Despite its obvious significance, the involvement of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the First Indo-China War has long been an under-researched and little understood subject in Cold War history. Because of lack of access to Chinese or Vietnamese sources, few of the many publications in English deal with China's connections with the war. In such highly acclaimed works as Marilyn B. Young's The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990, Jacques Dallaoz's The War in Indo-China, 1945–1954, Anthony Short's The Origins of the Vietnam War, R. E. M. Irving's The First Indo-China War, Ellen Hammer's The Struggle for Indo-China, 1946–1955, Edgar O'Ballance's The Indo-China War, 1945–1954, and Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy: Insurgency in Vietnam, 1946–1963, the PRC's role is either discussed only marginally or almost completely neglected.

The collapse first of Communist rule of the USSR and then of the USSR itself was without question one of the pivotal events of the era. Since China's 20th-century history has been so deeply influenced by Soviet developments, it is important to examine the impact of these events on China. This article asks, first, whether the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), had a deliberate policy towards the decline of Soviet Communism, and if so, what was the nature of that policy? Did the CCP attempt to assist their comrades in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as the latter battled for survival during 1990 and 1991?

The decade from 1978 to 1988 was a period of great social transformation in China. The pragmatic economic policies and comparatively relaxed political approach resulted in a less rigid and dogmatic atmosphere, providing a more liberal setting for cultural and intellectual activities. Chinese intellectuals directly participated in defining and developing the new social intersubjectivity and ideological discourse. In comparison with the first 30 years of the People's Republic, the role and functions of intellectuals between 1978 and 1988 became increasingly complex within a rapidly changing social context. The period also marks the development of a new pattern in the relationship between Chinese intellectuals and the state, which was no longer based on the total submission of the former to the latter.

The distribution of income in China has been a subject of great interest to economists and others both inside and outside the country. Scholars have wanted to know whether a socialist strategy of development has resulted in an egalitarian society and, more generally, how the distribution of income in China compares with that in other developing countries that have relied more on market forces. Policy-makers have wanted to know, especially after the economic reforms introduced since 1978, whether the institutional transformations and policy interventions ameliorated or aggravated existing inequalities. Unfortunately it was not possible to address these questions systematically because of inadequate statistical information. There were few estimates of the distribution of income in China and those that were available were fragmentary and of uncertain reliability.

Over the past decade a highly significant development has attracted little scholarly attention: the steady expansion of Chinese power in the South China Sea. There were several excellent studies of this process through the very early 1980s, but these ended well before China's push from the Paracel Islands to the Spratly Islands in 1988. Indeed, they disagreed about whether China would actually do this. By the early 1990s China had pushed into the Spratlys and built up a relatively strong base there. It is thus time to look anew at China's activities in that region.