We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The new improved relations with China have placed China specialists in the United States, and in some other countries as well, in an apparently contradictory position. On the one hand, direct contact is now possible: instead of being confined to libraries an ocean away or visiting Hong Kong a border away, China specialists can now look forward to visiting China itself, and to experiencing at first hand what before was principally a mental concept. On the other hand, it appears that most of the scholarly exchanges will be in areas such as physics, medicine, and the biological sciences, and that social scientists in general and China specialists in particular are low on the priority list of people being admitted to China. There are exceptions to this, of course, including fields such as population studies and early childhood development, and perhaps archaeology, art, and language. Still, it is undeniable that the opportunities for doing research in China are very limited. So near and yet so far.
The performance of the Chinese economy is a subject of great interest to many people, and a number of western scholars have put considerable effort into estimating the growth of China's national product, but no one has made use, either directly in his calculations or indirectly as a check on his work, of the aggregative data that Premier Chou En-lai gave to the late Edgar Snow during the winter of 1970–71.
Readers may be interested in the status of the concept of “alienation” and of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (where the topic is most extensively discussed) in mainstream Chinese Marxism. The topic is important, among other reasons, because it has figured so prominently in “revisionist” philosophical writings of the problem of freedom in societies where the bureaucracy becomes a new class. The points I am about to make are based both on my own research and on talks with philosophers in the People's Republic in 1973.