It is now 15 years since Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power was first published and became known as a controversial book. However, when in the autumn of 1960 I began writing my doctoral dissertation in political science at Berkeley, it never once crossed my mind that I was writing something controversial or even publishable. For the previous two years I had been reading Japanese Government archives concerned with the Japanese war in China, 1937–45, archives that had been obtained for the Berkeley libraries by Professor Robert Scalapino from Hatano Ken'ichi, one of Japan's leading specialists on China and a Japanese governmental adviser during the so-called “China Incident.” These archives impressed me with a point that I thought was already widely accepted among scholars interested in the Chinese Revolution – namely, that the Japanese army had created conditions of such savagery in the Chinese countryside that the peasantry in overwhelming numbers had given their allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party as the only true leader of anti-Japanese guerrilla resistance. Because the Communist Party had openly championed resistance to Japan, it had won the “hearts and minds” of a significant proportion of the rural population, an achievement that guaranteed that in the postwar world it could no longer be regarded by the Kuomintang (KMT) as merely a “rebel faction”. When the Nationalists precipitated a civil war with the Communists after Japan's defeat, it was only natural that the mass of the population in the formerly occupied areas supported the Communists, and it was this factor of popular support, as in most other civil wars, that contributed most to the communist victory of 1949.

Until recently few international law scholars and governments have paid much attention to the special sea law problems concerning mid-ocean archipelagos. The question of whether a group of islands can be considered as a unit in delimiting territorial sea has, according to most authorities, been adequately solved by general rules concerning the delimitation of the territorial sea of the mainland or island. The 1929 Harvard Draft on the Law of Territorial Sea contains no provision relating to groups of islands or archipelagos. Article 7 of the Draft provides that the territorial sea of islands should be measured in a similar way to that of the mainland. It is a contention of this article that no different rule should be established for groups of islands or archipelagos, except that, if the outer fringe of islands is sufficiently close to form one complete belt of marginal sea, then the waters within such a belt should be considered as territorial waters.

The data presented in this paper are drawn from observations and materials that I acquired as the result of a short visit to Kwangtung Province in April 1977. During that time I was able to travel as an individual and undertake 10 days of concentrated interviewing on the composition of the household, marriage and kinship relationsin a selection of rural villages and urban neighbourhoods. During this visit I specifically set out to test the correlation between differing patterns of marriage with the structure and functions of households and primary groups that I had already developed from a study of the documentary sources. In making these correlations from documentary sources, I found that I was far from clear about questions such as household composition, post-marital residential arrangements and relations between households and kin groups in rural villages. I hoped that my visit might allow me to make an inquiry into the structure of domestic groups and the nature of primary kin groups in rural and urban areas. Restricted by time, I had to be less concerned with the actual marriage patterns themselves and with other areas of interest, such as the relation of kin groups to leadership patterns. My collection of data is, therefore, directly relevant to a very limited subject area. The materials collected from one village have been published here because the opportunities to acquire a survey of, or more comprehensive materials from, a single village are still limited, and previous such collections stand out as land-marks in the history of the study of social institutions in China.

The following is an abbreviated account of a three-hour interview with Chang Hsüeh-hsin of the Higher Education Bureau of the Education Ministry in Peking. The interview took place on 19 July 1977. My purpose in requesting it was to discover the policy changes that were being contemplated by the new Chinese administration in the controversial field of education. Few concrete details on the subject had appeared in the press up to that time, although renewed emphasis on science and technology, together with travellers' tales and other informal sources of information, all suggested that major changes were in the offing. Comrade Chang confirmed that such changes were underway, although not finally decided upon. The announcement by People's Daily on 22 October that the college entrance examination would be unified and that all candidates should be senior middle school graduates or the equivalent, indicates two decisions taken after the interview.