When the empire of Annam, by the treaty of June 5, 1862, ceded to France the three eastern provinces of Cochinchina, France acquired several new neighbors in the Far East. From 1862 on, she was constantly occupied by her political and economic relations with these neighbors. She was led inexorably by her will to protect her conquest to further and further territorial expansion. The first result of her policy was the establishment of a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863. The next consequence was the annexation of the three remaining provinces of Cochinchina in 1867.The third logical step in her Far Eastern progress was an arrangement with Siam in 1867 by which the latter recognized her protectorate over Cambodia at the price of territorial concessions. A further advance was registered in 1874 by the establishment of a French protectorate over Annam.

Four hundred farm families were studied in 1927 by the Social Survey Department of the Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement in an effort to secure figures that would give a picture of the economic life and activities of the farm families of Tinghsien, Hopei Province. The families all lived in the eastern part of the hsien in the 62 villages included in the Movement's First Experimental District. Preliminary and experimental work was carried on in this limited area before the hsien-wide program of the Movement was inaugurated. Contact was made with the families studied, generally through the teachers of the Mass Education schools. Being a project of an educational group, the study was able to enlist the cooperation of nearly all of the families approached. Although we attempted by chance selection to make our group of families as nearly typical as possible, we recognize that our choice was necessarily affected by such factors as the families' willingness to cooperate in an unusual study, readiness to answer many intimate questions and that our group, therefore, probably had a higher than average intellectual and economic level and a more than average number of the larger and wealthier farms. We have attempted to overcome this difference by dividing the 400 families into several groups according to the size of their farms, thus giving several pictures of farm activity on different economic levels rather than just the averages for our particular group.

In may, 1942, The Far Eastern Quarterly published an article on Outstanding books on the Far East published in 1941. This article indicated twelve books of unusual value published during that year and gave comments on many others which for one reason or another seemed worthy of notice. Since Pearl Harbor, American interest in Asia and the Pacific has greatly increased and American publications about the Far East have become much more numerous. However, increase in quantity has not necessarily meant increase in quality. Many of those who might normally have produced reliable popular works or thorough research studies have been called on to do special war work and have had little time or opportunity for writing, while pseudo-experts and eye-witnesses without real background have burst into print. The layman who wishes to learn about Eastern Asia, as every American should and must, sorely needs a touchstone with which to tell gold from dross in the pile of recent publications on the Far East which confronts him. The editors of The Far Eastern Quarterly have therefore felt that an attempt to select the outstanding books published since the beginning of 1942 is decidedly in order.

American participation in the war in the Pacific has led to the production of a steadily increasing pile of pamphlets intended for schools, adult study groups, and those many individuals who are unlikely to read books but may be tempted by something shorter and more palatable looking. This list attempts to point out some of the most useful series of pamphlets and individual items.