Students of Chinese society should devote more attention to urban Taiwan, for several reasons. First, whatever the relative significance of Taiwan and Communist China in the world, Taiwanese social life can at least be studied at first hand over a protracted period, and with relatively little interference. The events on the China mainland since 1950 are often described as “the most large scale experiment in social change in world history.” Yet these events cannot be studied in the way social scientists prefer to do their research. Moreover, the most dramatic social events do not necessarily make the most important sociological problems; important breakthroughs in any science often come from the study of very mundane phenomena. Second, Taiwan is now, with Japan, Singapore and Malayasia, the most industrialized and economically developed of Asian countries. Urban Taiwanese are strategically significant in this context. Since Taiwan as a whole is becoming ever more urbanized and industrialized, knowledge of social life in metropolitan Taiwan today may provide the best clues as to the patterns toward which Taiwan as a whole will tend in the future. Third, Japanese sources describe many aspects of social structure in urban Taiwan a half century or more ago, and thereby provide comparative data on change over time in urban Taiwan. Such data have been little utilized thus far.

The philosophical reflections on literary art produced in traditional China cannot be accurately described as literary criticism or literary theory. A scholar or writer set forth his ideas about the nature of literature in general, the value and function of imaginative writing in different genres, or the merits and flaws of specific works, but did not really criticize literature in the sense we do today, to evaluate it for those not trained to judge it. He did not claim such authority, and seldom supported his opinions with solid proofs or reasoned arguments, as literary critics are now expected to do. Having read through Ts'ao Chih's poetry, for example, Chung Hung could judge that it originated in the Kuo-feng, a class of Shih Ching poetry, and exclaim: “Alas, the status of Ts'ao Chih in literature is comparable to that of the Duke of Chou and Confucius in ethics!” but he could not expect his audience to agree with him automatically. He expressed his knowledge and taste, in other words, and the way of expressing them was so uniquely his own, so difficult for others to share, that it was what we may call a private revelation of his ideas. Chung Hung was, therefore, not offering any critical or theoretical defense of Ts'ao Chih's poetry, which does not need any promotion among the learned and does not mean anything to the uncultured. He expressed his personal enthusiasm for Ts'ao Chih's poetry, and so defined his taste and knowledge. He had added another dimension to his own personality, the dimension reflected in Ts'ao Chih's great poetry. He had, in other words, moved a step further toward the definition of his philosophy of life, which he could express in his comments and judgments on nature, on political and ethical institutions, and on literature as artistic rendition of life. What Chung Hung formulated was a private philosophy of literature; it was not literary criticism or theory in the modern sense.

One of the basic aims of American foreign policy has been to maintain the right of all countries to trade with China on an equal basis. The first formal declaration of this aim came with the sending of the Open Door notes in September, 1899. The origin of these notes has received much attention from historians in recent years, and certain aspects of their origin, particularly the part played by W. W. Rockhill and the Englishman, Alfred Hippisley, have become very well known. At least one aspect, however, has been entirely overlooked: namely, that special business interests in the United States were concerned over the possible loss of the Chinese market; were eager to have the government take just the sort of action which it did take; and were active in bringing pressure to bear on the government. It is the thesis of this article that they were partly responsible for the sending of the notes and, consequently, for America's Open Door policy.

The parish guild, or miyaza, has been studied by Japanese scholars from various perspectives and disciplines. While not wishing to disparage other approaches to the subject, in this paper I shall treat the institution as a socio-religious monopoly. A monopoly, by definition, is a group that restricts or denies resources, services, or markets to other segments of a society. While the word is generally confined to economics—where one thinks of medieval guilds and modern cartels—the concept can be profitably extended to other areas of society. The sociology of religion, for example, provides us with a wide variety of monopolies. These groups restrict access to the sacred, just as economic monopolies corner markets. Access to the sacred can be controlled in various ways—e.g., by maintaining an exclusive kinship tie with the gods (clans), by means of a purity-pollution complex (caste), or by control of a sacramental system necessary for salvation (sacerdotal priesthoods).

On November 4, 1946, representatives of the United States and China signed a five-year “Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation” at Nanking. Negotiation of this pact within six months of the cessation of hostilities had been called for by the treaty of January 11, 1943, under which the United States relinquished extraterritorial rights in China. The new treaty should thus have occasioned no surprise since it was intended merely as a routine instrument for facilitating commercial relations between the two countries.

One of the most noteworthy incidents in the history of Japan's transition from a feudal regime to a modern state was the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877. The province of Satsuma is situated in the southernmost portion of the island of Kyushu, and Kagoshima is the capital city. The Daimyo of Satsuma was one of the most powerful and aggressive of the feudal lords ruling the country at the time Japan was opened to foreign intercourse. He and his warlike samurai took a leading part in the events which saw the decline of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the restoration of the Emperor.

Two years ago our revered elder statesman Kenneth Scott Latourette gave us a comprehensive review of the development during the last few decades of studies in the United States of the Sinic world. In a sense I wish to follow in his footsteps, on the one hand broadening the base to include studies by people of all nationalities, and on the other narrowing it or restricting it to cover only one branch of the many fields of learning represented by our membership. For good reasons too I limit the discussion to China alone. Not that important discoveries have not been made elsewhere, from the Indus River to the island of Hokkaido and from Siberia to the Maldive Islands, many of them bearing importantly on the growth of civilization amongst the Chinese people; a Han crossbow lock in Taxila, T'ang cash at Anuradhapura, a rock-cut representation of a Sung junk at Angkor, a late Han bronze at Oc-Eo, pre-Han silk in the frozen graves of the Altai, Ch'i state coins of the third century B.C. in northern Korea, and tenth-century block printing in the bosom of the lovely Buddhist statue which Chōnen brought back to Japan from Pien-liang in the year 985. All these and many more were discoveries of recent years in the regions now included in the Association for Asian Studies. One might, if desired, construct a much wider horizon, and so take in the Han dynasty hu or vase found in Dane John at Canterbury and now a prized possession of the British Museum, or Sung to Ming porcelain turned up at Fostat and the Kilwa Islands off the coast of Tanganyika, and the items of presumed Chinese inspiration discovered on the west coast of Central America and in Peru. But this would take us far afield, interesting though the subject may be. They show us how mobile the early Chinese were, or, if not the people themselves, certainly the work of their fingers, and how valued it was, giving tongue to the comment of Abū Zayd Ḥasan (ca. 916): “Amongst all the creatures of Allah, the Chinese have the cleverest hands at designing and creating things: for the execution of all manner of works there is no people in the world who can do better than they.”

If the several articles assembled here dramatize a long-standing suspicion that our understanding of nationalism has not progressed very far beyond its original conceptualization, they also reveal the limitations of this tradition of discourse which we have had to work in. Yet in disclosing the limitations of this tradition they have in fact gone beyond it. In viewing the subject as a condition of a more basic problematik they have raised new questions demanding serious accountability and, perhaps, cleared the way for a total reassessment of nationalism as history and hermeneutic. In the following pages I would like to rehearse a few of the ideas found in these papers and pursue some of the implications of their suggestiveness.