On November 4, 1946, representatives of the United States and China signed a five-year “Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation” at Nanking. Negotiation of this pact within six months of the cessation of hostilities had been called for by the treaty of January 11, 1943, under which the United States relinquished extraterritorial rights in China. The new treaty should thus have occasioned no surprise since it was intended merely as a routine instrument for facilitating commercial relations between the two countries.

With the death of Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), both anthropology and Asian studies lost one of their most prominent, influential, and wide-ranging figures, as many obituaries and retrospective assessments of his life and work have noted (see, e.g., the unusually thoughtful and balanced one by Sherry Ortner, 2007). For more than forty years, Geertz's books and articles had a profound impact on his own discipline and on many neighboring ones, and though he dealt at length with other parts of the world, from Morocco (the subject of some of his fieldwork) to the United States (he sometimes turned his gaze to the rituals of his own culture), he often wrote about Southeast Asia, and Indonesia in particular. In terms of topics, he made major contributions to general debates on how to study history and culture, and to more specific discussions of issues such as the path that Islam took into and through individual nation-states.

When students of Japanese literary history view the latter part of the Tokugawa period, two developments stand out. First, Edo replaced Kyoto and Osaka as the center of cultural activity. Second, a baffling variety of forms of prose fiction arose. The former stemmed largely from the policies of Yoshimune, the eighth Tokugawa shogun. Although his suppression of “pernicious literature” had a baneful effect on publishing in Kyoto and Osaka, it indirectly improved the competitive position of Edo booksellers. During Yoshimune's reign, also, the city of Edo underwent enormous population growth. Many hatamoto and samurai were forced to resettle in Edo, where they lived on rice stipends rather than on the direct produce of their land. Bureaucracy expanded. Samurai turned from the rigors of rural life to polite urban pursuits. Need for additional services led to a growth in the number of merchants. Likewise, Yoshimune's personal interest in mathematics, science, and even Western learning resulted in the import of books and ideas from the outside world, particularly China. Proscriptions against foreign learning became less rigid.

The Chinese Communist movement stemmed from nationalism and assumed the left wing in the Chinese national revolution. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) was organized in the wake of the May Fourth Movement which had kindled a great fervor of patriotism, particularly among the intellectual youths. Only as nationalists first and Communists second, were the Communists willing to join the KMT (Kuomintang) as individuals in order to take an active part in the national revolution. In a span of five years, the KMT-CCP alliance had contributed to the consolidation of the revolutionary base in Kwangtung and the spread of revolution to the north. In the course of the national revolution, the CCP enjoyed a spectacular growth from a group of about 70 intellectuals in 1921, when the party was founded, to a mass party of over 50,000 members in 1927, when die Pei-fa (Northern Expedition) swept the whole of South China.

In the seventeenth century, at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Ch'ing dynasties, China produced three outstanding scholars: Huang Tsung-hsi (1619–95), Ku Yen-wu (1613–82), and Wang Fu-chih (1619–92), all great thinkers, voluminous writers, and ardent patriots. The social and political chaos, economic deterioration, excess of Wang Yang-ming's intuitionism, and, above all, the conquest of China by the Manchus must have stimulated the best minds to develop their ideas in a more practical direction. They were contemporaries of René Descartes 1596–1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623–62) and only slightly earlier than Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Confined by their cultural tradition and living in a vast but largely isolated empire, these men naturally developed ideas different from those of their European contemporaries. But they had enough challenges of their own to meet. The originality in their ideas bespeaks the intellectual vigor of late imperial China.

Dr. Hermann Lautensach has made an outstanding contribution to the study of Korea. Since his publications are mainly in German geographical periodicals, they may have escaped the attention of many Korean and American scholars.

Dr. Lautensach is one of the best trained German geographers. His reputation was established by his classic work on Portugal. He became closely associated with German geopoliticians and wrote articles for the Zeitschrift für geopolitik. He was one of the authors with Haushofer, Obst and Maull of the Bausteine zar geopolitik (Berlin: Kurt Vonwinckel Vertag., 1928).