The Radio and Television Universities of China, better known there as dianda, are now well established and growing rapidly. Dianda have been the subject of a number of articles, but, although the amount of comment on their operation has grown over the years, the focus has been on describing this operation. No attempt has been made to relate in detail the developments to the whole of higher education in China. Dianda warrant detailed consideration, not only because of their importance to the development of higher education in China, but also because they form the largest distance education system4 in the world. The size is indicated in the figures for student enrolment in three-year full-time degree programmes (at zhuanke level) since the founding of dianda, shown in Table 1. These programmes are offered in all provinces except Tibet, relying mainly on television lectures, backed up by text-books and face-to-face teaching. It is an extremely decentralized system, largely confined to urban areas, with local centres being responsible for student administration. (The central administration in Beijing has no individual student records.) The degree programme in the first four years was offered only by the science and technology department and included electrical and mechanical majors, and less commonly physics and mathematics. In 1982 over 78,000 students graduated. Social science courses in economic management started in 1983 and in future years it is hoped to introduce a wide variety of courses, shifting the balance away from science and technology.

In 1980 the People's Daily reported that 200 million Chinese peasants were living below the poverty line, while in 1982 Vicepremier Wan Li admitted the “for many years in the past, more than 150 million peasants had not solved the problem of not having enough to eat.” To enrich the rural economy, Party leaders called on peasants to pursue numerous private roads to prosperity. The new policy, highlighted by the phrase “permit some peasants to get rich first” (rang yixie nongmin xian fuqilai), allows households who are more industrious, more innovative and, of course, those with better personal and economic ties, to utilize their skills, personal relationships, excess labour power, and comparative advantages to accrue wealth quickly.

The purpose of this article is to examine comparatively three distinctive exemplars of Sino-Western educational co-operation: Tongji University as an expression of Sino-German educational interaction, Qinghua University with its roots in Sino-American relations, and the lesser-known Zhongfa University, an important institution of French-Chinese scholarly collaboration in the pre-Liberation period. The present open-door climate has given rise to contemporary projects of educational cooperation between China and each of these countries, as well as many other western countries, which might be illumined by some reflection on an earlier period. It will be of interest, therefore, to investigate the particular combination of scholarly values or ethos created by each institution and its relevance to the wider problematic of the modernization of Chinese scholarly culture.

The year 1985 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication in The China Quarterly of Ezra F. Vogel's classic article, “From friendship to comradeship: the change in personal relations in communist China.” The present article examines personal relations in China in the wake of the intervening two decades of Cultural Revolution (CR) and modernizing reforms. I will describe the major dimensions of personal relations in 1985 and offer a sociological explanation for them. My argument is that these relationships represent a re-emergence of certain traditional patterns as reshaped by both the CR and the current restructuring of state-society relations.

The leadership in literature and the arts that replaced the appointees of the “gang of four” in the late 1970s was formed of the old guard. Their policies were restorationist. They reversed the judgments of the Cultural Revolution, giving approval to all the theories then tarred black, notably “the broad road for realism” (which allowed for artistic diversity), “the deepening of realism” (which meant that not everything needed to be depicted as fine and dandy), and “middle characters” (intended to break the monopoly of proletarian heroes). They interpreted the principle that literature should serve socialism and serve the people relatively liberally. Serving the people meant “the whole people” (a formulation for which Zhou Yang had been condemned); and when the formula of “workers, peasants and soldiers” was repeated, it was pointed out that “workers” included brain workers. The enjoyment principle was also invoked.

China's economy has been undergoing major changes since 1979 that are beginning to affect both the structure and performance of her economic system. Although the changes have been carried out largely on an exploratory and experimental basis, they promise to infuse greater management flexibility into some units of production. China's economic system has been greatly influenced both by excessive administrative control that has tended to slow down the processes of decision-making and production adjustment, and by ideological mandates that predetermined the forms and functions of the national economic system. The new economic order being shaped was formally sanctioned by the third plenary session of the eleventh central committee of the Communist Party of China held in Beijing between 18 and 22 December 1978, which called for the adoption of a series of major new economic measures to relax the central government's tight grip on production units. Such tight control has left most, if not all, production enterprises with little management authority and has to a large extent hindered the performance of the economy as a whole.

China's urbanization patterns and policies since 1949 have been the focus of a good deal of attention. The main elements of this “Chinese Model” have been the massive “rustication” movements, the recruitment of large numbers of city dwellers to work in rural areas, strict controls on rural-urban migration through food rationing and household registration, and the expansion of rural employment through the development of rural industries. While controlling urban population growth has been problematic to most governments of developing countries, it has been widely accepted that China, particularly in the Maoist era, has been successful in this sphere. The “Chinese Model”, therefore, may offer such countries great promise as an alternative approach.

In Issue No. 99 (September 1984), page 680, the first sentence under the section United States should have read “President Reagan (accompanied by the American foreign secretary) arrived in Beijing on 26 April for a six-day state visit – the first by an American president in office since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1979.” and not as printed.

The Chinese Communist Party's economic reforms have at times slowed down and have even halted, but they have not deviated from their course of loosening government controls, moving towards a more market-orientated economy, and opening up to the outside world. The Party's policy towards the intellectuals, whose skills are crucial to economic modernization, have generally followed the shifts in the economic sphere, but the shifts in the intellectual sphere have been more extreme and have at times deviated from the course. This was the case in the autumn of 1983 with the campaign against western spiritual pollution. Although the campaign quickly dissipated in the economic realm and scientific community, it continued on into 1984, specifically against those intellectuals who were influenced by such western thinkers as Sartre, Freud, Kafka and Euro-Marxists. The Party charged them with causing ideological confusion and questioning of the Party and socialism.