1958 was the year of collapse for democratic constitutionalism in the new countries. Although some, following the example of Latin America, had already abandoned their brave new experiments, hopes were still high for the rest. The major defectors from the democratic ranks in 1958 were Pakistan, Burma, and the Sudan, in all three of which the military took over, but other countries underwent similar experiences which emphasized the nature and extent of the crisis. In Indonesia the existing regime was pushed further toward an unstable combination of disintegration and authoritarian rule by the proclamation in Sumatra of a provisional revolutionary government, claiming to supplant the government headed by President Sukarno. In Thailand, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who had replaced Field Marshal Pibul Song-gram, reasserted and tightened his dictatorial control. In the Middle East the United Arab Republic was established under the firm authoritarian rule of Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser; Iraq was taken over by General Abdul Karim Kassim; and Lebanon and Jordan were both threatened by upheavals. In Africa south of the Sahara the military had not yet come to prominence but Nkrumah and his Convention People's Party tightened their grip on Ghana; and Guinea, voting its independence from France, set up an explicit one-party system under the leadership of Sékou Touré.

In the summer of 1921, the Communist world was preparing for the first major conference of Far Eastern peoples. This conference was originally scheduled for Irkutsk in the late summer or early fall of that year. It was intended as a sequel to the Baku Conference of September 1920, which had been attended mainly by delegates from the Middle East. But it was also planned as the Soviet answer to the Washington Conference, as is well known. Competition between the Soviet Union and the United States for the support of the Asian people can be dated from this time, although initially Moscow was much more aware of this fact than Washington.

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?

Civilization, it has been said, is the management of complexity. One ingredient of complexity is the plurality of social groups divided by language, race, religion, caste, and class. The political arrangements that enable plural groups to live together is one aspect of civic management.

Few would deny that one of the most important factors shaping the Chinese economy in the past hundred years or so was the economic contact between China and the West. This external economic confrontation has been widely held by the Chinese as a factor detrimental to the development of the Chinese economy. First, it is argued that foreign trade and foreign investment in China upset the Chinese economy by ruining handicraft industries and disrupting agriculture. Secondly, foreign trade and investment in China are alleged to have drained the Chinese economy of its wealth because of the secular unfavorable balance of trade of China and the large amount of income made or remitted to their home countries by Western enterprises in China. Thirdly, it is maintained that foreign enterprises in China were so effective in their competitive power or enjoyed so many advantages secured on their behalf by their respective governments that the Chinese-owned modern enterprises were hopelessly oppressed and had little chance, if any, to grow.

The Korean Communists face a troublesome problem in recording their hiswtory. The first years of the Korean Communist movement are now regarded as a gigantic skeleton in the closet. Official party publications brush over them in a few paragraphs. Individual Communist leaders are almost all identified as petty bourgeois intellectuals, sectarians, deviationists, or factional wreckers. The Communist movement itself is recorded as a “failure” and a “disgrace” by contemporary Kim Il-sŏngists. When praise is meted out, it generally goes to the broader nationalist movement, and the only truly “good guys” turn out to be “the people.” Only when the omniscient Kim arrives on the scene in 1931, do Korean Communist historians begin to panegyrize their past.

There is a sense in which urbanization recapitulates civilization. More than seventy per cent of Bombay's people came from outside the city, most of them probably from rural villages. When they arrived, they found their old affiliations and loyalties supplemented, sometimes challenged, by new ones. The important village affiliations—it would be misleading to call them memberships or associations—were made at birth and sanctioned by ritual and long usage. Urban affiliations, including the vital ones of job, union, and “brotherhood” (for men without families sharing the same tenement room), are made by choice and derive their rightness not from faith but from their serviceability to the city dweller. Traditionally, it has been the intrinsic problem as well as the opportunity of cities to bring hitherto isolated tribes, religions, and trades into interaction. Both V. Gordon Childe and Ralph Turner declare that the resolution of this problem yields civilization. In a limited sense, it is always being solved in big cities: one can study it in caste interplay in the managing agencies of the Bombay textile industry, in the system of the Catholic church, or in the precinct organization of Boston. In this study, I will call this aspect of urbanization the competition of loyalties.

It is a fact of singular note that in nineteenth century China the vast majority of the educated classes either passively or actively rejected Christianity. Passively, they did so by remaining coldly indifferent to Christianity's message; the percentage of officials and literati who embraced the foreign religion was infinitesimally small. Actively, they expressed their hostility by writing and disseminating inflammatory anti-Christian literature; creating countless stumbling blocks for the Christian missionary; issuing threats of retaliation against any who dared enter the religion or have dealings with its foreign transmitters; and by the direct instigation of, and participation in, anti-Christian riots.

It is an essential feature of merit bureaucracy that there must exist within the institutional framework of government some method of guaranteeing that fixed standards of recruitment, promotion, and discipline are applied without discrimination to all members, or potential members, of the public services. In the Federation of Malaya, as in most Commonwealth countries, institutional machinery intended to satisfy this requirement of merit bureaucracy takes the form of public service commissions. It is the purpose of this study to trace the development of these institutions in Malaya, to outline briefly the organization, composition, and procedures of the commissions, to point out social and political factors in Malaya which affect the application of the principles underlying the institutional machinery, and to comment on the future of the service commissions in the Federation.

The Nationalist unification of China was nominally completed on December 29, 1928. On that day Manchuria, under the leadership of Chang Hsüeh-liang, accepted and hoisted the Revolutionary flag. Historians have tended to emphasize the role of nationalism in the union of the Three Eastern Provinces with the Kuomintang domain after the death of Chang Tso-lin on June 4, 1928. According to the general view, Chang Hsüeh-liang, having grown up in the period of the May Fourth Movement, shared many of the national aspirations of the younger generation, and desired to stop civil warfare in China and assist the Kuomintang in the policy of unification. Moreover, he is represented as being violently hostile to Japan, suspicious of the Japanese in the killing of his father, and determined to put forth every effort to bring Manchuria and Nationalist China together, so that the unified nation could resist the ambitions of its imperialistic neighbor. Japan, under the “positive policy” of the Tanaka ministry, is pictured as attempting to keep the Three Eastern Provinces separate from the Nationalist South; to delay, if not halt, an eventual union.

Japan's actions during the Boxer crisis which resulted in the siege of. The foreign legations in Peking from June 20 to August 14, 1900, are the subject of debate among historians. Some argue that Japan's actions were “generally sound in dealing with the difficult international circumstances of the time; considering Japan's mission today as a bridge between east and west, they may be regarded as a historical fact of which the Japanese can be very proud.” Those who take this view would claim that Japan tried to balance her sympathy with China with her responsibilities to the powers and that she generally succeeded. On the other hand, others hold that while “Japan played a singularly conscientious role in the allied relief expedition to Peking to rescue the legation staffs in the summer of 1900, … the Tokyo cabinet was certainly not indifferent to its opportunities.” They would argue that, while Japan did not acquire territory in China during the Boxer disturbances, she thought of doing so and took steps to that end. The published archives of the Japanese ministry of foreign affairs show the extent to which she acted in line with the expansive temper of the powers in China at the time. This paper will consider the projects which were undertaken by the Japanese, the motives for them, and the reasons why they were not followed through.

Violence, non-violent civil disobedience, and mass demonstrations have been a part of Indian politics since independence; indeed, even before 1947. Occasionally these outbursts are truly spontaneous, and, when they are, they may be accounted for by the hypothesis that more discontent exists in Indian society than has been expressed by organized groups. But such anomic movements have been rare in India since 1947, although mob violence during the days of partition may be an illustration par excellence of this phenomenon in Indian life.

The study of the Tibetan religious institution, usually regarded as the province of Orientalists, Sanskritists, and students of comparative religion, has much of value to offer the social scientist. The institution represents a striking demonstration of a cultural force that has defied the dominant cultural patterns of China and India, under whose political authority a major portion of the religion's followers live. Simultaneously, the institution has united in a distinctively Tibetan cultural pattern many disparate groups, such as the Lepcha of Sikkim and to an extent even the revitalized Buddhist Newars of Nepal, whose original cultures resembled that of either their tribal or Hindu neighbors. Into this institution are woven nomadic pastoralists and urban craftsmen, slash-and-burn agriculturalists and people engaged in international trade, world-travellers and serfs bound to the land, brigands and saintly mystics. Rather than Tibet and its monasteries being an isolated geographic and cultural “refuge” area, the study of this key institution reveals a far more dynamic picture.

The Indian Municipal Elections of 1959 raised in compelling form the question of the relationship between urban life and political radicalism; radical parties of both the left and the right gained ground in Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. In Calcutta, radicalism already had a long history. The Madras results, when put in the context of the state's political history, raise further questions: is urban life an experience or a location; are city and village two different and separate worlds whose politics are discontinuous; or do the politically salient experiences of urban and rural people in some measure overlap?

To be forced to make a choice of nationality following a revolutionary upheaval is a trying experience. It becomes traumatic when one is, or feels oneself to be, part of the “privileged class” in a plural society in which the “natives” are about to achieve supreme political power. The Eurasians of Indonesia are a group of mixed descent closely tied to the land of their birth, but culturally and politically oriented to a society thousands of miles away along the shores of the North Sea. F. H. de Hoog, charismatic chairman of the powerful Eurasian League from 1928 to 1939, referred to the Eurasians as the “vanguard” of the Dutch population in the Netherlands. He emphasized that Eurasians were imbued with Dutch culture and would stand or fall with Dutch rule.1 In 1949, the “vanguard” was cut off.

The Ethic that produced a Ben Franklin or a John D. Rockefeller has imbued relatively few persons in Ceylon. There is no doubt that Ceylonese are as ambitious as other peoples, but their historic value systems have been quite different from that of Western society. Their status-achievement-work value matrix has been nurtured by institutions of government, education, marriage, social class, and caste—particularly by education in modern times. The major characteristics of this set of values are: (1) Employment in government service is of higher status than equivalent work in private enterprise; (2) Neither work itself nor idleness has much moral flavor, i.e., productive employment is not a value in and of itself; (3) Except for agriculture, manual employments of any type are denigrated, as are, to a lesser extent, entrepreneurial activities; (4) Thrift and savings are typically viewed as serving the purposes of consumption rather than of investment; (5) Wealth in land is more highly esteemed and secure than is any alternative form of investment. Although elements of this value set are shared by Sinhalese and Tamils, the present analysis has more explicit reference to the Sinhalese.