In A.D. 1227, during the Southern Sung, the four hsien on the peninsula in Chekiang which is dominated by Ningpo supported twenty-six rural markets; six and a half centuries later, during the Kuang-hsü reign, there were approximately 170 rural markets in the same territory. Chin-t'ang hsien, Szechwan, had four rural markets at the beginning of the K'ang-hsi reign in 1662; by 1875 the number had increased to thirteen and by 1921 to thirty-two. Rural markets in Yen-shan hsien, Hopei, rose from twenty-three in 1868 to thirty-seven in 1916. By what principles and in accordance with what patterns do markets thus proliferate on the landscape?

I set forth in this paper a partial description and preliminary analysis of rural marketing in China. This neglected topic has significance with ranges far beyond the disciplinary concerns of economics. It interests anthropologists in particular because marketing structures of the kind described here for China appear to be characteristic of the whole class of civilizations known as “peasant” or “traditional agrarian” societies. In complex societies of this important type, marketing structures inevitably shape local social organization and provide one of the crucial modes for integrating myriad peasant communities into the single social system which is the total society. The Chinese case would appear to be strategic for the comparative study of peasant marketing in traditional agrarian societies because the integrative task accomplished there was uniquely large; because the exceptional longevity and stability of Chinese society have allowed the marketing system in many regions to reach full maturity prior to the beginnings of modernization; and because available documentation of Chinese marketing over several centuries provides rich resources for the study of systemic development—of change within tradition.

Sir George Bailey Sansom, who died on March 8 in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 82, was the last of the great amateurs and first among professional students of Japan in the Western world. Like Aston, Satow and Eliot, earlier pioneers of Japanese studies, he began his studies of Japan during his tenure in diplomatic posts. The long exposure and intimate knowledge of Japanese life that he received in the British Embassy in Tokyo between 1905 and 1940 provided a setting very different from contemporary academic arrangements whereby stays in Japan are reliefs from, and not the center of, professional life and activities.

Even before the completion of land reform, the Communist regime had introduced in most parts of China the two new institutions through which it planned eventually to socialize rural trade, namely the state trading companies and the supply and marketing cooperatives. The former, wholly owned by the state and controlled by governmental departments of commerce, were normally established in cities and central market towns. Each company specialized in certain lines—e.g., grain, edible oils, marine products, stationery supplies—and established branches in nearby market towns as required for sales or purchases. With few exceptions, free competition obtained between the state trading companies and private firms until November 1953, when the companies began to acquire official monopolies of important commodities. By the end of 1954, state concerns had absorbed a number of larger private firms and captured a major share of the wholesale market.

“The study of ancient China, particularly from the historic period on, requires A the collaboration of historians, archaeologists, palaeographers, as well as specialists in other disciplines.“

Isolated phenomena of a dualistic nature in various Shang institutions have long been recognized (see below), but their interrelationship and their possible relevance to a coherent dualistic system generally prevalent in Shang society cannot be clearly understood unless the various specialists on ancient China break disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with vigor and mutual understanding. This paper attempts to bring attention to some of these phenomena and to define the probable areas of research for a highly important problem in Shang studies. To begin, let us examine some interesting features at the archaeological sites of Hsiao-t'un and Hsi-pei-kang.

Ever since its first draft was written by a small group of Americans and presented to the Japanese Government in February, 1946, the present constitution of Japan has been a source of political controversy. Even under “normal” circumstances the enactment of a new constitution in modern democratic societies is almost certain to exhume and revivify all sorts of latent political conflicts and to add to these its own measure of new dissensions. Controversy is even more probable in the case of a constitution drafted by aliens and conquerors for a nation completely subject to their occupation and control and, in the Japanese case, the nature of the document itself still further increased this probability. The American-authored constitution of 1947 was in spirit and provisions almost a complete inversion of its predecessor, the Meiji Constitution of 1889. Where the latter did its brilliant best to protect the legal and political heartlands of the imperial system and a traditionally oligarchic and authoritarian form of government against popular encroachments, the former uniformly espoused concepts and institutions that are among the world's most democratic and progressive. It is difficult to conceive of two modern constitutions more diametrically opposed in spirit and in basic mechanics. The new constitution thus labored under the dual handicaps of alien authorship and of a radical departure from the traditionally ascendant norms and institutions of Japanese politics. It provided ample substance for bitter controversy.

After expressing his appreciation of the honour of an invitation to be the principal guest at the Annual Ceremony and his pleasure at being able to speak under the distinguished chairmanship of Lord Scarbrough, Sir George Sansom said:—

My only qualification for addressing this learned assembly is a claim to be one of the few survivors of a vanishing race, or perhaps it would be better to say a small fossilized remnant of that race.

Chinese history is bedevilled by a false image of the throne. With few exceptions the emperor remains in the thrall of his ideologists—a tired, familiar, synthetic figure whose range of attributes is limited to Good and Bad and whose portrait ignores the face for the robes. This is not a credible image, but it is a durable one. Only recently has its authenticity been challenged and its flatness rejected. Analysis has finally moved from acceptance of the one-dimensional, simple cliché to the two-dimensional, complex stereotype. The typological components of the “good first” and “bad last” emperor have been identified and isolated; the administrative components of the “organizing,” “normalcy,” “reforming,” and “ineffectual” emperor-types have been articulated. It remains to add a third dimension where we discern not a unified figure (however complex its components) but a composite figure made up of several images from quite disparate sources.

There is something particular, though perhaps not unique, about Ceylonese nationalism, or, to be more precise, about recent Ceylonese nationalism. In the last years of colonial rule, Ceylon appeared to be sliding gently and quietly along the road to independence, with properly conducted constitutional change to mark the milestones; when colonial rule ended on February 4, 1948, it seemed that the gentleness and quietness was to continue into the era of independence itself. But with the 1956 elections there came an apparently sudden change. In the elections themselves, a landslide overwhelmed the long-dominant United National Party in a way that has not so far afflicted the Indian Congress or other similar parties, and a new Government came into power borne, it seemed, on the crest of a second wave of nationalism, of a different and more violent quality than its predecessor. There followed a period of rapid change, of communal strife, riots and emergencies, of political assassination; and, in 1962, there was an attempted coup d'état followed by political arrests. Such is still the instability of the contemporary scene in Ceylon that he would be a bold prophet who would dare to forecast the next political surprise.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that under at least one of the so-called “warlords” or military rulers who governed China during the 1930's, there occurred political, social, and, above all, economic changes of the utmost importance. These changes took place in the northwestern province of Shansi, where, beginning in 1932, the warlord Yen Hsi-shan undertook to modernize the underdeveloped economy of his domain by carrying out a “provincial Ten-Year Plan of Economic Reconstruction,” or Shan-hsi sheng-cheng shih-nien chien-she chi-hua. I have chosen to call Yen's scheme for promoting economic growth in Shansi “China's First Five-Year Plan,” since in addition to being cut short by the Japanese occupation of Shansi only five years after its inception, it was inspired by the success of Russia's first five-year plan. Throughout the 1930's, Yen and his supporters repeatedly lavished praise on the Soviet Union for its spectacular accomplishments in the field of industrial development and advocated adopting Russian methods in order to achieve similar results in China. Notwithstanding his hatred of the Chinese Communists, who invaded Shansi in the winter of 1936, Yen continued to praise the Soviet economy throughout the 1930'5, holding it up as a model for China and for Shansi. “The Soviet Union accomplishes in one year what it takes other countries five years to achieve,” he remarked.

The fall of Yüan Shih-k'ai in the summer of 1916 came as a result of an abortive attempt to set up a monarchy. This was one of the turning points in the Chinese revolution. The revolutionary tide which had been held back by his authoritarian rule was unleashed after its collapse. There followed a deluge. The focus of this paper is on the Japanese policy which, it is submitted, was primarily responsible for the defeat of the monarchical plan.

In old Guntur District, as in other districts of South India, several different elite groups, arranged within a highly complex and segmented social order, were interlocked with corresponding elements of the political hierarchy. Each group was associated in one way or another with its own stratum in district government and, at times, with seeral different strata, from die Collector's Office at the top to the village at the bottom. Operating at its own level or in its own area of the district, each group was linked vertically with allied superior and subordinate groups and was often in conflict with another group of comparable and therefore competitive rank and function. Such a pattern of group relationships was further complicated by die fact that it was constantly changing. My purpose here is to look at the positions of diese elite groups in relation to each other and in relation to the administrative structure of one district, and to show how these groups behaved within a changing political system and how traditional processes of power continued under die “rule” of die East India Company.

In this paper I am concerned with an examination of symbolic and social dual organization. Does “dual organization” refer to those rare social systems in which the total community is in one way or another bisected into two definable “groups” which have certain formal relations with each other? Or, alternatively, can we speak of “dual organization” when the society is not so divided, or when the social divisions are obscure, but where there is a symbolic system in which binary categories are prominent? And furthermore, just what is the relationship between dualism as a symbolic order, which appears quite widespread, and dualism as bisected social structure, which has rarely been satisfactorily analyzed ?

Much attention has been devoted, by scholars and others, to the dramatic growth of Singapore in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as a great commercial entrepôt, as a flourishing city of tens of thousands of Chinese migrants, and as the maritime focus of two economic empires, the British and the Dutch. The direction and the intensity of this interest are, of course, understandable, but it has done much to obscure the role of Singapore as a focus also for the cultural and economic energies of the Malaysian world which existed alongside but in many ways separate from the world created by the West. While the comparison cannot be pressed too far, Singapore in the nineteenth century may be likened to Malacca in the fifteenth, in its role as metropolis for an area that embraced the whole Malay Peninsula and Archipelago, from Kedah and Acheh to the Celebes. Island trade in Malaysian or Arab hands, Indonesian migration to the Peninsula, the pilgrimage to Mecca and its subsidiary activities in the fields of Islamic teaching and publication, brought together in Singapore a great variety of Malaysian and Muslim peoples from differing social and economic background but sharing a lingua franca and important elements of a common culture, and often freed from the more hampering restraints of traditional social systems. Urban life has in all places and times been an important breeding ground for new ideas and new ways, and to this general pattern Singapore at the close of the nineteenth century conforms.

It has become customary among many Western scholars to consider Japan as part of an East Asian cultural area, or as a participant in Chinese or Sinic civilization. In a general conception of Asian culture viewed as consisting of East Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern cultural areas dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Islamic civilizations respectively, it seems obvious that Japan belongs in the first category. Yet most Japanese scholars use another classification which would divide Asian culture into four areas: Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and—as a separate category on the same level as the other three—Japanese. Without denying the close relation to China, the Japanese scholar is apt to emphasize the unique configuration of Japanese culture which makes it in some sense sui generis. This is only one among many manifestations of the widespread feeling in Japan that Japanese culture is “unique,” and “different.” This sense of Japan's uniqueness may give rise to pride, sorrow, or a feeling of loneliness; but that it is shared by Japanese with otherwise quite varying views is itself a fact of significance.