Friends, guests, and colleagues : the mu-fu system in the late Ch'ing period

civilized way. Iriye interprets the last decade of Ch'ing foreign policy as the result of an unsuccessful relationship between the Chinese state system, the international framework, and a new component, Chinese public opinion. "The Reformer as a Conspirator: Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the 1911 Revolution" by Ernest P. Young revises earlier estimates of Liang by demonstrating that Liang was loyal to the Manchu monarchy not on principle or because of its superior administration but only because he disapproved of other alternatives. By 1911 Liang was ready to take up arms for reform and proceeded to engineer first a northern and then a southern attempt at overthrow. Both failed. Mutual distrust or dislike prevented an alliance between the T'ungmeng Hui and Liang—an alliance that might have forestalled the former's capitulation to Yuan Shih-k'ai. T'ung-meng Hui leaders are portrayed as narrow, factional regionalists whose racial slogans Liang deplored. In his stimulating essay "The Province, the Nation, and the World: The Problem of Chinese Identity" Joseph R. Levenson traces with a wealth of comparative detail the changing role played by Chinese provincialism from the Ch'ing era through the periods of rule of the Republic and the Nationalists to the present regime. Whereas the Empire saw Confucian universality living in harmony with provincial particularism, the years after 1912 witnessed an effort to develop a national identity which regarded any orientation toward the provinces as backward and passe. China was launched into the ocean of modern, urban cosmopolitanism. When they took over, the Chinese Communists in a distinctive way caused provincial characteristics to contribute to a national whole and to the sum of national values. Confucius was preserved by putting him in a museum. Provincials were assigned to a national theater. So regional traditions have finally become a means to promote class consciousness. Kuomintang treatment of student political activity is admirably delineated in John Israel's "Kuomintang Policy and Student Politics, 1927-1937" from the purges of April 1927 through anti-Japanese boycotts and the December 9, 1935 movement to the massive defections to Chinese Communism after the Sianfu Incident. A pattern emerges—qualified JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES