The 1911 Revolution in China is usually considered a failure. Changing the perspective of judgement from the national level to the local level permits a reassessment. Enough information is available from Chinese memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and foreign consular reports to make the new judgement somewhat secure if attention is focused on one particular location—Swatow.

The old administration was overthrown by expeasants led by deracinated rural intellectuals. They took power in the name of modern merchants. These merchants easily pushed the young radicals out because the ideology of the radical prevented them from using force against the wealth and status of the merchants. Rural disorder of the ex-peasants and republican election victorier for the radicals forced the urban merchants to rely on foreign election victories for the radicals forced the urban merchants to rely on foreign wealth and rural power to maintain law and order needed for trade and to maintain their own urban power base. Armed peasants and the young radicals were suppressed or bought off. Power fell to rural warlords and other political allies in urban enclaves. Only a rejoining of radical intellectuals and ex-peasants could offer China a revolution instead of just another bloody cycle.

This reflection on Errington's thought-provoking paper, by an intellectual historian and a student of Chinese philosophy, does not dispute her interpretive position on classical Malay literature in general and on hikayat in particular. Rather, it attempts to challenge three salient points of her argument: that the distinction between “oral” and “written” is a hazy one in the paratactic style of the hikayat; that the “images” in this type of literature are flat, repetitive and without content; and that the Malay art of story-telling is diametrically opposed to the rhetorical style of history characteristic of the post-Renaissance West. It is hoped that such a discussion will bring about fruitful encounters between scholars in different fields and disciplines in Asian studies.

Scholars of medieval Japanese history are not often blessed with sufficient statistical data to employ it systematically in their analysis of problems in the political, social, and economic history of the period. Yet in certain limited areas of investigation, enough information does exist to permit independent testing of the validity of conclusions that have been based on the historian's examination of the archival record—for example, the lower bureaucracy during the Muromachi period (1336–1573), which consisted of a group of officials known as the bugyōnin.

Lu Xun, a lifelong translator dedicated to introducing foreign thought, “searched for new voices from alien lands” to reinvigorate indigenous culture. Yet, his attitude toward cultural exchange was an ambivalent one. Among the questions that preoccupied him: How are foreign discourses, technologies, and knowledge appropriated and disseminated? Do they enable new frameworks for understanding the self and the world and forward an emancipatory agenda? Or legitimize systems of oppression? While Lu Xun's essays and short stories largely affirm the latter, “Mr. Fujino” imagines a paradigm of relationality that goes beyond the limits of nationalist and colonial discourse. The sentimental account mythologizing his friendship with his Japanese anatomy teacher—one that draws on Confucian notions of benevolence and reciprocity—and, in turn, the positive sentiments and cross-cultural encounters the story has generated, reflects, and in a certain sense, enacts, Lu Xun's more sanguine visions of the transformative possibilities of cultural exchange.

A full decade has passed since Frederic Wakeman, Jr., published his influential “Rebellion and Revolution: The Study of Popular Movements in Chinese History” (1977). He opened his article with the observation, “During the past twenty-five years, hundreds of studies of Chinese peasant rebellions have appeared in print.” He added that most of these studies had been published in the People's Republic, but in his bibliography he listed dozens of entries by Western scholars on the topic. Significantly, while noting that Western studies of peasant resistance in China “drew upon Chinese scholarship to write histories of their own,” Wakeman emphasized that Western historians were divided on the issue of whether the “Maoist depiction of Chinese history as perennial class struggle” was accurate. He summed up the controversy in these words:

Was an immiserated peasantry ruthlessly exploited by a venal landlord class through the sweep of pre-modern Chinese history? Or would it be more accurate to say that, while the population suffered in times of epidemic or famine, there were long periods of plenty when relatively affluent farmers benefited from rising agricultural prices, and negotiated rental contracts to their own liking with accommodating landlords? (Wakeman 1977:202)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian classical music was in transition. Most readings of the transition stress the choices of the professional musicians, as these musicians and the institutions in which they functioned were caught up in political and economic movements such as nationalism and commercialization. This article studies a different type of transition: when a small-town professional group with a strong associational culture became musicians. This second process, standing in contrast to the received narratives, suggests novel lessons in the history of urban cultures during a time of change.

The first volume of the Tsinghua University Warring States bamboo-strip manuscripts contains a text with passages that match medieval quotations of a text referred to as Cheng Wu 程寤 or Awakening at Cheng, which in turn is said to be a lost chapter of the Yi Zhou Shu 逸周書 or Leftover Zhou Documents. The passages concern one of Chinese literature's earliest interpretations of a dream, and were quoted in medieval encyclopedias in their sections on dreams. This article discusses the significance of this discovery both for Chinese textual history and for the interpretation of this particular dream. In particular, it shows that trees seen in the dream predict the Zhou conquest of Shang, and the subsequent Shang acquiescence to Zhou rule. It also notes that this discovery simultaneously confirms the antiquity of this text, but also calls into question the dominant traditional interpretation of the dream.

Korean shantytowns existed in every large Japanese city from the postwar years through the late 1960s. Japanese people recall them as secluded, dirty, impoverished, and dangerous. To many scholars, their existence confirms the transwar continuity of Japanese oppression of underclass ethnic minorities. But zainichi Koreans who grew up in such slums, which they called tongne, offer inspirational stories and fond memories of living there. This article sheds light on Koreans’ postwar experiences by discussing the important sociopolitical functions of the tongne and their continuing symbolism among the zainichi population. Viewing the tongne as zainichi's postliberation place of origin and paying attention to the reproduction of its meanings in hakkyo (schools) helps us understand the uneven terrain of power relationships in zainichi society, including why the Chongryun exercised great cultural power at least until the 1970s.

Bridging Tibetan, Chinese, and South Asian studies, this article examines the 1960 Tibetan Muslim Incident, when nearly one thousand Tibetan Muslims declared themselves to be Indian citizens by virtue of their Kashmiri ancestry and petitioned the Chinese government to be allowed to emigrate to India. The paradox of the 1960 Tibetan Muslim Incident is that it occurred after a decade of careful Sino-Indian diplomacy, a diplomacy emerging out of each nation's shared struggle for independence and liberation from an anti-imperialist past. By locating the event in the broader ideological movements of postcolonial Asia, the article focuses on a set of aspirations, motivations, and spaces by which China, India, and the Tibetan Muslims sought to define their actions outside of standard nationalistic, ideological, and military narratives of the period.

I first heard of “radioactive coal” in the summer of 2012, when I was living in the small village of Koyan, one of many settlements in Eastern Kazakhstan that hosted the Soviet-era Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. A scandal over the sale of radioactive coal had erupted in the fall of 2011 when local media began reporting on a train from Kazakhstan carrying more than eight thousand tons of it (in 130 wagons) to a heating plant in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Upon discovering that radioactivity in the shipment was eight times higher than normal, Kyrgyz authorities had it removed from the Bishkek's central heating plant. Rather than discarding it, they put it to use elsewhere, including in the heating stoves of more than one orphanage, a kindergarten, and several rural schools. When media covered this development, public outcry forced Kyrgyz politicians to demand that the coal be returned to Kazakhstan; allegations of corruption and arrests of Kyrgyz officials ensued. Political wrangling over responsibility and refunds meant that negotiations between Kazakh and Kyrgyz authorities took more than a year to complete. Finally, Kazakhstan allowed the coal to be returned.

Previously unexamined written, visual, and performative channels of communication between central government officials and local Buddhist monks call for a nuanced understanding of sociopolitical connections between the capital and the provinces of late Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). Via a multidisciplinary approach, this article addresses the patronage of three shrines dedicated to meritorious Buddhist monk-generals and martyrs who fought during the Japanese invasions (1592–98). Male and female members of the central elite supported the construction of the shrines in order to advance their respective political ambitions. Discontented with court factionalism, the central elite wielded their support of the shrines as a shaming device against their opponents and/or corrupt officials, while Buddhist monks sought to gain social recognition and enhance their respective monastery's political caché by maintaining the shrines, and by performing Confucian commemoration rituals with royal support.