This essay discusses three contrasting versions of the relationship between good and evil in contemporary China: a spirit medium who maneuvers between them, a charismatic Christian group that forges an identity by defending the border between them, and an official state and religious discourse of banal goodness and universal love that seeks to annihilate evil. Each defines good and evil differently, but more importantly, each imagines the nature of the boundary itself differently—as permeable and negotiable, clear and defensible, or simply intolerable. These varied conceptions help to shape alternate views of empathy, pluralism, and the problem of how to live with otherness.

I am most honored and perhaps also startled to read these comprehensive scholarly essays dedicated to the question of the appropriation of Gender Trouble in Asian studies. Sometimes “appropriation” is a problematic activity, such as the cultural appropriation of artworks and styles from minority communities, such as the indigenous, for the purposes of market circulation, profit, or the augmentation of human capital. But when texts such as Gender Trouble enter the global market of books, a different kind of appropriation becomes possible. The book is at once taken up and refused, indicating the limits of translation or marking a resistance to cultural imperialism.

The communis opinio of historians is that early modern, or precolonial, states in Southeast Asia tended to lead precarious existences. The states were volatile in the sense that the size of individual states changed quickly, a ruler forced by circumstances moved his state capital, the death of a ruler was followed by a dynastic struggle, or a local subordinate head either ignored or took over the central state power; in short, states went through short cycles of rise and decline. Perhaps nobody has helped establish this opinion more than Clifford Geertz (1980) with his powerful metaphor of the “theatre state.” Many scholars have preceded and followed him in their assessment of the shakiness of the state (see, for example, Andaya 1992, 419; Bentley 1986, 292; Bronson 1977, 51; Hagesteijn 1986, 106; Milner 1982, 7; Nagtegaal 1996, 35, 51; Reid 1993, 202; Ricklefs 1991, 17; Schulte Nordholt 1996, 143–48). The instability itself was an enduring phenomenon. Most polities existed in a state of flux, oscillating between integration and disintegration, a phenomenon which was first analyzed for mainland Southeast Asia by Edmund Leach (1954) in his seminal work on the Kachin chiefdoms. This alternation of state formation and the breaking up of kingdoms has been called the “ebb and flow of power” and the “rhythm” of Malay history (Andaya and Andaya 1982, 35). In this article, I will probe into the causes of the volatility of the Southeast Asian states, using material from Sumatra to make my case.

An the spring of 1984, officials of Taishan County, Guangdong, erected a statue in the central square of the county seat to commemorate the man whose life represented the highest attainment of ambition, idealism, and patriotism in recent local history. The man so honored was neither a conquering general nor a communist zealot. Taishan's chosen hero was a master of commerce and industry, who overcame the early disadvantages of birth to an impoverished family to become a wealthy and successful businessman, a powerful labor contractor, a railroad engineer, and the owner of a thriving import-export business based in the American city of Seattle. Chen Yixi (1844–1928) was not distinguished by financial success alone, for many other Taishanese men went to America, where, by dint of hard work, determination, and luck, they also became wealthy men.

This article concerns the Chinese law of the Ch'ing period at the trial level in one locality in China. Through use of a unique archive, namely, the Tanshui and Hsinchu archive, and through statistical studies of the materials in that archive, the article asserts the hypothesis that many prior conceptions of Chinese law of the Ch'ing period were inaccurate. Thus the article asserts that civil law matters were a substantial portion of all cases to come before the local magistrate. Furthermore, that the Chinese population was not terrified about bringing a case to court and that ordinary Chinese people litigated civil matters. Civil cases did not usually result in punishment for the offenders nor were there long delays in the processing of civil matters. Finally, the legal system of the Ch'ing period can not be differentiated from a modern legal system on the basis of its lack of rationality, but rather the significant difference between a modern and pre-modern system lies in the lack of effective institutions of control in a pre-modern society.

The introduction and operation of the cultivation (culture) system in Java were closely tied to the collection of landrent. Reinsma has noted this clearly and succinctly in his contention diat “the landrent served as the lever for making use of an important part of the labor and land of the people.” Yet die closeness of this relationship has frequently been overlooked. An all-too-frequent impression today is that landrent was superseded by a requirement to cultivate ground. The fact that landrent continued to be collected is regarded as an abuse of the system, a sort of double taxation. As a result, a certain confusion about how landrent functioned within the cultivation system now pervades the thinking on die subject. This confusion is especially apparent in die English-language histories dealing with the system, but is by no means limited to these. The fundamental source of confusion can be traced back to the writings and pronouncements of Johannes van den Bosch, the man who conceived and breathed life into the cultivation system during his years in Java from 1830 to 1834.

One of the most salient features of traditional political life in Tibet was the intense and pervasive competition for power and prestige that took place within the ranks of the politically relevant, particularly within the aristocratic lay-official segment of the government. Plots, disputes, and confiscations were key elements in the dynamics of the system. Although this competition appears, synchronically, to be part of a stable circular process, when the Tibetan political system is viewed diachronically, the apparent stability is seen to be part of a larger, ongoing process of change. Thus, while it is possible to analyze the “structure” of this competition from a synchronic point of view, a diachronic perspective is necessary to understand the forces which have generated it, as well as the overall nature of the system.

This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis project using an ancient and medieval Chinese corpus of over five million characters in works that date from the earliest received texts to the Song dynasty. It describes “distant reading” methods in the humanities and the authors’ corpus; introduces topic-modeling procedures; answers questions about the authors’ data; discusses complementary relationships between machine learning and human expertise; explains topics represented in Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi that set each of those texts apart from the other two; and explains topics that intersect all three texts. The authors’ results confirm many scholarly opinions derived from close-reading methods, suggest a reappraisal of Xunzi’s shared semantic content with Analects, and yield several actionable research questions for traditional scholarship. The aim of this article is to initiate a new conversation about implications of machine learning for the study of Asian texts.

In Apple CEO Tim Cook's keynote speech at the Chinese government's 2017 World Internet Conference, he extolled the values of “Privacy. Security. Decency” (Apple Newsroom 2017). The last two terms, “security” and “decency,” have long been closely associated with Chinese government efforts to control the Internet. Indeed, in 2017 Apple agreed to turn over user data to Chinese government servers and start a Chinese provincial government-run data storage center. Yet in 2015, Apple refused to turn over the passcode for one user in the United States during the FBI investigation following the San Bernardino terrorist attacks. The company's different policies in the United States and China relate directly back to Apple's concern for market share and access.

Since independence, India has had electoral quotas for Scheduled Castes (SCs, Dalits, “untouchables”). These quotas have been praised for empowering members of a deprived community, but have also been criticized for bringing to power SC politicians who are mere tools in the hands of the upper castes. Tracing the history of these quotas through four critical junctures, I show how a British attempt to strengthen their own control of India eventually resulted in one of the world's most extensive quota systems for minorities. The quota system was in the end a compromise between several political goals, and was not strongly supported by anyone. Also, while the quotas were designed to integrate SC politicians into mainstream politics, there was a subtle and gradual shift in the debate about them, to being about development for the SC community as such. This created a disjuncture between the design of the quota system and the expectation of what it would achieve. The case of quotas in India illustrates how policy choices often result from long path-dependent processes, how policy makers struggle with trade-offs when trying to design institutions, and also the power of expectations in shaping the perceptions of the outcomes of those institutions.

Today historians hesitate to judge collaborators with the Axis powers in World War II, citing the impossibility of putting oneself in the often untenable position collaborators found themselves. Nonetheless, contemporary moral philosophy continues to ponder the ethical choice of complicity versus resistance. Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950?), Korea's most distinguished modern novelist as well as one of its more notorious pro-Japanese partisans during the colonial period, offers a compelling test case for how we might attempt to not only understand, but also morally adjudicate, his support of Japan's occupation of his country. With the ongoing debate over collaboration with the German Reich in mind, I contend that the case of colonial Korea presents us with important first-order ethical issues to resolve.

The conversion of the Mahars to Buddhism in October 1956 was an ambitious attempt to construct a new ideology fundamentally opposed to the traditional Hindu system of beliefs, which had been destructive for the individual psyches as well as for the collective existence of Untouchables. The conversion was intended to transform the consciousness, both individual and collective, of the Mahar-Buddhists through the creation of new institutions and new modes of social interaction. The conversion was effective in inculcating a new ideology and relationships among the Mahar-Buddhists, and it did serve to make the community more cohesive and self-confident than it had been. Yet, because of the intrusion of the reservation issue and the ambiguous constitutional status of the Buddhists, they became more isolated from Untouchable communities than they had been. The conversion also had unexpected effects that ultimately reinforced divisions and class tensions both among Untouchable communities and within wider Maharashtrian society.

At the time of the Revolution of 1911, as many as ten million Chinese lived abroad. The great majority were poor coolies but a minority had already moved into the business pursuits for which they are well known today. Within this group, particularly in Southeast Asia, could be found a stratum of very wealthy merchants. Because few individuals viewed their expatriation as permanent but rather sought to identify with the homeland and its culture, there had been considerable interest in the events of the late Ch'ing period. It is widely assumed that the multitude actively opposed the Manchu regime and gave its support to the reform and revolutionary movements encouraged by K'ang Yu-wei and Sun Yat-sen. This traditional conclusion is, however, unfounded. Although most overseas Chinese had lost faith in Manchu leadership by 1909, only a small percentage took political action. In fact there was a time, forgotten by some historians, when prosperous merchants abroad wanted closer relations with the Ch'ing dynasty.

This paper explores the nature and understandings of history, or itihasa/Purana, in eighteenth-century India using two Mangalkabya narratives. These materials belong to a large genre of performance narratives, usually devoted to eulogizing various deities, that were produced in Bengal for several centuries. The paper illustrates how a “traditional” genre such as the Mangalkabya was effectively used to articulate contingent political and cultural preoccupations. The narratives studied here show that the historical experiences and contexts mirrored in them were derived from Mughal rule over Bengal and large parts of India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The paper seeks to historicize and contextualize the shifts noticeable in these narratives and to engage with the notion that premodern, precolonial India lacked a sense of history molded by contemporary material and cultural imperatives.

In any anthology of Chinese politicalor Kuan Chung or Kuan Tzu scattered in the works of most,writing, one is likely to find the namesif not all, periods fromKuan the Spring and Autumn to the present. According to a widely accepted tradition, it was due to Kuan Chung's political and financial policies when he was prime minister that Duke Huan of Ch'i was able to seize the leadership of the Chinese states in the seventh century B.C. Duke Huan thus became the first of a series of hegemons who dominated the Eastern Chou empire.

The Life and thoughts of every subject of the Emperor of Japan have been guided at every point by an incredibly meticulous officialdom. Accepted as a truism in Occidental discussions, this miracle has escaped critical analysis. That aspect of Japanese governance which through sumptuary laws and minatory regulations grinds so exceedingly small that everything in the life of the individual conforms to authoritative patterns merits detailed analysis.

During the war of 1941–1945, with a minimum transfer of effective authority to local governments, the Imperial Government was able so completely to control its subjects that the pull of a string in Tokyo produced a response from any one or all of the 73 million rippana nihonjin from Hokkaido to Kyushu. The degree to which the wartime controls of the Japanese Government were efficient and effective was due in part to the psychological homogeneity of the Japanese people. To no lesser extent was it due to the centralized nature of Japanese government, to those institutions and techniques peculiar to Japanese life which have tended to concentrate authority in the central government.

The values and premises underlying the Chinese family system can be seen as an amalgam of several partially contradictory strains of thought, each with its own history and vocabulary. While ideas tied to the classical tsung model remained at the level of high ideals, seldom even emulated, notions related to the family (chid) and the continuity of the patriline were highly pervasive and would seem to account for much of the uniformity in Chinese family practices. In this article the ways these strains of thought reinforced or countered each other is examined through an analysis of texts written in the Sung (960–1279) period, a time of social and intellectual ferment when it was common to write on family matters with considerable candor.

A Villager in India, besides being a member of a distinguishable local community and interacting with many of its other members, has important ties of a more extensive nature, and participates in practices and understandings characteristic of wider areas. In discussions of the independence, viability and future of the Indian village it may be useful to keep the nature of these ties to the outside in mind and to consider their past history and the present trends in respect to them. So that concrete material may serve as a basis for discussion, data from Senapur, a village of Northcentral India in the Jaunpur district of Uttar Pradesh will be utilized. Senapur, as do all individual communities, presents some unique features, but we know that it is much like other villages of the region and we know that in respect to principal institutions, social structure, and most of the attributes that will be reviewed here it shares much with other villages of North India which have been described in the literature.

It is widely believed that the Allahabad Kumbh Mela is an ancient religious festival or that it is “ageless”, that its roots lie obscured in time immemorial. Editorials and articles in the press at mela time (every twelve years) lyrically emphasize the continuity of the pilgrimage throughout India's past, find inspiration in its durability and changeless character, and marvel at the anachronism of an ancient festival thriving in the modern world (“The Kumbh Mela”, Pioneer, 17 February 1918; “Editorial”, Leader, 16 January 1942; “Pilgrim's Process”, Times of India, 24 January 2001). There is no better example of this than the oft-quoted section of Jawaharlal Nehru's will and testament, in which the avowedly secular modernist explains his desire to have a portion of his ashes scattered at the triveni sangam, the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers and the site of the Kumbh in Allahabad:

I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jumna rivers ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people. … She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. … And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent the free development of the body and the spirit; though I seek all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from that past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that it has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India. That chain I would not break, for I treasure it and seek inspiration from it.

(2000, 612–13)