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.

Archaeology has a long history in traditional China where it served as the handmaiden of history, lexicography and geography, as well as preserver of art and literature. References to ancient material remains are common in the early Chinese literature. In the early fifth century b.c. Feng-hu-tzu, presumably after a study of early implements, proposed a four-stage sequence for the ancient period, each characterised by a weapon made of stone, jade, copper and iron, respectively. The grand historian of the second century B.C., Ssu-ma Ch'ien, made special efforts to visit as many ancient sites and monuments as possible to substantiate his records. In the second century a.d. Hsü Shen compiled a dictionary of 10,516 characters, many of which were drawn from ancient bronze and stone inscriptions. In the sixth century Li Tao-yuan wrote his commentaries on the Book of Rivers, which was fully documented with archaeological data. Throughout the ages many important discoveries were recorded and large numbers of ancient art objects and literature preserved. By the twelfth century Chinese archaeology had become a specialised subject, known as Chin-shih-hsueh, literally, a study of bronze and stone objects. A vast literature began to accumulate, reaching its height in the last two centuries.

In terms of Western political science or military doctrine it seems somewhat irrational that the leaders of Communist China should refer to great powers as “paper tigers.” It appears even more illogical that they should call atomic bombs “paper tigers,” especially when they themselves place the highest priority on the development of a nuclear capability. Yet, since the first Chinese nuclear explosion on October 16, 1964, the official Communist Press has again referred to the United States, Great Britain and the “revisionists” (both Khrushchev and the present leaders of the Soviet Union) as “paper tigers.” This same metaphor has also been applied to “imperialism” and “all reactionaries,” as well as to nuclear weapons, air-power and sea-power.

China had a system of medicine long before the advent of scientific medicine in the West. The first book about it, the Su Wen Nei Ching, was written about 300 B.C., and its detailed description of some medical phenomena cannot be surpassed even today. Despite the fact that much of the terminology is metaphysical, this traditional system of Chinese medicine is at the same time very much down to earth, being largely the result of minute observations. Consequently the symptoms of many diseases are much better described in traditional Chinese textbooks than in their modern scientific Western counterparts. Reading the Chinese books indeed opens up a new vista to a Western doctor, transforming the small range of obvious symptoms he learned at a Western medical school into a vast panorama of interconnected phenomena. It would seem that, with his reliance on laboratory procedures, the Western doctor may have been gradually losing this art of close observation; perhaps it is only artists who retain it today.