In reviewing the progress of Asian studies and of this Association, it is necessary both to point with pride and to view with alarm.

For the former, no doubt, there is some justification. There has been a great increase since the early beginnings at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale. Looking back over the last thirty years, one can recall the new stimulus to Far Eastern studies in the 1930's provided by David Stevens at the Rockefeller Foundation through his support of Mortimer Graves of the American Council of Learned Societies and fellowship programs for American trainees in Tokyo and Peking. The imagination and initiative of these men and a few others laid important foundations.

Three years of glorious revival for the Kuomintang followed Sun Yat-sen's death on March 12, 1925. Military success in the Northern Expedition transformed the embattled Cantonese Party of 1925 into the recognized national government of China. But the same period also brought about vicious squabbles over Party authority among Sun Yat-sen's disciples. Political infighting, insubordination, outright treachery, even murder, and a bewildering variety of political shenanigans shook the Party's very foundations. At the end of those three years, Chiang Kai-shek emerged in a permanent if precarious position of control of a Kuomintang that was shot through with persistent, if sometimes disguised, hatreds.

The Iwakura embassy's encounter with Hamilton Fish at the State Department in 1872 is far more than a quaint but insignificant episode in the relations between Japan and the United States and deserves resurrection from the footnotes of history. The two sides, much to the surprise of both, met in a long, drawn-out series of trying and painful interviews, stretching from mid-March to the end of July, to argue and then attempt to revise the terms of Japan's 1858 treaty of friendship and commerce with the United States. This confrontation marks the proper, though halting, beginning of the treaty revision movement in Meiji diplomatic history and also illustrates the Grant administration's policy, or more accurately, cluster of attitudes toward East Asia during the early period of post-Civil War expansionism.

“Biography,” in the words of Hu Shih, “is the least developed branch of Chinese literature.” This statement would, at first sight, seem to have little justification when we take into account the enormous quantity and wide variety of Chinese biographical literature produced during the past two millennia, and when we consider the voluminous biographical output and the keen popular interest in biography in twentieth-century China.

I Want to address myself to two points: why I think the study of China requires the study of its history, and why I think the proper practice of the historical profession in general requires some awareness of the history of China. I would argue that the study of change in time is the heart of the historical approach, and that for this reason, history's contribution to the study of China is intellectually legitimate and quite different from that of the more specialized disciplines; and conversely, that the general problems which historians find exciting are nowhere offered in such profuse and interesting combinations, with such abundant documentation, as in the history of China.

Students of Chinese society should devote more attention to urban Taiwan, for several reasons. First, whatever the relative significance of Taiwan and Communist China in the world, Taiwanese social life can at least be studied at first hand over a protracted period, and with relatively little interference. The events on the China mainland since 1950 are often described as “the most large scale experiment in social change in world history.” Yet these events cannot be studied in the way social scientists prefer to do their research. Moreover, the most dramatic social events do not necessarily make the most important sociological problems; important breakthroughs in any science often come from the study of very mundane phenomena. Second, Taiwan is now, with Japan, Singapore and Malayasia, the most industrialized and economically developed of Asian countries. Urban Taiwanese are strategically significant in this context. Since Taiwan as a whole is becoming ever more urbanized and industrialized, knowledge of social life in metropolitan Taiwan today may provide the best clues as to the patterns toward which Taiwan as a whole will tend in the future. Third, Japanese sources describe many aspects of social structure in urban Taiwan a half century or more ago, and thereby provide comparative data on change over time in urban Taiwan. Such data have been little utilized thus far.

“Your honors, in this venue, I announce my separation from the United States … both in military, but economics also,” said Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte to a burst of applause from an audience of officials in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, the symbolic seat of China's ruling Communist Party. At the Philippine-Chinese trade forum that same day, October 20, 2016, Duterte opened his speech by asking, “What is really wrong with an American character?” Americans are, he continued, “loud, sometimes rowdy, and they have this volume of their voice … not adjusted to civility…. They are the more forward commanding voice befitting obedience.” Evoking some deep Filipino racialist tropes, Duterte then mocked the flat, nasal American accent and rued the time he was questioned at the Los Angeles airport by a “Black” officer with a “black” uniform, “black shoes,” and a “black” gun. Moving from rhetoric to substance, Duterte quietly capitulated to Beijing's relentless pressure for bilateral talks to settle the dispute over the South China Sea, virtually abrogating Manila's recent slam-dunk win on that issue before an international court (Demick and Wilson 2016; DU30 News 2016).

The upheavals of 1857 in India left a heightened conviction among the British rulers of what many had long believed, that the loyalty of their subjects could never be relied upon. Even after 1857 the British fear of sedition was stimulated at irregular intervals by such events as the Wahhabi trials of the eighteen sixties and the Kuka uprisings of 1869–72. British responses to nationalist challenges for decades to come were conditioned by the resulting insecurity, and nowhere was this more dramatically reinforced than in Bombay Presidency in the late eighteen seventies.

British rule in Maharashtra had been erected on the ruins of the Maratha confederation. The legacy of independent Hindu rule lived on after 1818, although civil disturbances in following years sometimes bore little relation to the change of rulers. Spasmodically from 1818 to 1857 a series of minor revolts broke out in the countryside and towns, all of which fell into traditional patterns. All were strictly local in scope, whether mutinies of sepoys against English officers or tribal and low-caste riots against village moneylenders.

Saionji Kimmochi was often called the last bulwark against complete usurpation of power in the civil government by the Japanese military in the early and middle 1930's. As the last of the Genrō he represented also leadership which had developed in the Meiji period centering in a small group of able men who carried Japan from isolation to intimate involvement in world affairs. Not as well known is Saionji's role in the Meiji period; its study brings rewarding insight into the pattern of leadership and the development of political life during those years. It is the purpose of this paper to describe Saionji's background and to analyze his role in the movement for popular rights and a constitution which culminated in the issuance of the Imperial Rescript of October 12, 1881, the Rescript which promised a constitution and the establishment of a parliament.