Once again, the “grain problem” has emerged as a key concern for the Chinese leadership. In his report to the second annual meeting of the Eighth People's Congress in March 1994, Premier Li Peng urged authorities at different levels to place top priority on agricultural development. A Central Work Conference on Rural Development was held immediately after the close of the People's Congress. It is particularly notable that this was the second Conference since October 1993, and the National Work Conference on Agriculture and National Work Conference on “Vegetable Basket,” Grain and Edible Oil had already been held in January 1994.

The nascent stock and bond markets in the People's Republic of China have received considerable attention from the international media, yet the emergence of these markets is poorly understood. China's new “limited stock companies” increasingly answer to a variety of public and private lenders and spenders, who partially own and largely manage the means of production. The government sometimes decides which companies and managers will be rewarded with the benefits of incorporation, and it grabs a lion's share of the newly issued securities. But the result is a slow, government-led move towards a more capitalist form of management and ownership. This kind of jointly funded project – companies that merge public and private ownership, management and responsibility – may become the defining characteristic of China's emerging “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.”

The Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan or JinJiLuYu Border Region was formally proclaimed on 7 July 1941, the fourth anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Even at that early stage some level of activity by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or its allies was claimed for 148 counties in Shanxi (Jin), Hebei (Ji), Shandong (Lu) and Henan (Yu). By 1947 and the outbreak of open civil war, the government of the JinJiLuYu Border Region claimed jurisdiction over some 30 million people. In 1948 it merged with the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region, immediately to the north, to form the North China People's Government, part of the process that led directly to the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

The May Fourth Movement of 1919 occupies a special position in scholars’ consideration of modern China as a result of the convergence of two sets of historical constructions. In China, according to official textbooks explaining the rise of the People's Republic that were first promulgated by the new socialist state in the 1950s, 1919 was identified as the very moment of origin when cultural iconoclasm was joined to a political activism of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle: the watershed affecting the flow of all subsequent revolutionary history. In the West, as presented in Chow Tse-tsung's highly influential 1964 volume, May Fourth was singled out as the time of patriotic awakening reached as a result of intellectual exposure to such Western liberal values as science, democracy, liberty and individualism. The May Fourth Movement has since been characterized variously as a response to Western liberal influence; as a product of education abroad in Japan, Europe or America; as an awakening to the call of international Bolshevism; and as an evaluative rejection of traditional Confucianism as the primary source of authority. Whether liberal or revolutionary, these intellectual developments were then seen as the inspiration for a unified national political movement that spread outward from Beijing and Shanghai into the provinces.