Showing papers in "The Journal of Asian Studies in 1959"

The Meiji Landlord: Good or Bad?

Abstract: It seems impossible anywhere in this century of the common man for history to remain a mere matter of recording and analysing the deeds of uncommon men. The most traditional of historians finds himself obliged to assess not only the influence exerted on the course of events by individual statesmen and generals, but also the collective influence of the wishes, the fears, the interests, or the prejudices of large numbers of anonymous individuals, grouped generally, for purposes of convenience, under such rubrics as “the urban middle classes,” “the city,” “the workers,” “the farmers,” “the discontented intellectuals,” or “the electorate.” Sometimes the statistical implications of such terms are recognised, as by the English Namierites, in the use of openly statistical methods of approach. Other historians use less tedious, and it must be admitted less convincing, means of summation. In any case, the business of writing history has become more complicated. The purpose of this paper is to give some account of the treatment Japanese historians have afforded one such large category of individuals who can no longer be ignored in recounting the history of Meiji Japan, namely “the landlords.”

Early Socialist Currents in the Chinese Revolutionary Movement: Sun Yat-sen Versus Liang Chʽi-chʽao

Abstract: After a decade in power, the Chinese Communists have had enough time to change the past as well as the present. Voluminous documentary collections, monographs, and general treatises on modern Chinese history have been published. Many of these works are designed to tell how socialism was victorious over evil and oppression, why the Communists deserved to inherit the mantle of heaven. Modern Chinese history is being reconstructed, with one eye always focussed upon those impersonal and inexorable forces of dialectical materialism and economic determinism, while the other is fixed upon the very personal if enormously heroic qualities of Chairman Mao. In the opening stages of a Communist revolution (and perhaps of most revolutions), a cult of personality comes so naturally and serves so many strategi c purposes, it is difficult to avoid, whatever the logic in second generation criticisms.

Steamship Enterprise In Nineteenth-Century China

Abstract: This paper is a study of entrepreneurial problems in nineteenth-century China as seen in two types of enterprise—foreign enterprise under the treaty system and Chinese enterprise sponsored and controlled by government officials. These two types existed in different institutional environments; their capacities for efficient operation and growth were therefore also different. Case studies of both types are conveniently found in a field of modern transport—the steamship business which arose to serve the trade in the treaty ports. After 1860 a large number of foreign firms began to operate steamships in Chinese waters, and between 1862 and 1881 the following specialized “steam navigation companies” were established in Shanghai.

The Anglo-Indian Community The Integration of a Marginal Group

Abstract: The Anglo-Indian community of India is one of several hybrid Eurasian populations which have found themselves in precarious social positions in some of the newly independent Asian nations. Eurasian populations originated in early periods of colonial domination when European women were scarce, and grew over the years through natural increase and occasional mixed contacts. Their original size relative to the indigenous populations and policies of both governing European and native populations have determined whether they: (1) have been submerged in the numerically dominant local population (e.g., White Russians in China); (2) have attempted to return to the European countries of their male progenitors (e.g., Indos of Indonesia); or (3) have been forced to attempt the maintenance of social and cultural solidarity as permanent minorities (e.g., Ceylonese “Burghers” and the Anglo-Indians). Events of the contemporary nationalist revolution in Asia have increased public awareness of the problems of these minority groups.

Rabindranath Tagore—“The Greatest of The Bāuls of Bengal”

Abstract: When Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 andwas thereby rocketed into international prominence, the literary and theological worlds were afflicted with a rash of speculation as to whether or not his ideas were basically Christian. “The God of Gitanjali is no impersonal, imperturbable absolute of Hindu philosophy, but…whether He be explicitly Christ or not, He is at least a Christ-like God, and the experience of His suppliant and lover is one with the deepest core of all Christian experience.” “The ideas of Rabindranath, like those of so many thinkers of modern India, have often been quite wrongly assigned to Indian sources.” “In Rabindranath we get a glimpse of what the Christianity of India will be like….”

Liang Sou-ming and the Rural Reconstruction Movement

Abstract: The name of Liang Sou-ming is perhaps most familiar in connection with his controversial published lectures of the early 1920's, The Cultures of East and West, and Their Philosophies. It is less well known that Liang had an extensive career in the field of rural reconstruction during the 1930's, that he was one of the prime movers of the political coalition which ultimately became the China Democratic League, and that, more recently, he has been under severe attack by communist thinkers for his continuing rejection of Marxism-Leninism as applied to China. Particularly during the time when he was active in rural reconstruction and in national politics, Liang represented movements which stood, or seemed to stand, as alternatives to both the Kuomintang and the Communist solutions to China's problems. The failure of these movements to prevent antagonistic polarization and civil war in China raises some of the most important problems to which a study of Liang Sou-ming gives entry. Here we shall be concerned primarily with the first of these efforts—rural reconstruction.

An Outline History of Korean Confucianism: Part II: The Schools of Yi Confucianism

Abstract: An outline of the history of Confucianism in the Three Kingdoms, Silla, Koryŏ, and Yi periods and a consideration of certain political and factional problems of Confucianism in Korea occupied Part I of the present “Outline History.” Part II will now attempt to deal briefly with the schools of Confucianism as they developed during the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) and with the principal Confucian institutions of Korea.Beginning with the classification of the schools of Yi Confucianism, we find a problem hardly less complex than the analysis of factionalism which was considered at the end of Part I of the present study. The corpus of Confucian doctrine and interpretation was vast when the dynasty opened; it increased steadily as the scholars of the contemporary Ming and Ch'ing dynasties produced their works. Within China, schools of interpretation were numerous, and their names more so. Korea inherited both the possibility of establishing on its own soil schools modeled after the Chinese and of proliferating native-grown variations.

Stories from a Ming collection : translations of Chinese short stories published in the seventeenth century

Abstract: The popularity of the Chinese storyteller goes back to the marketplace of the T ang dynasty, but the familiar figure came into its own in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This selection of stories from Feng Menglong s collection, Stories Old and New (originally published in 1624), includes representative types of the storyteller s traditional art. The Pearl-Sewn Shirt is a cautionary romance describing the tragedy of a broken marriage; the heroic biography, which depicts a neglected man of high worth gradually receiving recognition, is represented by Wine and Dumplings"; an authentic twelfth-century forerunner of the detective story is found in The Canary Murders." The other tales concern traffic in the supernatural, didactic admonitions to observe morality in sex and loyalty in friendship, and realistic accounts of the meanness and corruption of official life. Also includes The Lady Who Was a Beggar, The Journey of the Corpse, The Story of Wu Pao-an, and The Fairy s Rescue. "