This article examines the subject of queues in the life and writings of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the most prominent figure in modern Chinese literature. The long-standing reluctance of readers and critics to associate this backward hairstyle with Lu Xun's iconic figure has restricted our understanding of the topic to two well-known satirical portraits in his short fiction, Ah Q and Sevenpounder. This article, however, proposes that the queue is of more than satiric interest—that the author's own experience raises fundamental questions about how he discloses and transmutes certain experiences in his writings. Starting from some little-studied events featuring queues in his pre-Republican years and a puzzling short story that recounts them, this essay analyzes the queue's autobiographical connections and their varied literary manifestations. It also makes a case for reexamining the uses of autobiography for a writer whose life story is an important part of his influence.

On the muggy afternoon of July 5, 1962, an unusual symposium of some 270 scholars and students of Chinese studies from all over the country gathered in Tokyo. They were drawn by the urgent need to discuss the problems raised by the Toyo Bunko's (Oriental Library) receipt of grants from the Ford and Asia Foundations for organizing the Center for Modern Chinese Studies. The vital issue was whether it was permissible to let the Toyo Bunko accept the huge amount of American funds to organize modern Chinese studies in Japan.

The foreign policy of Japan known as the Tōa shin chitsujo or New Order in East Asia was officially announced by Prince Konoye on November 3, 1938, the birthday of Emperor Meiji. Further statements were issued by Foreign Minister Hachirō Arita to correspondents of foreign newspapers on December 19, 1938 and by the premier to the nation, three days later. When the fall of the Netherlands and France in May and June 1940 pointed to the complete collapse of European colonial empires in Asia and offered opportunity for the expansion of Japanese hegemony, the cabinet of Prince Konoye, on August 1, 1940, issued a restatement of the policy under the name of the New Order in Greater East Asia or Dai Tōa shin chitsuj. The Greater East Asia included not only Japan, Manchukuo and China, but also Indo-China and Thailand or Siam, and possibly the Dutch East Indies and the South Seas.

During the years 1895 to 1898 the Chinese reform movement was a remarkable success and then a conclusive failure in Hunan. For the first time, ideas emanating from the intellectual ferment in the treaty ports were actively implemented in the conservative provinces. Members of the Hunanese elite joined with government officials in a broad program of modernization. But in late 1897 and early 1898, as foreign powers pressed for concessions in China, a new leadership gradually took control of the Hunan reforms. Led by Liang Chʻi-chʻao, this group was intensely influenced by the teachings of Kʻang Yu-wei. By March it had broadened the scope of institutional change and had widely popularized Kʻang's ideas. Members of the elite, who at first had supported reform, became alarmed as the movement became more radical. They disagreed sharply with the Kʻang Yu-wei group over reform objectives, and after a bitter controversy during the spring of 1898, they suppressed Kʻang's teachings and ostracized his followers. By the summer of 1898 they had reasserted their domination over provincial affairs.

Catastrophic Asia began as an experimental initiative of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Culminating in a spring 2014 symposium where three of the four papers presented here and earlier versions of the two commentaries were delivered, the project sought to bring together a diversity of perspectives on Asian experiences of and vulnerability to disasters. We sought to collect an unlikely group of scholars whose work is not typically discussed in a single forum. They included natural and physical scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and scholars of literature. The project sought to discover what common epistemological ground might be found when such diverse approaches are brought to bear on catastrophic events, as well as the risks of catastrophe, in a particular area of the world.

In this paper, I shall try to examine and identify the factors responsible for the increase in agricultural output in Communist China in the nineteen fifties. Then I shall try to discuss the implications of my findings in relation to future agricultural growth.

Agricultural Output 1949–1957. Agricultural statistics remain the Achilles' heel in evaluating the performance of the Chinese economy in quantitative terms. For foodgrains, the official statistics show an increase of nearly 43 percent from 1949 to 1952, and nearly 20 percent from 1952 to 1957. These claims are generally regarded as exaggerated. Based on per capita consumption requirements, Liu and Yeh regard the pre-1956 official figures as gross understatements. They accept, however, the official figure for 1957. They allow for no more than 5 percent increase from 1952 to 1957 for the production of food crops. After adjustment of reported cultivated area has been made, Wu's estimate shows virtually no increase in foodgrains from 1952 to 1957. Hollister, after suggesting official understatements for earlier years, accepts the official 1955 figure and estimates that the 1957 production of basic food crops and animal products was 14 percent higher than that of 1952. Jones and Poleman also maintain that the official estimates of grain production were underestimates for 1952–54; they accept the 1955–57 figures. Their estimates put the 1957 level about 12 percent higher than that in 1952. Choh-ming Li, though without making any independent estimates of his own, regards the official figure for 1955 as more reliable or least unsatisfactory for the whole period 1949–57, while considering the pre-1955 years as underestimates and the post-1955 years (that is, 1956 and 1957) as overestimates.

As part of this year's anniversary of the October 6, 1976, massacre at Thammasat University, an outdoor exhibit of photographs of the violence and the three preceding years of student and other social movements was displayed upon the very soccer field in the center of campus where students were beaten, shot, lynched, and murdered forty years prior. Several of the photographs were printed on large sheets of acrylic and positioned such that the images of the buildings in the photographs were aligned with the actual buildings, which remain largely unchanged. The most striking of these was a photograph of hundreds of students stripped to the waist who were lying face down on the soccer field prior to being arrested and taken away. At the edge of the image was the top of the university's iconic dome building, which lined up with the existing building. The organizers explained that their intention was “to reflect a perspective on the past through the eyes of people in the present in order to show the cruelty of humans to one another.” The proximity generated by the image was underlined by the fact that the fortieth anniversary of the massacre and coup in 1976 that led to twelve years of dictatorship was taking place under yet another dictatorship, that of a military junta calling itself the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), which seized power on May 22, 2014, in the twelfth coup since the end of the absolute monarchy on June 24, 1932. Suchada Chakphisut, founding editor of Sarakadee magazine and Thai Civil Rights and Investigative Journalism, who was a first-year Thammasat student during the massacre, began her autobiographical account of the day, written for the anniversary this year, by writing: “We meet every year when 6 October comes around, and with it an inexplicable sadness always takes hold of my psyche. It has grown even more devastating since the 22 May 2014 coup, in which we must face the news of the arrest and detention of activists and those who oppose dictatorship.” This was not a commemoration after dictatorship such as those of the same era held in Argentina or Chile during recent years of democratization, but memories of dictatorship in situ.

This article examines how Chinese national values are imparted to and through the recent phenomenon of ceremonial volunteers or etiquette volunteers (liyi zhiyuan). These volunteers are all young college women who serve at major national events by greeting guests, ushering, and holding ceremonial ribbons. They are supposed to embody Confucian ritual values and the practices of propriety that define China as a nation of civilization through their roles as ceremonial hostesses. This feminine symbol of national tradition and cultural virtues is realized through a heavy emphasis on discipline, physical training, compliance to authority, and collectivism expressed through the ways the performances are staged and mass mediated. This article argues that the ceremonial volunteer represents a new state effort to engineer a model woman citizen by combining the Confucian discourse on etiquette, the communist party-state discourse on militarization and strong womanhood, the communist sport tradition of body training, and the latest initiatives on volunteering. The result is the making of gendered national subjects, marking new values of class, femininity, and nationalism. This article contributes to the understanding of emergent values about gender, class, volunteering, and the important roles they play in the process of citizen making in today's China.

Perhaps the first thing to note about a forum on the subject of 1919 in Asia is how awkwardly the spatial frame of “Asia” maps onto the international history of that moment. To be sure, the postwar international conjuncture, which I have elsewhere called the “Wilsonian Moment,” had a revolutionary impact across Asia, perhaps more so than in any other world region outside of Europe. As the three preceding essays in this forum note, that year was a waypoint, and sometimes a launching pad, for a rush of novel or renewed revolutionary discourses, connections, and mobilizations in China, India, and Korea, as it was in other parts of Asia and of the world. These were all propelled by the accumulated material and ideological transformations of the years of war, transformation that imbued the moment with revolutionary potential and gave contemporaries a sense that the international order, its power structures and its norms of legitimacy, were uniquely malleable, amenable to concerted action. Indeed, 1919 was a moment in which the very idea of “Asia”—its spaces, the identities they attached to, and the solidarities that ran across and beyond it—was reimagined in ways that at once stitched it together and rent it apart.

Editor's Introduction: In mid-August 2015, Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo gave a high-profile speech looking back at the Japanese surrender of 1945. Three weeks later, also to mark the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia, China's Communist Party head and president Xi Jinping presided over a lavish parade in the heart of Beijing, which featured missiles and other Chinese military hardware as well as large contingents of People's Liberation Army soldiers and small contingents of troops from various other countries. Following up on a trio of essays in the August issue of the JAS, which looked ahead to events such as these, we now publish this special “Asia Beyond the Headlines” section made up of four essays that explore the meaning, for different individual or sets of countries, of Abe's speech and Xi's spectacle. This quartet of commentaries, by three political scientists and one historian, is designed to complement the last issue's contributions by historians Carol Gluck, Rana Mitter, and Charles Armstrong, as well as the historical photograph from seventy years ago that appears on the cover of this issue.

The set begins with an essay by historian John Delury, a scholar trained in Chinese history and currently teaching in Seoul, who has written on varied aspects of East Asian international relations and notes, among other things, the curious fact that the representative from South Korea rather than from North Korea got the warmer reception from Xi during the recent Beijing spectacle. Following this comes Sheila A. Smith, a scholar based at a Washington, D.C., think tank, reflecting on the current state of the complex bilateral relationship between Tokyo and Beijing. Appearing next is a commentary by Maria Repnikova, a specialist in both Chinese and Russian affairs who was trained in political science and holds a postdoctoral fellowship in a school of communications. She writes on the increasingly close ties yet lingering tensions between Beijing and Moscow, as well as the way that official media has celebrated, while some users of social media have mocked, the symbolism of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping presiding over recent victory day parades in their respective capitals. The series concludes with a commentary by Srinath Raghavan, a London-trained scholar now based at a New Delhi policy institute. He completes our survey of commemoration of the end of World War II with a look at the way recent parades revealed the Indian government's tricky position vis-à-vis Moscow and Beijing, as well as the relatively scant attention that India's significant contributions to World War II received, at home and internationally, during the season of commemorative speeches and displays.

Throughout Burmese history people donated money, land, and labor to the sangha in the hope of acquiring merit and ensuring rebirth in a better existence. Each dynasty was confronted with the flow of wealth from state properties and taxable public holdings to tax-free sanghika estates. Since all religious donations were given in perpetuity, and so were cumulative, the pattern had serious economic consequences. It also posed an ideological dilemma for the monarch: while he was supposed to be the major benefactor of the Religion, the state needed these essential resources for its own survival. In order to halt this trend temporarily, or reverse it within the confines of legitimate Buddhist kingship, Burmese kings used sasana reform, a religious ritual for purifying the sangha; sasana reform was structurally related to economic factors. Although this paper is concerned primarily with Burma, evidence is provided to suggest that similar economic pressures may have been responsible for sasana reform in India, Ceylon, and Thailand.