This essay is an exploration of one aspect of the politics of gender representation in Thailand, namely, how the portrayals of Siamese women in Thai popular histories form part of the present-day shaping of gender relations. I argue that moving in tandem with developments in academic historiography, popular history since the 1980s has become a battleground for cultural hegemony.

Hitherto the preserve of antiquarians, popular history has caught the interest of the emergent middle class, who are intent on inscribing their reading of the past on the Thai cultural landscape. Where gender relations are concerned, the middle class has worked out a modern rationale for the traditional view that women are subordinate to men. However, critical scholars, alert to what they see as the perpetuation of the historical subordination of women through the medium of popular history, have sought to stem the tide by addressing their critiques of the middle-class interpretations to a popular audience.

With the publication of Kaze no Uta o Kike (Hear the Wind Sing; 1979), Murakami Haruki (b. 1949) found himself more or less at odds with well-known members of the Japanese literary establishment. If one takes Murakami at his word, this was not the result of conscious effort on his part, but rather a matter of his own individualism, a certain indifference (feigned or not) toward the conventions and opinions of professional critics in Japan's literary community. He commented to journalist Kawamoto Saburō in a 1985 interview that “[i]t never occurred to me to resist the paradigms of existing ‘pure’ literature, or to offer some kind of antithesis to it…. I don't think I worried about whether existing types of works would go on existing, so long as I could write what I wanted, how I wanted” (Kawamoto 1985, 39–40). Such a statement might be taken as a reflection of the author's anxiety not to be labeled “anti-bundan“or otherwise standing against the proliferation of so called “pure“literature, or junbungaku. And yet, given the general trend of Japanese literature from 1980 onward, beginning perhaps with Tanaka Yasuo's plotless novel Nantonaku, Kurisutaru (Somehow, Crystal; 1980), Murakami appears to belong to a growing new set of contemporary authors who do precisely that: resist the concepts and definitions of “pure“literature, redefining the term to suit their own needs.

Thirty years ago the buddhist compassion Relief Foundation (Ciji Gongdehui, hereafter Ciji) was virtually unknown. Lost in the backwater of Taiwan's eastern coast, the group began in 1966 with a nun, five disciples, and thirty housewives who contributed pin money of NT $0.50 each day (just over a penny at that time) to help supplement medical fees for the poor. The nuns sewed children's shoes to generate a little more income, and their monthly total of funds available for charity was under NT $1,200 (about US $30 at that time). Today Ciji is the largest civic organization in Taiwan, claiming 4 million members worldwide in 1994, and nearly 20 percent of Taiwan's population. It gives away well over US $20 million in chanty each year, runs a state-of-the-art hospital, and has branches in fourteen countries.

As early as the han dynasty, exegetes of the texts in the Confucian canon were preparing written commentary on them, and by the dynasty's end they were interspersing their glosses in the body of these texts as interlinear, running commentary. From this time on, few Chinese would have read any classic from the canon without commentarial companion. And, as Confucianism came to be identified over the course of the imperial period with the Chinese cultural tradition par excellence, the writing of interlinear commentary on the canon of texts became a standard, even dominant, mode of scholarly and philosophical discourse for Chinese literati. It was in commentary that these men would offer their reflections on the meaning of Confucian doctrine as it had evolved through the centuries and attempt to construct a philosophical or moral vision meaningful in a world far removed from that of the classical age.

As K. Sivaramakrishnan has pointed out in a paper published in 1993, one of the persistent ironies of postcoloniality “has been the way elites assuming the task of building a national culture and providing it with a liberatory/progressive history have turned to modes of knowledge and reconstruction produced in the colonial period.” And of the varied strands that have constituted the twentieth-century knowledge and self-knowledge of India, none is more central than the notion of the timeless, conservative caste, and its antediluvian ancestor, the unchanging primitive tribe (Sivaramakrishnan 1993; Inden 1990, 70–72). In this view South Asians, like other unprogressive people, did not change—they merely accumulated, with the latest addition to the population overlaying its predecessor, much as geological strata did. This paper will attempt to expose the historic roots and explore the contemporary ramifications of this model.

In a recent article in this journal, William C. Kirby (1995) chronicled the development of China's Company Law, which was crafted in 1904 to promote industrial development by codifying a commercial code. Among other objectives, the Company Law was aimed at providing institutional support for the emergence of modern legal corporations. Indeed, it was a widespread belief among the Qing reformers of the period that “Modern industrial capitalism … demanded Western corporate structures to do business’ (Kirby 1995, 43). Kirby argued that after numerous revisions it has become clear that the Company Law has failed to promote the emergence of privately owned, publicly traded corporations. Given China's rich commercial tradition, its dramatic post-1978 reforms, and its rapid economic growth over the last two decades, Kirby's finding raises a most puzzling question for China scholars: Why is there not a single privately owned, publicly traded corporation (PPC) in mainland China?