The Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) claimed credit for bringing democracy to Japan during the Occupation. With some exceptions, the predominant result of SCAP's activities in economic (as distinguished from political) affairs, was just the opposite. SCAP imposed comprehensive economic controls on Japan and suppressed the free market system. Its intervention was especially repressive on the international plane.

Prior to mobilization for the Pacific War, Japan had never had a planned or controlled economy. As the occupation drew to a close, SCAP authorized the Diet to pass legislation for international economic controls to be employed by successor peacetime governments. An extensive Japanese government bureaucracy with a vested interest in the perpetuation of economic controls took charge of their implementation. The economic control laws, and the bureaucracy to which they gave rise, constituted an important part of SCAP's legacy to postwar Japan. This legacy became a primary conditioning factor in Japan's subsequent resistance to economic liberalization—a source of continuing friction in relations between the United States and Japan.

How to best maintain public goods under conditions of chronic resource shortage and insufficient state administrative capacity is a challenge for nearly all developing states. This article concentrates on a range of attempted reforms in China's forestry sector in the 1990s. It first evaluates the dynamics of long-standing “leakiness” in forestry conservation initiatives. After a set of major floods in 1998, major uncertainties remained as to how to effectively implement conservation initiatives, given systemic underfunding and patchy administrative supervision from higher levels. The article then argues that higher (central and provincial) levels of the state have employed measures substantially unchanged since late imperial times: (1) the partial rationalization and extension of formal bureaucratic systems of direct control, and (2) the manipulation of moral incentives through exhortation and appeals to a complex trope of “cadre quality,” concluding that subjective notions of moral “character” in local leadership can combine with objective economic and infrastructural factors to either support or undercut central state initiatives.

Rajasthan is a large, unusually diverse state in western India. It has a long frontier with Pakistan, and from north to south touches the adjacent states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat. Rajasthan adds to its own internal, social, economic, and political complexity some of the features of each of these disparate neighbors. The dominant geological feature in Rajasthan is the Aravalli range, which runs south to north through the heart of the state. This barrier almost completely arrests the already faltering summer monsoon, creating a semiarid and desert zone to the west and a more watered region in the east.

Mainstream media faces challenges in developed democracies like never before. On one hand, seemingly “free” digital (including social media) options are eroding the market for print drastically. Ads are not so much shifting from print to digital, but apparently simply disappearing. In the face of the pressures stemming from changing economics of the news business—which still has to be gathered at great expense, even if it can be distributed or shared by third parties practically for free (denying the gatherers their share of revenue)—one now encounters a new form of threat that is more political and cultural, namely, “fake news” and state and nonstate actors who wield it to undermine the public's trust in traditional media or news sources.

This article surveys the available English translations of contemporary Chinese literature from the People's Republic. In view of the post-Mao Party policy of relative freedom for creative writing, more works are pouring out of China than ever before. Of the most recent translations, the largest share belongs to Panda Books, a publishing subunit of the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. Under the leadership of the Yangs (Xianyi and Gladys), a husband-and-wife team of great renown, this new Panda series has published more than a dozen titles as of 1984, and new ones continue to be received.

Despite its voluminous production, the editors of the Panda series have made certain choices that are of dubious value. Especially weak is the representation of traditional literary works, which are often drastically abridged or collected in slender anthologies. In comparison, coverage of modern and contemporary works is more exciting. The translations are generally correct, the most felicitous from the hands of Gladys Yang. However, the translations suffer from a certain uniformity of style and sometimes from severe cuts. Volumes in the series are nevertheless a useful addition to the increasing library of English translations of contemporary Chinese literature, now more than adequate for an undergraduate course.

In 1533, Lady Qu, native prefect of Wuding Prefecture in northern Yunnan, sponsored the inscription of two texts on a cliff face at the center of her domain. One was in Nasu, the language of the ruling lineage; the other was in Chinese. Both commemorated the long, powerful line of Né (or Yi) native chieftains to which Lady Qu was heir. Yet they gave contradictory accounts of the forms of chiefly succession, sources of political authority, and geopolitical position of the native domain. The inscriptions show that chiefly sovereignty was neither merely embodied in ancestral authority nor simply endowed by the emperor. Sovereignty—particularly that of a female chieftain—was the capacity to master both modes of self-description while embodying their incompatibility. While we often understand colonialism through power-laden projects of translation, Lady Qu's inscriptions give evidence that Ming colonization of the southwest might require a different approach. Native chieftains were often intermediaries in encounters between indigenous peoples and imperial agents, garrisoned soldiers, and other migrants. Rather than merely understanding these elites as translators and mediators of colonialism, we might also ask how they emphasized and strategically deployed cultural and linguistic differences to achieve ends of their own.

This address was intended to be and remains about global circulatory processes and the ways that human societies have sought to deploy, control, or regulate these processes. In this essay, I principally consider how nationalist ideologies regulate global circulatory processes. The parallel with the current COVID-19 crisis is evident, and my remarks do suggest some similarities. Although COVID-19 is not the topic I engage here, my theme alerts us to thinking methodologically about largely invisible or inconspicuous modes of circulation and their consequences, less dire but deeply transformative.

One of the most striking facts about the history of modern Vietnam has been the persistent strength of the communist movement. In part, of course, this strength must be attributed to the organizational abilities of the communists themselves. But it might also be said that it is a testament to the weakness of the more moderate elements within the nationalist movement. Resistance to French control has a long history in Vietnam, dating back to the original conquest in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet only after the Second World War, when the communist-dominated Vietnam Independence League (Vietminh) led resistance to French authority, did a movement of truly national proportions arise in the country. By their leadership of the Vietminh, the communists became the most potent political force within the nationalist movement. By contrast, non-Marxist parties were consistently plagued by political factionalism and lack of unity, a reality that has been a major contributing factor to the contemporary tragedy in that country today.

Introducing these three critical essays on Edward Said's Orientalism† raises perplexing questions of scholarly and professional definition. In the case of the recent JAS symposium on Thomas A. Metzger's Escape from Predicament, the organizer of the group effort came to the Journal with a proposal which the editor ultimately encouraged, accepted, and brought to publication; this time the editor initiated the Said symposium himself, persuaded his colleagues to participate, and then subjected them to varying degrees of editorial suggestion before sending the whole package off to the printer. It might well be suggested that editors should stick to processing and avoid initiating; that there is a built-in conflict of interest, a potential for abuse of editorial discretion, if the editor not only decides what ought to be accepted for publication but also dabbles in what ought to be written about in the first place. As is obvious from this symposium's appearance in the Journal, I would hold that occasionally crossing the line from processing to initiating—in the case of a work like Said's, for example, which does not fall within the ordinary domain of the Journal's primary readership—can be constructive.

On May 18, 1948, the Archivist of the United States accessioned from the Foreign Documents Branch of the Central Intelligence Agency a collection of over 30,000 volumes of official records which had been seized in Japan by the United States government. Known as the “World War II collection of seized enemy records: Japan,” these volumes now form part of record group 242 and occupy some 3,450 cubic feet of space in the War Records Division of the National Archives. Being in good condition and unrestricted, they form basic sources for any study of modern Japanese military history. They are one of the largest bodies of primary Japanese materials on any subject available in the United States and can be expected to shed light also on various phases of Japan's modern social, economic, political, and diplomatic development.

In the Indian Hindu society of today voluntary associations form for the purpose of sponsoring annual religious ceremonies or pūjās. These associations are organized by young men who collect funds from their neighbors and friends, install images for worship in temporary shelters on open land on the ceremonial days, and employ priests to perform the religious rituals. Such associations may be composed of men of any caste, and although they observe religious ceremonies, they also provide many secular diversions. These associations devoted to religious ceremonies have proliferated since India gained her Independence. They seem to exemplify the changes that have come into Hindu society with the assurance of the preservation of the traditional culture by the new government. They also indicate the greater awareness of the larger community beyond the range of the family, due to enhanced mobility of the population and the trend toward urban dwelling.

The current interest of anthropologists in the scientific study of the rural life of India has been faced from the very beginning with the question of comprehending the meaning of discrete village studies in the context of the universe of Indian society and culture. Various attempts have been made to analyze the social structures and patterns of organization in Indian villages. Many scholars have noted the existence of intra-village factionalism, inter-caste struggles and several other apparently disintegrating features of the village community. Extensive social and religious ties of the villages with the outside and their economic and political dependence on organizations which do not have their roots in the community have also been noted. In the face of such evidence one begins to wonder whether an Indian village can be characterized at all as a functioning social unit distinguishable from others and whether studies of individual villages can help us in understanding India.

It is not customary to associate Japan with the Crimean War yet there is a very real connection. When the Russo-Turkish conflict expanded into a general European struggle it made out of the North Pacific and the seas around Japan a new arena of friction. Until March of 1854 the fighting had been confined to the Black Sea and the Near East, but with the entrance of Great Britain and France into the war on the side of Turkey the Asiatic colonies and commercial settlements of Russia were brought within the scope of hostilities. Europe, however, continued to remain the major sphere of battle, which fact tended to eclipse the significance of events that were taking place in and around Japan. Historical treatment of the period of the Crimean War has naturally dealt with these more important phases, ignoring almost entirely the Far East.

Women's studies an interdisciplinary area of inquiry is a recent phenomenon in India. Some scholars view women's studies as a harmless fad; others see it as a threat to the intellectual integrity of disciplines, or at least to the male domination of faculties. Women's studies certainly questions the androcentric assumptions of many scholarly fields and seeks a greater piece of the academic pie for women scholars, but that is not the whole story. In the past decade or so, gender has joined class, race, and ethnicity as an element in theories about the major forces that shape society. Women's studies is not only concerned with changing intellectual inquiry but also with changing society itself. Scholars and activists sometimes inhabit different bodies, but by and large people who are concerned with inquiry into women's condition are also engaged in trying to change that condition.

Since well before the symposium on Sinology and the Social Sciences, carried in this journal more than a decade ago, modernization theory has provided a key theoretical orientation for many Western students of China. Immanuel Wallerstein has launched a major frontal attack on modernization theory and has proposed an alternative of considerable interest to those of us studying late imperial and modern China. Indeed, “Wallersteinism” is becoming something of a major academic growth industry. Wallerstein's perspective is not without problems, but his views deserve fuller exposure in the China field because of their implications for the study of change in Chinese society.

Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the study of Eastern Asia occupied a marginal position in American education. Each crisis in the Far East, such as the Manchurian “incident” of 1931 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese conflict in 1937, had increased interest in China and Japan in American schools and among Americans at large, but even so the development of Far Eastern studies in the United States had been unimpressive. In general, the higher one rose in the school system of the United States the better chance one had of learning something about the peoples and cultures of Eastern Asia. In elementary and secondary schools the Far East was almost entirely overlooked; at the undergraduate level in colleges and universities there were a relatively few courses offered; in a few graduate schools it was possible to secure the M.A. or the Ph.D. with emphasis on some phase of Far Eastern studies.

This essay explores records from Beijing's efforts to intern and reform the city's “lumpenproletariat” after 1949. Connecting these reports to central government directives about national thought reform policy, I show that reeducators and their superiors discoursed in detail about the existence of resisters, who opposed and defied the government, but whom reformatory staff explicitly labeled as non-enemies. The case of Beijing reformatories suggests that anti-state, but non-counterrevolutionary resistance was an important symbolic and rhetorical category, central to the Chinese Communist Party's articulation of its own purpose. In the context of reeducation, opposition to the party-state constituted evidence of a founding “truth”: feudal, imperialist, and capitalist oppression had so damaged the Chinese nation that only a radical and revolutionary transformation could save it. Over the course of the 1950s, reading and analyzing resistance in this way led policy makers to redefine “The People” as well as the social place of individuals accused of activities like prostitution, begging, and petty crime.