Traditional China was an agrarian society which experienced a significant development of handicraft and commerce. In this respect, China was similar to medieval Europe and to certain pre-Hellenistic civilizations of the northern and western Mediterranean. However, while these Western agrarian civilizations ultimately lost their societal identity, Chinese society perpetuated its basic features for millennia. And while medieval Europe saw a commercial and industrial revolution that led to the rise of an industrial society, traditional China never underwent such changes.

Obviously, when characterizing societal structures, it is not enough to speak of agriculture, handicraft, and trade in general. We must consider their ecological and institutional setting and the specific human relations involved in their operation.

The poetry of every nation and age is a complex expression of the history, spirit, and individual genius of a people; and, as each successive generation evaluates a native or an alien poetic tradition from its own historical and cultural vantage-point, it discovers meanings and values as well as limitations and weaknesses in the poetry it reads. Each generation must reassess for itself the glory that was Greece or the grandeur of Japan—so that the attempt to describe the formative elements which underlie Japanese poetic expression is more than a single essay, individual, or generation can accomplish. But the undertaking nevertheless seems necessary today, when we can no longer be satisfied with the older extremes of Victorian condescension towards “Japanese epigrams”; the exclusively historical or biographical treatment which evades direct analysis of the poetry; or that simple-minded exoticism which prefers ignorant rapture to the disciplined effort of literary criticism. For the Westerner as well as for the Japanese, poetry lives only as it is understood and felt, and our experience of Japanese poetry today must reflect contemporary critical standards and techniques of analysis—the means of understanding given us by our own age and culture.

The study of abandoned civilizations, and of the reasons for the disaster, is a field in which many imaginations have wandered. In several parts of Southeast Asia, notably in Cambodia, northern Siam (the Kingdom of Haripunjaya), the Pagan area in the dry zone of Burma, and the dry zone of Ceylon, this pattern has been repeated. Only in Ceylon is there a more or less continuous historical record, plus numerous stone inscriptions, to assist in solving the puzzle. Otherwise the cases are suggestively alike. All arose on reasonably level plains (often the only level land in the region), in a climate of alternating wet and long dry seasons, which especially in the tropics usually means irrigation if agriculture is to be productive enough to support a more than primitive civilization. All did in fact depend heavily on extensive irrigation, and appear to have shared the characteristics which Wittfogel has associated with this kind of basis: a strong central state, massive public works, a highly structured society, and a powerful ramified bureaucracy. All were plagued with chronic invasions from nearby densely populated areas, and all collapsed with dramatic suddenness, to be blotted out by jungle so that with some even their memory was forgotten. Finally, all were abandoned at about the same period, the thirteenth century (Angkor Vat somewhat later), and with few exceptions no significant attempts were made to reoccupy them until very recent years.

The following three papers were read in a symposium on “The South Asian Village” at the eighth annual meeting of the Far Eastern Association in Philadelphia on April 3,1956. A fourth paper, on “The World View of the Punjabi Villager,” contributed by Miss Zekiye Eglar, is not here included because its publication was committed elsewhere. The Opler, Singh, and Dube papers are based on field research sponsored by the India Program of Cornell University and directed by Professor Opler. Comprehensive reports of this research are now in preparation. Since the application of community studies to the study of complex, historic civilizations is still in an exploratory phase, a few words of explanation about the theoretical problems to which all three papers contribute may be in order. The reader will also find it helpful to refer to the earlier symposium in this journal, “Community Studies in Japan and China” (FEQ, XIV, Nov. 1954).

Historians have pondered over the phenomenon of the propitious appearance in Japan of numerous statesmen in the critical mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps more startling is the number of able leaders who came from Kagoshima, a modest-sized city of the Satsuma fief. Men who played a major role in the history of modern Japan such as Saigō Takamori, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Matsukata Masayoshi, and Admiral Tōgo Heihachiro grew up together in Kagoshima almost within a stone's throw of each other.

When one thinks about the people that are portrayed by modern Chinese authors, one inevitably sees, foremost in the gallery, the image of Ah Q, the homeless farm hand who lives in a village temple, the tragic hero of a mock epic. The image, as one recent Chinese critic puts it, is similar to a caricature sketched by a cartoonist; the character is portrayed by strokes swift in movement, simple in outline, and suggestive in tone. One might first associate Ah Q with frolic pleasantry, but the lasting impression is awe and pity.

The True Story of Ah Q (1921), during the last few decades, has been regarded as the most penetrating satire of the spirit of compromise and rationalization that is prevalent in China. The name Ah Q has come to describe all that is false in reason, cowardly in action, and unstable in principle. The character of Ah Q, however, does not yield to a simple definition. The evasive spirit which hovers beyond the immediate satire engraves the image of Ah Q on the memory of the reader.

Aside from its current significance, the recent report from Taiwan announcing the inauguration of a new urban land tax grogram based upon the teachings of Sun Yat-sen serves to reawaken interest in one of his most controversial doctrines—the min sheng principle. The use of Sun's pʻing-chün ti-chʻüan—“equalization of land rights”—as a specifically urban taxation device raises a question concerning the original scope and purpose of this major aspect of the min sheng program. Taken by itself, “equalization of land rights” has an agrarian land tenure reform connotation, and has often been associated with land redistribution, some of its alternative translations being “equitable redistribution of the land” and more recently “proportionalization of the land.” Yet a study of Sun's prolific expositions of this theme starting with the Tʻung Meng Hui manifesto of 1905 down through the first year of the Republic when he was most actively concerned with the promotion of min sheng fails to substantiate the agrarian reform interpretation. On the contrary, according to the available sources for this period, there are few explicit references to the excesses of rural landlordism and the maldistribution of landholdings which in 1924 finally prompted Sun publicly to declare a “land to the tiller” policy. During this formative period for Kuomintang ideology, Sun's use of “equalization of land rights,” and the Western doctrines from which it was derived, indicate a definite preoccupation with the potential problems of a future capitalist order rather than concern with the aberrations of China's current agrarian structure.

A Villager in India, besides being a member of a distinguishable local community and interacting with many of its other members, has important ties of a more extensive nature, and participates in practices and understandings characteristic of wider areas. In discussions of the independence, viability and future of the Indian village it may be useful to keep the nature of these ties to the outside in mind and to consider their past history and the present trends in respect to them. So that concrete material may serve as a basis for discussion, data from Senapur, a village of Northcentral India in the Jaunpur district of Uttar Pradesh will be utilized. Senapur, as do all individual communities, presents some unique features, but we know that it is much like other villages of the region and we know that in respect to principal institutions, social structure, and most of the attributes that will be reviewed here it shares much with other villages of North India which have been described in the literature.

An assault upon the massive problem of economic stagnation fundamentally requires the pursuit of three kinds of basic social and economic changes. First, and perhaps most important, a society must either mobilize domestic savings or attract foreign financing in order substantially to raise its level of investment. This is the problem of financing. Second, these resources must be employed to change production functions in important sectors of the economy to provide increased yields from the utilization of the country's economic endowments. This is the problem of technology. Third, the society must revamp its institutions in such fashion that high levels of savings and investment are perpetuated and the search for new and more productive techniques of production—innovation—becomes a basic social propensity. This is the problem of institutional change.

The current interest of anthropologists in the scientific study of the rural life of India has been faced from the very beginning with the question of comprehending the meaning of discrete village studies in the context of the universe of Indian society and culture. Various attempts have been made to analyze the social structures and patterns of organization in Indian villages. Many scholars have noted the existence of intra-village factionalism, inter-caste struggles and several other apparently disintegrating features of the village community. Extensive social and religious ties of the villages with the outside and their economic and political dependence on organizations which do not have their roots in the community have also been noted. In the face of such evidence one begins to wonder whether an Indian village can be characterized at all as a functioning social unit distinguishable from others and whether studies of individual villages can help us in understanding India.

The internal political dissensions of the Yi period (1392–1910) provide a fruitful object of study for students of Korean history. Throughout all but its first decades they troubled the dynasty, eroding the effectiveness of government, introverting the intellectual concerns of the educated, narrowing access to needed new influences, producing social and political rifts which have become deeply ingrained. For all their faults, factional dissensions also brought marked political and intellectual stimulation, and are as important as any of Korea's native institutional phenomena for the formation of her modern political life. Ending only with Yi power in 1910, these struggles still echo under the surface of Korean society.

The 1953 Chinese census reported a total population on the Chinese mainland of 582.6 million. This figure came as a surprise to Western observers, since the population figures most frequently quoted for China during the preceding twenty years had been on the order of magnitude of “about 450 million,” the 1933 estimate of the League of Nations. Although the inadequacies of Chinese population statistics and their controversial nature are well known, some understanding of the latest figure is possible by viewing it in historical perspective. Such an analysis is here presented, and is confined to the 1953 census data referring to the size of the population and its distribution among the provinces.

The Mongolian People's Republic, or Outer Mongolia as it is more commonly known, is a country of some 600,000 square mile area which is bounded on the north by Soviet Siberia, on the south by China, with Manchuria to the east and Sinkiang to the west. Many centuries ago, the western world lived in fear of the Mongol hordes which swept westward as far as the Danube laying waste to all which lay before them. Over the years, the power and importance of Mongolia declined and it fell, at different times, under Russian and Chinese influence respectively. More recently it was under Chinese domination in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1911, as a result of internal disorders within China, the Mongolians were able to break loose and set themselves up as an autonomous nation. This so-called period of autonomy lasted until 1921 at which time the Soviets gained de facto control of the government. Actual power still resided legally in the hands of a local theocratic ruler. Upon his death in 1924, the present government was established. Since 1924, Outer Mongolia has been a Soviet satellite in the same sense that the eastern European nations have been since the end of World War II. In fact, Outer Mongolia has the dubious distinction of having been the first “People's Republic” to survive as an “independent” nation. Recently, this small nation has been in the public eye as a result of the Soviet Union's unsuccessful attempt to secure for it UN status.

The industrialization of Pakistan, which has proceeded at a fairly rapid pace in the decade since partition, has engendered new and growing problems for industrial labor. These problems have until recently received scant attention from either the Government of Pakistan or from scholars. Domestic and international political matters and concern for rapid industrialization have hitherto occupied government officials more than a rigorous analysis of the economic problems of the population. Even scholars concerned with economic problems may make only peripheral references to industrial labor, as does Dr. S. M. Akhtar in his fine new edition of Economics of Pakistan. Recently, with the growth of the industrial labor force and of trade unions, greater official and scholarly concern has been shown for industrial workers. Accurate information on Pakistan's labor problems and some suggestions for their solution may be found in three recent works dealing with different aspects of labor in Pakistan. Several other sources for a study of Pakistan labor now exist, and it is possible from these to assess the position of the industrial worker and the prospects for its improvement.

Studies of peasant rebellions in China are significant because of the key role such disturbances have played in Chinese history. Merely from the point of view of numbers one is impressed by the many references to agrarian violence in the historical records of the various dynasties. To be sure, usually these outbreaks were short-lived, but at times they reached such serious proportions as to become one of the major causes for the fall of a dynasty. Furthermore, as is well known, two major dynasties, the Han and the Ming, were founded by peasant rebels.

Experiments in the field of technological change and rural community development in many underdeveloped areas of the world have brought into sharp focus the importance of cultural factors in the acceptance or rejection of the programs of directed change sponsored by external agencies. There has been a growing realization among rural extension experts and technical assistance workers that even some of the less involved technological or economic innovations have latent cultural and social dimensions that need careful consideration if the success of these programs is to be assured. Detailed case studies of specific action programs have revealed that the secondary and tertiary ramifications of given innovations are of critical significance in determining their ultimate acceptability. With this understanding planners and their staff members no longer approach an underdeveloped community with the naive assumption that it will enthusiastically adopt superior tools and techniques when they are placed within its reach; instead, considerable emphasis is now laid on adapting modern techniques to the culture and values of the community in which the program has to operate.