After nearly two decades of revolutionary rule in China, the break with the past which Communist direction has seemed to represent is increasingly being seen in a wider perspective. Few scholars would attempt to argue that the Communists have not brought a genuine revolution or that their ascendancy is merely the equivalent of a new dynasty. But as the character of the new order has become clearer with time and as an analysis both more detailed and less concerned with short-term matters has become possible, many scholars have been as much impressed by continuities with the pre-Communist past as by discontinuities. To take perhaps the clearest example, the current Chinese view of their relation to the rest of the world appears to represent little change from the traditional Sinocentric image. Ideological absolutism is also not new to China with Mao Tse-tung, nor is the conception of individual subsevience to public good, the unquestioned rightness of close social limits on individual actions. And contemporary China retains, for all its professed egalitarianism, a strongly elitist and hierarchial pattern.

In the opinions of J. A. Hobson and Lenin European imperial expansion during several decades following 1870 was caused by the need to export surplus capital, and aimed at expediting this process. Hobson saw this necessity as arising from over-production (or under-consumption), a curable defect of capitalism; Lenin as an inherent quality of ‘monopoly-capitalism’ which was directed principally by bankers and was heading for revolution.

Two major factors determined the growth of Indian nationalism: developments within Indian society and indigenous political organizations and the British response to agitation and the demands of Indian politicians and interest groups. Current studies of Indian nationalism generally focus upon the former, while the relation of British rule to political development is either ignored or misunderstood. Frequently the British are portrayed as inept bureaucrats, or the government as a monolithic structure run on inflexible bureaucratic principles and bent upon a policy of repression. While the shoe often fits, this caricature ignores the basic fact that, despite mounting pressure from 1904 onwards, the British rulers managed to keep order and to choose their hour of departure. They were able to continue governing primarily because they were adroit in handling agitation, minimizing serious grievances, and retreating from policies or measures which threatened to inflame the subcontinent. Professor Anthony Low of the University of Sussex has shown graphically how the Government of India manipulated Gandhi's first and second civil disobedience campaigns to its own political advantage. This paper explores the background and the British response to an earlier but equally volatile situation, the 1907 rural disturbances in the Punjab.

Research on the Japanese electoral process has quite legitimately focused on a broad range of topics. Elections in Japan have been studied from the perspective of national issues and evaluation of their popular appeal, description and analysis of voting behaviour patterns, and identification of the support mobilization efforts and campaign postures of individual candidates. Of the various kinds of electoral contests, those of the House of Representatives and local elections have received the greatest attention.