Social critics and intellectuals since Sir Thomas More have subjected growing urban industrial centres to sweeping criticism. Much of city planning in the West is characterised by reassertion of rural values and rural self-sufficiency. The anti-city approach often takes the form of ‘planning Utopian communities in the country, free from the “excesses of urbanism.” However, in an industrialising country like China a different theme underlies the view of country-city relations. In predominantly rural China, and in the U.S.S.R. during early years of industrialisation, the emphasis of city planning shifts to the need to bring cities and industry to the land. The aim has been to spread industrial values and techniques to rural areas.

Mao Tse-Tung utilised the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution to lecture delegates attending the Moscow Communist Party Conference on the correct method for dealing with erring comrades. Mao appeared to be offering his formula “unity-criticismunity” to other Bloc parties as a substitute for the violence and terror inherent in Stalin's periodic purging of the Soviet party. At the same time, Mao appeared to be giving assurances that Stalin's errors connected with the “cult of personality” could not possibly develop within the Chinese party.

While the partisans were expanding on the Shen-Kan border in 1932, San Yuan hsien became the centre of the peasant movement in the Wei Pei area. Developments seemed sufficiently promising for the Shensi Party to resolve on June 6, 1932 that a new soviet be created in the three hsien of San Yuan, Fu P'ing and Yao Chou, where land redistribution had begun and a revolutionary committee established.

When the victorious Tokugawa rulers of early seventeenth-century Japan brought an end to decades of warfare, the warrior class, the samurai, no longer had any wars to fight. However, the ideals of the samurai warrior did not die quickly, and new generations of samurai continued to learn the “martial arts” and to give obeisance to the model of the loyal and fearless warrior. In fact, however, under peaceful Tokugawa rule, the samurai gradually became an administrator-bureaucrat and took up the study of the “literary arts” which were more suited to his daily activities than studies of the martial arts.

For A Western-trained lawyer considering contracts within the context of a planned economy, three caveats are in order at the outset. First, plans inevitably involve consultation, which easily shades over into negotiation at the stages of formulation and implementation (the latter often requiring re-formulation). In this sense, plans are not wholly antithetical to the concept of agreement between concerned parties. Second, subject to that qualification, a primary function of contracts in a planned economy is to implement the planners’ preferences. Consequently, it is to be expected that the degree of private autonomy associated with contracts in the West will be restricted. Finally, in Western societies also the parties are limited, to a lesser degree to be sure, in the terms they may incorporate in a contract; e.g., minimum wage laws set limits on wage provisions. Thus, in the theoretical spectrum from wholly unrestrained, enforceable agreements to pure commands, both plans and contracts in practice fall somewhere in the middle in all societies.