In a famous article written in 1928 when the Left-wing writers of the Sun and Creation Societies were criticising Lu Xun for being behind the times, Qian Xingcun (A Ying) asserted that the age of Ah Q was already past. Fifty years later Chen Baichen's dramatization of Ah Q Zhengzhuan, which was staged in 1981 as part of the Lu Xun centenary celebrations, ends with the narrator declaring that although Ah Q had no women it was not true that he would have no descendants, because his line would continue for generations to come. It is, of course, possible to reconcile these two apparently contradictory statements. Qian Xingcun was referring to the fact that the peasant masses were becoming politically organized, having played an important role in the revolutionary movements of those years. He did not claim that people like Ah Q no longer existed. Chen Baichen, on the other hand, was referring to the Ah Q mentality which still lives on in people's minds, long after Ah Q himself has been executed. He did not see this mentality as the dominant force in society. Nevertheless there have been striking changes of attitude towards Ah Q in recent years. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution it has been generally recognized that the Ah Q mentality is still a force in China which is holding back attempts at modernization and that many other aspects of the Chinese traditional society and culture which Lu Xun criticized in his stories and essays have still not been eradicated 45 years after his death.

The commercial, cultural and educational agreement between the State of Ohio and Hubei province has become a major element in Hubei's efforts to modernize its industrial and agricultural sectors. At the same time, the agreement also provides evidence of increasing provincial autonomy in China's economic development. This latter fact is seen in the negotiating practices adopted by provincial officials before and after the agreement was reached.

Some 150 Germans in all served as advisers to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) in the decade between the Guomindang's Northern Expedition against the warlords (1927–28) and the end of the first year of Japan's full-scale invasion. Their importance to a government struggling to survive and modernize in the face of Japanese aggression and the threat of rural-based communism is recognized, and several studies describe the diplomacy and work of the unofficial mission at Nanking. But it is difficult in military as in civil reform to uncover how policies worked in practice. Chinese plans and pronouncements tended to gloss over contemporary realities, of which the most intractable were the persisting habits of warlordism within ex-warlord and even nominally Central armies. A cross-check of German, American, and British assessments with evidence from the Chinese side can indicate how genuine were the reform efforts, how influential the German officers, how intrusive warlord-style habits, and how impressive the results. I shall focus here on the neglected topics of German-directed officer education and troop training, and the much misunderstood German role in Chiang Kai-shek's strategy.

A large number of statistics on the Chinese economy are generated through complete enumeration. Essentially the entire rural population, for example, is organized into agricultural collectives or state farms, and these units are required to submit standardized reports on a range of economic and social activity. They report on several categories of production, on financial flows, and on matters such as births and deaths. There are, of course, areas of interest to Chinese planners and social scientists, the data for which are not routinely compiled at local levels, e.g. data on family consumption patterns. In China, as elsewhere, sample surveys are used to fill such information gaps. Such surveys are commonly conducted using the technique of “typical example investigation” (dianxing diaocha). While well established in China, this survey technique, which might be characterized as stratified non-random sampling, is increasingly challenged as inadequate to the needs of economic science. One recently published large scale typical example investigation generated some statistics for which are available population parameters derived from complete enumeration. Comparison of the results of the typical example investigation and the complete enumeration reveal a strong bias in the sample. The bias is shown to result from the role of social statistics in China, and provides a clear illustration of the contradictions in that role.

Since the deaths of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1976 and the ensuing concentration on the Four Modernizations, increased attention has been paid to whether, and to what extent, China will be able, or wish, to bring its military machine and its military strategy more closely in line with that of “advanced” countries. The term usually applied to this question is “military modernization.” Such a term possesses the advantage of pointing to how changes in military investments are related to the Chinese Communist Party's overall programme of general economic recovery after the Cultural Revolution and how military affairs fit into the Party's plans for the next two to three decades. Extending the meaning of the concept and relating it to the general state of China's political economy has the additional benefit of drawing attention away from exclusive emphasis on one component of Chinese military affairs, “people's war,” that overworked and by now sterile term to which both Chinese practitioners and western analysts were slave for the past four decades. “People's war” as a strategy and a useful concept continues, but it is no longer the umbrella term for understanding Chinese military issues. Indeed, it has been modified by the Chinese themselves, under the rubric” people's war under modern conditions.”