This paper attempts to examine the nature of underground activity in Bihar in the 1940s. It outlines, for the first time, the dynamics of the Congress underground movement as it emerged after the imprisonment of Gandhi and the established Congress leadership in 1942. No historian has, to my knowledge, attempted to study the nature of the underground activity and its implications for the Congress organization in Bihar, or elsewhere, in this period. Most of the studies of the Quit India movement examine only the few days in August when the mass movement erupted with full force and then neglect the more significant following period. This includes the studies of Stephen Henningham and Max Harcourt who have examined the nature of popular protest in Bihar in some detail. This neglect is surprising, for the underground movement was very active and proved to be a major ‘law and order’ problem to the British well into 1944. As an underground activist, Havildar Tripathi, told me in an interview in Patna in March 1986, ‘The mass movement lasted for only 2 weeks in August, we carried it much beyond that’.

To most Australians, Burma is still associated with the Second World War, and in particular the infamous ‘death railway’ from Thailand. In May 1942 some 3,000 Australian prisoners of war (POWs) were sent from Singapore, to provide labour for the construction of an airfield at Tavoy. They were subsequently joined by another 1,800 or so Australians from Java, making a total in southern Burma of 4,851 men. Together with other Allied prisoners and Burmese levies they were later put to work building a railway line over Three Pagodas Pass, to link Burma with the Siam-Malaya railway system. Before the project was completed in November 1943, 771 Australian POWs (nearly 16 per cent of those on the Burma side of the border) had died from disease, malnutrition and the brutality of their Japanese captors. Casualties among the POWs working on the railway in Thailand were even higher.

Immigrant associations known commonly as huiguan have long been a research area among specialists on the Overseas Chinese. Recently, the same subject has attracted increasing attention among scholars who attempt to examine urban life in late imperial China. In either case, the existing historical literature seems to have focused on the two following aspects of huiguan development: the various principles of organizational formation such as common native place, surname, occupation and the new locational identity, and how they interacted with one another and shaped the community structure; the functional relevance of huiguan firstly to the various needs of the immigrant society and the local elite, and secondly to the overriding concerns of the ruling authority, be it the Chinese imperial bureaucracy or the governing authorities in a foreign settlement. Yet few attempts have been made to delineate the longitudinal evolution of these associations over an extended period in any single locale, and above all, to provide an analytical framework to decipher the complex interplay of different forces behind organizational changes. Relying primarily on Chinese newspapers, huiguan archives and publications in Singapore,3 this paper represents a very preliminary effort along both lines. After a brief background discussion on the nineteenth century, I will try to document closely several significant features in the development of Chinese huiguan in Singapore between the turn of the century and the beginning of the Pacific War. The main thrust here is to demonstrate the possibility of going beyond number games, that pay too much attention to organizational inventory, to examine more substantive issues such as changes in organizational forms, the revamping of institutional set-ups, leadership turnover and varying functional priorities. Then the following section will seek to account for these organizational metamorphoses. It will be argued that our explanatory paradigm should at least consist of three categories of factors: domestic forces associated with community evolution; the impact of the host society; and influences emanating from China and particularly the native area.

With the current and continuing collapse of marxist-stalinist structures occurring in the eastern part of our European world and the ensuing debate now circulating about personal cultship and the mythologies surrounding it, I feel I must congratulate the convenor of this 1990 Oxford Trinity College lecture programme for the title he chose to bestow upon the small part I am responsible for discussing.

Ever since its occurrence, the ‘Manchurian Incident’ of September 1931 has been interpreted, by both Japanese and non-Japanese writers, as a crucial event in modern Japanese and, indeed, world history. Not least, it has been identified as the beginning of Japan's ‘fifteen-year war’. Whether or not such judgements are accepted, it must be recognized that the Manchurian Incident and subsequent events significantly affected the workings of Japanese politics in the 1930s, the relationship between civil and military authorities and Japan's international image in the years leading up to the Pacific War.

The nature of British interests in the Far East in the 1930s meant that both the Treasury and the Board of Trade were necessarily closely involved with the making of foreign policy. While Foreign Office officials resented this intrusion into their domain, they were themselves disdainful of so-called ‘technical’ considerations connected with tariffs or currency reform, and were willing to leave them to the specialists. Under the dynamic impetus of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, and the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Warren Fisher, the Treasury, encouraged by the apparent abnegation of the Foreign Office, made a bold and aggressive foray between 1933 and 1936 into realms of foreign policy-making hitherto regarded as the exclusive sphere of the professional diplomat.

In June 1930, units of the 10th Red Army, which had been formed in northeastern Jiangxi by Fang Zhimin and Shao Shiping, entered the ancient porcelain town of Jingdezhen. The capture of the town brought the modern revolutionary politics of the Chines Communits Party (CCP) into contact with the local government and trades union organizations of a conservative, traditionally-minded town. Jingdezhen remained under the influence of the Red Army from 1930 until the strategic withdrawal from the Northeast Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 which was the forerunner of the complete withdrawal from the Jiangxi base areas and the Long March. There is ample information on the organization of the N.E. Jiangxi Soviet base and its best-known leader, Fang Zhimin, but most studies concentrate on the political structure of the Soviet government, the career and personality of Fang and the peasant milieu in which the Soviet emerged.1 Jingdezhen was not a peasant society or a major city: it was an intermediate small town world with part of the population permanently resident and many seasonal workers from the rural areas who provided a link with peasant communities.

Kang Sheng—a veteran counter-intelligence official and close political ally of Mao Zedong's—is said to have remarked in the winter of 1959 that among the critics of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) there was ‘One soldier’ and ‘One civilian’ whose criticisms were ‘in close harmony’. The soldier was Peng Dehuai, China's Minister of Defence, who had clashed with Mao at the Lushan Conference that summer, and whose criticism of the GLF had subsequently been denounced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee as an ‘attempt at splitting the Party´ and ‘a ferocious assault on the Party Center and Comrade Mao Zedong's leadership’. The civilian was Yang Xianzhen, the President of the Central Party School, who had aroused Kang's wrath by condemning the GLF as hopelessly Utopian, and by claiming that it already had brought on starvation and might yet bring about the collapse of the CCP.