Our resources for the analysis and dissemination of information on Asia have expanded greatly since the beginning of World War II. The record reveals an astounding amount of popular and scholarly publication on almost every aspect of the continent's civilizations, with the quality rising over the decades. It is doubtful, however, that these contributions have had a meaningful impact either on public opinion or on the attitudes of those key persons who determine policy. The critical cases of China, Korea, and Indochina are the most vivid examples of recent failures in effective communication. Although in recent times no Asian country has escaped violent power struggles arising from internal or external causes, or their combined effects, in none of these conflicts has professional reporting been adequate. If readily available information and a carefully considered interpretation of that information can ameliorate conditions leading to conflict, we students of Asia, among others, cannot be proud of our achievements. The common academic response that scholarship must be disinterested and thus must bear little or no relationship to public policy is, to my mind, quite unacceptable.

This article attempts an assessment of the putative similarities between generic fascism and the revolutionary nationalism of Sun Yat-sen. Whatever characteristics the two ideologies have in common can be traced to similarities between Sun's thought and pre-Fascist Italian Nationalism. The latter was only one of the elements that contributed to Italian Fascism. A distinction is then drawn between Sun's ideology and that of the Italian Nationalists by identifying the latter nationalism as “exacerbated.” Further distinctions are attempted between such nationalisms and the mature ideology of Italian Fascism. Italian Fascism is viewed as a subspecies of revolutionary nationalism, while revolutionary nationalism itself is understood to include a relatively pacific and potentially democratic species and an exacerbated, potentially authoritarian one.

Using the concept of fascism for analyzing political developments in early Shōwa Japan has become a controversial topic, and a lively debate about a general definition of fascism has raged among scholars of modern European history. This article presents a new interpretation of Japanese fascism and a modification of Ernst Nolte's definition of fascism as anti-modernism. The author argues that while Japan was not fascist during the 1930s, the original New Order Movement, which was planned by the Shōwa Research Association and promoted by Premier Konoe Fumimaro in 1940, did constitute a fascist movement. It was modeled on policies of European fascism and, fitting Nolte's definition, aimed at creating an anti-modern society. In addition, the New Order Movement revealed a polarity in its basic goals—the advocacy of anti-modernism and the simultaneous quest for a strong military and industrial state—that is central to fascist movements. The author also rejects the previously held image of Japanese intellectuals as passive resisters against the rise of authoritarianism in Japan by emphasizing the leading roles of three prominent writers—Miki Kiyoshi, Ryū Shintarō, and Rōyama Masamichi—in planning the New Order Movement.

Following the end of the Second World War, Japanese and foreign scholars eagerly seized upon the concept of fascism as the basis of an analytic framework for explaining what had gone wrong in pre-war Japan and who, if anyone, could be held responsible. The literature on Japanese fascism is, as a result, quite extensive; some of it is richly insightful. The problem with such studies, however, is that fascism has never been satisfactorily defined, either logically or empirically. Recent studies have shown how difficult it is to find a definition that is at once broad enough to encompass the varieties of fascism across time and space and yet concrete enough to illumine distinctive characteristics. In this comment, some of the salient distinguishing features of the Japanese experience are alluded to, and a few important questions which studies of Japanese fascism have failed to address are identified. After nearly forty years' pursuit of the phantom of fascism, the time has come to direct our search toward alternative theoretical concepts which promise to throw new light and fresh perspective on what happened during the twenties and thirties, and why.

An earlier generation of Mughal scholars used the British-Indian Empire of the late Imperial period (c. 1875–1914) as its model for interpreting the Mughal state. The highly structured military, judicial, and administrative systems of the British Raj provided the perspective from which they viewed the material on the Mughal state contained in the Persian sources. Unfortunately, the assumptions implicit in this approach caused both a misreading of the Persian texts and a misunderstanding of the Mughal state. This essay argues that the patrimonial bureaucratic empire, a model developed by Max Weber, better captures the true character of the Mughal polity. A close analysis of the major Persian text on Mughal government, the A'in-i Akbari of Abu al-Fazl, demonstrates the superiority and appropriateness of the patrimonial-bureaucratic empire as a model for understanding the Mughal state.

The discovery in Hunan in 1973 of silk manuscripts over two thousand years old opened a new field of Chinese studies. The find is of considerable value and importance to students of Chinese archaeology, palaeography, textual criticism, history, and philosophy. The Silk Manuscripts of Ma-wang-tui, containing around 120,000 characters, include two hitherto unknown versions of the Lao Tzu and probably the lost “Four Scriptures of the Yellow Emperor.” A preliminary investigation of these texts indicates that they represent a mode of thinking referred to in the Historical Records as the “thought of Huang-Lao,” that was prevalent in China in the second century B.C. and that may have originated in the ancient state of Ch'u. This paper proposes that the thought of Huang-Lao, as a fusion of Taoist and Legalist ideas, articulates a coherent political philosophy that emphasizes the inseparability of the metaphysical foundations of politics and the art of government as a daily routine.