On September 15, 1965, Mr. B. K. Nehru, India's Ambassador to the United States, told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.: “What seems impossible to deny is that the Chinese and the Pakistanis are working in the closest possible co-operation to increase the military and economic pressure on India and to encourage internal disorder with a view to weakening, and if possible causing the break-up of, the Indian Union.” There has indeed been evidence of Sino-Pakistani co-operation in recent years, though the use of the words “closest possible” might be questioned. Strangely enough the United States, by her arms aid to India since 1962, became at least partly responsible for one of the more successful phases of Chinese Communist diplomacy since the inception of the People's Republic in 1949.

Communist literature on “Contemporary (post-May 4) History” in which China begins a “bourgeois democratic reVolution” is more than an ideological exercise; it is autobiographical. The leading character is none other than the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself. The emotional inVolvement of mainland scribes is comparable to that of a public figure writing his biography. Every event from 1919 to the present is regarded in the light of the CCP's role. Communist leadership is even attributed to the May 4 Movement, which antedated the Party's formation by two years.

In recent years a number of visitors to China have remarked on the rather surprising preservation and even revival of the country's ancient native medical tradition. To Westerners, so accustomed to associating modern medicine with progress and scientific advance, the continued existence of this obviously prescientific art has been one of the more curious anachronisms in the new society. Moreover, for a revolutionary government so firmly committed to science and modernisation, this support and encouragement of traditional medicine has seemed paradoxical indeed.

In antiquity, China was far from being the China we know today, neither in extent, nor in political and social organisation. To the south it did not extend beyond the Yangtze River, to the north it stopped short of the Mongolian steppe, to the north-east, only a small part of the south Manchurian plain was included, whereas in the west it merely went up to the easternmost part of what is now Kansu Province; the Szechwan plain was only included at the end of the fourth century B.C. Politically, the King of Chou was theoretically the overlord of most of this area, but in actual practice, independent rulers reigned over a congeries of larger and smaller states. As a result of wars of conquest, seven large states had come to be formed by the middle of the fifth century B.C. and these were engaged in a ceaseless struggle for supremacy. The time between the middle of the fifth century and 221 B.C., when the western state of Ch'in finally conquered all its rivals, is known as the period of the Warring States.

One of the tragic phenomena in Chinese history is the frequent occurrence of natural calamities. It has been estimated that there have been 1,035 droughts and 1,037 floods in a period of 2,142 years from 206 B.C. to 1936. The Chinese Communist Government puts the blame for the failure to alleviate them on “feudalism” and, over the past century, on the combination of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism. They have proclaimed: “Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the People's Government have paid much attention to water conservancy. During the period of national economic recovery and the period of socialist industrialisation, the main tasks of water conservancy are to alleviate the disasters of flood and drought to insure a steady in-crease of agricultural production, and to promote the development of industry and river navigation.” The Draft Outline of the National Agricultural Development for 1956–1967 proclaimed the determination of the Chinese Communist Government to eliminate ordinary floods and droughts within a period of seven to twelve years beginning from 1956. This is a truly bold and far-reaching programme. The success or failure of this attempt will have great influence on the stability of the Government and on the life of the people. The purpose of this article is to study the degree of success the Communist Government has achieved in this field and also the implications of this record as an index of its overall effectiveness and future prospects.

As in all living scholarly traditions one can see in traditional Chinese historiography a wide range of divergent opinion as to what history is and how it should be written. On one point, however, all schools of Chinese historiography agree, and this is the clear awareness of the evaluative character of their trade. The historian of every school was an arbiter who, by passing judgment assessed the value of, and gave meaning to, events. This consciously evaluative character of Chinese historiography demanded self-reliance and courage on the part of the historian, who was not only the keeper of documents and the recorder of events; his assessments assumed normative status like the sentences of a judge.

In May of this year Lin Feng led a delegation to Moscow for the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany. In reporting this, a news agency described Lin as a “little known middlerank” politician. Lin is indeed little known to the outside world, but within Communist China he is a top Party leader and one who has made an impressive record despite a somewhat unorthodox path to power. Unlike most top Peking leaders, he was not born in central-south China, he did not serve in the Kiangsi Soviet, and he did not make the Long March. Rather, Lin hails from Manchuria where he was born about fifty-six years ago, thus making him one of the youngest of the senior Party leaders—although already a veteran of twenty years on the Party Central Committee. Sources vary widely on Lin's educational background; he is reported to have studied at Nankai University in Tientsin, at Peking University, in Japan at famed Waseda, as well as in Moscow. By the mid-1930s Lin was deeply involved in the Party underground in North China. He was working behind the scenes in an attempt to win over to the Communists the highly nationalistic students who were bitterly opposed to Japanese incursions into North China. Among those whom Lin won was his future wife, Kuo Ming-ch'iu who has become one of the outstanding women leaders in Communist China. At that time Kuo was a high-school girl and acting head of the Peiping Students Federation.