Like other Chinese state institutions, the educational system has undergone many changes since the death of Mao Zedong and the overthrow of the “gang of four” in 1976. Several accounts and studies have appeared treating different stages and aspects of this continuing transformation. Further adjustments to the system of education are likely to take place in the near future. Now that the Sixth Five-Year Plan has been published in draft form laying down the blueprint of China's development in the coming few years, some kind of assessment needs to be made of the; educational system, its performance and its prospects, since much of they immediate and future operation of rapid economic growth depends on U ithe human capital provided by schools.

On the night 13/14th October 1950 soldiers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) crossed the Yalu river from north-east China into Korea. In the 10 weeks of operations that followed, these men, with others crowding in behind them, threw back the powerful divisions of the United Nations Command, ejecting them from the territory of North Korea and, further, seemed capable of driving them from the whole Korean peninsular. No doubt the government in Beijing believed for a time that its soldiers were once more about to deliver an immense political prize to Party and state. They were wrong. If the intervention of the PLA changed the course of the Korean war initially much as Mao Zedong intended, it changed also the outlook of the PLA, led to factionalism among the military leadership, which persists and, arguably, accelerated the subsequent rift between China and the Soviet Union.

For millennia China's enemies have come chiefly out of northern and central Asia. In the 1980s, after a historically anomalous century during which most of her enemies came from the sea, China's defences once again are orientated north and west. The military threat of the 1980s is more complex than that posed by the barbarian nomads of old. The Soviet armed forces can launch land-air battles simultaneously all along the 10,000-kilometre Sino-Soviet border. Moreover, time and space factors which long shielded the interior of China provide little protection in the missile age.

According to current Chinese views, in 1949 China was liberated from three major evils: feudalism, imperialism and bureaucratic capitalism. The present article takes a closer look at the relationship between the two last mentioned. The period chosen is the early and mid 1930s, which was marked by growing tensions between the powers in East Asia, by acute economic depression and subsequent recovery, and by the gradual extension of the Nanjing Government's control over the country. On the foreigner's side, the focus will be on the British experience at a time when Great Britain's political position in the Far East was being overshadowed by Japan's thrust towards hegemony. It will be argued, the widening gap between Britain's political and economic presence in China was partly bridged by increasingly close co-operation between British business and the Chinese ruling elite.