[ { "id": 209423, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1982", "page_number": 80, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "58\n\nJ. H. HAAN\n\nSeventy years later it was complained that \"official business in this important municipality is conducted in secret. Members of the Municipal Council are bound not to disclose matters discussed in meetings and no reporter of a local newspaper has ever attended a meeting of the Council. The Council does issue a so-called Municipal Gazette, probably the dullest official journal in the world, which contains brief reports usually starting out \"Notice is hereby given\" or \"I have the honour to convey\n\netc.\"\n100\n\nNow it is, of course, true that in Western countries with a parliamentary government, meetings of the cabinet or other governing bodies were (and are) not open to the public. But there the rulers were responsible to representatives of the people, be it in parliament or its local equivalent. Nothing of the kind happened in Shanghai, which apart from the other structural and institutional regulations which halted democracy as understood elsewhere, made the whole administrative system come to be looked upon as oligarchic.\n\nSummary\n\nSummarizing this article we might say that the Settlement government rested on a base which became increasingly outmoded in Western countries where democracy allowed ever more people to participate in politics. Franchise according to tax paid was gradually abolished in the West, but in the International Settlement at Shanghai it remained till the last day of its existence. In the beginning, consent of all residents was claimed to be the foundation of municipal government, but as time progressed the administration degenerated into an oligarchy with or without the negative implications which the term suggests. Political interest was low and nobody really tried to change the system. Though Justice Feetham published a massive report about the situation in the Settlement and offered valuable advice in 1931, nothing was done. Only in the heyday of Chinese nationalism were some minor facelifts agreed, without altering any of the fundamentals.\n\nIt was only after the return of the Settlement to China in 1943 and especially after the communist takeover in 1949 that", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210984, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1987", "page_number": 46, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "21\n\nnineteenth-century sinologists had laid the foundations for modern China in studies in the West.\n\nBut this long episode of almost total neglect of China was to come to an end with the unexpected ascendancy of Communist China. French intellectuals were caught completely unprepared, all the more since there was strictly no equivalent in France to the sympathetic writings of Snow, Smedley and so many other reporters who had prepared at least some sections of British and American public opinion for the Communist takeover. The French intellectual scene was a blank page - a very Maoist feature and this was a decisive contributing factor to what has since been described as the 'love affair' between Maoist China and French intellectuals.\n\nThis love affair is a very complex story, and requires a much closer look. It had first of all to do with the rejection on the part of the French intellectuals of Soviet-styled communism, once so popular with them. China and Maoism provided ex-Communist Party members with an occasion to settle their accounts with Moscow. Chinese communism was also considered a valuable experiment in Marxist economic theory, and noted economists, such as Charles Bettelheim, always made this point. For Jean-Paul Sartre, who was in the late 1960s at the peak of his cultural and political prestige, Peking was definitely different from Moscow.\n\nChina also met a basic aspiration among French left-wing intellectuals, which I would describe as political exoticism, that is, the tendency to look for a political homeland and model of reference in distant, exotic countries. At times in Cuba, at one time in Algeria, in Vietnam, then in China; each provided a substitute for the ideal society France was unable to develop at home, especially after the failure of the May '68 movement which had been so popular with most intellectuals, and not only with students. The radical young intellectuals of the May '68 generation, such as André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy, who were later to establish themselves as trendy 'new philosophers', were among the most devoted Maoists.\n\n—\n\nBut it would be just too easy to restrict the love affair between Maoism and French intellectuals to such radical groups. At least", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212404, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 346, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "323\n\nattitudes towards China and Japan is equally poor. He shows little appreciation of the effective American acquiescence in Japanese expansion during most of the 1930s, nor of the manner in which private American investments in and commerce with Japan undercut the professed United States policy of building up China. He gives one little sense of the dynamics of the inter-relationship between domestic American politics and the government's role in the Far East, nor of the manner in which the international crises in Europe and the Pacific were interconnected. To judge by the sources cited in the notes, he did not consult the works of Irvine H. Anderson, Jr., Roberta A. Dayer, Michael H. Hunt, Jerry Israel, David Reynolds, Jonathan G. Utley, or Paul A. Varg, but relied largely on a traditional and dated interpretation of United States policies towards both Japan and China. One hopes that, should a second edition appear, these chapters will be rewritten to take these factors into account.\n\nHappily, Dudden escapes from these doldrums to give a workmanlike account of the familiar territory of the Pacific War, the effect of the developing Cold War, the American occupation of Japan, the Communist takeover of China, and American intervention in Korea and Vietnam. This was the period in which American involvement in the Pacific region increased exponentially, so that by the mid-1950s the United States was the guarantor of the security of Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and most of the Southeast Asian nations, and had bases scattered through the Pacific. While he does not, perhaps, bring out the theme of the extent to which American policies in Asia were generated by considerations arising from developments in Europe, his survey is solid and thorough. One may perhaps regret that he apparently did not make use of recent works by such scholars as Bruce Cumings, Rosemary Foot, and Christopher Thorne, but his coverage of the period of maximum American military commitment to Asia is essentially sound.\n\nDudden's final chapter, on the 1970s and 1980s, is inevitably inconclusive. The growing United States tendency to turn inwards and concentrate on the country's own domestic problems; the commercial rivalry with its ally and protégé Japan, and to some extent with South Korea and Taiwan; the love-hate relationship between America and China, particularly since the Tiananmen Square Incident of June 1989; the ambivalent relationship between the United States and the Philippines, still fatally ready to make their old colonial sovereign", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 } ]