Patrimonial politics and administration in princely India from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century are the subjects of this essay. The bureaucratic lineage, exemplified here by three related families, is our unit of analysis for understanding elite formation and conflict. The period of the lineage's historical ascendency, a century spanning four generations, is sufficiently long to capture processes of conflict and change as well as more visible and easily accessible features of integration and stability.

This essay is an attempt to reassess the role played by Wu San-kuei during the crucial year of 1644.1 Traditionally ignored by historians or relegated to a minor role, the conventional wisdom has instead preserved the following now well established account of Wu's place in the Manchu conquest of China. When the rebel Li Tzu-ch'eng was marching eastward and advancing toward Peking, Emperor Ch'ung chen finally realized the danger of the threat. In early April he conferred upon Wu San-kuei and other able generals the title of earl; Wu was designated P'ing-hsi po (Earl who Pacified the West). The emperor further ordered Wu both to abandon the land east of the Shan-hai pass and to move the troops back to Peking to meet the threat posed by Li's advance toward Peking. Nevertheless, Wu temporarily ignored the order and delayed his march. When his troops eventually marched halfway to Feng-jun, on the 26th of April, Peking had already fallen into the hands of the rebels. Consequently, he marched back to the Shan-hai-kuan, a vital strategic town located at a pass at the east end of the Great Wall, to contemplate the next move. Meanwhile, Li Tzu-ch'eng sent a delegate to demand Wu's surrender, holding his father, the retired commander Wu Hsiang, as hostage. Wu considered complying with the demand but changed his mind upon learning that his favorite concubine, Ch'en Yüan-yüan, had also been seized. Outraged, he surrendered to the Manchus and invited them to suppress the rebellion.

One of the problems recurring in the Buddhist Pali Texts is the question of what it is that transmigrates. Buddhism accepts as axiomatic the doctrine of rebirth, a process of “renewal of becomings” until the attainment of complete knowledge, whereupon the process terminates. At the same time, the Pali texts are committed to the doctrine that there is no soul. The two doctrines, held simultaneously, presented a difficulty of which the Buddhist monks were well aware. If there is no soul, no Ego, no self, and yet rebirth is a fact, what is reborn?

French Indochina presents a veritable mosaic of languages, among which are representatives of all the major language families of Southeast Asia. This country has long served as a geographical cul-desac for the continental mass of Asia and thus has received a variety of cultural and linguistic influences, producing one of the most complex ethnological pictures to be found anywhere in the world. Within its confines may be found languages belonging to the Mon-Khmer, Malayo-Polynesian, Annamese-Müöng, Thai, Kadai, Miao-Yao, Tibeto-Burman, and Chinese stocks. Generally the centers of distribution for these language stocks lie outside Indochina, which has received only a trickle of speakers from linguistic spillage across its borders; only one of these stocks (Annamese-Müöng) is an exclusively native product of Indochina. Little is known of most of these languages, and even the more important among them (Annamese, Khmer, Lao) have not yet received adequate modern linguistic treatment. The main outlines are sufficiently clear, however, and afford us data on the cultural history of the country.

The diplomats, business men and publicists who were actively engaged in the penetration and exploitation of China during the latter part of the nineteenth century most frequently offered economic explanations for their actions. References to the commercial opportunities to be found in China appear with almost wearisome repetition in diplomatic correspondence, in treaties and conventions and in the press. Armed with a more complete knowledge of the situation, recent commentators upon European imperialism in China have been prone to discount this interest, and it is true that the China trade did receive notice that was out of proportion to its importance. However, the wisdom of hindsight may sometimes be misleading and unless we know the general opinion of the China market as it was expressed in the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties the strong interest displayed both by governments and individuals in tapping that market is largely incomprehensible to us.

The popularization of Japanese Buddhism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is generally equated with the development of independent religious movements such as the Pure Land and Lotus schools, which emphasized salvation by faith and simple invocations. Although these movements were indeed at the heart of Buddhism's transformation from an aristocratic to a popular religion, there are problems with an approach that focuses on them alone. To begin with, such an approach ignores the considerable contribution of the older schools—Tendai, Shingon, and those centered in Nara—to the popularization of Buddhism. In addition, it becomes tempting to see the spread of Buddhism as only the result of innovations in doctrine and religious practice, the most obvious differences between new schools and old, and to ignore the role played by monasteries as social and economic institutions.

Modernization is a word that has been widely and rather loosely used for some time to characterize the fundamental changes that have been taking place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among non-Western peoples. It was first used in this sense to describe developments in Japan, China and Turkey, but with the multiplication of newly independent nations in Asia and Africa since World War II die term has been applied to them, also.

Each upsurge of Hindu-Muslim tension in India brings in its wake scholarly and journalistic articles that highlight the frustrations of Indian Muslims and that raise serious questions about their commitment to India's secular democracy. The philosophical and empirical bases of these accounts are challenged by findings that suggest that region, poverty, illiteracy, and the working-class position of Indian Muslims are more significant in shaping their political outlook than religion. In contrast with the “orientalist” orthodoxy, this study finds the views of Indian Muslims to be diverse, complex, and well-integrated into the political perspectives of the linguistic regions in which they reside.

Few events have made a more profound impact on political developments in modern Ceylon than an outbreak of riots between Buddhists and Muslims in 1915 and the reaction of British colonial officials to the disorders. The Ceylonese view was that the authorities responded with unjustifiably harsh repression and executed or imprisoned persons who had no responsibility for the outbreak. To many ceylonese, the government's actions illustrated a basic failing of colonial rule and starkly demonstrated the need for self-government. The handling of the riots galvanized nationalist sentiment and led to the appearance of an organized national independence movement. Although few constitutional changes had occurred in the preceding eighty years, progress came rapidly after 1915, culminating in independence thirty-three years later. The three articles in this symposium constitute a major examination and reassessment of the 1915 riots and their causes and consequences.

Four recent studies of the modern Chinese economy show how the disciplines of economics and history have produced different judgments about the economic changes of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. These differences are overridden, however, by shared disciplinary concerns with problems of inequality and the growth of the modern state. Economists have demonstrated statistically that regional variations (particularly urban-rural differences), coupled with the size of the Chinese polity, continue to pose many of the same administrative problems for the modern state that they posed during the late empire and in turn have produced some similar strategies for ruling. These enduring problems are located squarely in the order of production in China's agrarian peasant communities and in the logistical problems of distributing what is produced there through an integrated political and economic system.

Between 1950 and 1953, the United Nations (UN) undertook two related tasks in Korea: the first was to assist the Republic of Korea in achieving military victory in its conflict with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea; the second was to support postcolonial economic and political reconstruction on the peninsula. In both, the UN promoted the implementation of modern agricultural and resource management practices, directly tying increased domestic farm and forestry productivity to military success. Through the lens of UN development projects, the Korean War, often characterized as a point of rupture, represented less a moment of disjuncture than it did a period of accelerated continuity. This article interweaves environmental, military, and development history to analyze several UN programs in the Republic of Korea between 1950 and 1953, demonstrating that the UN viewed resource development as among the most effective ways to wage and win a war.

Richard A. Solomon's book, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), suffers especially from a faulty approach to the political culture of traditional China. Neglecting documentary sources, Solomon fails to understand the role of legitimated protest in traditional China, and this failure in turn limits his understanding of how values have changed in China under Mao. His book, however, contains much interesting factual material about Chinese attitudes toward authority and about politics in the CPR.

While Russian and Chinese wage and distribution policies in general differ from each other in terms of specific provisions and regulations, they are also generically very similar, if not identical. To provide some insight into the nature of this unity and diversity of policy, it seems best to discuss first the distributive implications of their common ideological reference, i.e. Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

Distributive Strategy and Tactics

Both the Russians and the Chinese deal with any human action as a process of material transformation, and consequently view the totality of man's actions as a chain of material transformation processes, conditioned by the distribution of ownership of the means of production as the determinant of social relations of production. Both hold that while human action is governed objectively by material and social nature and its laws, it is determined subjectively by man's technical and social awareness and thus by man's technical and social experiences. Both assert that man's increasing comprehension of nature and its laws manifests itself in increasing accumulation and in enlarged reproduction, i.e., in economic growth. Both aim for the unity of objectivity and subjectivity, i.e., for the complete reproduction of nature by man at the earliest possible moment, and both strive therefore for the most rapidly enlarging accumulation over time.

Theravāda Buddhism has during the past century been an annoyance to scholars who tried to find a general and crossculturally valid definition of religion. Durkheim refuted Frazer's minimal definition of religion being “the belief in Spiritual Beings” solely on the grounds of the notable exception of Theravāda Buddhism. He based his argument that “the idea of gods is absent, or at least, … plays only a secondary and minor role” mainly on the now classic work of Oldenberg, “Buddha, his Life, his Doctrine, his Community,” published originally in 1881. The same book was also used extensively by Max Weber who asked himself whether a system of “ethics without God” and “with absolute indifference towards the question whether gods do exist or not and how they exist” could be called a “religion.”

As historians of Southeast Asia turn to the study of rural history, they will have to resort increasingly to theoretical aids as an answer to the paucity of written records. Such theory, drawn from the other social sciences, must be shaped and tested to fit the needs of the historical discipline. For example, the work of Ester Boserup and Clifford Geertz on the relationship among population density, land usage, and socioeconomic behavior has applicability to problems of the evolution of Southeast Asian rural society under colonial impact. A comparison of Geertz' study of agricultural involution in nineteenth century Java with my own work on Pampanga Province, Philippines, provides some first steps towards a theory of rural change. Specifically, a modern cash crop economy produces more sophisticated contractual relations between tenants and landowners regardless of changes in population density per agricultural hectare. And, in the face of a scarcity of resources (e.g., land, cash, machinery, etc.) needed for modern agriculture, a given society will evolve highly complex institutions in order to share as far as possible those commodities in short supply. Specific types of institutions may develop to meet given needs, and the greater the number of shortages, the more involuted the society will become.

Mr. Chang, who lived in Hopei Province in China, found himself in need of money to meet some special business expenses back in 1918. He might have gone to his relatives and asked them, as members of his family, to lend him the money. Or if there were not enough relatives to provide the sum needed, he might have persuaded one of his friends to introduce him to one of the well-to-do money lending families of the community, but that would have involved the payment of interest of two, two and a half or even three per cent a month. To save the heavy interest charge and to avoid putting too much burden on his relatives, Mr. Chang went to thirty of his friends and relatives, told them of his need for funds and invited them to join a mutual savings society. Such societies are very numerous in North China. They are popular because the members provide the capital sums that they use in turn and so avoid the expensive services of the money lender.

Between 1900 and 1908 the Chinese revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, tried to obtain assistance from the French government for his movement to overturn the Manchu dynasty, and at one point he contacted a French army officer who gave the impression that such aid might be forthcoming. This connection between Sun Yat-sen and France, revealed in Sun's memoirs, has intrigued and puzzled historians who have been uncertain as to the policy behind this curious contact. However, French archival records reveal that the promise of assistance to Sun was ephemeral as the French government decided that its political and economic interests in Asia dictated against any support for an Asian revolutionary leader. Under pressure from the Imperial Chinese government French officials banished Sun Yat-sen from Indochina in 1908, thereby demonstrating a basic hostility toward revolutionary movements in Asia.

The success of the Chinese Communists in defeating their adversaries and consolidating their power is in large measure attributable to their capture of the sympathy and support of students and intelligentsia. This was the culmination of a long historical development. Repeated Kuomintang failures, social, economic, and political, drove more and more of the literate class into the Communist camp. This group now comprises some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the new regime, and they have been given the task of consolidating the Communist position among workers, peasants, and businessmen. There are dissenters, but few will risk open criticism of Marxist theory, Russian orientation, or party policy. This paper deals with the pronouncements and actions of a group of scholars and educators in the field of sociology who have been particularly prominent in their support and implementation of the policies of the new regime.

In recent years the cry has gone up: Sinology is dead; long live Chinese studies! And in this apothegm, by contrast with its prototype, a fundamental change is implied. Whereas old-time Sinology was given shape by its tools, so that Sinological skills defined the field and became an end in themselves, Chinese studies is shaped by its subject matter and Sinological skills are but means to analytic ends. Whereas traditional Sinology fostered uncritical immersion in a single civilization, modern Chinese studies brings at least that degree of impartial detachment which the comparative method implies. Whereas Sinology focused on China's “great tradition” and strove to capture the very ethos of the literati whose works it studied, Chinese studies today attempts to encompass the entire society and cultural product of China, to study its regional “little traditions” along with the “great,” and to empathize for heuristic purposes with nonélite social groups as well as with the literati. Sinology, a discipline unto itself, is being replaced by Chinese studies, a multidisciplinary endeavor with specific research objectives. As Professor Wright has suggested, what is text for the Sinologist becomes, for the disciplinary student of China, evidence.