One of the basic aims of American foreign policy has been to maintain the right of all countries to trade with China on an equal basis. The first formal declaration of this aim came with the sending of the Open Door notes in September, 1899. The origin of these notes has received much attention from historians in recent years, and certain aspects of their origin, particularly the part played by W. W. Rockhill and the Englishman, Alfred Hippisley, have become very well known. At least one aspect, however, has been entirely overlooked: namely, that special business interests in the United States were concerned over the possible loss of the Chinese market; were eager to have the government take just the sort of action which it did take; and were active in bringing pressure to bear on the government. It is the thesis of this article that they were partly responsible for the sending of the notes and, consequently, for America's Open Door policy.

The progress of India during the last fifty years in industrialization and urbanization, though considerable, has not significantly affected the predominantly agricultural and rural character of her society. Five out of every six persons live in villages and four out of every five of these live by agriculture. According to the census of 1951 there are 558,089 villages and 3,018 cities and towns in the Indian Union. Out of a total population of 357 millions, 295 millions or 83 percent live in villages and 62 millions or 17 percent in cities and towns.

In Japan, as in the West, the novelist has become his own favorite character. But the Japanese novelist (or short-story writer) seems less anxious to conceal his predilection than to flaunt it, so many frank self-portraits are there in the gallery of sbōsetsu. He appears in his fiction as a writer. We see him at work—pressed to meet a deadline, interrupted by the visits of literary friends, smoking and sipping tea over a hibachi, or at a desk cluttered with books, papers, pens and pencils, brushes and inkstone. We go with him on a holiday or to a rendezvous; we follow, in quotidian detail, his ordinary monotonous routine. Novels, stories, and sketches elaborate this rather seedy character, which the reader is allowed—sometimes encouraged—to accept as autobiographical.

Last March, the Inter-Asian Conference at New Delhi gave clear expression to the sympathy of Asia's peoples with Vietnam in its fight against colonial imperialism. And this was not just an empty gesture. The Hindu government has decided to place limits on the passage of French airplanes over India; and Indian longshoremen have refused to work for the revictualling of French troop transports.

There are those who will see an “Asiatic racism” in such manifestations as these. They will recall the Japanese propaganda for a “Greater Asia” which in fact would but have been an Asia dominated by Nipponese imperialism. The Inter-Asian Conference assumes an entirely different significance. It resumes the long-term trend which began in the first decade of this century, for the renovation of Asia by the democratic ideal of Western Europe.

In the cultural transition from traditional to modern China, the decade of the 1890's, along with the early 1900's, stands as an important watershed the significance of which, so far, has not received sufficient appreciation and adequate assessment by historians. Its importance, indeed, can hardly be overestimated. Intellectually, the period saw the conclusion of the ching-shih tradition in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the search for ideological reorientation in the twentieth century. Socially, these years witnessed the differentiation of a hitherto unitary class of gentry into two important status groups which dominated the social scene of twentieth-century China, namely intelligentsia and landlord-gentry. Yet why has such an important watershed so far not received enough attention?

Perhaps one reason is that in the past there has been a general tendency among historians to focus attention to the dramatic May Fourth Movement of 1919 as the great divide in the cultural transformation of modern China. This tendency resulted in a widespread impression that during the May Fourth period there was a cataclysmic release of new cultural forces which made a clean sweep of the past and thereby made the post-May Fourth period an entirely different intellectual world from what had been before. Such a view would almost inevitably, as it did, have the consequence of diverting attention away from many important intellectual changes which antedated the May Fourth period and whose significance cannot be appreciated by an isolated focus oh that period. There is no intention here to deny the significance of the May Fourth Movement in the cultural development of modern China. All that is suggested is that the May Fourth Movement needs to be reassessed from a broader historical perspective, a perspective which can only be attained by a detailed investigation of the intellectual changes which took place in the late Ch'ing, in particular, in the decade from mid-1890's to mid-1900's.

Japanese within the Manchukuo education bureaucracy stood out from their contemporaries in other Japanese colonies in their opposition to including militaristic and Japanese emperor-centered materials in the schools. As late as 1943, they published textbooks that focused on the students' daily lives rather than on encouraging respect for the military or reverence for the Japanese imperial family. Here, the author discusses how the congruence of an attempt by Manchukuo authorities at gaining authenticity and the progressive background of leading Japanese educators in the region brought about an education system that was unlike any other in the Japanese empire. Using Manchukuo textbooks, education journals, and postwar memoirs, the author examines a school of thought among Japanese colonial language educators, referred to as “reform optimists,” who held that whole language education could solve the contradiction between Manchukuo's stated ideal of ethnic equality and the reality of Japanese domination.