On the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize through the generosity of her colleagues, students, and friends, the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Prize.

This article summarizes relevant historical developments involving Taiwan and Okinawa in Asia-Pacific multilateral relations over the longue durée, and suggests future prospects.

1. Both Taiwan and the Ryukyus are within the Kuroshio (Black Tide) Current Civilization Zone (from approximately the beginning of the 3rd Century): At that time, crops such as cassava and yams traveled northbound with the Kuroshio Currents, which ran from the Philippines to Taiwan and the Ryukyus to Kyushu, while crops such as millet in northern parts of South East Asia traveled to Taiwan via the South Sea and further traveled to the Ryukyus and Kyushu. Together with the path of rice from south of China's Yangtze River via Korea to Kyushu, Japan these were two important sea-borne cultural exchange paths in the Asia-Pacific. However, by the 3rd Century, the direct route from south of the Yangzi to central Japan, as well as the Silk Road from Chang'an in Northwest China to Central Asia, and the shipping route from Guangzhou to India superseded the aforesaid routes. As a result, Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands became isolated on the international stage for about one thousand years (Ts'ao, 1988).

What does it mean to be able to study Chinese history at scale? What methods, tools, and approaches will allow us to understand Chinese history and historiography from a larger perspective over the longue durée, including linguistic, philosophical, ethnographic, and literary concerns? In this article we present what we feel is one potential key to answering these questions and provide an overview of the utility and value of harnessing this framework for text-based historical research as a means to expand one's scholarship to virtually limitless scales.

The Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project was a five-year state-sponsored project, carried out between 1995–2000, to determine an absolute chronology of the Western Zhou dynasty and approximate chronologies of the Xia and Shang dynasties. At the end of the five years, the Project issued a provisional report entitled Report on the 1996–2000 Provisional Results of the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project: Brief Edition detailing its results. A promised full report was finally published in 2022: Report on the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project. Although numerous discoveries in the more than twenty years between the publications of the Brief Edition and the Report have revealed that the Project's absolute chronology of the Western Zhou is fundamentally flawed, and some of the problems are acknowledged by the Report, still the Report maintains the Project's chronology without any correction. In the review, I present four of these discoveries, from four different periods of the Western Zhou, discussing their implications for the Project's chronology. I conclude with a call for some sort of authoritative statement acknowledging the errors in the report.

I first heard of the term ‘Chinglish’ when I was at Baiduizi (白堆子) Beijing Foreign Languages School in the 1970s, through Janet Adams’ book, From Chinglish to English. The book contained 60 short dialogues in simple American English. It was meant to be teaching us colloquial English, compared to, I suppose, the textbook English written by Chinese teachers. I found the term Chinglish rather odd, and it was an odd thing for us pupils at that particular school to be made aware of, because the school was, quite literally, the only school in China at the time where foreigners were directly teaching Chinese children foreign languages and cultures. Few of these foreign teachers had formal teaching qualifications, and they were not using any textbooks written by Chinese teachers, but in their own ways using material the school compiled specially for the pupils. It was a form of audio-lingual and direct method. The language we were taught was pretty colloquial and we did not, as far as I could tell, speak Chinglish that the examples in Adams’ book illustrated.

This article provides a detailed description of an undocumented use of zaìshì 在勢 as a deontic adverb in Late Qing and Early Republican Chinese literature. This word commonly functions as a verb (“to hold power”) or a nominalized verb (“one who holds power”), but its use as a preposed deontic adverb, meaning “under these circumstances”, is not attested in earlier Chinese texts and has no cognates in other Sinitic languages. The author analyses the syntax and semantics of zaìshì in a large corpus of medieval Chinese texts and early Chinese translations of foreign literature. The article then suggests that the preposed deontic adverb zaìshì emerged as the result of the appropriation of linguistic elements present in classical literature but whose use had been restricted to classical forms of literary composition.

The discovery in 1977 at Fuyang (Anhui province) of several mantic instruments dating from the beginning of Western Han (ca. 165 B.C.E.) marked a decisive change in modern studies of early Chinese science, divination, and religion, many of which now regard the shi 式 as the material basis for modes of thought in Warring States, Qin, and Han culture. While the examples of devices discovered to date have provided a valuable interpretative key to early Chinese schematic cosmography, the meaning of the term shi remains a source of perplexity as its connotations are imprecise and can vary from one author to the next. Whether this change is an accurate representation of ideas about the shi in pre-Han and Han is precisely the issue at stake in the present paper. The following conclusions are drawn: (1) the existence during the Han of several instruments of the shi type no longer permits the use of the term to refer to a singular and unique device, even though evidence drawn from the received texts tends to show the contrary; (2) the multiple meanings of the term shi, as well as the gradual shift between its strict sense as mantic device (shipan 式盤) and its broad sense as calendrical astrology (shizhan 式占) give rise to serious misunderstandings when it is used alone; (3) since these mantic devices are primarily offshoots of pre-Han and early Han astrographic and calendrical theories, the patterns and designs that appear on their surface (shitu 式圖) need to be considered within the larger scope of the spatial representations of calendrical time cycles, of which the excavated texts and artifacts now offer numerous examples; (4) the widespread use of the term shi-method (shifa 式法) in modern studies when referring to some mantic techniques described in the manuscripts raises the interesting question of how to delineate boundaries between the early developments in calendrical astrology and the hemerological practices in general.

Yue gong qi shi 越公其事 is a recently published manuscript from the Tsinghua University collection. The manuscript provides a new version of the well-known story of King Goujian of Yue 越王句踐 (r. 496–464 b.c.e.), who turned defeat into victory and overcame Yue's formidable rival, the state of Wu 吳. My exploration of this text focuses on its two most notable aspects. First, the story about the policy of self-strengthening allegedly adopted by Goujian offers new insights into the evolution of political thought in the Warring States period. Second, the text allows deeper insight into the genre of didactic historical narratives that became prominent at a certain point of time between the Springs-and-Autumns (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 b.c.e.) and the Warring States (Zhanguo 戰國, 453–221 b.c.e.) periods.

On April 12 it was revealed that the Japanese government is deliberating raising the level of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster to 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale of the International Atomic Energy Agency. This is the highest level and the same as the 1986 Chernobyl accident. At the same time, the Japanese government has made moves to evacuate high radiation areas outside of the 20km radius. This move is welcome as critics have decried the original evacuation zone as arbitrary. Discussion has also begun on compensation for victims in the evacuation zone, with talk of 1,000,000 yen per family.

Immunities of Representatives Accredited to the League of Nations — Swiss Federal Decree of August, 1922.

Belligerent Occupation — Legislative Powers of Occupant — Decree Prohibiting Disposal of Enemy Property — Restrictive Interpretation of.