Sumatran population changes, 1961–80

In the period 1961 and 1980, Sumatra's population increased from nearly 16 to 28 million; a rise of 78%. This population growth was at least 50% faster than the Indonesia national average, and exceeded only by Maluku. Local and intensive demographic and economic analysis is needed to explain fully this rapid demographic increase. Sumatra's abundant resources of tin, bauxite, petroleum, natural gas, forest and agricultural products during the 1960s and 1970s supported these population increases, as well as providing export income to aid other Indonesian areas.

The chief population changes within Sumatra are:

1. Rapid percentage population growth in Lampung, Jambi, Bengkulu, and Riau provinces. However, population numbers increased most in North Sumatra, Lampung, and South Sumatra.

2. At the more detailed, kabupaten scale, Sumatra's 1961–80 population growth was very uneven, ranging from nearly 229% in central Lampung, over 97% in eight other kabupaten, to as little as 21.8% around Lake Toba in upland North Sumatra. Actual or perceived economic opportunities, sizeable migration flows, and high natural increases favoured some areas; resulted in outmigration flows from others.

3. The nineteen municipalities (only seventeen according to some sources for 1961) rose to twenty kotamadya by the mid‐1960s. Collectively, their urban populations increased from less than 2 million in 1961 to 4.25 million in 1980. Medan, in particular, now is the dominant city not only of Sumatra, but also of all Indonesia beyond Java‐Madura. Only Sawahlunto in upland West Sumatra remained almost stagnant through this period.

4. Population densities rose throughout Sumatra, but at greatly different rates. At the kabupaten scale at least seven areas of relatively high population density, plus a few localized urban‐ or resource‐centred areas elswhere, stood out from other, much less densely populated areas.

     

Buddhacarita I, 1 – 7 und 25 – 40

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South Africa's Departure from the Commonwealth, 1960–1961

Famine threatened the lives of over twenty million residents of north China in 1920, prompting a massive, and ultimately successful, relief effort. Scholarship on the famine has largely credited China's foreign and coastal, cosmopolitan Chinese circles with this humanitarian feat at the expense of what was in fact a surprisingly effective Chinese state apparatus that year, as well as local relief operations by many famine-stricken communities themselves. This study captures a very specific moment of US and European cultural production on ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in which the great north China famine of 1920–1 occurred, to argue that our current understanding of Chinese relief culture circa 1920 remains largely a product of foreign characterization (by the celebrated likes of Somerset Maugham and Bertrand Russell) and political commentary by reformist Chinese during a period of post-May Fourth cultural turmoil. If we hold the output of these writers up to alternative original sources on events that year, it becomes clear that the historiography on China's greatest humanitarian crisis of the first quarter of the twentieth century remains insufficiently insulated from the raw discursive climate in which the crisis unfolded.     

The Rise and Fall of Non-Aligned Mediation, 1961–6

From its inception, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) considered itself to be a moderating force in the cold war and in the post-colonial world. In September 1961, in the wake of the Belgrade Conference and at the height of the Berlin crisis, it dispatched emergency missions to Washington and Moscow, with Sukarno and Keita journeying to Washington and Nehru and Nkrumah flying to Moscow. Yet, by the decade's end, the movement had moved away from that mission. Paying particular attention to key turning points of the mid-1960s such as the 1964 Congo crisis and the Americanisation of the Vietnam War, this paper interprets the abandonment of cold war mediation as a product of the Vietnam War, rising anti-colonial sentiment, and organised non-alignment's corresponding shift toward a more militant stance on the world stage. This shift helped to foster a newly antagonistic relationship between the United States and the NAM.     

John Foster Dulles,Illness, Masculinity and US Foreign Relations, 1953–1961

In the last two decades, scholars have increasingly looked to understand the way that socially constructed norms and values have influenced the course of international diplomacy. Yet while much work has been produced on areas such as gender, far less has been written on the way that perceptions of illness affected the way that leading policymakers saw themselves, their allies, and their respective roles in the world. This article, by focusing on former US secretary of state John Foster Dulles, looks at the influence that perceptions of illness had on US foreign relations during the 1950s. First, it argues that US perceptions of British and French weakness – as typified by the ill-health being suffered by those nations’ respective leaders – shaped American responses to the diplomatic crisis that erupted over the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Second, it highlights the substantial changes that took place in US policy when first President Eisenhower, and then subsequently Secretary Dulles, were stricken down by severe illness. In doing so it demonstrates how a better understanding of the relationship between illness, emotions and masculinity can help historians to better understand the course of Cold War foreign relations.