The first census of the Philippines during the period of American occupation was taken on March 2,1903. About sixteen years later, the second census was taken. The need for a new census became apparent as the Philippines entered the Commonwealth period and approached final independence. The National Assembly passed a bill providing for the taking of a census which was approved and became Commonwealth Act No. 170, on November 12, 1936. President Quezon requested the services of an expert on census matters from the United States Government on August 17, 1937. The services of Mr. Ray Hurley, Acting Chief Statistician of Territorial, Insular, and Foreign Statistics of the United States Bureau, of the Census, were secured and upon his arrival in Manila he was appointed Expert on Census Matters effective as of October 9, 1937.

The South Asian historian, often unaccustomed to the tools of other disciplines, has largely neglected his most massive primary source—the newspaper. A newspaper file is massive enough to distract researcher and librarian alike, but they should not be distracted. A newspaper by its very nature cannot exist in an ivory tower. Whether subsidized or self-supporting, it is a part of its society. It reflects that society and influences it—sometimes both—in an intellectual ricochet. This article will consider, first, the availability and identification of South Asian newspapers; second, what might be learned from them, and third, how it might be learned.

The relationship between pragmatism and Chinese Communism is a question important in its consequences but ambiguous in its content. By careful reading of the intellectual history of China during past half-century, certain implications on the intertwined relationships between them can be easily detected. For example, both pragmatism and Marxism were introduced to China during the May Fourth era, a time of unprecedented intellectual ferment. Their common belief in the Western materialist tradition had not only paved the way for a brief united front in the struggle against the dead weight of the Confucian tradition, but their shared emphasis on scientific culture reinforced their common goals and made “science” one of the most worshipped watch-words in contemporary China. Such backgrounds have in fact led many to think that pragmatism represented only a transitional stage on a road that “led naturally and easily to communism as the science of society.” Some claimed that pragmatists not only tended to be tolerant of dialectical materialism and the Communists, but they admired the Communist movement as an integral part of the democratic ideal and helped to prepare the way for the spread of materialism in China in the next few decades. Although the precise relationship between pragmatism and Chinese Communism remains undefined to this day, the pragmatic element in Chinese Communism is a popular theme which has gained wide currency among some recent interpretations.

The problem proposed by the editor of the Quarterly to the members of this symposium is to consider the varying patterns of railway development in three Far Eastern countries. It is a particularly challenging problem because the influential role which railroads have played in Western economic growth leads one naturally to ask whether Western experience has been repeated in the East, and, if not, how the differences may be explained. This question does, indeed, seem to have been the central one raised by the three following articles.

Whether china has changed or remained the same is a question of remarkable longevity in the field of Chinese studies. It is sustained in part by the continuity of certain terms of reference within Chinese culture, from late imperial to contemporary times, together with the maintenance of certain institutions. W. F. J. Jenner has recently identified some of these: the bureaucracy, walls, “dad, mum and the kids,” “severe punishment,” among others (Jenner 1992). In Jenner's analysis, the fact of China being ineluctably Chinese is readily translated into the fact that it has failed the challenge of modernization. The same equation has been made by others: Peyrefitte's “l'empire immobile,” Mabbett's “mirage of modernity,” and Pye's nationalism without modernization all bespeak an understanding of China as not only imprisoned by its past but also, to draw on older views again, as stagnant, mummified, or decaying (Peyrefitte 1993; Mabbett 1985; Pye 1993).