The spectre of civil society is haunting South East Asia. Witness Manila's ‘People Power’ in 1986, Bangkok's ’No-More-Dictatorship‘ demonstrations in 1992, and, most recently, the Reformasi movements centered on Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in 1998. Indeed, these recent waves of popular mobilization have underscored the significance of civil society—as political discourse and social terrain—for the successful launching of challenges against the non-democratic state in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. In terms of the political discourse of ‘civil society’, a common claim to spontaneous voluntarism and cross-class universalism was articulated and celebrated in some form by each of the four mobilizational campaigns identified above.

Many years ago, the eminent historian Gordon A. Craig wrote: ‘One of the recurring themes in those books on the diplomatic pre-history of the Second World War which have come to us from the former enemy countries is the plight of the professional diplomat, whose training and knowledge convinced him that the policy of his government was leading straight to disaster but whose advice was seldom solicited and never followed.’ Craig went on to show that this pattern of ‘the neglect and abuse of the resources of expert diplomacy’ occurred in the democratic countries of the time. Professional Chinese diplomats (and intellectuals) fared little better than their counterparts, democratic or totalitarian, in the 1930s when their leader, Chiang Kai-shek, pursued a policy of appeasement toward Japan. Chiang's appeasement policy, or what some have referred to as a policy of accommodation or gradualism, has received much treatment from historians.

‘We will not recognize the Nation, if the Nation does not recognize us’

This statement was made by AMAN (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara), the Alliance of Indigenous People of the Archipelago, at their inaugural congress in Jakarta, March 1999. The congress was organized by a consortium of Jakarta-based NGOs, and funded by international donors (USAID, CUSO, and OXFAM among others). Building upon a process of mobilization that began with the International Year of Indigenous People in 1993, the Congress marked the formal entry of masyarakat adat (literally, people who adhere to customary ways) as one of several groups staking claims and seeking to redefine its place in the Indonesian nation as the political scene opened up after Suharto's long and repressive rule. AMAN and its supporters assert cultural distinctiveness as the grounds for securing rights to territories and resources threatened by forestry, plantation and mining interests backed by police and military intimidation. Their attempt to place the problems of masyarakat adat on the political agenda has been remarkably successful. While seven years ago the head of the national land agency declared that the category masyarakat adat, which had some significance in colonial law, was defunct or withering away (Kisbandono 18/02/93), the term now appears ever more frequently in the discourse of activists, parliamentarians, media, and government officials dealing with forest and land issues.

The profound influence of American management thought on Japanese industrial practice has generally been considered a postwar phenomenon. Stressing the contributions of Deming, Drucker and other American experts, both popular wisdom and scholarly opinion have embraced the notion that ‘the managerial revolution that occurred in Japan after World War II was made in the United States’. Prewar Japanese management, however, has seldom been figured in terms of American inspiration. Historians have commonly conceived prewar Japanese practice as somehow impervious to American theories and techniques, emphasizing instead the importance of indigenous patterns of familialism, German influences, or a capital-labor dynamic largely detached from external stimuli. Thus, in industrial management—as in so many facets of modern Japanese history—the prewar narrative and the postwar narrative have remained separate and unreconciled. Despite recent interest in establishing a fuller genealogy of Japanese management, the question of how American models could thrive in postwar Japan without a prewar legacy of integration has yet to be answered or even seriously addressed.

Processes of transformation in cities in the non-western world during the colonial period have often been described as one-way processes through which European colonial regimes restructured the physical and social environments of the cities and established their domination there.Thus, for Anthony King, the transformation in Delhi between the early 19th and the mid 20th centuries was a process whereby the British colonial government installed, apparently at will, particular spatial and physical arrangements in the old city of Delhi and in the region immediately beyond it. For Narayani Gupta, this process had the additional impact of damaging the finely balanced social relationships and social structure of the city which had done so much to enhance the quality of social life there in earlier times. For Veena Oldenburg, the changes in late 19th century Lucknow represented a process by which the government, ‘guided by a ruthless concern for the security and well-being of its own members and agents’, drastically reorganized the physical space in the city. For Mariam Dossal, again, the changes in late 19th century Bombay were constituted by the drastic restructuring of the landscape, topography and everyday life of the people in the city through the active intervention by the colonial state. The ordinary residents of the city had hardly any voice in those developments. Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development (London, 1976); Narayani Gupta, Delhi Between Two Empires 1803-1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth (Delhi, 1981); Veena Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow (Princeton, 1984); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845-1875 (Bombay, 1991). Rarely have scholars explored the possibility that these processes could have been contested and negotiated and that the indigenous elites of the cities could have appropriated some of the policies of the colonial governments to their advantage, thereby imparting a somewhat different nature to the changes in the cities.Though some works on South Asian cities examined the question of contestation and the attempts at political dominance in the cities by the indigenous elites, they kept the description of these contestations limited mostly to the sphere of electoral and representational politics. None of them took up the question of contestation by the indigenous elites (or, for that matter, by other social groups) in the field of spatial reorganization in the cities or dealt with the cities as lived and build environments. Examples of such works are, Kenneth Gillion, Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History (Berkeley, 1968); C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad 1880-1920 (Oxford, 1975); Rajat Ray, Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875-1939 (New Delhi, 1979); A.D.D. Gordon, Businessmen and Politics: Rising Nationalism and a Mod ernising Economy in Bombay, 1918-1933 (New Delhi, 1978); Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: the shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928 (Berkeley, 1991). This article seeks to correct this deficiency by showing that the process of change in at least one non-western city, namely, Ahmedabad, a large industrial city in western India, in the first half of the twentieth century, was not a one-way process of the establishment of domination by the colonial government but was instead one where a section of the Indian elites contested the restructuring that the government was carrying out in the city and appropri ated it to bring about their own reorganization of the urban centre. In carrying out the reorganization, the elites also established their political and social hegemony in the urban centre. The article analyses how the Indian elite group brought about the transformation, the nature of the changes fostered and the way in which the process of transformation helped the elite leaders to establish their hegemony in the city.

The movement to create a phonetic script for the Chinese language was arguably one of the most arresting and exciting engagements in modern China. While generations of Chinese intellectuals tirelessly applied themselves to sorting out the linguistic technicalities in devising a Chinese phonetic system, what made language reform—or, depending on the perspective taken, revolution—historically so intriguing was that it had been a fiercely contested domain where a fascinating array of ideological positions was staked and contended. As John de Francis has observed, there had always been ‘a significant correlation between attitudes toward social change and attitudes toward linguistic reform in China’. Indeed, Qian Xuantong insisted at the height of the May Fourth New Culture Movement that to destroy Confucianism, one must ‘first dispose of the Chinese language’, whereas the Communist-led latinization movement of the 1930s, for its part, was meant to create a medium for the emergence of a true proletarian culture.

An orthodox marriage in the Chinese traditional system was marked by a complex negotiation between the two families concerning the dowry the bride took with her on marriage and the bride price paid by the groom to the bride's natal family. This protracted form of gift-giving posed a considerable economic burden on both families. For this reason, throughout the imperial period, considerable flexibility was exercised in interpreting what constituted an orthodox marriage in order to allow impecunious families to marry off a daughter or obtain a bride for a son. This study will focus on one such form of marriage, one so ‘deviant’ and ‘primitive’ that it is usually relegated to the dawn of the history of the Han Chinese race or placed in the category of ‘objectionable customs’ (lousu) of the imperial past. I am referring to a form of marriage by abduction, commonly known as qiangqin (seizing the bride), which was prevalent in many areas of China until the 1940s. It is argued here that marriage by abduction should be considered less a ‘primitive’ remnant from China's ancient past than a socially acceptable response to the irrationalities of the dowry/bride-price system, in other words, a local ‘institution’.

Late 1946 was a time of anticlimax in the history of Sino-American relations. For four years since the outbreak of the Pacific War, thousands of American servicemen had been in China rubbing shoulders with the Chinese. When victory finally came, more United States troops (mainly the marines of the Third Amphibious Corps) poured in, and the Chinese hailed them as heroes. In less than a year, however, as hostilities between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closed in, the Americans were caught in the crossfire. Along the communication lines in North China, armed clashes between US and CCP forces escalated; in the cities, anti-American rallies became daily occurrences. The Chinese now became hostile to its erstwhile allies; wherever US servicemen went, they received boos from the locals. The rupture seemed to be irreversible: US forces started to evacuated, George Marshall, the presidential envoy to China, also ended his yearlong mediation, thus bringing the extraordinary intercourse between the two nations to an anticlimactic conclusion.

The existing literature has examined the Chinese nationalism of Chinese overseas merchants, detailing their financial contributions to the anti-Japanese war and their participation in boycott movements of Japanese goods. This paper uses Japanese consular reports, prewar Japanese publications, as well as Chinese and Japanese newspapers from Taiwan, Fujian, Japan, Singapore, and the United States to study the adoption of multiple nationalities, including Japanese nationality, by overseas Chinese merchants to reduce commercial risk and seek out economic opportunity. The phenomenon suggests that overseas Chinese merchants were not simply agents of Chinese nationalism.

As explained by Abrams (1971:32-3), a connotation is ‘the range of secondary or accompanying meanings’ which a word ‘commonly suggests or implies’. The word ‘home’, for example, connotes ‘privacy, intimacy, and coziness’. Which exact secondary meaning from among the range is evoked ‘depends on the particular context in which (the word) is used’. Connotations play an important role in interpreting different types of texts, as shown by Abrams and others.For example, Fowler (1989:80-3); Schulte-Sasse and Werner (1977:90-109). For example, when in fiction events or their setting or atmosphere are presented the way they are perceived by a character, the connotations involved in such observations may well inform the reader about the feelings and values fostered by the character concerned, and thus contribute to an interpretation of the text.

Since 1991, India's courting of foreign investment has been accompanied by protectionist posturing in sensitive sectors like insurance and the media. The tensions in making the shift from a mixed economy to a relatively open and market-oriented economy were evident when the government considered reviewing a ban imposed by Jawaharlal Nehru's government in 1955, and allowing foreign press companies to operate in the country's ‘mind-market’ in 1991. This led to a welter of protest, forcing the government to drop the move. Since foreign media proposals periodically engage government attention and provoke reactions, this is an attempt to take a closer look at the issues involved. This paper will examine the posturing of the Indian elites, the state of the Indian press, the notion of media-cultural imperialism and the legal question of media ownership by foreign nationals. It will conclude with the suggestion that nationalist, cultural and mercantile interests were conflated to run one of the most effective campaigns by the press against the government in recent years. Large sections were animated by genuine concerns, but mercantile interests rode high, and manipulated them to telling effect.