The catechists were involved in various activities; they belonged to the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) in a province of North Vietnam called Tonkin, and they were not limited to the ordinary functions of simple preachers of catechism. After the dissolution of the Society of Jesus in the latter half of the 18th century, with authorization from Rome, the hierarchy and functions of the MEP catechists developed in a range of unique ways in the Vicariate Apostolic of Western Tonkin.
The Tonkinese Christians always paid their respects to the highly-ranked catechists who were literate not only in Christian dogma and rites, but also in the world of the traditional Sino-Vietnamese classics. It was the catechists who gave moral education to these Christians and connected them with the non-Christian villagers by means of their intellectual influence in the local communities of North Vietnam.
However, in the view of European missionaries and Tonkinese priests, the catechists had never broken free of their hierarchically determined position as followers or simple servants and became increasingly entrenched in this position from the end of the 18th century onwards.
The gradual tendency for catechists to be subordinated to their superiors became more widespread with the increase in their numbers and the accomplishments of the local clergy system in the Vicariate Apostolic of Western Tonkin.
By the early 19th century, most low-ranked catechists had already become almost mechanical in their actions. They worked in the “Maison de Dieu” of each parish, which offered food, clothing, education, and shelter to displaced people and refugees from the civil wars and famines caused by natural disasters such as droughts and floods. Candidates for such catechist work were not primarily motivated by religious reasons.
Though the catechists in the Vicariate Apostolic of Western Tonkin seem to have lost their early high status, they continued to act within Christian communities as indispensable intermediaries between European missionaries or Tonkinese priests and local Christian villagers. Their role cannot be considered negligible when we consider the tenacity and flexibility of Vietnamese Christian communities, which survived severe persecutions perpetrated by the Nguyen dynasty under the French military invasion in the mid 19th century.

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This article examines the state ideology formation of the Ne Win regime (1962-1988) in Burma. Drawing on military documents and interviews with key figures, it depicts the interaction between the faction fighting within the military in the 1950s and early 1960s and the development of the future state ideology. I argue that understanding the military institution and the dynamics of military politics is essential to understanding the process and nature of the regime fromation.
After March 2nd coup d'état in 1962, the Revolutionary Council announced the organization of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) as the only political party for guiding the revolution. BSPP's official ideology was The System of Correlation of Man and His Environment (SCME). SCME had been the state ideology until the fall of Ne Win's regime in 1988.
SCME was written by U Chit Hlaing who belonged to the Directorate of Psychological Warfare, the Ministry of Defence. He received the order from General Ne Win in November 1962 and wrote the draft based on his articles, a series of “namà rupà wadà”, published in Myawaddy Magazin in 1957 and 1958. Chit Hlaing wrote those articles as anti-communism and pro-constitutionalism propaganda under the intra-military leadership of Brigadier Aung Gyi and Colonel Maung Maung. They launched a number of initiatives to reform the military in the 1950s. One of them was to forge the military doctrine to ensure anti-communism and pro-constitutionalism.
However, the political structure of the military changed in the early 1960s. Colonel Maung Maung was removed in 1961 and Lt-General Aung Gyi lost his leadership in the military. General Ne Win formed an alliance with the hard-liners. It enabled the military took over the state on March 2nd, 1962. General Ne Win rejected pro-constitutionalism. But they were unclear as to the guiding ideology which would be taken to achieve “Burmese Way to Socialism”. Therefore General Ne Win ordered Chit Hlaing to make out a draft of the BSPP's offical ideology. It is ironic that the articles written under the principle of anti-communism and pro-constitutionalism became the document to legitimate one-party rule and political intervention by the military for 26 years.

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Northeast Thailand is known as a typical “rain-fed” rice area. Archival materials and interviews with village elders, however, indicate that “rain-fed” rice land began to appear only around the mid-20th century, and until then, most rice lands had been irrigated by a kind of earthen weir diversion system. The system consists of a higher-than-bank earthen bund, called thamnop (probably of Khmer origin), across a stream, which diverts the whole volume of the stream flow into adjacent rice fields with or without canals and ditches. The diverted water irrigates the rice, and the excess flows through paddy fields and eventually returns to the original stream downstream. The region is an erosional plain under the hot and humid climate. Base rock beneath the plain is chemically weathered at a great depth, leaving only fine materials near the surface. The thamnop system can be seen as an adaptation to an environment void of stone materials.
Today, thamnop are disappearing. The rice area of the region increased by about eight times in the first half of the 20th century, and two and half times in the second. This staggering expansion was made possible by the drainage of lowland on the one hand, and reclamation toward higher ground that cannot be irrigated by the thamnop on the other—that is, the evolution of “rain-fed” rice fields. The expansion toward higher ground has affected the thamnop system adversely. First, the stream flow has been greatly reduced due to the declining run-off ratio caused by a greater retention of water upstream by bunded “rain-fed” rice plots. Second, the bottom land to be irrigated by the thamnop system has been reduced to a small portion of the total area under the rice at the regional as well as the village level. The changes in villages' economic structure due to the commercialization of rice and other export-oriented crops, and off-farm jobs have caused a shift in farmers' priority from food security to profitability. This has made the assured harvest by the thamnop less relevant.
Around the Tonle Sap in Cambodia, the rectangular earthen bund with its opening towards the bank, called tnup (a corruption of thamnop), is used for the retention of receding water towards the end of the rainy season for irrigating dry season rice. Although the erosional plain and the fans between the lake and Kulen hills are often described as “rain-fed” areas, there actually exist numerous thamnop apparently still playing an important role in village society. Although the antiquity of the thamnop is not known, it appears likely that the thamnop-irrigated rice production was one of the irrigational forms existed during Angkor times. Scattered records in Vietnam, Burma, and southern Thailand suggest that the system might have been distributed throughout Southeast Asia.

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Although not widely recognized, Washington's intervention in Myanmar's democratization process during and after 1987-90 was not a recognized U. S. policy. Testimonies during the hearings at the U. S. Congress on September 13, 1989 reveal that the Political Bureau of the Department of State (DOS) was squarely against the intervention, which some Congressmen, the Bureau of Humanitarian Affairs of the DOS, and the ambassador to Myanmar were advocating and had unilaterally been putting into action. The interventionists' behaviors were based on the idea that Myanmar's military government—successor to Ne Win's dictatorial regime, which took power by means of the 1988 coup that brutally cracked down on the pro-democracy demonstrations—not only violated human rights but had also been engaged in narcotics trafficking, and that U. S. cooperation with Myanmar for the purpose of narcotics eradication should be postponed until a civilian democratic government was established with extended U. S. support to the protesters and economic sanctions should be imposed on the military government.
The Political Bureau of the DOS had no intention of intervening. Instead, they denied the military government's involvement in narcotics abuse, which is ascribed to the country's ethnic insurgents by most of the researchers on Myanmar (Burma) and on the “heroin politics” in Southeast Asia, and claimed that the reasons for the crackdown were due to the military's apprehension of foreigners and political parties sowing dissent within the ranks of the military as well as within the nation. They also asserted that the U. S. needed to resume good relations with Myanmar (Burma) in order to continue to cooperate in the country's narcotics eradication efforts.
In this connection, the article mentions two basic historical facts. One is that the problem of the narcotics industry in Myanmar is a by-product of the CIA-backed KMT operations— an unconventional covert intervention during the early Cold War days for the purpose of turning the ethnic insurgents into anti-communist paramilitary forces— that overrode the traditional, legitimate policy of the DOS towards Myanmar. The other is the Anti-Narcotics Abuses Act of 1986, which legally obliged the U. S. president to impose sanction against the narcotics-producing countries, including Myanmar, and thereby trapped the whole U. S. government in the dilemma of the by-product of the covert KMT operations, the secrecy of which is legally not allowed to be disclosed.
A close comparative examination of the U. S. official documents related to human rights practices and the narcotics eradication efforts in cooperation with Myanmar before and after the passage of the 1986 Act discloses what Robert Taylor describes as “self-serving, distorted and overly-simplified reconstructions of the past, ” which led to the above-mentioned contradictions in perception and in policy. The article concludes that the traditional, legitimate policy was defeated once again by the unconventional covert interventionist policy in dealing with what Taylor and M. Reisman call “low-intensity warfare.”

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The legislation of RT/RW was completed in Jakarta in December 1966 by the “Jakarta Governor's Decision” or Keputusan Gubernur DKI Jakarta. This legislation reorganized the RT/RK of Jakarta, which was introduced during the Soekarno era. In addition, it could be said that the legislation signaled the beginning of RT/RW system in the New Order.
Soeharto's New Order was built on the physical disorganization of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). For Soeharto and his armed forces, or ABRI, the PKI was their greatest political enemy during the Soekarno era. In those days, the PKI entered society at the grass-roots level to obtain their political supporters by means of neighborhood organization, i. e., RT/RK.
Therefore, Soeharto had to destroy the PKI's power, which had been established through RT/RK.
On the other hand, when Ali Sadikin was appointed Jakarta's Governor in 1966 by Soeharto, there was a great deal of social confusion and problems caused by the physical disorganization of the PKI and a population expansion to Jakarta.
For this reason, Ali Sadikin required implementation of a new neighborhood association to resolve the confusion and problems. Accordingly, he made the decision to introduce the RT/RW system as an appropriate strategy.
As described above, we can conclude that the historical background of the legislation behind Jakarta's RT/RW in 1966 was to purge Indonesia of the influence of the PKI at the grass-roots level by means of RT/RK, and to resolve the confusion and problems of the time.

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It has been eight years since the fall of the Suharto's New Order regime. In parallel with the process of decentralization, the new legal framework for village government has been put in practice since 2001, which emphasizes the concepts of “diversity, participation, autonomy, democratization, and empowerment.” Much of the literature on political studies in post-Suharto Indonesia has focused on the theme of democratic decentralization, chiefly from the perspective of policymakers in Jakarta, and a disproportionate amount of attention has been paid to the technical aspects of the institutional design of democratic decentralization. Drawing on research carried out in a village of Bandung District, this paper examines to what extent the new legal framework has reorganized the old style of village government (in which power was centered on the village chief) by shedding light on the functions of some key village institutions.
The policy changes with regard to village government codified in Law No. 22 1999 on Local Government marked a radical departure from “uniformity, demobilization, rationalization, monoloyalty, and depoliticization.” The most dramatic change in village government has been the establishment of the Village Representative Council (BPD), which replaced the defunct Village Consultative Assembly (LMD) under the New Order. Independent of the village chief, the BPD has prevented the concentration and overlap of power between the village chief and village officials. Moreover, the establishment of the BPD has diversified the backgrounds of the elected members, paving the way for the entry of new actors into village government.
This paper also highlights two unexpected consequences of the institutional changes at the village level. First, despite its empowered position, the BPD is unable to function as a checks and balances system vis-à-vis the village chief. In response to the institutional changes, village elites have struck deals to protect their vested interests at the expense of the democratic functions of the new village-level institutions. As long as this consensus between the village executive and legislative branches is mutually respected, the two “democratic” institutions cannot achieve the stated objectives.
Second, recruitment through examinations and elections has facilitated the emergence of a new type of village elites while creating hurdles for the traditional village elites in exercising influence in the formal political arena. During the New Order, village development subsides were dropped from the center to villages, which showed monoloyalty to Golkar during election time every five years. With the collapse of the New Order, which controlled villages through the vertical links between the state-bureaucracy-Golkar, villages must make proposals to obtain village development subsidies from the districts. With the changes in the political environment, villagers with practical knowledge and higher education are increasingly playing an important role in village government.
Democracy in Indonesia has been discussed from various viewpoints. Seen against the state-society relationship, democracy in Indonesia must be built up from the village level, laying the foundation for democracy at the national level.

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