After half a century of intense debate, landlordism in traditional China continues to be one of the most controversial subjects in Asian Studies circles. The earlier literature on this topic tends to be contradictory and, at times, highly polemical. Two loosely defined schools of thought have emerged since the 1930s: (A) those scholars who argue that landlord-tenant relations were primarily exploitative with the balance of power passing increasingly to urban-based absentee landlords, and (B) those who maintain that a high rate of tenancy is not particularly unique to the twentieth century and that the relationship between landlord and tenant was not uniformly exploitative. The present paper does not fit neatly into either school, although specific elements of the following argument can be isolated to support opposing sides of the debate. I intend to explore one form of traditional Chinese tenancy, known in the literature as ‘hereditary’ or ‘permanent’ tenancy, which was common throughout many parts of Southeastern China until the Communist land reform campaigns of the early 1950s. The tenants were hereditary in the sense that the usufruct passed patrilineally from father to son while the actual title to the land remained in the hands of powerful lineage corporations. The tenants lived in satellite villages near the landlords' communities and were overshadowed in every way by their dominant neighbors.

The city has usually been first of all a ‘place’—a clearly defined space visibly possessed and controlled by human beings and often sacred to their gods, a statement of man imposed upon the chaotic and threatening vastness of nature. It has represented the desire of man to master his own world, creating an environment reflecting his powers of reason, his desire for convenience and order, and his aesthetic predilection for beauty and meaningfulness in his surroundings.

A Unianimous decision of the Viceroy's Council was taken on 14 March 1878 to establish a check over the vernacular press in India. This was Act IX of 1878, an act for ‘the better control of publications in Oriental languages’. It was to control ‘seditious writing’ in the vernacular newspapers everywhere in the country, except the south. Too much was being written in these newspapers of the ‘injustice and tyranny’ of the British government, ‘its utter want of consideration towards its native subjects, and the insolence and pride of Englishmen in India’.One hundred and fifty-nine extracts from vernacular newspapers of the North-Western Provinces, Punjab, Bengal and Bombay were produced before the Supreme Council as evidence of existing sedition. Surprised at its own importance, the vernacular press staggered into the eighties of the nineteenth century. The crucial demand for ajudicial trial in case of an accusation of sedition against an editor was never conceded by the government, although in October 1878 the act was modified in minor respects. The important thing was that the government from an almost complete unawareness had come to be so preoccupied with the vernacular press. What was the nature of the vernacular press in India in the 1870s and how wide was its range?

The study of the British demission of power in India has focused on the political story, on the nationalist pressures and the British policies that led inexorably to self-government and to partition. This began, explicitly at least, with the Montagu declaration in 1917. But the idea of gradually developing self-governing institutions seemed in many ways easier to implement in politics than administration. India was proceeding from an authoritarian to a popular government: the transfer of power was not only from British to Indians but also from administrators to politicians. And as Philip Woodruff, writing on the I.C.S., comments, ‘it is hard to serve where you have ruled’. On one level, the Service could be Indianized, and from the early 19205 Indianization proceeded apace. What was more complicated was the role the I.C.S. was expected to play in the changing constitutional and political circumstances from 1920 through to 1947—expected to play, that is, in addition to the sustained execution of the everyday functions of government.

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident on 7 July 1937 has been commonly regarded as the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese war. The early days of the war were a history of rapid Japanese advances and, inversely, of the equally fast retreat of the Chinese. The Chinese Nationalist Government evacuated Nanking and moved westward to the Wuhan area in late November 1937. Central China soon became untenable in face of heavy Japanese reinforcements; the Chinese government again evacuated in October 1938, this time much further west to Chungking in Szechwan. There was no declaration of war and China clearly had the sympathy of Britain and the United States. The two countries continued to recognize the government at Chungking, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, as the government of China, despite the fact that it retained control only over the south-west corner of the country. Pearl Harbor strengthened the tie of relations; the Chungking government won Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands as allies in its colossal struggle against Japan.