In the course of establishing an interpretative chronology of the post-1949 political and economic development of China, scholars have often assumed that in the early and mid-1950s there was a continuum in terms of the progressive application of Soviet organizational methods and strategic perspectives in China. In other words, the Chinese Communist leadership in the early 1950s not only “leaned to one s side” in international terms, it endorsed and implemented an essentially Stalinist strategy with its consequent implications of rigid hierarchical management and lop-sided investment patterns in favour of rapid heavy industrialization at the expense of agricultural production in the countryside.

Opportunities to observe a people's court in action dealing with a criminal cases are relatively rare. Therefore, the following summary of the trial of an embezzler at the Hungkou District People's Court, Shanghai, which I attended on the morning of 14 December 1977, may offer some additional understanding of the way the legal system currently works in China. The visit to the court formed part of a tour by a group mainly drawn from the University of Adelaide. The fact that we were invited to attend the court, however, was mainly due to the presence among us of the attorney-general of South Australia, Mr Peter Duncan. The visit was preceded by a meeting with two judges of the Shanghai Higher People's Court who outlined in fairly familiar and general terms the basic structure of the Chinese legal system. The judges also accompanied us to the district court.

After completing his trilogy The Eclipse in the spring of 1928, a physically and mentally exhausted Mao Tun went to Japan, where he stayed from the summer of 1928 to the spring of 1930. The series of catastrophes that had befallen his party in 1927–28 continued to torment him, and party politics followed him even to Tokyo. Attacks from several groups on the left in Shanghai directed at the three novels that made up The Eclipse provoked Mao Tun to an angered defence, “From Ruling to Tokyo” (16 July 1928). A storm of polemics ensued.

How people live under different economic systems is always of enormous interest, although comparison is handicapped in practice by the presence of other, non-systemic differences, such as culture and the level of economic development. Significant comparisons of living standards in the market-orientated Taiwan and the plan-orientated mainland portions of China, where the inherited culture is similar, have been precluded by the wide disparities in size, urban-rural mix, and level of development. Yet an interesting, and perhaps useful comparison can be made between Taiwan and a counterpart region within the People's Republic, such as Shanghai.

The Chinese term pu-cho (“catch”) an earthquake expresses the Chinese Government's resolve to save lives and property by applying the political techniques of mass mobilization to improve upon the predictive accuracy achievable with fine instruments and professional methods alone. To be more specific, during the most critical stage of the shortrange prediction process the public can contribute large numbers of useful observations not requiring ultra-sensitive instruments.