The China of the 1980s seems so very different from that of the mid 1960s: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is now widely denounced, seemingly both for the mid 1960s' diagnosis of the ills afflicting Chinese society and for the remedies chosen at the time to cure them. Today few would wish to defend the treatment meted out by Red Guards, but a condemnation of past actions is no substitute for an understanding of what happened and why.

Two decades after Mao Zedong ignited the Great Proletarian Revolution there is still no satisfactory accounting for the upheaval which Beijing now says caused millions of deaths and left some 100 million people scarred victims. Ordinary imagination cannot grasp what took place during those “10 bad years of great disaster” (shinian haojie) as the Chinese now call them. Since so much at that time defied conventional theories of politics, outsiders quickly put the phenomenon out of mind once the turmoil ceased. For the Chinese, however, it has not been so simple. Those who personally suffered have tended to summarize the story according to their individual tragedies. Chinese seeking a larger perspective are caught between the inexplicableness of its causes and the incalculability of its consequences.

A vital key to Zhou Enlai's diplomacy in Indo-China during 1954 and 1955 was his systematic effort to “neutralize” the region. Zhou, as Chinese premier and foreign minister, laid the foundations of China's approach to Indo-China. Subsequently, his policy of neutralization and its application to Indo-China focused on the enlargement of the “area of collective peace” along China's southern frontiers. This general formula reflected Zhou's primary concern for China's territorial security and economic development. In Zhou's estimation the immediate western military threat to China's security could be curbed effectively if Indo-China became a “neutralized” region in which the three local states, that is, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, were not allowed to enter into alliances with any outside major powers. Only by terminating French colonial domination in Indo-China and restraining major-power interference in the internal affairs of these three states could the peace and stability of Indo-China be secured.

The publishing world, like everything else in China at the moment, manifests both signs of change and resistance to change. Some publishers are cautiously hopeful about the current reforms, others feel change is not happening fast enough, and yet others do not ally themselves with reform at all but would prefer to have more stringent controls. This field note will attempt, therefore, to offer a portrait of how Chinese publishing is organized at the moment with areas of likely change, as well as highlighting the relations between Chinese publishing establishments and their counterparts in the west.

Hong Kong has never taken the path of constitutional development towards democratic self-government followed by the rest of Great Britain's colonial empire. In 1984 the Legislative and Executive Councils were still composed entirely of officials and unofficials nominated by the Governor without a single elected member, just as they have been for the past 140 years. This anomalous position has commonly been justified in two ways: the official explanation is that there have been no demands for democratic institutions voiced by the people of Hong Kong; unofficially ministers and officials have claimed that the People's Republic of China objects to free elections and Britain has found it expedient to give heed to China's views. This has never been publicly and unambiguously admitted by any Minister of the Crown while in office to avoid diplomatic embarrassment, but a large number of comments and replies to parliamentary questions can be quoted which leave little doubt that this is in fact the case. It seems that the Chinese People's Government has always equated democratic constitutional advance in Hong Kong with moves to grant independence to the territory and so has imposed her veto on any changes which might preclude the future resumption of Chinese sovereignty. But now that Britain has formally declared her intention to restore the whole of Hong Kong to China in 1997 China has in turn declared that after 1997“The legislature of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall be constituted by elections,” and is apparently prepared to waive her longstanding objections to democratic developments in the intervening 12 years before Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty.