In the intellectual ferment which defeat and occupation brought to Japan the social sciences underwent a particular upheaval. The decade before the war had seen their development stultified by the officially enforced atmosphere of dogmatic moralism and irrational metaphysics which was actively inimical to any positivistic and scientific study of life in society. The end of the war opened the flood-gates to the works of American and European writers of the previous two decades. It also gave courage and opportunity to the intellectuals who had received their academic training in the more liberal period of the twenties or in foreign universities but had since preserved silence or lost their way.

The Sino-Indian boundary dispute provides an interesting test case to determine the willingness of mainland China, a revolutionary regime, to argue its position within the framework of traditional international law. Judging by Peking's official rationale for its claims in that dispute, one must conclude that its leaders demonstrated an awareness of the law's uses and limitations, and a willingness to rely upon it as an important support for its position. Thus, though the issue was viewed as a political question, Peking chose to argue that the correct answers to it should rest upon such legal or quasilegal considerations as: (1) the boundary had never been delimited through a process recognized by international law and (2) Chinese claims to contested territory were based upon historical evidence such as administrative control and official records. At the same time, China's diplomate skillfully interspersed nonlegal theses, e.g., that India was seeking to gain by the imperialist activities of the British, and underlined all of their propositions with a show of military strength on her southern frontier.

The immediate purpose of this study is to describe an interesting and rather bizarre episode in nineteenth century Chinese-British relations. It concerns the so-called “Canton City Question” of the 1840's, and I hope to show that the traditional accounts of this incident may have been misleading and, in some cases, inaccurate.

Our resources for the analysis and dissemination of information on Asia have expanded greatly since the beginning of World War II. The record reveals an astounding amount of popular and scholarly publication on almost every aspect of the continent's civilizations, with the quality rising over the decades. It is doubtful, however, that these contributions have had a meaningful impact either on public opinion or on the attitudes of those key persons who determine policy. The critical cases of China, Korea, and Indochina are the most vivid examples of recent failures in effective communication. Although in recent times no Asian country has escaped violent power struggles arising from internal or external causes, or their combined effects, in none of these conflicts has professional reporting been adequate. If readily available information and a carefully considered interpretation of that information can ameliorate conditions leading to conflict, we students of Asia, among others, cannot be proud of our achievements. The common academic response that scholarship must be disinterested and thus must bear little or no relationship to public policy is, to my mind, quite unacceptable.