When the Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850, Tseng Kuo-fan (1811–1872) had been residing in Peking for more than a decade. He earned a distinguished scholarly reputation as a member of the Hanlin Academy, and between 1847 and 1852 he was a high official of the metropolitan administration; he was Acting Senior Vice-president of the Board of Civil Appointments when he left the capital in 1852. Particularly in the three years 1850–1852, his official duties gave him many opportunities to express himself on the urgent problems of his time. While Tseng's later career is well known and while studies have been done on his scholarship and philosophy, his early political ideas have so far not been analyzed in detail. Yet surely Tseng's views on government before he became involved in the campaigns against the Taiping Rebellion would have a bearing on his remarkable performance as military and administrative leader after he became so involved.

There has always been a sizeable gap between public and national interests and needs and the capacities of a society's educational system to respond adequately thereto. Both teaching and scholarship are by their very nature conserving disciplines heavily involved with the preservation, elaboration, and passing on of a heritage of experience and knowledge acquired over great lengths of time. When one considers the degree to which our own national intellectual heritage is derived from the classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions, therefore, it is not at all surprising that our educational system should be profoundly Eurocentric in both form and content. But if it should persist in so confining a bias at a time when the central tendencies of the major technological, economic, and political developments of the past several centuries have been the compacting of global space, the convergence of cultures, and the emergence to positions of increasing salience and importance of an ever-expanding array of non-Western people, states, and interests, is this not cause for serious national concern?

It should be emphasized at the outset that Georges Dumézil does not consider himself to be a social theorist of any sort, least of all a “structuralist.” Indeed, his opinion of the structuralist movement, to say nothing of the extent to which others have attempted to associate him with the origin and development of that movement, is less than enthusiastic; and in the Introduction to Mythe et épopée III he has explicitly denied any connection whatsoever with structuralism per se and, implicitly, with the theories and methods of the leader of the movement, Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Depuis quelques années, le mot “structure” est devenu ambigu. Tout en gardant sa valeur précise, ancienne—lorsqu'il est question, par exemple, de la structure d'une démonstration, d'un roman, d'un État—, il a pris un emploi technique beaucoup plus ambitieux dans un système philosophique aujourd'hui fort en vogue, auquel il a même donné son nom.

One of the striking differences between the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions was the Chinese use of rural bases (Soviet Areas) to capture national political control—surrounding the cities with the countryside. Remarkably, these bases, their evolution, characteristics, and role in the various intra-Party struggles remain one of the least studied or understood elements in our knowledge of Chinese Communist history.

Liu Zihua arrived in France in 1919 as part of the Sino-French Work-Study Movement. In 1940, he completed a PhD thesis in which he combined modern astronomy and the Yijing through “analogical reasoning” to discover a planet. After Liu went back to China in 1945, his efforts to win recognition came up against nationalist and communist anti-traditionalism but were eventually integrated into the intellectual revival of the 1980s. This study relies on historical sources and anthropological fieldwork to show that Liu is an emblematic figure of the cultural upheaval caused by the introduction of modern Western categories of science, religion, and superstition at the beginning of the twentieth century. Liu's example reveals the changing status of the Yijing in Chinese society, the cross-cultural understanding of science and sacred literature as embodied in this classic, and the role of analogy in cultural assimilation. It also sheds light on the shaping of academic standards in China and on the connection between traditional literary scholars and contemporary “amateur scientists.”

William Callahan's conceptualization of Ai Weiwei as a “citizen intellectual” is the latest in a long-standing cottage industry seeking to make sense of and define China's intellectuals. Frederic Wakeman Jr. in 1972 offered “a typology of intellectual species” for Chinese thinkers and writers in late imperial China: statesman, administrator, ethical idealist, aesthete, and emirite or recluse (Wakeman 1972, 35). Hao Zhidong applies a Weberian lens on twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals to identify nested categories of: professional, cultural, and (smallest of all) critical intellectuals (Hao 2003, 393). Tani Barlow traces the identity of China's thinkers and writers from “intellectual class” in 1905 to “enlightened scholars” in the 1920s to “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) ever since. Barlow identifies a tension between the social power of these knowledge specialists and their dangerous dance with the state in which they succumbed under both Nationalist and Communist regimes to a service role to power, a “category of the state” (Barlow 1991, 216). Merle Goldman has focused on critical intellectuals under the Chinese Communist Party, what most people think of as critics and dissidents. Carol Hamrin and I sought to go beyond Goldman's focus on dissidents to study “establishment intellectuals” by looking at “the motives and means for collaboration, as well as the sources of tension and conflict between leading intellectuals and the top Communist Party leadership” (Hamrin and Cheek 1986, 3). “Establishment intellectual” proved a useful category for opening up our understanding of intellectual participation at the elite level under Mao and during the 1980s. The 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and the June 4th massacre and crackdown changed everything. Merle Goldman usefully picked up on these changes by identifying the rise of “disestablished intellectuals” in the post-Tiananmen period, particularly intellectuals who had been active in the reformist administration of the CCP in the 1980s associated with disgraced General Secretary Hu Yaobang (Goldman 2007, 15ff, 86ff). These fallen establishment intellectuals populated the academic posts, publishing ventures, and new business opportunities that exploded after Deng Xiaoping's famous certification of economic reform in his 1992 “Southern Tour.”

Psychological characteristics of enemy peoples were studied almost frantically during the recent war with a view to more effective psychological warfare. Answers were sought to questions like the following: How does the average enemy individual think and feel? Can his mentalemotional constitution be exploited to disrupt his will to fight? And how did he get that way?

Prior to 1941 almost no one investigated the phenomena of personality development in Japanese society. Even the Germans were subjected to very little systematic study. After the bombs began to fall, when collection of essential data had become impossible, both governmental and private initiative backed research into “character structure” among enemy peoples.

The author identifies three meanings of individualism (kojinshugi) in Japanese journalism during the Taishō period. They were: first, individual character and talent should be cultivated for the purpose of strengthening the state and fostering the active commitment of individuals to state policies; second, personal autonomy and self-expression were legitimate within a restricted “private” sphere that coexisted uneasily with the dominant values of the “public” sphere; and third, the development of free, autonomous individuals was the most fundamental value by which state and society should be judged. Proponents of individualism were unable to alter the state structure established by the Meiji Constitution or the state ideology of submission; their innovative thinking did serve as a leavening agent within state structure by demanding new relationships between elite and masses and by sustaining a high degree of elite pluralism.

It is often said that the nationalism of the 1930's was more “narrow,” more “parochial,” more “isolationist,” and more “pathological” than the nationalism of Meiji. In the earlier period, men like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Ōi Kentarō, who had ingested the liberalism of the late Victorian West, defined Japan's identity and role in the world in cosmopolitan, even revolutionary terms. By contrast, it is said, the nationalists of the 1930's were “frogs at the bottom of a well,” whose vision of the nation was clouded by folkish myths of national superiority or who were moved at most by narrow concern for national self-interest. The men of Shōwa, unlike those of Meiji, lacked a conception of Japan's role in the world which admitted the claims of higher goal or value than the nation itself.

On April 25, 2015, central Nepal was struck by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that killed over 9,000 people and displaced 2.8 million. The image of the Dharahara, a nineteenth-century minaret that collapsed during the quake, quickly became for many Nepalis an iconic representation not only of the disaster but also of a national determination to recover and rebuild. Drawing upon media and literary discourse in the Nepali language, this article asks why the Dharahara tower, rather than the country's severely damaged World Heritage sites, loomed so large in the Nepali imagination in the immediate aftermath of the April 2015 earthquake, and why it became a rallying point for a resurgence of Nepali hill nationalism.

Six hundred miles west of Hang-chou the Yangtze River emerges from a mountain corridor onto the lowland plain of south-central China. Here the river bed widens sharply and loses depth; the Yangtze winds a snake-like path across a thousand miles of rich, flat, water-laced country, northeastward to Han-yang, then south toward the Po-yang Lake, north again to Chiang-ning (modern Nanking), and finally into the East China Sea at modern Shanghai. Medieval Chinese called it simply “River”—a River among rivers, the designation of an entire S-shaped area whose character depended more on water than on land, the dominant feature of the southern landscape. In the twelfth century this river region developed a strategic importance as it became first the refuge for a besieged court, then an area of contention with barbarian invaders, and finally the principal artery of Chinese control. This transformation reflected a major reorientation of the Chinese mind.

This article examines different patterns of “cosmopolitan capitalism” in three paired localities in China and India: (1) Zhejiang/Gujarat, (2) Zhongguancun/Bangalore, and (3) Guangdong/Kerala. The paired cases illustrate the attentiveness of the local state to transnational society and present varied expressions of the local developmental impact of remittances and return migration. Analytically, this article departs from conventional usages of both state and society by focusing on the local state in combination with a less territorial conception of society. The rationale for this dual definitional stretch—both downwards (local state) and outwards (transnational society)—has an empirical basis. First, the local government represents the day-to-day point of contact with “the state” for most people. Second, limiting the scope of “society” to populations currently residing within national borders unnecessarily excludes temporary migrants and diasporic communities who continue to identify with a locality. Theoretically, this article extends Albert Hirschman's classic categorical troika of “exit, voice, and loyalty” to the literature on new transnationalism.

In his presidential address at the 1977 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Marius Jansen pointed out that the relationship between monarchy and modernization in Japan is a significant subject of research for Western scholars specializing in Japanese studies. Specifically, Jansen emphasized the need to investigate the popular perceptions of the monarch usually overlooked by Japanese historians. He noted that a study of Japanese mentalité must cover a vast area, including “imagery, iconography, and ritual.” Until we “get at” this level of the social and cultural history of modern Japan, Jansen feared, we will fail to gain “a better understanding of modernization, of Japan, in world history” (1977:612–22).

Sui-tang luoyang, built IN 605–6 as the eastern capital of the Sui dynasty and subsequently the eastern capital of the Tang dynasty, was one of the great cities of medieval China. Almost as soon as it was built to the taste of Emperor Sui Yangdi (r. 604–17), Luoyang became the second largest city in China, surpassed only by Daxingcheng-Chang'an, the first capital, which had been built by Yangdi's father. Both cities were objects of scholarly interest as early as the eighth century when, in 722, Wei Shu completed his Liangjing xinji [A new record of the two capitals] (Fukuyama Toshio).

It is said that the best European scholars are after their deaths given chairs at American universities. The saying holds true, at any rate, for Max Weber: many of his most important writings have been translated into English only in recent years, making it possible for his theories to gain a broader acceptance in English-speaking countries.

It would probably be an exaggeration to mention the young Dutchman Jacob Cornelis van Leur among the best European scholars. Killed in the battle of the Java Sea in 1942 at the age of 34 after having worked as a civil servant in the Netherlands East Indies, Dr. van Leur was not in his lifetime to hold a university post in either the Netherlands or the Indies, let alone the United States.

After three-quarters of a century of fluctuating efforts, the development of railways in China remains an unfinished task today. In contrast to industrially more advanced countries, which had built most of their existing lines by the turn of the present century, railway construction is regarded even now as an indispensable part of the economic development of China. Measured by the potential demands of the country the existing railway facilities are small indeed. Recent data indicate that at the end of 1952 the Chinese railway system consisted of some 17,570 miles of tracks, including all lines in operation on the mainland and Hainan but excluding those on Formosa. This means that there is one mile of railway for every 216 square miles of territory (or approximately 463 miles per 100,000 square miles), and that for every 1,000,000 of population there are 39 miles of rail transportation. Small though the figures appear to be, they nevertheless represent an increase over those of a decade ago. In 1942 the estimate was 12,036 miles of railways in all of China, including those in Manchuria and the occupied areas; the ratio was then 274 miles of railroads per 100,000 square miles, and 27 miles per 1,000,000 population. The vast potential development that lies ahead is apparent when we compare the above figures with those for the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.