The Sino-Indian boundary dispute provides an interesting test case to determine the willingness of mainland China, a revolutionary regime, to argue its position within the framework of traditional international law. Judging by Peking's official rationale for its claims in that dispute, one must conclude that its leaders demonstrated an awareness of the law's uses and limitations, and a willingness to rely upon it as an important support for its position. Thus, though the issue was viewed as a political question, Peking chose to argue that the correct answers to it should rest upon such legal or quasilegal considerations as: (1) the boundary had never been delimited through a process recognized by international law and (2) Chinese claims to contested territory were based upon historical evidence such as administrative control and official records. At the same time, China's diplomate skillfully interspersed nonlegal theses, e.g., that India was seeking to gain by the imperialist activities of the British, and underlined all of their propositions with a show of military strength on her southern frontier.

This article traces the development of ethnic relations in West Java during the period of transition from local government to Dutch colonial rule. Changes in relations between Javanese and Chinese-origin elites provide its subject matter, the West Javanese principality of Cirebon its locale, and the half century preceding the massacre of the Chinese in Batavia by the Dutch East India company in 1740 its period.

This essay examines the cross-border trade among the migrant Yunnanese between Burma and Thailand during the era of the Burmese socialist regime. It was a period when the Burmese government implemented a nationalized economic system and strictly forbade free movement and private trade. Taking a transborder perspective, the essay looks beyond government institutions and probes the mercantile agency of the migrant Yunnanese traders, which contributed to the formation of their socioeconomic mechanisms. The findings suggest that the economic practices of the Yunnanese traders in effect constituted a transnational popular realm that formed an informal oppositional power against the Thai and Burmese national bureaucracies on the one hand, and incorporated varied state agencies on the other hand.

Many writers interested in Chinese culture and society have drawn attention to the uneven distribution of large, highly corporate, localized lineages in China. Many have noted the concentration of such lineages in the two southeastern provinces of Fukien and Kwangtung, but relatively few writers have attempted to offer anything like a systematic explanation for the distribution. The most recent and ambitious attempt to come to grips with the problem is found in Maurice Freedman's book, Chinese Lineage and Society. The author reviews a number of factors relevant to the emergence and persistence of strong lineages, and singles out a few which he considers to be of special importance. A relationship is suggested between rice cultivation, extensive irrigation, the exigencies of frontier life, and the emergence of large, localized, highly corporate lineages. The purpose of this paper will be to reassess the role of the frontier in the development of the Chinese lineage. We will consider the extent to which the conditions of frontier life may have functioned as a catalyst in the formation of elaborated, localized lineages in China. Freedman has suggested that the need for cooperation in opening and bringing water to wild land, and in defending life and property, stimulated a rapid development of corporate, localized lineages on the southeastern Chinese frontier.

Does ongoing animosity between South Korea and Japan over the disputed Dokdo Islands and other issues that originated from historical disputes generate rally effects in Korean domestic politics? This article argues that the Dokdo Islands dispute—and related disputed issues rooted in the colonial experience of Korea under Japan's rule historically—strongly influence Korean presidents’ abilities to effectively mobilize domestic support for not only the issues, but particularly the public opinion of presidents. Using data on Korean presidents’ approval ratings between 1993 and 2016, this article shows that Korea's bilateral disputes with Japan tend to promote Korean presidential popularity. The findings suggest that external crises with Japan related to historical disputes have positive political effects on leadership ratings in Korea.

Few events have been more important to the history of modern South Asia than the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. The coming of partition has cast a powerful shadow on historical reconstructions of the decades before 1947, while the ramifications of partition have continued to leave their mark on subcontinental politics fifty years after the event.

Yet, neither scholars of British India nor scholars of Indian nationalism have been able to find a compelling place for partition within their larger historical narratives (Pandey 1994, 204–5). For many British empire historians, partition has been treated as an illustration of the failure of the “modernizing” impact of colonial rule, an unpleasant blip on the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial worlds. For many nationalist Indian historians, it resulted from the distorting impact of colonialism itself on the transition to nationalism and modernity, “the unfortunate outcome of sectarian and separatist politics,” and “a tragic accompaniment to the exhilaration and promise of a freedom fought for with courage and valour” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 3).