This article examines the subject of queues in the life and writings of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the most prominent figure in modern Chinese literature. The long-standing reluctance of readers and critics to associate this backward hairstyle with Lu Xun's iconic figure has restricted our understanding of the topic to two well-known satirical portraits in his short fiction, Ah Q and Sevenpounder. This article, however, proposes that the queue is of more than satiric interest—that the author's own experience raises fundamental questions about how he discloses and transmutes certain experiences in his writings. Starting from some little-studied events featuring queues in his pre-Republican years and a puzzling short story that recounts them, this essay analyzes the queue's autobiographical connections and their varied literary manifestations. It also makes a case for reexamining the uses of autobiography for a writer whose life story is an important part of his influence.

Although recent expressions of “anti-Americanism” in South Korea have alarmed policy makers in Seoul and Washington and aroused fears about declining popular support for the bilateral alliance, they are understandable manifestations of civil society activism, which has grown since democratization began during the late 1980s. This paper analyzes anti-Americanism as a dynamic coalition movement accompanied by the all of internal competition, conflicts, and contradictions that characterize such movements. In the process, some actors and issues have become high priorities, whereas others have been marginalized or silenced. Professor Moon examines kijich'on (camptown) prostitution around U.S. military bases in Korea as a case study of how power conflicts within the coalition movement, which are focused on nationalism and gender, have exploited and shut out the very people who served as its initiators and early leaders.

Perhaps best known today as a pioneering scholar of Inner Asia and a victim of the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, Owen Lattimore was more basically, like his friend Arnold Toynbee, a major player in the vogue of comparative history that captured wide public attention in the second quarter of the twentieth century. His lifelong intellectual project was to develop a “scientific” model of the way human societies form, evolve, grow, decline, mutate, and interact with one another along “frontiers.” In the process of working out this model, Lattimore appropriated for his own purposes, and often later discarded, some of the analytic devices most popular in his day, including ecological determinism, biological racism, economic geography and location theory, and Marxist modes of production. At every stage in his thinking, he sought to confound complacent teleologies, both those of Western “progress” and those of Chinese “civilization” of its pastoralist neighbors.

This paper examines the causes and processes of a popular tax-resistance movement by adopting a multidimensional approach that considers dynamic rural power relations, popular responses to social and economic changes, and cultural practices that both united and divided rural communities. Popular rebellions in 1862 reflected not only the social and economic distress that the peasantry experienced in everyday life but also the inability of the dynastic structure to accommodate the social, political, and economic changes that were occurring in the nineteenth century. This work pays close attention to the particular historical and cultural context of 1862 Korea, such as various rural conditions and the workings of dynastic institutions at the local level, and discovers that different patterns of popular protest grew out of the competition, division, and conflict that had developed along class, social status, village community, and political lines.

Beginning in the late Ming period, China experienced a surge in the production and consumption of books. Printed pages bound into fascicles and housed in cases moved across space and through the social landscape. Their trajectories illuminate larger social, intellectual, economic, and cultural patterns. They also reveal identities under construction—by readers, writers, publishers, and consumers. This article assesses the expanding field of late imperial Chinese book history in the United States and Japan, with some reference to scholarship in China and Taiwan. It looks at the field's move away from its origins in the history of technology and its increasing engagement with social and cultural questions. In particular, the article highlights the field's focus on the “place” of publishing in late imperial China, construed both in terms of regional orientation and the social position of readers and producers of books.

This paper deals with ideal masculine types in the gender discourse of Korea's modernizing nationalists during the late 1890s and early 1900s. It begins by outlining the main gender stereotypes of Korea's traditional neo-Confucian society, and it argues that old Korea's manhood norms were bifurcated along class lines. On one hand, fighting prowess was accepted as a part of the masculinity pattern in the premodern society of the commoners. On the other hand, the higher classes' visions of manhood emphasized self-control and adherence to moral and ritual norms. The paper shows how both premodern standards of masculinity provided a background for indigenizing the mid-nineteenth century European middle-class ideal of “nationalized” masculinity—disciplined, self-controlled, sublimating the sexual impulses and channeling them toward the “nobler national goals,” and highly militarized—in early modern Korea.

This essay investigates the configuration of public space in Taipei City using the example of a small urban park. In particular, this essay considers how that space functioned and functions as a site for “occupation”—that is, when and how the public space was produced by, brought under the control of, or performed in by a specific cultural agent, whether a colonial government or skateboarder. Those occupations delineate and transform the space for purposes ranging from the official, macro, and long-lived to the subversive, partial. and fleeting. The park is a shifting pastiche of different moments of occupation, diachronically and contemporaneously layered, existing in a tissue of accommodation and anxiety. The primary focus here is the evolution of the park in the urban plans of the early Japanese colonial government; however, comparisons to both the pre- and postcolonial periods are made, and the contemporary conditions of the park are considered as well.

This paper offers an alternative paradigm to dynastic history and state formation with which to understand the formation of Chinese civilization: cultural hegemony. It argues that an elite culture first crystallized in the early second millennium BCE at Yanshi Erlitou in Henan Province in which bronze was associated with a set of religious practices centered on ancestral offerings. It established a cultural hegemony over the Chinese continental region by the middle of the millennium (early Shang Dynasty). Archaeologically, its primary markers are bronze vessels with a common set of motifs and ritual forms. Although cultural diversity and local political authority remained, it was unlike the previous Neolithic cultures because it had no challenger in range or influence. Moreover, it anticipated the later common elite culture, which in Confucius's time was defined in terms of shared rites. Thus, we may legitimately call it an early stage of “Chinese civilization.”

This essay attempts to discover patterns of communicative and hermeneutic practices in the Analects, as well as in the commentary tradition, known as jingxue (classicism). The Analects contains at least two distinctive paradigms showing different ways of interpreting speech: One is Confucius's pragmatic approach, which emphasizes the intention and purpose of the speaker, and the other is Gongxi Hua's approach, which focuses on the literal meaning of the speech. Examples of each paradigm can be found in the long history of the exegeses of the Analects. Commentaries by two groups of scholars are discussed: those whose approach is similar to that of Confucius (Sima Qian, Zheng Xuan, Mouzi, Huang Kan, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi) and those whose approach is similar to that of Gongxi Hua (Xianqiu Meng, Han Fei, Wing-tsit Chan, Ya Hanzhang, and Wang Yousan).

A number of Korean legal historians have argued that Chosŏn Korea had a tradition of customary law and that it was suppressed and distorted by the Japanese during the colonial period. But a comparison of Korean “custom” with that in late medieval France, where the legal concept of customary law developed, reveals that custom as a judicial norm was absent in premodern Korea. The Korean “customary law” that has been postulated as a true source of private law in Korean historiography was the invention of the Japanese colonial jurists. The Japanese collected Korea's popular usages that were supposed to serve as an antecedent for a modern civil law, and colonial judges employed the legal instrument of custom in reordering Korean practices into a modern civil legal framework. In colonial Korea, custom played the role of an intermediary regime between tradition and the demands of modern civil law.