After three-quarters of a century of fluctuating efforts, the development of railways in China remains an unfinished task today. In contrast to industrially more advanced countries, which had built most of their existing lines by the turn of the present century, railway construction is regarded even now as an indispensable part of the economic development of China. Measured by the potential demands of the country the existing railway facilities are small indeed. Recent data indicate that at the end of 1952 the Chinese railway system consisted of some 17,570 miles of tracks, including all lines in operation on the mainland and Hainan but excluding those on Formosa. This means that there is one mile of railway for every 216 square miles of territory (or approximately 463 miles per 100,000 square miles), and that for every 1,000,000 of population there are 39 miles of rail transportation. Small though the figures appear to be, they nevertheless represent an increase over those of a decade ago. In 1942 the estimate was 12,036 miles of railways in all of China, including those in Manchuria and the occupied areas; the ratio was then 274 miles of railroads per 100,000 square miles, and 27 miles per 1,000,000 population. The vast potential development that lies ahead is apparent when we compare the above figures with those for the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.

Some records of social protest written during the Tokugawa period contain more fiction than fact. Their form owes much to the structure of folktales, and their content relies heavily on the military tales of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. Although they do not describe what peasants actually did, narratives of uprisings say a great deal about how their listeners and readers viewed themselves and their society. In them peasants became heroes—the subjects of action in a system that had defined them as the passive objects of authority. As a paradigm for behavior at times of crisis, however, the narratives came into increasing conflict with the dictates of individual self-interest by the middle of the nineteenth century. The author draws on the theories of Victor Turner to explain the function of fictionalized history for its audience and then develops a historical model to correct the lacuna of the anthropological perspective.

Six hundred miles west of Hang-chou the Yangtze River emerges from a mountain corridor onto the lowland plain of south-central China. Here the river bed widens sharply and loses depth; the Yangtze winds a snake-like path across a thousand miles of rich, flat, water-laced country, northeastward to Han-yang, then south toward the Po-yang Lake, north again to Chiang-ning (modern Nanking), and finally into the East China Sea at modern Shanghai. Medieval Chinese called it simply “River”—a River among rivers, the designation of an entire S-shaped area whose character depended more on water than on land, the dominant feature of the southern landscape. In the twelfth century this river region developed a strategic importance as it became first the refuge for a besieged court, then an area of contention with barbarian invaders, and finally the principal artery of Chinese control. This transformation reflected a major reorientation of the Chinese mind.

The author identifies three meanings of individualism (kojinshugi) in Japanese journalism during the Taishō period. They were: first, individual character and talent should be cultivated for the purpose of strengthening the state and fostering the active commitment of individuals to state policies; second, personal autonomy and self-expression were legitimate within a restricted “private” sphere that coexisted uneasily with the dominant values of the “public” sphere; and third, the development of free, autonomous individuals was the most fundamental value by which state and society should be judged. Proponents of individualism were unable to alter the state structure established by the Meiji Constitution or the state ideology of submission; their innovative thinking did serve as a leavening agent within state structure by demanding new relationships between elite and masses and by sustaining a high degree of elite pluralism.

Culturally Indochina has suffered considerably, though less as a result of the war than of the strife which has followed it, and the damage sustained has been in the fields of both personnel and material equipment.

The losses of the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) have been chiefly in regard to personnel. Its prewar and wartime director, Georges Coedès, has resigned and is living in France, where he has succeeded Paul Pelliot as head of the Musée Dennery. P. Guilleminet, the ethnologist, has also retired from the EFEO, and M. Destombes, the school's specialist in ancient maps, is now working with UNESCO in Paris. Georges Groslier, another distinguished member of the EFEO staff and curator of the Phnom Penh museum, died in June 1945 during an interrogation by the Japanese. Madeleine Colani, ethnographer of Tonkin and Laos, died at Hanoi in June 1943 at an advanced age.

This article examines different patterns of “cosmopolitan capitalism” in three paired localities in China and India: (1) Zhejiang/Gujarat, (2) Zhongguancun/Bangalore, and (3) Guangdong/Kerala. The paired cases illustrate the attentiveness of the local state to transnational society and present varied expressions of the local developmental impact of remittances and return migration. Analytically, this article departs from conventional usages of both state and society by focusing on the local state in combination with a less territorial conception of society. The rationale for this dual definitional stretch—both downwards (local state) and outwards (transnational society)—has an empirical basis. First, the local government represents the day-to-day point of contact with “the state” for most people. Second, limiting the scope of “society” to populations currently residing within national borders unnecessarily excludes temporary migrants and diasporic communities who continue to identify with a locality. Theoretically, this article extends Albert Hirschman's classic categorical troika of “exit, voice, and loyalty” to the literature on new transnationalism.

William Callahan's conceptualization of Ai Weiwei as a “citizen intellectual” is the latest in a long-standing cottage industry seeking to make sense of and define China's intellectuals. Frederic Wakeman Jr. in 1972 offered “a typology of intellectual species” for Chinese thinkers and writers in late imperial China: statesman, administrator, ethical idealist, aesthete, and emirite or recluse (Wakeman 1972, 35). Hao Zhidong applies a Weberian lens on twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals to identify nested categories of: professional, cultural, and (smallest of all) critical intellectuals (Hao 2003, 393). Tani Barlow traces the identity of China's thinkers and writers from “intellectual class” in 1905 to “enlightened scholars” in the 1920s to “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) ever since. Barlow identifies a tension between the social power of these knowledge specialists and their dangerous dance with the state in which they succumbed under both Nationalist and Communist regimes to a service role to power, a “category of the state” (Barlow 1991, 216). Merle Goldman has focused on critical intellectuals under the Chinese Communist Party, what most people think of as critics and dissidents. Carol Hamrin and I sought to go beyond Goldman's focus on dissidents to study “establishment intellectuals” by looking at “the motives and means for collaboration, as well as the sources of tension and conflict between leading intellectuals and the top Communist Party leadership” (Hamrin and Cheek 1986, 3). “Establishment intellectual” proved a useful category for opening up our understanding of intellectual participation at the elite level under Mao and during the 1980s. The 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and the June 4th massacre and crackdown changed everything. Merle Goldman usefully picked up on these changes by identifying the rise of “disestablished intellectuals” in the post-Tiananmen period, particularly intellectuals who had been active in the reformist administration of the CCP in the 1980s associated with disgraced General Secretary Hu Yaobang (Goldman 2007, 15ff, 86ff). These fallen establishment intellectuals populated the academic posts, publishing ventures, and new business opportunities that exploded after Deng Xiaoping's famous certification of economic reform in his 1992 “Southern Tour.”

To perceive more fully the particular meaning and aesthetic power of the Hsi-yu chi, it is necessary to examine more closely certain of its features hitherto ignored in criticism. One such feature is the vast amount of poetic “insertions” within the narrative. Though the mixture of prose and poetry is common in classic Chinese fiction, and has its antecedents in the pien-wen texts and in the popular stories and dramas of earlier periods, the poetry of the Hsi-yu chi has its own significant function. By its descriptive realism, its encyclopedic range, and its peculiar technique of versification, the poems serve to heighten both scenic situations and character developments. The narrative effect thus achieved may best be appreciated when it is compared with epic songs and heroic sagas of other cultures. Another means with which the novel is endowed with epic magnitude is the greatness of its theme, the sacred mission of Tripitaka. To understand the crucial importance of this mission, it is necessary to discern how it functions to create in both plot and characters a sense of heroic grandeur and epic immensity.

Psychological characteristics of enemy peoples were studied almost frantically during the recent war with a view to more effective psychological warfare. Answers were sought to questions like the following: How does the average enemy individual think and feel? Can his mentalemotional constitution be exploited to disrupt his will to fight? And how did he get that way?

Prior to 1941 almost no one investigated the phenomena of personality development in Japanese society. Even the Germans were subjected to very little systematic study. After the bombs began to fall, when collection of essential data had become impossible, both governmental and private initiative backed research into “character structure” among enemy peoples.

Japan has been home to two distinct approaches to typewriting, the first oriented exclusively towards the typing of kana and the second oriented towards kanji. In look and feel, this first family of machines was indistinguishable from those built by Remington, Underwood, or Olivetti. The second, however, was indistinguishable from typewriters already being produced in China: tray bed machines featuring approximately 2,500 of the most commonly used characters. In part because of this Janus-faced approach to the typewriter, Japanese companies succeeded in penetrating the Chinese information technology market where Western manufacturers had failed, making inroads as early as the 1920s. With the expansion of empire-building in 1931, and the outbreak of war in 1937, Japan came to dominate the entire Chinese typewriter market. In giving rise to the Japanese-built Chinese typewriter, this historic period also gave shape to what is now understood within information technology circles as CJK: the distinct Chinese-Japanese-Korean technolinguistic zone.

This article examines how the bodies of Japanese women became a key site of political and cultural contestation during the Allied occupation. The sale of sex, once legally recognized and regulated, became a conspicuous symbol of postwar chaos. Ostracizing sex workers who catered to servicemen provided a means to display an abiding nationalism without directly confronting the occupiers. But these women were also indispensable in the economy of military base cities. Journalists and social critics sought to discern or impose order by devising elaborate taxonomies, cartographies, health regimes, and moral codes. Sex workers were active participants in this process, but their personal testimonies show how their lives defied categorization. When the Diet finally intervened with the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law, it was merely the culmination of a long process involving every segment of Japanese society.

While modern readers willingly acknowledge the virtues of informing themselves about the ways the cultural contexts of fiction of various times and places differ from their own and the ramifications this may have for interpretation, we tend to assume that the emotions depicted in the fiction of other cultures are essentially the same as those we find in our own hearts. Scholars of literature exert considerable effort to help readers understand such things as contemporary political systems, kinship structures, marriage practices, and norms of etiquette, but we have not wondered whether the smiles, tears, and frowns of characters of other times and places reflect the same feelings as our own. Love, hate, jealousy, anger, joy, and sadness are popularly taken to be universal human emotions. However, classroom experience teaching classical Japanese literature and close readings of texts have led me to the conclusion that there are subtle but significant differences between the nature of love as depicted in premodern Japanese literature and love as we expect to find it in American society today.

In his presidential address at the 1977 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Marius Jansen pointed out that the relationship between monarchy and modernization in Japan is a significant subject of research for Western scholars specializing in Japanese studies. Specifically, Jansen emphasized the need to investigate the popular perceptions of the monarch usually overlooked by Japanese historians. He noted that a study of Japanese mentalité must cover a vast area, including “imagery, iconography, and ritual.” Until we “get at” this level of the social and cultural history of modern Japan, Jansen feared, we will fail to gain “a better understanding of modernization, of Japan, in world history” (1977:612–22).

There is a considerable body of literature on the relationship between common law and various systems of personal laws especially in the Asian context. My only excuse for adding yet another account is this: A technical legal description of this relationship, focusing on such topics as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and so on, adds a real and important dimension to the study of culture contact. Except in Hong Kong, common law is no longer the dominant political system; it has become, with local variations, “government law” in the territories under consideration. Since law is the instrument most often used in the implementation of new government policies affecting family matters, for example, it seems important that some attempt be made to describe the techniques of interaction and to set out the present law as accurately as possible. Hopefully this essay will serve as skeleton reference material on the relation between these two systems of law. To accomplish this aim I will: (a) describe the ways in which the common law has been adapted so as to take account of Chinese law, (b) state the “principles of Chinese law” which the courts have formulated in the course of this adaptation, and (c) note the points at which the respective courts in the three territories have differed in their interpretation regarding the content of Chinese law.

In this article the author studies the main trends in the evolution of modern Soviet Indology in the context of developments in Soviet Oriental studies and examines the extent to which both these were conditioned in turn by shifts in Soviet ideology. The development of Soviet Indology is further examined within the context of the organizational growth of the Institute of Oriental Studies (IVAN) and the evolving expertise of Soviet Indologists on contemporary India (along with a study of patterns in the academic training of these scholars). The author thus investigates both the intellectual and organizational bases contributing to the growth of Soviet Indology in an integrated and interconnected manner.

One promising traditional industry slated for revival in late colonial India was carpet weaving. Characterized by low technology, high product value, and strong demand, carpets appealed for obvious economic reasons, while simultaneously evoking India's luxurious artisanal past. In western India, carpet weaving was centered in jails where convicts produced high-quality rugs using historic designs in prison factories that served as laboratories for redefining penal labor and traditional design under the eyes of the colonial state. For, even as they were poised at the center of new exchange networks of design ideas, jail factories also claimed practical economic goals: to earn money for jails, train convicts in new skills and habits, and build India's productive potential in a time of economic malaise. As such, they provide an ideal site for examining the economic context for the emerging design industry, and for limitations of colonial visions of the Indian economy.