Civil-military relations in China demonstrate a unique fusion of military and political leadership within the Communist Party. Variously described as a “symbiosis,” “dual-role elite” or “the Party in uniform,” this feature rooted in the guerrilla experience of the Chinese Communist Party was sustained over six decades by the political longevity of the Long March generation. The civil war experience formed political leaders skilled in both civil affairs and military command. Analysts of civil-military relations in China must therefore define the scope of “civil” in relation to the Chinese Communist Party.

Rarely does a researcher have the opportunity to participate in something he has described and even predicted. This reporter was therefore both honoured and fascinated to be part of the International Symposium on the Great Wall (Chctngcheng guoji xueshu yontao hui), sponsored by the China Great Wall Society, of which Huang Hua, the former Foreign Minister (1976–82) of the PRC, is chairman.

It all began when angry villagers accused the Party secretary of turning off the electricity to an ice lolly (binggunr or popsicle) factory whose owner had refused to pay bribes. The lolly maker had not been paying his rent but that was no reason, they said, to melt his stock and to cause the bank to foreclose on the village's most profitable enterprise.

In 1980 when I took over the editorship of The China Quarterly from Dick Wilson, I was conscious of two main challenges. One was the administrative and managerial challenge of editing the journal with the degree of efficiency that would be required; the other was the editorially strategic challenge posed by the unfolding of events in China as reform and opening to the world gained pace.

During the reform era, there have been two important developments in China's administrative system. First, there has been a moderate degree of administrative decentralization in the area of cadre appointment. Prior to 1983, the central Party authorities – formally the central Organization Department (OD) – were responsible for appointing cadres down to the bureau level; the 1983–84 reforms delegated bureau-level appointments to ministries and provinces. As a result, the Centre is responsible for appointing fewer cadres than before; as of 1983, it had 7,000 cadres on its management list, a reduction of some 6,000 from the 1980 list. The second development is that the Centre has sought to regulate the appointment decisions that it no longer controls directly and to monitor officials’ performance and conduct. To this end, new and increasingly detailed procedures have been laid out to guide appointment decisions and there have been efforts to strengthen the specialized monitoring agencies.

The year which I spent as acting editor of The China Quarterly was a time of turmoil and transition for China studies which now seems very far away. How contemporary China should be perceived was a matter for intense and sometimes bitter argument. This was part of the wider controversy over the whole nature of Asian studies and its relationship to government policy which had arisen out of the American intervention in Vietnam. The difficulty of understanding the Cultural Revolution and the lack of scholarly access to China only sharpened the debate. Yet Western China scholarship was on the verge of a new leap forward which would soon make China more penetrable than at any time since 1949. For the year of 1971–72 led from ping-pong diplomacy to Richard Nixon's on-the-spot discovery that the Great Wall of China really was great. Before long even those scholars who had maintained that China was better studied from a safe distance found that their institutions were able to secure tempting access to the mainland.

National leaders need security protection against political assassinations, espionage, terrorism and many other dangers, and therefore almost every country has a specialized organization to provide such protection. In the United States, the President is protected by the Secret Service of the Treasury Department, and in the Soviet Union, the Kremlin denizens were guarded by the Ninth Directorate of the KGB. The Chinese security system for the top leadership, consisting mainly of the Central Security Bureau in Zhongnanhai, is however distinctive in several respects. Institutionally it has a peculiarly complex set of arrangements which result in some puzzling divisions of responsibilities. It also relies heavily on a military detachment, Unit 8341. Above all, the Chinese central security apparatus can, and does, play a more active and indispensable political role than is common in other countries.