Recognising that pre-Communist China in the 1930s was not a very prosperous or well-ordered community, even before the Japanese invasion, we should nevertheless examine what information is available about the level of its productivity and well-being, as a standard with which to compare such information as we can obtain today. This is fairer than comparing productivity in recent years with that of 1949, which is what Communist propagandists prefer to do (and many western economists are naïve enough to follow them). In 1949 the country was so disorganised that a substantial improvement in productivity was to have been expected as soon as any stable government was established.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with a particular evaluation or interpretation of the 1953 census registration—“the first modern census of China”—one must admit that the few published statistics have been thoroughly covered and analysed. Not enough attention, however, has been given to the system that was established to produce the population data published since 1953. Most of the analysis has naturally focused on acceptability of the figures themselves and reasonableness of the indicated rates of growth, rather than on the capabilities of the responsible institutions and individuals to collect the necessary data for current population statistics—the only means of determining a nation's population and its rate of growth during the intercensal period.

China's nuclear detonation at Lop Nor has dramatised the last decade of advancement in Chinese Communist strategic thinking and weapons production: use of Uranium-235 suggests the availability of a uranium hexafluoride gaseous diffusion plant, aside from the plutonium-producing reactors already identified, and suggests the imminence of a Communist Chinese H-Bomb. The recent evidence of Chinese nuclear competence and speculation regarding the development of modern delivery systems underscore advances in strategic thought over the last decade. It is perhaps less obvious that the intellectual genesis of current weapons developments dates from the first decade of the nuclear era, when Chinese Communist leaders attempted to reconcile their concepts of nuclear warfare with Maoist revolutionary doctrines. Although public pronouncements between 1945 and 1955 emphasised the conservatism of Communist Chinese military strategy, they hinted at strategic innovations—regarding “tactical” nuclear and thermonuclear weapons—which may help to explain the priority, sacrifice and direction of China's weapons programme in more recent years.

History is not going to find it easy to render a full judgment on the Second World War. The impact of the technological developments which that war stimulated is still working itself out. These developments alone have set to the politicians of various countries a series of problems which demanded action and which required a more complex, sustained intellectual effort than was needed in earlier times. The more advanced and more powerful the country, the more the problems arising from technological development, especially in weaponry, placed themselves in the centre of attention. For a full decade after the end of the war, it was generally thought that the bipolar distribution of power was a lasting phenomenon. The second postwar decade produced some evidence that this might not be so, but even now no one can be quite sure what qualifications or exceptions to bipolarity are significant today or will be in the future. The decolonisation process, attended by the emergence of many new, for the most part modernising, states and paralleled by the restructuring of European politics, clearly is one of the major phenomena of the period. Here, too, the future is obscure. Throughout the period, there has been a pervasive uncertainty as to what cultural and social values the world's peoples would subscribe to and what political leadership they would follow.

Various interpretations of Chinese politics have been offered since the tumultuous days of the abortive “great leap” and the high tide of the Mao-Khrushchev debate. The perplexing problem which has confronted the Western analyst has been that of estimating the effectiveness of Communist policies designed to initiate predictable and controlled changes. Though differently perceived, this same problem now underlies the principal concerns of the Chinese Communist elite. Rigid adherence to long-held views of development may have blinded Peking's leaders to subtle—but crucial—distinctions in the actual situation of their own society, and they may now be unable to prevent the advancement of fundamental changes which contradict cherished goals and programmes. This article seeks to analyse one limited dimension of the current disparity between policy and social reality in terms of the concept of revolutionary struggle.

If as a theorist Mao Tun was without a theory, as a polemicist he was without a polemic. What plagued him there also hurt him here, and for the same reason: he did not as yet have any firm conviction regarding his standpoint. He did not have a solid base to operate from.

On December 9, 1963, Singapore's Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, in presenting a general policy statement of his government for the coming year to the Singapore Legislative Assembly, noted that in Singapore's Nanyang University “a situation is developing which if left unchecked will make it more a University of Yenan than of Nanyang,” and that “Indeed the problems of Nanyang can never be resolved until the political abuse the Communists make of it is exposed and stopped.” Lee's remarks, like his previous ones on the subject of Nanyang University, did not fail to touch on a raw nerve of the University's problems. But as in the past, the raising of the spectre of Yenan has tended to obscure the complex patterns of pride and prejudice and the dilemmas of educational policy confronting the Malaysian Chinese community and indeed the hua ch'iao (Overseas Chinese) of Southeast Asia generally, of which the University is but an expression. Nanyang University's problems today provide an index to the paradoxes and the conflicting appeals as a whole that stir the community whose interests it was originally designed to serve.

This article surveys the development of Chinese education within South-East Asian Chinese societies, and briefly relates it to the integration and assimilation of the hua ch'iao into indigenous societies.

The Chinese are still divided into two groups. One group is very left in its views, very vociferous, very active, very humourless, very narrow minded and forceful, and knows what it wants and intends to achieve its objects by fair means or foul, regardless of what the rest of the population may think. The other group is undoubtedly immensely larger, though one might be excused for not realising this, as it lacks cohesion and the people in it merely wish to be left alone to carry on their normal avocations. Since it has no strong feelings not only does this group not speak out, but in many cases it finds the line of least resistance is to support the other group when asked to do so.

The 1962 Annual Report for the District of Kuching, The Sarawak Gazette, May 31, 1963.