I set forth in this paper a partial description and preliminary analysis of rural marketing in China. This neglected topic has significance with ranges far beyond the disciplinary concerns of economics. It interests anthropologists in particular because marketing structures of the kind described here for China appear to be characteristic of the whole class of civilizations known as “peasant” or “traditional agrarian” societies. In complex societies of this important type, marketing structures inevitably shape local social organization and provide one of the crucial modes for integrating myriad peasant communities into the single social system which is the total society. The Chinese case would appear to be strategic for the comparative study of peasant marketing in traditional agrarian societies because the integrative task accomplished there was uniquely large; because the exceptional longevity and stability of Chinese society have allowed the marketing system in many regions to reach full maturity prior to the beginnings of modernization; and because available documentation of Chinese marketing over several centuries provides rich resources for the study of systemic development—of change within tradition.

“The study of ancient China, particularly from the historic period on, requires A the collaboration of historians, archaeologists, palaeographers, as well as specialists in other disciplines.“

Isolated phenomena of a dualistic nature in various Shang institutions have long been recognized (see below), but their interrelationship and their possible relevance to a coherent dualistic system generally prevalent in Shang society cannot be clearly understood unless the various specialists on ancient China break disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with vigor and mutual understanding. This paper attempts to bring attention to some of these phenomena and to define the probable areas of research for a highly important problem in Shang studies. To begin, let us examine some interesting features at the archaeological sites of Hsiao-t'un and Hsi-pei-kang.

The fall of Yüan Shih-k'ai in the summer of 1916 came as a result of an abortive attempt to set up a monarchy. This was one of the turning points in the Chinese revolution. The revolutionary tide which had been held back by his authoritarian rule was unleashed after its collapse. There followed a deluge. The focus of this paper is on the Japanese policy which, it is submitted, was primarily responsible for the defeat of the monarchical plan.

Much attention has been devoted, by scholars and others, to the dramatic growth of Singapore in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as a great commercial entrepôt, as a flourishing city of tens of thousands of Chinese migrants, and as the maritime focus of two economic empires, the British and the Dutch. The direction and the intensity of this interest are, of course, understandable, but it has done much to obscure the role of Singapore as a focus also for the cultural and economic energies of the Malaysian world which existed alongside but in many ways separate from the world created by the West. While the comparison cannot be pressed too far, Singapore in the nineteenth century may be likened to Malacca in the fifteenth, in its role as metropolis for an area that embraced the whole Malay Peninsula and Archipelago, from Kedah and Acheh to the Celebes. Island trade in Malaysian or Arab hands, Indonesian migration to the Peninsula, the pilgrimage to Mecca and its subsidiary activities in the fields of Islamic teaching and publication, brought together in Singapore a great variety of Malaysian and Muslim peoples from differing social and economic background but sharing a lingua franca and important elements of a common culture, and often freed from the more hampering restraints of traditional social systems. Urban life has in all places and times been an important breeding ground for new ideas and new ways, and to this general pattern Singapore at the close of the nineteenth century conforms.

The galaxy of non-indigenous elements confronting the student of Indonesian cultural history has often obscured the fact that, in order to elucidate a valid picture of their role and significance, these elements need to be studied in their own terms, in relation to their own environment and at specific synchronic levels, such levels being but points on the continuum of the historical process. Thus to consider Javanese culture exclusively as a linear (and corrupt) descendant of Indian culture on the one hand, or as perpetually conditioned by a hypothetical indigenous ur-society in the manner of Rassers on the other, leads to a dead end, and has stultified much otherwise useful and impressive research.

Most periodization schemes of Chinese history would note the significance of a “great divide.” It may be placed before the T'ang period, considering from ethnological as well as cultural standpoints such factors as the first major influx of non-Han conquering groups, the march toward the sub-tropics, the penetration of Buddhism, and so forth. It may be placed much later, around 800 A. D. or after, roughly from the late T'ang to the early Sung, noting the general characteristics of the society and fundamental changes that shaped die political and socio-economic structures of subsequent centuries. Even the Marxist view or revisionist interpretations thereof would not dispute the importance of such changes.

I enter this controversy from a somewhat curious position: I began life as a psysical geographer, graduated in the high tradition of European Sinology, work in the field of economic history, and administer a department of languages and literatures. I suppose I might be said to have a foot firmly in each world, and to be qualified to make a plea for the unity of Chinese studies. Additionally, the circumstances of British university teaching force my colleagues and myself to face this problem continually, since our undergraduates specialize in Chinese studies to the exclusion of all else, and we are forced in our teaching to attempt a broad coverage of both the humanities and the social disciplines, to give our students a reasonably broad academic education oriented around China.

Chinese studies (alias Sinology) and die disciplines came, in the final analysis, from the same parentage: the desire to know. They are intellectual twins which, nurtured in divergent circumstances and showing dissimilar traits, are thus “fraternal” rather than “identical”. Academe has always been nursery and playground for the disciplines. In the early days, those who served as Sinology's amahs were mostly non-academic people. Uncommitted to die established disciplines and frankly amateurish in approach, they all but bastardized Sinology in the eyes of the more strait-laced among the governesses of the disciplines. For a time, some of the latter were hardly aware of the underprivileged twin's existence.