“For forty years,” Sun Yat-sen said in March 1925 in the Tsungli's Will, “I have devoted myself to the cause of the people's revolution with but one end in view, the elevation of China to a position of freedom and equality among the nation.” “But,” he lamented, “the work of the Revolution is not yet done.” For forty years since, Chiang Kai-shek has been at the very center of the Chinese political limelight. During half of this period, from 1928 to 1949, he was to a remarkable degree China itself. But like Sun, he has also failed to consummate the Kuomintang movement and the work of the revolution.

The non-cooperation movement of 1920–1922 was a significant landmark in the development of nation-wide political activities by the Indian National Congress. At the same time, because it took place within very different regional contexts, the nature of the movement and the response which it provoked derived a good deal from regional ingredients. In the United Provinces (the present day Uttar Pradesh), an agricultural region with a largely rural population, it was the agrarian system which molded the character of the non-cooperation and “anti-non-cooperation” movements. Non-cooperation there coincided with unrest among the peasantry and, for a time at least, it assumed the appearance of a revolutionary upsurge. The British Government of the province, therefore, had to meet this revolutionary movement as well as the Congress-led political movement. The Government turned to the landed aristocracy, whose influence in the countryside it had depended upon in the past, to provide the basis for an anti-revolutionary front. Initially, then, the non-cooperation movement served to refurbish the province's traditional landlord-based political system. It went further, however; and at one stage it appeared likely that the moderate-nationalist politicians, usually critical of the government, would be prepared to ally themselves with both the government and the landlords because of their concern over the dangers of revolution within the province. “Anti-non-cooperation,” it seemed, might create a new use for traditional methods of political control, as well as the source of important new lines of political development in the province. It is the creation of this situation, and its working out within the framework of the Government's efforts to counter both revolution and disorder, which is traced here.

Put simply, hair and clothing make a difference. To phrase the matter another way, the presence of these material and visual forms, or alternatively their absence from the human body, embodies potent cultural meanings and has concrete effects in the social world. To be sure, more-hidden body parts may lurk below the surface that signal our membership in certain social categories—gender, to give a prime example. In practical terms, however, when we see strangers walking toward us from a distance, we are in the habit of assuming they are a man or a woman not because we have observed their genitalia (it would be strange indeed if that were the case) but rather because we recognize and extract meaning from a more readily visible set of identity markers—primarily clothing-related (sartorial) and hair-related (tonsorial)—whose semiotic rules must be learned culturally and which vary across space and time.

During the years 1851 to 1864 a central feature of the Chinese political scene was the Taiping rebellion. This was a peasant movement led by disappointed candidates in the official examinations and unlettered men of native military and organizational genius who capitalized upon the economic distress of the time and the declining ability of the Manchu rulers to take the principal cities of the Yangtze valley and at one point to threaten Peking itself. The rebels maintained their capital in Nanking from 1853 until 1864. From this point they waged intermittent campaigns in the provinces from Hunan and Hupeh east to the sea and thus denied the ruling dynasty the rich lower-Yangtze revenue for more than a decade. The rebellion was active at one time or another in fourteen of the eighteen provinces of the empire. Antidynastic societies not part of the Taiping movement used the embarrassment of the dynasty to disrupt areas which the Taipings did not reach. From the military point of view the Ch'ing dynasty was probably threatened most seriously in 1853 when the rebels got to within thirty miles of Tientsin. But if the Taiping troops were never again able to invade Chihli, neither were the imperial soldiers capable of regaining the Yangtze basin. After 1853 it required eleven years of punitive expeditions, the training of a new type of provincial militia, and incidental foreign aid to put down the rebellion.

This article explores the contradictory history of lower castes converting out of Hinduism yet not out of lowliness or casteism in early twentieth-century Panjab. It begins by contextualizing what B. R. Ambedkar's undelivered 1936 Lahore speech on annihilating caste might have meant to an audience of largely landless agricultural laborers. Next it examines the changing constellation of caste names and occupational designations for these groups amid the emergence of the Ad Dharm movement and its struggle to impart equality, dignity, and community to Panjabi Dalits. To situate this new sense of identity in the context of actual labor practices, the article then analyzes the fraught relationship between landholding cultivators and landless laborers working side-by-side while continuing to be separate and unequal. That a large proportion of lower castes could adopt religions other than Hinduism or even start their own and yet remain excluded and exploited reveals the limits of a politics centered on conversion, as well as a different horizon for emancipation.

One hundred years ago the patient efforts of Townsend Harris bore fruit and on July 4, 1859, Japan opened her doors to traders from the West. It was a small beginning, for Consul Harris' treaty allowed foreigners to live and trade at only three Japanese ports; two of which, Nagasaki and Hakodate, lacked the hinterland to make them much more than coaling or victualling stations. The third port was a small fishing village of twenty or thirty huts. It was built on a mud bank, backed by an odious swamp and commanded by surrounding hills. The Japanese called the place Yokohama.

Research into the reunification of Korea has focused on the governmental policies of North and South Korea, as well as the policies of countries involved with them. The views expressed within Korean civil society about reunification have not been given much consideration. It is difficult, therefore, to gauge what the Korean people themselves think of reunification and how opinions differ among discrete sociopolitical groups in Korea, such as the conservatives, liberals, and radicals.

My country “is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women,” goes one of the most frequently quoted gender-related adages. Japanologists might be tempted to attribute this uncourtly utterance to a learned nobleman of Heian Japan (794–1185) embittered by the outpouring of vernacular narratives from women's writing brushes that were eclipsing male endeavors to emulate Chinese classics, or to an exasperated modern Japanese novelist in reference to the neo-Heian phenomenon, namely, the renaissance of women's literature in postwar Japan. Actually it was Nathaniel Hawthorne (1855:141) who made the now infamous sexist remark in chagrin at American women who were churning out best-sellers in force. Thereafter, this phenomenon abated for a full century, but since the 1960s, Western women writers have made a glorious resurgence, marked by unprecedented degrees of output and worldwide market domination in a genre known as the romance fiction. The title of the first romance series and the name of its publisher, Harlequin, has become something like a generic term with multiple signification.

The peoples of Indonesia differ widely in culture. All stages of social JL development are represented among them, from the nomad life of the Orang Laut, who wander in their praus upon the sea, and the Orang Kubu, who were, until recently, nomads of the forests in South Sumatra, up to the high forms of social and cultural attainment on the island of Bali, where the arts of the dance, of music, of sculpture, of temple architecture have reached a high peak and people live their lives in a harmoniously organized social order.

In recent years, several empirically based studies of blue collar and white collar Japanese workers—notably by Taira, Hazama, Marsh and Mannari, Cole, and Evans—have resulted in a substantial “revision” of our understanding of Japanese labor markets.2 These studies have disputed previous claims that Japanese workers commit themselves irrevocably to their employers and have shown that familiar economic and non-economic incentives affect marketplace behavior. Moreover, while these studies recognize the importance of paternalistic practices in shaping employment relations, they prove that these practices are not simple reflections of traditional values.

In January 1941 Guomindang forces crushed a New Fourth Army (NFA) column under Xiang Ying and Ye Ting, which had just missed a deadline to get north of the Yangzi River. The Guomindang and the Communist center in Yan'an both wanted Xiang in the north, each for its own reasons. However, Xiang put off leaving until the last moment for he was loath to give up his independent base in south Anhui. Xiang favored closer cooperation with the Guomindang than did Communists elsewhere in China. Ironically, Xiang's resistance to Yan'an's pressure to cross the river brought him into conflict with Chiang Kai-shek. Loyalist NFA units that did go north routed Guomindang armies there, and partly in retaliation, Chiang Kai-shek suppressed Xiang as a “mutineer.” Yan'an leaders called the Incident an act of fratricide, and afterward they radicalized their idea of the united front—always wider than one of mere collaboration with the Guomindang—still further. In Yan'an, Xiang was blamed for hesitating to expand northward and for entering a trap when he eventually did leave. However, Yan'an bore some responsibility, never acknowledged, for choosing Xiang's route to disaster.

French Indochina is a union not only of different states bur of geographically diverse areas. Both the physical and cultural-geographic elements have variety in their distribution on the land. This lack of uniformity presents problems for those attempting to create national unity within Indochina. The present brief review can mention only some of the more important contrasts; thoughtful persons will wish to bear in mind these physical and the equally complex cultural-geographic elements in considering those economic and political situations that have arisen in Indochina in modern times.

From a purely objective point of view, the study of the political novel in any period of history is useful because of the inherent value of that particular type of novel – portrayal of the political ideology of its time and presentation of its authors' political opinions. This is especially true with reference to the political novel in Japan's Meiji era. The Restoration had shifted the balance of power; Western influence was strong; Japan was emerging from her self-imposed seclusion. In the first flush of her breakaway from previous restraints – and before new ones could be devised and stringently enforced – Japan's political thought as expressed in the literary vehicle specifically designed for it presents perhaps a truer index of the feelings of the literate classes than does the governmental mechanism which was evolved at that time, inasmuch as one of the avowed purposes of a novel is to appeal to its audience, a point not included in Japanese governmental tradition. This being the general trend in the Far East, the most important medium – even the only medium – through which the articulate could register their objections and their own thoughts has been literature. Certainly one of the most important causes for the Western belief that the Oriental is phlegmatic and mysterious is that so little study has been made of his writings, the only possible channel for his outpourings.

One of the perquisites of age is reminiscence. It is the function of the historian to recount the past. As one of the elders of our fellowship and as a historian it would seem to be both my privilege and my duty on this occasion to trace the course of Far Eastern studies in the United States since I first became familiar with them. We are told on the authority of an ancient book which has come to us from the Orient that “your old men shall dream dreams.” It may not be amiss, therefore, not only to survey the past, but also to attempt, in the light of that past to look into the future and to formulate such dreams for it as that past and the prospect for the future inspire.