principles taught in books;

find out the right and wrong in history;

know how to deal with men;

—more briefly, knowledge and wisdom.

The study of chinese religions is a lively and growing field. Its major bibliographer in the West, Laurence G. Thompson, comments that in revising his bibliography of Western-language publications through 1980 to include those published in the following ten years, the index of various types of contributors increased by over 1,100 names, and the number of research categories grew from eighty-four to one hundred and three (Thompson 1985, 1993). Anna Seidel of the École Françhise d'Extrême-Orient, Section de Kyoto, published in 1990 a discussion and bibliography of Taoist studies in the West from 1950 to 1990 that for this topic alone is 124 pages long (Seidel 1989–90). New documents, from Shang oracle bones to twentieth-century spirit-writing texts, are being discovered, the Taoist canon has been systematically surveyed for the first time, and fresh interpretations

Sites, here the eighth-century Buddhist shrine Borobudur and other remains of the Hindu-Buddhist past located in colonial (predominantly Islamic) Java, are in this article our analytical tool to provide insight into the local and transnational dimensions of heritage politics and processes of in- and exclusion in Asia and Europe around 1900. Because we recognize these “sites” as centers of multiple historical, political, and moral spaces that transgress state boundaries, we take this concept beyond the nation-state-centered lieu de mémoire. By exploring how site-related objects traveled from temple ruins in Java to places elsewhere in the world (here: Siam, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain) and back to Java, we show the transformation of heritage engagements around 1900 at multiple locations, and we make clear why, despite professionalizing state-centered heritage politics, state control was limited. We argue that the mechanisms of exchange and reciprocal interdependence, as theorized by Marcel Mauss, are crucial to understand the moral and economic engagements that define the problem of heritage, at local and transnational levels.

Rural settlement patterns on the island of Java conform in general type to the dominant mode throughout the rest of monsoon Asia: a nucleated residential unit surrounded by the lands cultivated by the residents, forming a community with political, economic, and religious dimensions. The dominant form of agriculture depends upon irrigated lands planted primarily with rice. In upland areas, where the topography has limited the spread of the irrigated land, the residential units are relatively small and isolated, and a characteristic village organization has developed in which the daily patterns of interaction can encompass the entire village. The much larger part of Java's population, however, lives in lowland areas where gentle, even gradients, plentiful sources of water, and the seasonal rains have permitted the establishment of widespread systems of irrigation. Here the residential units have expanded and coalesced into large blocks and strips of several square miles, alternating with large uninterrupted areas of irrigated land. Under these conditions, village units have expanded far beyond the daily interaction group, and vaguely denned neighborhoods (barisan or lingkungan) have developed within which most of the daily patterns of mutual interest and aid take place. Within the area studied, the average population of the lowland rural village is roughly 600, with a range from 200 to 2000. The average area encompassed by each village is roughly a quarter square mile, with a range approximately proportional to the population.

This paper examines the causes and processes of a popular tax-resistance movement by adopting a multidimensional approach that considers dynamic rural power relations, popular responses to social and economic changes, and cultural practices that both united and divided rural communities. Popular rebellions in 1862 reflected not only the social and economic distress that the peasantry experienced in everyday life but also the inability of the dynastic structure to accommodate the social, political, and economic changes that were occurring in the nineteenth century. This work pays close attention to the particular historical and cultural context of 1862 Korea, such as various rural conditions and the workings of dynastic institutions at the local level, and discovers that different patterns of popular protest grew out of the competition, division, and conflict that had developed along class, social status, village community, and political lines.

The expansion of political participation is generally recognized as an essential aspect of modernization. China's twentieth-century experience certainly fits this model. Yet we are far from understanding the processes by which participation expanded in China—especially in the early twentieth century, when complex patterns of social change and institutional reform brought new groups to political awareness. Who comprised the newly participant strata in the first decades of this century? How large and powerful were they? How did their members participate? Who were their leaders?