Few events have made a more profound impact on political developments in modern Ceylon than an outbreak of riots between Buddhists and Muslims in 1915 and the reaction of British colonial officials to the disorders. The Ceylonese view was that the authorities responded with unjustifiably harsh repression and executed or imprisoned persons who had no responsibility for the outbreak. To many ceylonese, the government's actions illustrated a basic failing of colonial rule and starkly demonstrated the need for self-government. The handling of the riots galvanized nationalist sentiment and led to the appearance of an organized national independence movement. Although few constitutional changes had occurred in the preceding eighty years, progress came rapidly after 1915, culminating in independence thirty-three years later. The three articles in this symposium constitute a major examination and reassessment of the 1915 riots and their causes and consequences.

The 1915 Buddhist-Muslim riots in Ceylon are often attributed to religious animosity, but economic and political factors significantly influenced the environment in which the riots occurred and help to explain the drastic government reaction to the disorders. The Muslims involved, recent arrivals from India called Coast Moors, were primarily traders and moneylenders. Resentment against price increases and alleged profiteering developed among the Sinhalese Buddhists. Before 1915, communal tensions had grown, with many Sinhalese-language newspapers denouncing the Coast Moors for exploitation of the Ceylonese. A Buddhist temperence movement had become a channel for articulating nationalist sentiments and was viewed with suspicion by the colonial regime. Labor unrest and trade unionism had appeared in Colombo prior to the riots. There, the 1915 disorders were led by the most militant urban workers, particularly railway workers, and reflected working-class grievances over rising living costs and unemployment. Fear of German intrigue during the war, the spread of nationalism and terrorism from India, and urban working-class unrest led colonial officials to interpret the riots as a threat to British rule. The officials were divided on the severity of action required, but those favoring the most drastic measures prevailed.

In 1915, riots broke out in the British colony of Ceylon, the climax of a controversy between Sinhalese Buddhists and a new clement among the commercial “Moors” (Muslims). A court ruling disappointing to the Buddhists, combined with economic complaints against Moors in this centenary of British conquest, led to a communal clash in Kandy during Wesak (Buddha's birthday) in May 1915. During the following two weeks, the riots spread to Colombo and along the west coast, greed increasingly matching creed as a prime motive.

The colonial government reacted slowly, allowing disorder to spread, and then changed to a policy of heavy repression of a presumed anti-British uprising at a time the Empire was fighting for survival.

Three months of martial law ensued, more deaths caused by police and military action than had occurred during the actual riots. Prominent citizens were arrested without cause. Shoot-on-sight orders were issued, and over 8000 were arrested and imprisoned. This colonial maladministration reflected the gap between officialdom and the colonial peoples. Little evidence of a general plot against government came to light. Since, however, headmen, monks and traders had planned anti-Moor action, especially in coastal areas, the question of conspiracy remains unsettled.

The 1915 Riots in Ceylon seriously undermined Ceylonese confidence in British justice, led to peaceful mass protests and a mission to London, and stimulated the maturation of nationalism, with independence as its objective.

Following the 1915 riots in Ceylon, a campaign for redress of grievances resulting from the colonial government's actions in suppressing the riots brought to prominence a new group of Western-educated, middleclass Ceylonese political leaders and led to the growth of the Ceylonese independence movement. The principal demand of the campaign, carried on in Ceylon and Britain, was for an inquiry by a Royal Commission into the government's handling of the riots. The agitation took the form of memorials, deputations, and lobbying intended to bring pressure on the Colonial Office to sanction an investigation. The campaign secured the support of many individuals and organizations in Britain and obtained the release of prisoners held for riot offenses and the exoneration of some prominent Ceylonese. However, the Colonial Office resisted the demand for an inquiry, which was strongly opposed by the colonial administration in Ceylon. Although unsuccessful in their immediate purpose, the Ceylonese spokesmen in the campaign gained experience in agitation and leadership and a zeal for political action. The nationalist movement of Ceylon, which had been dilettante, became focused and purposeful.

An anthropological and linguistic analysis of the idiom of modern Hindu religious specialists and their followers, an audience which embraces all English speaking Indians and a large segment of the urban populations of India. The highly eclectic, quasi-secular and neo-Hindu ideology inaugurated by such charismatics as Vivekananda, other “Swamis” and interiorized by Indian nationalists, expresses itself in a highly stereotyped coded parlance, informed by Victorian English as well as by diffuse elements which could be described as a Hindu Protestant Ethic. Both systematic and conscious obfuscation of scriptural categories as well as complex but predictable patterns of dissimulation extending over virtually all types of cultural and social discourse—the caste-system, “superstitions,” the “scientific” base of Hinduism, political talk, etc., are adduced and investigated as paradigms of contemporary Indian parlance, which is not the grass-roots idiom, but which is gathering momentum as the forensic instrument of India's leadership and of Indian administrators, educators, and the Indian intellectuals.

The 1911 Revolution in China is usually considered a failure. Changing the perspective of judgement from the national level to the local level permits a reassessment. Enough information is available from Chinese memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and foreign consular reports to make the new judgement somewhat secure if attention is focused on one particular location—Swatow.

The old administration was overthrown by expeasants led by deracinated rural intellectuals. They took power in the name of modern merchants. These merchants easily pushed the young radicals out because the ideology of the radical prevented them from using force against the wealth and status of the merchants. Rural disorder of the ex-peasants and republican election victorier for the radicals forced the urban merchants to rely on foreign election victories for the radicals forced the urban merchants to rely on foreign wealth and rural power to maintain law and order needed for trade and to maintain their own urban power base. Armed peasants and the young radicals were suppressed or bought off. Power fell to rural warlords and other political allies in urban enclaves. Only a rejoining of radical intellectuals and ex-peasants could offer China a revolution instead of just another bloody cycle.

North Korea is one of the most efficient totalitarian regimes existing in the world today. Especially after 1958 Premier Kim Il-song intensified the drive to heighten the cult of personality and to consolidate the control and administrative mechanisms in order to ensure the maintenance and operation of an efficient and effective power structure.

Between 1953 and 1958 the socioeconomic environment in North Korea underwent a radical change. Adjustments in the structure and function of local administrative and control mechanisms reflected these economic changes. The prefecture (the kun, or county) became the most important administrative unit. Through collectivization of farms and accompanying administrative reorganization, the ri (the precinct) was transformed from a purely administrative unit to a production unit. The functions traditionally performed by the People's Committees at the prefectural level were dispersed among different agencies, and the party structure at the prefectural level was expanded and given new powers. These measures were carried out between 1953 and 1964 for the purpose of increasing efficiency and efficacy in local administration. They were also designed to insure party control over the entire society. At the end of the reform period, the supremacy of the party was structurally guaranteed. The improvement in control, administration, and production, however, does not necessarily result from structural changes alone, and the problem of controlling and manipulating human beings still remains as an important problem.

The article discusses recently published material on the subject of the author's book on Sino-Russian relations entitled The Expansion of Russia in East Asia 1857–60 (with an introductory chapter on 1792–1856). The two Chinese document collections Szu-kuo hsintang and Chou-pan i-wu shih-mo, edited by Kuo Ting-i, contain a number of hitherto unpublished Chinese government papers. One document in the Szu-kuo hsintang confirms that Putiatin defied Russian government orders when he negotiated for the Amur at Tientsin. Others throw light on the activities of the anti-Russian clique of princes and dignitaries, who influenced Ch'ing policy in these years, on Perovskii's mission to China and on the mutual present giving after the conclusion of the Sino-Russian treaties. The Soviet document collection Vneshnaia politika Rossii v XIX i nachale XX veka gives new facts about the Golovkin mission to China in 1805, but excludes all mention of the Amur. The extracts from K. A. Skachkov's Peking diary published in Moscow also exclude foreign affairs. Finally, the author's researches into the private papers of the 8th Earl of Elgin are described. They appear to confirm Ignatiev's claim that Elgin was ignorant of his negotiations with the Chinese in Peking in autumn 1860.

One of the major problems facing modern Japanese historians is that of providing adequate explanations for the nature and timing of changes in the decision-making structure after 1868. The domination of the decision-making process and structure by the civil bureaucracy indicates that bureaucratic development was a major factor in determining such changes.

The civil bureaucracy underwent two dramatic changes in the period after 1868. The first occurred in the years 1868–78 and resulted in the integration, centralization and specialization of the bureaucratic structure. This was confirmed by an analysis of all increases and decreases in operations at the prefectural level—the level at which integration had been critical. The second major change occurred between 1884—1889 as the result of a series of reforms aimed at rationalizing the bureaucratic role. Analysis of the backgrounds and careers of a 25% random sample of all prefectural governors between 1868–1945 clearly indicates that by 1900 the norms of the bureaucratic role had changed drastically. From a role based on extra-bureaucratic norms—participation in the Restoration, possession of some Western knowledge and membership in the traditional elite—the “new” bureaucratic role was characterized by predominantly “legal-rational” norms. These changes had a number of consequences for the decisionmaking structure: 1) the centralization, integration and specialization of the bureaucracy placed decision-making in the hands of a small number of bureaucratic leaders thus laying the foundation for the oligarchic (genro) structure which now emerged. Decision-making roles were thus allocated on the same extra-bureaucratic criteria as upper civil service roles; 2) rationalization of the bureaucratic role undermined and finally eliminated the genro structure through elimination of the norms for selecting genro members. The resulting vacuum was filled by contention and conflict between the bureaucracy and the political parties both claiming legitimacy in the selection and allocation of decision-making roles. The result was a system of allocating decision-making roles which was informal, ambiguous and highly particularistic. The result was the instability of decision-making which characterized the post-1925 period. The hypothesis that bureaucratic development was a major factor in determining change in the decision-making structure thus appears to be confirmed.

Archeology in Asia during the past twenty years has taken great strides. The three main areas of new research have been in paleoanthropology, investigation of post-pleistocene neolithic sites, and ethnology. The population of Asia is now known to have been distributed over the entire mainland and Indonesia during the Paleolithic period which embraced the first million years of human evolution. There is growing evidence for the existence of many centers of plant domestication in Asia, each of which appears to have developed out of an indigenous “mesolithic” period of collecting and gathering. Recent research in linguistics and ethnology point the way to unravelling the separate histories of Asia's many cultures.

This article is an introduction to the type of materials available to the historian of pre-1800 Vietnam, particularly that material produced during the reign of Le Thanh-tong. The rule of this Emperor is significant for the bureaucratization of the government and a consequent growth in paperwork which occurred under him. During the last quarter of the fifteenth century, many of the resulting documents were brought together to form major compilations on various topics, Following a brief description of the historical background and the manner in which this material came to be assembled, the article groups such materials, from both this period and later centuries, into the following categories: histories, geographies, personnel records, official records, belles lettres, and general collections. It then proceeds to enumerate the available material under each category and to analyze the uses to which this material may be put for the study of Vietnamese history. A note follows in the May 1970 issue of the JAS describing the major modern collections of these documents and giving the locations of each work mentioned in the article. Characters and Vietnamese romanization are given for each title, term, and name.

The Kiangsi Soviet period, the second phase of the Chinese Communist movement, began with the establishment of the Chingkangshan base by Mao Tse-tung in late 1927 and ended in the “Long March” in October 1934. The study of this important period had long remained sketchy because of lack of materials. With the release of the Ch'en Ch'eng Collection—a collection of Communist documents, papers, and publications from the Kiangsi Soviet period—in 21 microfilm reels, a comprehensive study of this period is possible for the first time. The bulk of materials of the Collection falls in the years, 1930–1934. The Collection contains over 70 periodicals, six of which were published with regularity and duration. Scattered in several journals, we found 17 articles from the pen of Mao Tsc-tung, which are not included in his Selected Works (Peking, 1965). The materials cover a variety of subjects from the Soviet congresses, the establishment of the Soviet economy, peasantry and labor, the intraparty struggle to the Red Army and its many campaigns against the Chinese Nationalists. Major works in all these areas are briefly introduced here.