One wonders what the general reading public has made of the translations of traditional Chinese fiction which have recently appeared in bookstores, in several instances in paper-bound series usually devoted to up-to-date novels of violence and vampires. Chinese colloquial fiction before the coming of Western influences certainly contains enough of both murder and adultery to give the average reader a sense of literary familiarity; but the thoughtful reader must be puzzled by an undefinable inadequacy, by a feeling of literary promise unfulfilled, to which even the student of Chinese stories and novels must confess. Unconsciously conditioned as are we all to the premises and achievements of European fiction, we cannot fail to weigh this fiction of another culture in the same balance and find it vaguely wanting. In the following pages I intend to isolate several of the factors which contribute to our impression of disappointment upon reading those works which have long been a source of delight to the Chinese.

In 1951, the Chinese delegate to the United Nations proposed to the General Assembly that the Chinese text of the Genocide Convention be revised. The reason for revision, as stated in the Chinese proposal, was that there existed a number of discrepancies between the Chinese text originally prepared by the United Nations Secretariat and the other official texts. The Chinese delegate included in his proposal a new Chinese text for consideration by the General Assembly. Of the proposed changes the most important one related to the Chinese translation of the term “genocide.” The term had originally been translated by the Secretariat as “wei-hai chung-tsu” (lit., “to cause harm or to destroy racial groups”), while the new Chinese text translated the term as “ts'an-hai jen-ch'ün” (lit., “to cause harm to or to destroy human groups in a ruthless manner”). The new translation is closer to the meaning of the term “genocide” which, as defined in Article 2 of the Convention, encompasses any act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The Chinese proposal was adopted by the General Assembly on December 21, 1952, by Resolution 691 (VII).

Unlike edward cameron dimock, Henry David Thoreau never traveled to India, but he imagined Yankee merchant ships transporting ice blocks from Walden Pond to New Orleans and Calcutta, where the pure Walden water would mingle with the sacred water of the Ganges. Less romantically, one can imagine the Walden ice mingling with British gin and tonic in clubs of the East India Company. In our own time, Ed Dimock has brought America and India together in more significant ways. I'm delighted that he is in New Orleans today—honoring him seems a wonderful way of celebrating ourselves on this fiftieth anniversary of the Association for Asian Studies.

Japanese imperialism relentlessly besieged the Nationalist government of China during the Nanking decade. Chiang Kai-shek, believing that China was not ready to confront Japanese military power and obsessed with the desire to eliminate the Communists, adopted a policy of consistent appeasement toward the.Japanese. This enraged public opinion in urban China, and Zou Tao-fen, a popular journalist, led the cry for resistance to Japan. He and his associates were continually suppressed by the Nanking government; nevertheless, they published several journals in succession, each of which denounced Chiang's policy toward Japan and all of which achieved enormous circulation. Late in 1935 Zou and his followers helped organize the National Salvation Movement, which demanded that Chiang suspend the civil war against the Communists and fight the Japanese. When Chiang Kai-shek, acting under Japanese pressure, arrested Zou and the leaders of the association in 1936, they became national heroes, the legendary “Seven Gentlemen.” Zou's martyrdom and that of his associates transformed their movement into a powerful political force, one that opposed Chiang and increasingly favored the Chinese Communists.

The four articles in this “Catastrophic Asia” collection, while showcasing distinct disciplinary approaches to the subject of what anthropologist George E. Marcus (1994) might identify as “technopolitical” catastrophes, are united in the attempt to uncover the sociopolitical resonances of “manmade” damage in what we take to be regional Asia. In his book Technoscientific Imaginaries, Marcus recognizes that science is deeply political and already embedded in events. In this special section of JAS, anthropologists join with scholars in the physical and natural sciences to apply this idea to catastrophic phenomena, continuing a transdisciplinary conversation that began in April 2014 at the Catastrophic Asia Symposium at the University of Colorado. Here, I contribute to this transdisciplinary enthusiasm by sharing with readers of an Asia-focused journal my own perspectives on catastrophe as a scholar of Brazil and a cultural anthropologist interested in medical anthropology and critical science studies. Specifically, I consider how experts working on issues related to the Angra dos Reis nuclear energy plant in Brazil—the site of my current research—viewed and discussed the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown of 2011. By reading the current articles through the lens of my own research, I seek to situate catastrophe within a broader anthropological literature on environmental toxicity.

China's trade and financial surpluses, exchange rate, and currency reserves make headlines, daily, around the world. As such, it is more imperative than ever to understand the inner workings of currency policy in China. Yet the exercise of power and decision making in these areas has received surprisingly little attention in Chinese politics, political economy, and, arguably, economics.

The interconnected body of stories about Ch'un-ch'iu-Warring States times, known to most Chinese and embodied in a wide variety of verbal forms both oral and written, was a secular mythology—secular because it concerned men acting in the datable past, mythology because it was invested with a special authority for the culture at large. In my study of the sources and transmission of one small part of this mythology, the matter of Wu Tzu-hsii, I conclude that in the period down to the Former Han regional epics and hero stories were important vehicles for the transmission of Wu Tzu-hsü's story and of other stories like it. This part of Chinese verbal culture underwent a profound transformation during the imposition of centralized national rule in Ch'in and Han times. The epic tradition gradually disappeared and the old stories that survived were infused with a new meaning by historians who were driven by what can only be called a didactic imperative. Thus, epic was overwhelmed by history—China's secular scripture. The early literary versions of the matter of Wu Tzu-hsü provide compelling evidence of this.

This paper begins with an examination of the burgeoning interest in literatures in Chinese. It argues that studies in literatures in Chinese map out a terrain where complex negotiations and interventions for different purposes are carried out. As studies in literatures in Chinese often imply a shift from the nation-state paradigm to the transnational paradigm, which implicitly celebrates diasporic imagination as a counterforce to the power of the nation-state, this paper proposes to examine the intersection of Chinese Malaysian literature and Taiwan literature at two specific moments of transnational literary production—the late 1970s to the mid-1980s and the late 1990s to the present—so as to demonstrate the unstable meanings of the diaspora sign. It highlights the importance of historicization in investigating phenomena of transnational cultural production and the need to reincorporate the notion of “place” into our agenda in conducting cultural critiques. The paper ends with a critique of the global city as a methodological concept and argues for a place paradigm without privileging the global city as a metaphor for transnational space.

American military bases and the protests they have elicited have had a major impact on Japanese political culture. But after the end of the formal Occupation, and outside the territory immediately affected, the cultural consequences of the U.S. military presence are much less clear. This article offers a synthetic analysis that integrates diplomatic and social history and relates the strategies of U.S. policymakers to those of anti-base activists. It shows how much the base system has changed over time and how protests have long focused on the same issues, especially sex work and sexual violence, territorial disputes, and nuclear weapons. In each case, Washington and Tokyo worked together to insulate Japanese society, which made it easier for Japanese men and women to tolerate the bases and easier for U.S. servicemen to live within them.

In 1876 Baba Tatsui, then a young twenty-six year old man who had just completed two years' study of English law in London, published a booklet there called The Treaty Between Japan and England. It was a remarkable work in that it was destined to become the source most frequently cited by many Meiji publicists and later historians who attacked the inequity of the extraterritorial regime in Japan. In this work Baba wrote that it was evidently to the interest of British consuls in Japan “to protect their countrymen rather than to prosecute or convict them,” and that the majority of the English residents in Japan had “strong prejudices against the natives of the country … and … against the native government. …” These facts alone, Baba went on to say, “show that the judges of the consular courts are not impartial, and therefore it is difficult to see how justice can be done in a court of justice where the judges have so much interest for the one and prejudice against the other.” In a similar vein in 1893 the Kaishintō Tōhō, a bi-monthly periodical published by the Kaishintō, commented: “Injustice is the general rule in these [British and American consular] tribunals: justice is rare. Nevertheless, when they render just judgments we applaud their justice, hoping thereby to encourage them in the exercise of that quality.” Thus arose in the late nineteenth century the farreaching generalization that the Western consular tribunals in Japan were so partial—toward Westerners and against Japanese—that they seldom rendered even-handed justice.

When people build cities—and particularly planned cities—they intend more and do more than simply meet their practical needs. The cities they build and the cities they leave behind in archeological remains and in the pages of history dramatize for us their social order—both actual and ideal—their view of the cosmos and their place in it, their hierarchy of values. Thus, for example, Akbar's palace city of Fatehpur Sikri is more than a vainglorious display of newly-won power; its subtle blending of Hindu and Islamic elements symbolizes Akbar's dream of an ecumenical Indian order informed with tolerance and mutual respect.

Jainism is well known as a radically ascetic strategy for achieving liberation from the world''s bondage. It is less well known as a system of religious belief and practice embedded in social life. This article will examine Jainism as a symbolism of social identity. At the center of my inquiry is a puzzling cultural fact, the seemingly paradoxical claim by many nonviolent Jains to be descended from warlike Rājpūts. Despite its extreme emphasis on ascetic withdrawal from the world, Jainism is, as I hope to show, deeply implicated in the worldly identity of certain social groups and even can function as a kind of origin myth for these groups. Understanding how this is possible requires a considerable departure from the usual perspective on Jainism. The ascetic is normally the center of attention in Jain studies. This article, however, will give equal attention to a figure less frequently considered. This is the warrior-king.

The history of the discoveries of Early Man in Indonesia has been marked by bold speculations and surprising successes alternating with frustrated hopes and discouraging lulls from the time when the first explorer in search of his remains set foot on Java's soil. This explorer was Eugène Dubois. He came to the island in 1889 for the outspoken purpose of finding the “missing link” and—he found it. What particular considerations induced him to seek after such a creature—at this time rather an idea than á substantiality—on this seemingly forlorn outpost of the Asiatic continent, we do not know. Dubois never told what prompted, him to look for such a phantom in Indonesia. But the fact is that he quit his position at the Department of Anatomy of the University of Amsterdam and entered the military service of the Dutch colonies as a health officer. In April 1889, he was delegated to “extend his studies to the tertiary and diluvial fauna of Java.” From that year until 1895 Dubois explored all the localities known from earlier investigations to be particularly rich in fossil remains, and assembled from them a large collection of plants and animals.