Both Beijing and London have vowed to maintain Hong Kong's stability and prosperity in the uncertainty surrounding the expiration of the New Territories Lease in 1997. The six books under review are timely but not entirely successful attempts to trace local socioeconomic developments since the riots of 1967. Three major themes emerge. The still-prevalent Chinese family system and social values have provided the foundation for political stability during this period of drastic changes. The general “prosperity” also entails human sacrifices and widening inequitable distribution of this increased wealth. The policies of the colonial administration have been a far cry from the ideals of laissez-faire government, and yet much remains to be done to make Hong Kong a just society.

Women have assumed a prominent role in China's post–Cultural Revolutionary fiction, just as they did in the literature of the May Fourth period. Addressing issues that apply not just to women but by implication to society as a whole, writers like Zhang Jie and Zhang Xinxin experiment with new literary forms to describe the special problems that continue to afflict women: problems of male domination and discrimination and, in some ways more burdensome, problems of self-definition and self-fulfillment. Recognizing the obstacles to their equality, productivity, and happiness, they are somewhat disappointed and disillusioned about the new society in which they once fervently believed.

Japanese complicity in the death of Marshal Chang Tso-lin on June 4, 1928, by an explosion under his railway car on the Peiplng-Mukden Railway, has long been taken for granted. In the absence of a full explanation of what happened near Mukden as well as what happened, in consequence, in political circles in Japan, myth and conjecture have obscured the real significance of the episode. An examination of the record makes it possible to show that it was not another manifestation of the positive policy of the Tanaka cabinet but that it was the first successful test of strength between the radical wing centered in young officers in the Kwantung Army, with civilian sympathizers in Japan, and the more responsible elements of the Japanese government, both civilian and military. Strong disciplinary action by the latter group at this point, perhaps, could have checked a chain of events that eventually led to the ascendency to power of the radical faction and the realization of some of its foreign and domestic programs. The failure to punish by established disciplinary procedures may well have been a fateful decision in Japanese history.

The worship of Vishwakarma, a god long associated with India's hereditary artisans and their tools, has achieved new relevance with the rise of industrial capitalism in South Asia. No longer moored solely to artisanal caste interests, worship of the god heralds a range of publics in which technē (crafting, fabricating, or making) is an exalted activity and public concern. Using “technophany” as a conceptual framework, we argue that deifications of technology and technicity sit at the core of Vishwakarma worship. Rather than treat religion and technology as ontologically distinct modalities of being-in-the-world, we use this framework to show how artisans, technicians, mechanics, and engineers use Vishwakarma worship to bring industrial technologies into alignment with the cosmos. Drawing on historical and ethnographic materials, we push beyond earlier scholarship that has treated Vishwakarma worship as a holdover from peasant culture or as a set of practices pitted against industrial capitalism.

Louis Charles Jean Dumont has been Directeur d'Etudes in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris since 1955. From 1951 until 1955 he was Lecturer in Indian Sociology at the University of Oxford. He began field research in India—among a single Tamil-speaking caste—in 1949, when the post-war generation of Anglo-American anthropologists was undertaking fieldwork on Indian villages. He had been trained in indology, Sanskrit and Dravidian studies; reared in the heritage of French sociology descended from Emile Durkheim through Marcel Mauss; and influenced by those intellectual currents that later took the name of structuralism. Thus, his perspective on India was different from that of his colleagues in the English-speaking world, and the results of his research were initially puzzling to them. There is no doubt that his work is now increasingly well understood outside France, especially since the appearance in 1970 of an English translation of his Homo Hierarchies: An Essay on the Caste System, originally published in 1967 in Paris. However, a great deal of uncertainty about the meaning and significance of much of what Dumont has written continues to be expressed in both anthropology and Asian studies. This symposium was organized in the hope that aspects of his thought might be clarified for a wide scholarly audience and some assessment made of his contribution to comparative sociology.

This article is a pioneering effort to analyze the establishment and consolidation of the T'ang dynasty in processual and systemic terms. The author argues that the extension of dynastic power over the North China Plain was a much more gradual process than hitherto thought, and he reinterprets early T'ang policies in this light. He then examines the structure of the dynasty, using the analytical framework developed by Amitai Etzioni. In the final section, the author considers the mature dynasty under Hsüan-tsung and suggests comparisons with the Roman Empire.

In The Early Twentieth Century, Shanghai Promised Opportunities that attracted people from all over China and, indeed, from around the world. To all who arrived—the wealthy banker from Ningbo looking to multiply the family fortune, the young British diplomat fresh from a desk job at the Foreign Office, the unwilling daughter from Suzhou sold into prostitution, the shop apprentice whose family connections brought another kind of indentured service, or the Chinese and foreign sailors “shanghaied” into service on one of the thousands of shipping vessels docked every year in Shanghai's harbor—Shanghai offered both great risks and real opportunities.

In the twenty years since Japan's surrender, new materials and greater perspective allow for more effective probing than heretofore of American policies on the occupation of Japan. This study aims to further this task by posing and answering—at least in part—several questions which underlay these policies.

In november 1841 a young Englishman named Thomas Taylor Meadows, who had spent some three years studying chemistry and mathematics in Germany, happened to attend Professor Karl Friedrich Neumann's lectures on the Chinese language at the University of Munich. The young man “almost immediately gave up every other study” and prepared for the British service in China. Hardly more than a year later, at the beginning of 1843, Meadows arrived at the new crown colony of Hongkong. When George Tradescant Lay opened the first British consulate at Canton on July 23, Meadows was Senior Assistant and a year later became Interpreter. This made him, in modern parlance, the chief British intelligence officer at the leading treaty port. After a stretch of seven and one-half years at Canton, during which he reported the beginning in Kwangsi of the great domestic uprising later known as the Taiping Rebellion, Meadows became Interpreter at Shanghai (Jan. 1, 1852), and by the time the Taiping horde erupted down the Yangtze from Wuhan to Nanking in early 1853, he was well prepared to study them at first hand.

The Chinese are changing,” we heard this said many times even before the last war. Numerous books, mainly popular in nature, have been written on this very theme. Most of us often fail to realize that it is largely an assumption. Unlike other assumptions about the Chinese it has, however, rarely been seriously questioned. To what extent have the Chinese changed? What are the most important factors responsible for their change? What are some of the directions of their change? These and other questions have been variously asked, but have usually been given answers so full of generality that few students of science found them useful.

Historicalscholarship in postwar Japan has exhibited a renewed interest in the origins of dynastic rule in Yamato, and the process leading to the establishment of the Yamato rulers as sovereigns of an imperial polity in the seventh century. New theories of dynastic origins have led to new controversies, and many of the most basic assuptions of prewar historians are now being abandoned. Among these, the previously sacrosanct idea of unbroken dynastic continuity, usually expressed by the slogan bansei ikkei, has been effectively challenged. This idea, an important element of state ritual from the seventh century onward, does not antedate that century. It follows that during the previous three hundred years, which witnessed the successive establishment of at least three different dynastic regimes in Yamato, the prevailing political structures and ideologies differed radically from those represented in the traditional histories, which were not completed until the early eighth century. The bases of royal legitimacy and the nature of the kingship itself very probably changed drastically in the process of development.