The acceleration of economic reform in the early and late 1990s has highlighted repeatedly the importance of social welfare for maintaining economic growth, social stability and political authority. Indeed each of these decade-long goals of China's government can be seen to rest on either establishing or maintaining an accessible social welfare package. Economic growth requires further enterprise reform which in turn requires alternative forms and funding of worker social welfare. Sporadic reports of urban unrest resulting from lay-offs and loss of welfare benefits and of rural discontent resulting from the continued absence of welfare benefits suggests that social stability and political authority are dependent on the government's ability to reform social welfare provisioning. Simultaneously the process of economic reform itself has altered urban and rural socio-economic and political environments and had far-reaching consequences for welfare demand, service supply and notions of security.

The profound silence that followed immediately after the 4 June massacres in 1989 was short-lived. As it became clear that the regime would stay in power, writers reacted as opportunity and circumstances allowed. Dissident writers associated with the protest movement were in danger of arrest and imprisonment: Duo Duo only just managed to get his flight to London on 4 June, joining those like Bei Dao who were already abroad and had no choice but to remain. Writers in high positions were also vulnerable: Wang Meng was forced to resign as Minister of Culture in 1989 and dropped from the Party's Central Committee at the 1992 Party Congress. Less prominent writers waited for a more propitious time to publish; younger writers barely paused.

Actually we could have picked a different name, such as the Chinese People's Party, the Revolutionary Party, the Liberation Party – any of these would have been OK. But no matter what, our intention remains to resolve the “property” (chan) issue. What are we fighting for? What is our goal all about? Getting “property” – not private property, but public property. For everybody to get rich, for everybody to lead a good life. That's why there has to be a revolution.

In the very first sentence of the first article in the first issue of The China Quarterly, Howard L. Boorman, seeking to summarize the first decade of the PRC, wrote: “The man who faces his typewriter to set down a thousand words of coherent comment on the Communist revolution in China confronts not only a massive experiment in social engineering but also the fact that his interpretation of that experiment will expose as much of the author as it does of the revolution.” Except that now it is a computer and not a typewriter, little is different for anyone who would try to summarize what is now 50 years of the PRC. True, enough time has gone by for us now to have not just the initial standard interpretations as to what transpired in China but revisions and then further re-revisions of the story, so that even though we cannot be so bold as to say that we now have the full truth, we probably are a bit closer.

This volume assesses the state of the People's Republic of China on its 50th anniversary by asking leading scholars in various fields to give their views of developments since 1949 with emphasis on recent decades. With the exception of the contributions by Bob Dernberger and Michael Sullivan, the papers were presented and discussed at a conference cosponsored with the Centra de Estudos Asiáticos of the Universidade de Aveiro in Aveiro, Portugal from 28 to 31 January 1999. The China Quarterly wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Universidade de Aveiro, its Rector, Júlio Pedrosa de Jesus, and the efforts of the staff of the Centro de Estudos Asiáticos, in particular Pedro Vilarinho, António Miranda and Helena Costa.

Since the Communists came to power in 1949 Chinese art has seen extraordinary changes. For 30 years, the Party apparatus and its Marxist-Maoist ideology exerted so tight a control over cultural life that it is natural for the art of that period to be viewed primarily as a reflection or expression of political forces. To some degree that is unavoidable, and it is the approach taken by the authors of two important books on post-1949 Chinese art, while Jerome Silbergeld's monograph on the Sichuan eccentric painter Li Huasheng is a fascinating study of the way in which these forces affected the life and work of an individual artist.

The dynamic growth of the Chinese economy over the past 50 years under the policies and administrative management of the People's Republic of China must rank among the most important developments of the 20th century. When I began my serious study of China's economy in the early 1950s, Western economists were preoccupied with a single question, “how are they ever going to feed all those Chinese?” Today, after 50 years in power, we must respect and even admire not only their ability to feed a population that has more than doubled in size, but also to provide the Chinese consumer with watches, washing machines, sewing machines, colour television sets, and tape and video recorders. A small, but significant and rapidly expanding, share of China's consumers is using mobile phones, computers and even private cars.

Using euphemisms and albeit haltingly, the leaders of the PRC in its 40s began blasting the barricades their forebears had constructed to design what they had considered a fully pristine, orthodoxly socialist, separate urban realm. The result of this recent demolition is that, as the system turns 50, its political elite – along with the markets they have licensed – is remodelling the metropolises into places less distinct socially from the rural areas outside them and much less homogeneous internally than the urban areas from which they are metamorphosing.