The colonialism of Richelieu first brought the French to the Indo-Malayan peninsula in the seventeenth century. Ayuthia, which was then the capital of Siam, was the chief entrepôt of the area and as such naturally attracted the French. But their efforts to establish diplomatic and commercial relations were terminated abruptly by two revolutions half a world apart. In Siam the Revolution of 1688 placed an antiforeign king on the throne. In England the Revolution of 1688 established William of Orange, implacable enemy of Louis XIV, as king of England. The former event dislodged the French from the favorable position they had won in Siam. The latter was the signal for the outbreak of general war in Europe, which so engaged French attention that the venture in Siam was forgotten.

What does the dog mean in Chinese culture? The answers can be found in China's first dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi, written by Xu Shen in 121 CE. The Shuowen holds cynological knowledge well beyond the dog's olfactory ability, because it includes notes on vocalization discrimination, situational gait, and even behavioral and personality traits. The dog is also upheld as the representative of all nonhuman animals, undoubtedly because of its morphological and functional versatility but certainly also because it was the human's main interface and companion at the beginning of Chinese civilization. The Chinese graphs for the word “dog” embody both views: generically animalistic or eerily resembling human depictions. As a rift slowly took place in the partnership between humans and dogs when urbanization began, the graphs themselves were manipulated to clearly demarcate one from the other. Eventually dogs became discursive scapegoats. This paper traces the destiny of the dog in semantic and graphic terms.

Comedy is a powerful tool for public meditation on and critique of lived experience and discursive practice. In China's post-Mao period, comedy also provided a means for Tibetan intellectuals to access state-sponsored stages and airwaves in minority-dominated Northwest China's restrictive cultural climate. This article examines a series of four comedic dialogues popular in Tibetan regions in the mid-1990s. Centered on the fictional Careful Village, these four performances juxtapose urban sophisticates and country bumpkins in ways that allow comedians to grapple with questions of tradition and modernity in a rapidly modernizing society. Though superficially similar to Chinese state-sponsored modernity—itself centered on Chinese Putonghua—attention to these performances’ juxtaposition of characters, social issues, and linguistic practice reveals the promotion of certain forms of the Tibetan language at the center of uniquely Tibetan modernity. This Tibetan modernity is no longer assimilationist, but based on mastery of the proper, Tibetan linguistic competences.

This article examines the early development of South Korean intercountry adoption to Sweden. It focuses particularly on two disruptions in the movement of children between the two nations, drawing on archival sources in Sweden, South Korea, and Denmark. The article demonstrates that South Korean–Swedish adoption was deeply bound up in the shifting Cold War relations within and between the Korean peninsula and Scandinavia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Further, state actions and strategies during this time reveal that both governments actively utilized their Cold War foreign policy and positionality to shape adoption to meet their respective national interests. This study extends US-centered adoption scholarship by revealing broader implications of Cold War geopolitics in cross-border adoptions to Scandinavia and, more importantly, significant ways in which intercountry adoption challenged, altered, and constituted the Cold War relations and nation-building projects of both sending and receiving states.

On July 10, 1898, the reformist leader Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) memorialized the throne proposing that all academies and temples in China, with the exception of those included in registers of state sacrifices (sidian 祀典), be turned into schools. The Guangxu emperor was so pleased with the proposal that he promulgated an edict (shangyu 上諭) the same day taking over Kang’s phrasing. On three occasions in the following weeks, the editorial in the famous Shanghai daily Shenbao 申報 discussed the edict not as a piece of legislation aiming at facilitating the creation ex nihilo of a nationwide network of public schools, but as the declaration of a religious reform, that is, a change in religious policy that would rid China of temple cults and their specialists, Buddhists, Taoists, and spirit-mediums. This it was, indeed, although both Chinese and Western historiography have so far usually neglected to appreciate the importance of the religious element in the so-called Wuxu reforms (June 11–September 21, 1898) and later modernist policies. This importance, as we will see, can be gauged both in the writings of some of the reformist leaders, and among the populations concerned by the practical consequences.

Japanese poetry has for a long time been credited with truly miraculous powers of concision, suggestion, and philosophical insight by some of its Western admirers. Other Westerners, from Chamberlain and Aston on, have been less charmed, and have criticized the classical poetry of the Japanese court in particular, for excessive artificiality, and for a lack of breadth, grandeur, and sustained power.

The court poetry which was the supreme literary genre of the Heian and Kamakura periods is indeed restricted. In mode it is confined to lyricism; in form, to the 31-syllable tanka which becomes synonymous, in these periods, with waka, or Japanese poetry. Its vocabulary is circumscribed, generally limited to that employed in the KokinshŨ of 905, first of the twenty-one imperially sponsored anthologies of verse. There are some subsequent additions, primarily from the lexicon of the great early collection, the Man'yōshŨ (ca. 759), but the admissibility of such words was hotly contested.

In 1910, a group or army officers led by Tanaka Giichi founded die Imperial Military Reserve Association in order to integrate Japanese society around military values. The founders, mostly proteges of Yamagata Aritomo, die chief Meiji period spokesman for unity to increase national wealdi and power, established die organization in 1910 because the already existing unity was under attack. Labor organizations and the influx of morally degenerate and subversive Western ideas caused Tanaka to fear army-civilian alienation and national divisiveness. Thus, to achieve integration, the reserve association disseminated the “soldier's ethos,” military ideals, such as obedience, frugality, bravery, cooperation, social stratification, anti-individualism, and diligence, all unified by a belief in a divine emperor, established branches in every community, 14,000 in all, and carried out activities which reinforced both the values and local social structure. The three million volunteer members, half of whom had no military experience, achieved their leaders' goals by performing public services and patriotic activities. They demonstrated to local residents die ethos in action and benefitted the community as well. By the 1930's, bodi die organization and die members had become the backbone of rural Japan.

A major shortcoming in much Western writing about recent events in Indo-China is that the inhabitants of the region are seen as objects of policy rather than as subjects of history. Focusing in this, way leaves out much of the picture and demeans the inhabitants of Indo-China who are largely responsible, after all, for defeating France and the United States. A number of the books reviewed here take a sympathetic insider's view of U.S. intervention in the region and try to approach the war objectively but still have an American focus. One book is a systematic attack on U.S. behavior in Cambodia since 1970. Finally a recently published collection of documents will be indispensable to students of the war, partly because it pays close attention to Vietnamese as well as American decisions.

Chin Yao-Chi (Ambrose Y. C. King) is internationally known for the knowledgeability and fluency with which he uses many of the perspectives of Western social science to discuss Chinese culture, modern Chinese history, and current developments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Born in 1935, growing up in Shanghai, he obtained a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pittsburgh and today is Professor of Sociology and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His life, however, has also been rooted in Taiwan, where he lived for many years after the fall of the mainland, and where he obtained both his B.A. and M.A. degrees. Long before the promise of the Republic of China's development became obvious, at least as early as 1966, he recognized it, astutely introduced Western modernization theory to analyze it, understood that pursuing it required not iconoclasm but a process of critically and creatively building on the inherited culture, and widely influenced Taiwan intellectuals as they tried to make sense out of their complicated, often distressing situation (Chin 1979, 1987, 1991). The publication of eleven of his articles written during the last decade (a few originally in English) by Oxford University Press (Chin 1992) rightly indicates that his views about Chinese modernization should be weighed by all those around the world concerned with this issue, not just by small scholarly circles. Yet just how insightful are his views? To what extent are they shaped by premises that have commonly informed much modern Chinese thought, and that many Western scholars could not easily accept? To what extent has Professor Chin himself “self-consciously” (tzu-chueh) identified any such premises and pondered their viability?

This article analyzes interactions among the early twentieth-century Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds. The author first develops a general conceptualization of intra–East Asian literary contact nebulae. These were the ambiguous spaces, both physical and creative, where imperial Japanese, semicolonial Chinese, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers interacted with one another and transculturated (i.e., discussed, translated, and intertextualized) one another's writings. Among the most intriguing literary contact nebulae are Chinese and Korean transculturations of censored Japanese literature. The second half of the article explores two key examples of this phenomenon: colonial Korean translation and intertextualization of the Japanese writer Nakano Shigeharu's poem “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” (Shinagawa Station in the Rain, February 1929) and wartime Chinese translation and intertextualization of the Japanese writer Ishikawa Tatsuzō's novella “Ikiteiru heitai” (Living Soldiers, March 1938). These transculturations embody multifaceted amalgams of (semi)colonial literary collaboration, acquiescence, and resistance vis-à-vis metropolitan imperial and cultural authority.