K. C. Chang's Shang Civilization is an invaluable, encyclopaedic guide to the archaeology, anthropology, and culture of East Asia's first historical dynasty. After a summary of the book's scope and a sampling of its interpretations, the review discusses six of Chang's major themes: (1) the acceptance of the “longer” rather than “shorter” dynastic chronology; (2) the identification of Cheng-chou as a Shang capital; (3) the hypothesis that two major groups held royal power in alternategenerations; (4) the extent to which the states surrounding the Shang enjoyed cultural and ethnic unity; (5) the existence of numerous walled towns; and (6) the relation between bronze tools and agricultural productivity.

During the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45), China's leading cartoon artists formed patriotic associations aimed at repelling the Japanese military. Their stated propaganda goals were to boost morale among the troops and the civilian population by circulating artwork that would ignite the spirit of resistance among Chinese audiences. In keeping with the genre, racialized and sexualized imagery abounded. The artists created myriad disturbing visions of how militarized violence impacted men's and women's bodies differently. By analyzing the two major professional journals, National Salvation Cartoons and War of Resistance Cartoons, this article shows that depictions of sexual violence inflicted on Chinese women were integral to the artists' attempts to arouse the spirit of resistance. By comparing their depictions of different types of bodies (Chinese and Japanese, male and female, soldiers' and civilians') the article argues that the cartoonists believed that the depiction of sexually mutilated Chinese women would build resistance and spur patriotism while equivalent depictions of mutilated male soldiers would sap morale and hamper the war effort. The article concludes with a discussion about the dubious efficacy of propaganda that invokes a hypersexualized, masculine enemy other.

The political, economic and social changes experienced by China over the past decade have been mirrored by transformations in the literary realm. Writers, editors, critics and readers have contended with the acceleration of commercialisation, the rise of the Internet, and the Communist Party's subtly changing attitude to creative freedom. This essay examines the creative responses of three critically acclaimed generations of novelists – born between the 1950s and 1980s – to this new climate. It considers the way in which writers have become entrepreneurs, managing their own personality cults over the Internet and through media spin. It discusses widespread corruption in literary reviewing; the weaknesses in editorial standards that affect the work of even the most mature voices writing today; and the fluid way in which novelists often abandon fiction for other professions or expressive forms, such as film. Finally, it considers the limits of literary freedom in China's one-party cultural system.

One of the most important contributions of the recent wave of historical and anthropological scholarship on community identities is to analyze the complex manner in which identities are constructed and to study how such constructions influence their enactment. Similar arguments have been made about caste and “communal” categories and conflicts (see, for example, Dirks 1992; Pandey 1990 and 1992). Political theorists and philosophers have contributed to dismantling old categories by exploring the diverse meanings, possibilities, and limits of secularism in India (Bhargav 1994; Bilgrami 1994; Chatterjee 1994). Given these important methodological and theoretical developments, which focus on the construction of community identities, are there distinctive contributions that students of Indian politics can make to the study of community conflicts? The essays in this symposium provide several important responses to this question.

When teaching Tokugawa intellectual history, I consistently encounter a question that is at once deceptively simple yet so difficult to respond to in a convincing and substantial way. Why do Japanese historians argue that Confucianism had an important impact on Tokugawa society, when geographical, political, and ethical realities in Japan were so vastly different from those in China? There is, of course, good reason to be perplexed, I reply, and offer a generalization or two. Tokugawa society clearly was not “Sinified” as is sometimes implied; but, on the other hand, the imprint of Confucianism on Tokugawa thought and culture was undeniably deep. Although the picture is sometimes overdrawn, Japanese historians constantly refer to Confucianism as the “rationalizing” force that transformed Japan from a religious and ascetic culture to a bureaucratic and secular one. The same historians continue to debate the intellectual merit of Tokugawa Confucianism in Japan's modern culture, for while the precise ramifications are still controversial, there is little doubt as to the depth of the Tokugawa intellectual engagement with Confucian thought and of the profound legacy of that engagement for the modern history of Japan. Unfortunately, these generalizations, although helpful, do not add up to convincing historical instruction, a realization that has invariably left me searching for more cogent lines of interpretation and more detailed characterizations of Tokugawa thought.

Hanumān, the ancient monkey-divinity of India: for many, he represents the force of life in man's struggle to exist. He is most famous for his devotion to the god-king Rāma, and for his exploits as leader of the monkey army that helped save Rāma's princess from the demon-king of Laṅkā. Yet in the Bhojpurī-speaking area of western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, Hanumān is a god of great importance in his own right. There he is worshiped as the epitome of strength and vitality; popular legends associate him not so much with the self-restrained Rāma as with Śiva, possessor of creative and destructive energy.

At the conclusion of the war in 1895, Japan acquired two territories from China: Liaotung Peninsula and Taiwan, including the islands of Penghu. (Hereafter Taiwan will denote the main island of Taiwan and the Penghus.) It is easy to understand why Japan annexed Liaotung: because of its proximity to Korea. But why was she interested in annexing Taiwan, located more than a thousand miles away from the principal battlefield and more than half of it controlled by headhunting aboriginal tribes? According to the conventional interpretation, Japan's decision on the annexation was based on consideration of two factors: (1) the island's potential as a new market, and as a supplier of food and raw materials for the rapidly expanding Japanese capitalism and labor forces and (2) its military value as a stepping-stone for future expansion in south China and southeast Asia. Implicit in such views is the assumption that Japan had planned the annexation long before the war—perhaps as early as 1874, when a Japanese expeditionary force briefly occupied a part of the island.

In Yadgiri Tahsil, an administrative subdivision of Mysore State, many villages stage annual fairs or festivals in honor of local deities. These festivals, known locally as “jātras,” usually involve the enactment of ritual, competition between villages, public entertainment, commercial activities, and feasting and celebrating. Description of the jātra as an “interlocal festival” emphasizes its distinguishing feature, the entertainment of reified guest villages by an equally reified host village. Participants in a jātra consist of guests representing neighboring villages and of hosts representing the village where the jātra is held. Comparison of the jātra with such cultural features as the American county fair, the Creek Indian ball game, the Olympic games, the Mexican fiesta, Pueblo Indian ceremonials, and medieval European tournaments may well, at a later date, make possible the establishment of the concept of interlocal festivals as a basis for cross-cultural generalizations. For the present, four jātras held in Yadgiri Tahsil will be described and some of their possible functions suggested.

Historians of the modern Far East have usually assumed that in spite of the founding of the Tsungli-yamen and the launching of the self-strengthening movement of the 1860's, Chinese foreign policy remained weak, inept, and uninformed. Typically, China's handling of the Korean problem is contrasted with the swift and sure diplomacy of the new Japan to show how little Chinese statesmen understood of changing world conditions or of the altered character of the threat from Japan. China's failure to prevent Korea from slipping out of the tributary system is held to offer such obvious proof of the inadaptability of Ch'ing diplomacy as to make the issue scarcely worth discussing.

The procession troupes at the gods' festivals so common today in southern Taiwan, as on the China mainland in the past, perform a kind of ritual drama. The processions themselves occur on god's birthdays, in great ceremonies of renewal (jiao) or, in a more abbreviated form, at pilgrimage sites. The troupes (zbentou) are dramatic elements in the procession in that the performers dress up, portray a story, and try to entertain. What they do may be classified as ritual: forms and content are stereotyped, repetitive, condensed, and conventionalized (Tambiah 1985). The performances are for divine as well as for human enjoyment, and vary little as the troupes parade from temple to temple.

Contemporary Japan has been consistently portrayed as a highly integrated society. Countless sociological works have argued that its mechanism of value consensus and social solidarity works efficiently and extensively. According to Ezra Vogel, for example, Japan is essentially a society where rapid transition has taken place in an orderly manner without much social disorganization. For Nakane Chie, Japanese society is composed of internally cohesive and vertically structured groups which tend to stabilize its system.

This essay is a first attempt at examining the origins and development of Chinese complaint systems before 1900, so as to understand the nature and character of this institution in historical perspective. The essay argues that the Chinese complaint system originated as an informal system in the pre-Han period and developed gradually from the late Han to the Sui. The Tang first institutionalized such a system and distinguished three major forms of complaints: direct, jumping, and gradual appeals. Subsequent states generally followed the Tang model but also made significant changes. Chinese rulers, deeply influenced by the Confucian concept of minben (people as the foundation of the state) and by notions of heaven–human interaction (tianren ganying), tended to accept illegal appeals no matter how annoying they were for fear that any grievance might prompt heavenly punishments, while complainants regarded their appeals as a natural right no matter how useless they were. In this way, the complaint system become a hot potato for rulers that was too hot to hold but too valuable to drop.

This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group before the construction of the “Uyghur” identity. In the absence of a national history, separate histories of local heroes were linked together through custom anthology production and networked travel to shrines, yielding a modular historical tradition that accommodated local interests in regional narratives. Central to the operation of this system were community authorship in the manuscript tradition, the creation of a new genre for local history, and the publicly recorded circulation of pilgrims who heard performances of historical texts. This constellation of phenomena underpinned an alternative type of imagined community: a reasonably homogeneous, regional, writing-facilitated identity system flourishing in a nonmodern context.

This paper traces a side story to the well-known tale of the poligar rebel Kattabomman, who was hanged in 1799 for his refusal to accept the authority of the emerging colonial state in south India. Specifically, it draws on the story of seventy-three poligars who survived the brutal Poligar Wars and were transported to Penang in Southeast Asia in 1801, an episode that highlights the workings of the coercive power and moral authority of the new regime in early colonial India. The paper illustrates the variety of forms that resistance to the regime took and the extent to which the colonial state in south Asia strengthened and was strengthened by the rising British Empire across the Indian Ocean. The poligars' lives in exile are reconstructed as a story of their struggle for status and dignity in a settlement where they were initially lumped together with convicts brought there from Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay.

On September 26, 1792, George Lord Viscount Macartney, the first British envoy ever to reach China, sailed from Portsmouth with a commission as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China. The aims of the mission were to put Sino-British relations upon a treaty basis, redress various grievances in the existing commercial arrangements at Canton, open new ports to trade in north and central China, and, if possible, establish a permanent legation in China. As the objectives of the embassy were important and as it would establish precedents for future British missions to China, the government had planned it with care, and had placed at its head an especially competent diplomat and colonial administrator. The British were well aware that the Chinese considered foreign embassies as tribute-bearing missions and generally, if not always, demanded that the ambassador perform the kotow before the Emperor.

In Apple CEO Tim Cook's keynote speech at the Chinese government's 2017 World Internet Conference, he extolled the values of “Privacy. Security. Decency” (Apple Newsroom 2017). The last two terms, “security” and “decency,” have long been closely associated with Chinese government efforts to control the Internet. Indeed, in 2017 Apple agreed to turn over user data to Chinese government servers and start a Chinese provincial government-run data storage center. Yet in 2015, Apple refused to turn over the passcode for one user in the United States during the FBI investigation following the San Bernardino terrorist attacks. The company's different policies in the United States and China relate directly back to Apple's concern for market share and access.

The founders of India's Mughal Empire were the last surviving remnants of the Timurid-Mongol ruling elite, descendants of Timur and Chingis Khan, for whom the traditions and institutions of Central Asia were universally recognized and potent symbols of cultural prowess and legitimacy. These ideas and understandings were not abandoned in the dynasty's displacement and reestablishment in India. Among them remained a distinctly Timurid understanding of the rights and roles of elite women—not only with regard to their artistic production or patronage but also, in marked contrast to their contemporaries the Ottomans and Safavids, the power offered to young, even childless, royal women and their active participation in dynastic survival and political success. In generations of Mughal rule on the Subcontinent, the comfortable cultural accommodation of independent elite women was a vital component of the Timurid cultural and social legacy, inherited and carefully maintained at the royal courts of India.

This article argues that the establishment of anatomo-power in China preceded and set the foundation for biopower. Anatomo-power is disciplinary power over live bodies in the military, schools, and hospitals, but also the power of the medical profession over dead bodies to investigate pathology through dissection. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese conceptions of political anatomy were used to advocate anatomical knowledge, and an anatomy law in 1913 made routinized dissection possible. Chinese society began to be transformed as old taboos were broken, and thousands of new terms allowed the scientific worldview to take root among professionals and the public. Anatomical researchers addressed both microscopic pathology to cure individuals and macroscopic questions that grouped individuals into a population to be managed, or that sought data to tell new narratives about the origins and future of humanity—a new political anatomy based on the practice of human dissection.