I Want to address myself to two points: why I think the study of China requires the study of its history, and why I think the proper practice of the historical profession in general requires some awareness of the history of China. I would argue that the study of change in time is the heart of the historical approach, and that for this reason, history's contribution to the study of China is intellectually legitimate and quite different from that of the more specialized disciplines; and conversely, that the general problems which historians find exciting are nowhere offered in such profuse and interesting combinations, with such abundant documentation, as in the history of China.

Reverend Issachar Jacox Roberts was, as far as is known, the only Western teacher ever to instruct Hung Hsiu-ch'üan, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion. Aware of his special relationship with Hung, Roberts was for many years enthusiastic about Hung's undertakings. This article is concerned mainly with an account of the dealings between the two men.

Born in Tennessee in 1802, Roberts studied at the Furman Theological Institution of South Carolina, and was ordained to the ministry in 1828. He preached for some time in Mississippi, where he owned property said to be worth $30,000. Using this property as a financial base, he organized the Roberts Fund and the China Mission Society. Upon arrival in China in 1837, Roberts took the Chinese name of Lo Hsiao-ch'üan (or Lo Heáou-tseuen). For his first five years in China, the missionary worked among the lepers at Macao. When his income became insufficient for his work there, he labored for a time as a saddler, joined the Baptist Mission in 1841, and in 1846 transferred to the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1844 Roberts, who was the first foreigner to live outside the restricted “factory” area, opened a mission in the city of Canton, which he used as a home base for the following twenty-two years of his missionary work. During this period, he returned to the United States only twice. His connection with the Southern Baptist Convention was dissolved in 1852, and thereafter he worked independently. He finally left China in 1866, and died of leprosy in 1871 at Upper Alton, Illinois.

The roles of various castes (jatis) in Hindu religious activities have been of interest to many students of rural Indian society. As a result, we are quite familiar with the patterns of ceremonial activity of Brahmin priests and of other participants in Brahmanical ritual such as temple keepers of various castes, barbers, carpenters, musicians, etc. (Dube, 1955; Opler and Singh, 1948; Planalp, 1956; Srinivas, 1952). Many of these patterns of religious participation are described and prescribed in the Sanskritic literature of Hinduism, and so fall within the “great tradition” of Hinduism (Redfield, 1956).

From about 1373 to 1570, or for nearly two centuries, the kings of Ryukyu engaged in a prosperous and active trade between East and Southeast Asia. Several hundred Ryukyuan ships voyaged to Southeast Asian ports, from Siam to Patani, Malacca, Sumatra, Java, and elsewhere. These were in addition to, and indeed complementary to, hundreds of trading voyages to China, Japan, and Korea.

However, there are only scattered references to the Ryukyuan trading expeditions to Southeast Asia in Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean records. What is more, Ryukyuan chronicles compiled in the seventeenth century contain only fragmentary notices of these voyages. This was most puzzling to modern scholars, for other records showed that tremendous quantities of goods of southern origin were carried frm Ryukyu to China, Japan, and Korea in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, indicating that there must have been a correspondingly large trade with southern regions. It had to be presumed that in connection with such trade, countless records and documents must have been compiled. And yet the official histories of Ryukyu made only passing mention of old contacts with countries in the southern seas.

How do ordinary people of India adapt themselves to the Hindu theory of karma and rebirth? It is said that these concepts justify and reconcile Hindus to the inequalities of the caste system and that they result in fatalism and “other-worldiness.” These, in turn, are said to obstruct interest in modernization and progress. Although hypotheses such as these have been formulated by students of Hindu texts (Singer, 1961; Weber, 1958; Schweitzer, 1936), there have been few investigations of the living contexts within which Hindu philosophical ideas operate.

Since the end of World War II, Southeast Asian economies have grown at widely diverging rates. Consistent and relatively rapid growth has occurred only in the Philippines; in that country rehabilitation from World War II was completed relatively early and the economy has gone on to provide gains in per capita real income, though at a falling rate. In Thailand and Malaya, rehabilitation and growth have occurred, but progress has been unsteady. In Burma, Indonesia, and the Indo-Chinese countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Viet Nam progress has taken die form primarily of restoring prewar levels of per capita production; it is unlikely that gains above prewar levels have been achieved.

A Study of the Ch'ing legal system, the culmination of the experience of many dynasties, provides clues to the understanding of Chinese political behavior before extensive Western contact. For this period, the decisions of the Board of Punishments (hsing-fu) recorded in the collection of cases known as the Hsing-an hui-lan form an important body of law. Of these, the cases pertaining to the illegal punishment of prisoners by government officials are particularly interesting. An analysis of thirty of these cases suggests answers to the following questions: 1) Did the Board of Punishments have the attributes of an independent law court? 2) Was the law which the Board of Punishments applied internally consistent and capable of growth ? 3) Was protection from official brutality adequately guaranteed by law?

The Board of Punishments, one of the six ministries of the central government, was the formal organ most responsible for the administration of justice. In judicial matters, it served as a buffer between the provincial authorities on the one hand and the emperor on the other.

The Shimazu daimyo of Satsuma-han maintained indirect contact with the China mainland throughout most of the Tokugawa period. This contact was possible despite the seclusion policy of the Tokugawa government which prohibited Japanese from going abroad and the policy of the Ming dynasty which would not allow Chinese to trade with Japanese. The link between Satsuma and China was die Ryukyu kingdom. Through the Ryukyu Islanders, the Shimazu daimyo obtained valuable Chinese commodities which were then sold for a profit to other parts of Japan. This commercial activity was a breach in the shogun's monopoly of foreign trade, which was supposed to be confined to the single port of Nagasaki.

In recent years the cry has gone up: Sinology is dead; long live Chinese studies! And in this apothegm, by contrast with its prototype, a fundamental change is implied. Whereas old-time Sinology was given shape by its tools, so that Sinological skills defined the field and became an end in themselves, Chinese studies is shaped by its subject matter and Sinological skills are but means to analytic ends. Whereas traditional Sinology fostered uncritical immersion in a single civilization, modern Chinese studies brings at least that degree of impartial detachment which the comparative method implies. Whereas Sinology focused on China's “great tradition” and strove to capture the very ethos of the literati whose works it studied, Chinese studies today attempts to encompass the entire society and cultural product of China, to study its regional “little traditions” along with the “great,” and to empathize for heuristic purposes with nonélite social groups as well as with the literati. Sinology, a discipline unto itself, is being replaced by Chinese studies, a multidisciplinary endeavor with specific research objectives. As Professor Wright has suggested, what is text for the Sinologist becomes, for the disciplinary student of China, evidence.

It is reasonable to assume that Kaga han, in view of its size, large rice and other exports, and central coastal location, provided the lion's share of ships and shipowners operating in the Japan Sea during the two centuries before Perry. Villagers were going from Noto to North Honshu and Hokkaido both for temporary occupation and for permanent residence in the mid-seventeenth century and diereafter; and some of these emigrants became useful Kaga han trade agents. Moreover, transport of rice and salt respectively to Tsuruga and Echigo from Noto villages early in the Tokugawa period can be documented. Kaga han needed an all-water route to Osaka because of the high cost of transshipping rice by land from Tsuruga to Osaka. This may have been the main reason for the development in the latter part of the seventeenth century of nishi mawari, the route for ships going from the Japan Sea through the Inland Sea.

Before the opening of the Second World Congress of the Communist International (July 19–August 7, 1920) [which met on the first day in Petrograd but subsequently in Moscow], Lenin prepared a draft thesis on the national and colonial question. M. N. Roy, a young Bengali attending his first international Communist gathering, eagerly responded to Lenin's request for criticisms. As a result, Lenin invited him to write an alternative thesis. Both theses were modified as a result of discussions within the National and Colonial Commission, and both were subsequently adopted by the Congress. After his encounter with Lenin, Roy rose rapidly in the Comintern hierarchy. In 1922 he was elected a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), and a full voting member in 1924. He became a member of the Presidium in 1924. It was in the year 1926, however, that Roy attained the peak of his influence in the Comintern. In February of that year he was appointed to the editorial staff of the Communist International, and in the following December he was reelected to the Presidium and joined the Political Secretariat of the ECCI. At the time of the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI (November 12–December 16, 1926), Roy became Secretary of the Chinese Commission, a post he held jointly with Petrov, and a member of the Agrarian Commission. The Plenum, convened for the purpose of considering the China problem, adopted a thesis on the question and Roy was sent to China as a representative of the Comintern to carry it out. Following the events in China in 1927, Roy's influence declined precipitately, though he was not formally expelled until December, 1929.

I Am the joker in the pack—not simply for the obvious reason that I am not an American, but also, and much more significantly, because I have no right to sit on a platform with people learned in Sinology. That I have been invited to join them says a great deal about American broadmindedness and something too about the underdeveloped state of Chinese studies in my own country. But in a way my disabilities qualify me: I am doubly an outsider (maybe that was why I was asked) and can therefore be relied on to be biased. Prejudice is a condition for argument.

In November, 1949, I witnessed the ritual events of the tenth day of the month of Muharram in a village of north India inhabited by Muslims of the Shiah sect. According to Shiah tradition, on this day of the year in 680 A.D., Husain, the grandson of Mohammed, sacrificed his life in the battle of Kerbela rather than swear allegiance to one whom he did not consider fit to be caliph and a successor to the Prophet. To mark the occasion, the villagers had gathered to recount the heroic resistance offered by Husain and his tiny band of seventy-two persons against fearful odds to preserve their religion and honor. Tazias (colored paper representations of the tombs of Husain and his brother Husan) were placed under a canopy, and a tall, grey-bearded elder read a long narrative poem describing the tragic struggle. His voice broke and tears streamed down his face as he detailed the acts of sacrifice and devotion performed by Husain and his followers and as he pictured the suffering of the women and children when enemy forces cut them off from water and supplies. His account was punctuated by cries of grief and distress from the audience.

While Russian and Chinese wage and distribution policies in general differ from each other in terms of specific provisions and regulations, they are also generically very similar, if not identical. To provide some insight into the nature of this unity and diversity of policy, it seems best to discuss first the distributive implications of their common ideological reference, i.e. Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

Distributive Strategy and Tactics

Both the Russians and the Chinese deal with any human action as a process of material transformation, and consequently view the totality of man's actions as a chain of material transformation processes, conditioned by the distribution of ownership of the means of production as the determinant of social relations of production. Both hold that while human action is governed objectively by material and social nature and its laws, it is determined subjectively by man's technical and social awareness and thus by man's technical and social experiences. Both assert that man's increasing comprehension of nature and its laws manifests itself in increasing accumulation and in enlarged reproduction, i.e., in economic growth. Both aim for the unity of objectivity and subjectivity, i.e., for the complete reproduction of nature by man at the earliest possible moment, and both strive therefore for the most rapidly enlarging accumulation over time.

Although India presents a scene of great local cultural diversity, in the study of religion the subcontinent may be viewed as a single large field of social action. Within this field new movements are constantly arising, whose practices and ideas interact with others and penetrate from one section of the subcontinent to the other, filtering across deep political and social barriers. Thus in ancient times Brahminical Hinduism spread south from the Northwest, and Hinduism and Jainism, originating in the Northeast, followed closely upon its path. In medieval times the various bhakti movements which arose in South India spread northward, but have continued to play an important part in the life of all regions. Similarly reform Hinduism, born under the impact of contact with the West, affects areas far from its points of origin.

In the study of social integration, there is continual interplay between fact and concept. As new societies come into the ken of social science, theory and method are stretched or hammered to take account of the novel modes of social solidarity. We have not yet come to terms with the diversity, the breaks in social organization, or the social norms that give Southeast Asian societies their particular forms of integration.

One of the earliest general apprehensions of the nature of social organization in Southeast Asia was put forth in 1910 by J. H. Boeke. This keenly observant Dutch administrator held that there existed from the Indian subcontinent to Japan a special sort of Asian society and culture, the dual society, based on die following major features: it was governed by tradition, and its people were spatially immobile; it was a rural society based on a corporate land tenure system; it was a consumer economy; and it was integrated by religious norms. In Boeke's widely known one-line summary, Asian society is essentially a “religious community of food-crop cultivators all belonging to the same clan or social unity.” There is a sort of Gemeinschaft, an organic unity of peasant cultivators, held togetlier by a value system of a sacred order and subordinating economic activity to the continuity of the social structure.

Sinology, and the case for the integrity of it: the one key word in that phrase has been as hard to define as the other has been to achieve in practice. If we can scarcely define it, and if there is no hope of achieving it for the masses, why then talk about it at all in the year 1964?

I believe we can try to define Sinology, and we can point to some who have achieved it in practice. It might have seemed wisest to ask someone who has at least come close to achieving the Sinological ideal to be its spokesman on this panel. And, in fact, I urged that course upon Mr. Skinner when he first asked me to participate. He ruled that out, not so much perhaps for fear that we'd have to import one, or that such a one could be expected to speak in an unintelligible accent and would read footnotes in seven languages from original sources only—but perhaps, anomalous as it is, from the justifiable fear that the real Sinologist might speak in a way that would confuse his own green and well-worked fields with the entire province, or his own home province with the whole realm. And integrity is what we are here to talk about. For it is that integrality of the whole realm, or world, of Chinese studies that I think should define Sinology. Therefore, let someone who thinks he sees a meaningful and universal ideal, but who does not expect the ideal to be judged by himself, discuss it with the freedom that can come from having nothing personal to defend. Otherwise, it would be indeed presumptuous for me to appear here as the spokesman for Sinology; this dilemma of the spokesman vis-à-vis his subject today clearly is one that does not afflict my colleagues on this panel (for reasons at least partially nattering to them all).