Not since the acquisition of the classified military periodical Kung-tso t'ung-hsün has the outside world been given so rich a store of material on the inner rationale behind Chinese foreign policy as is provided by the two volumes of Cultural Revolution compilations, Mao Tse-tung ssu-hsiang wan-sui. Although these documents cannot be authenticated as to accuracy of transcription and are obviously selective as well as edited, they nonetheless provide a wealth of insight into Mao's views on China's external affairs. In particular they throw new light on the 1958 Quemoy crisis with surprisingly frank admissions of miscalculation on Mao's part, both in terms of his objective in the bombardment and his underestimation of the American response thereto.

Although the People's Republic of China attaches little importance to elections in parliamentary democracies, elections are seen as important in societies going through the transition between capitalism and communism.1 Elections of local level leaders were carried out in the CCP-controlled base areas before 1949, and throughout the period after Liberation. The attention devoted to election propaganda and voter turn-out attest to the importance placed on mass electoral participation by the Chinese leadership.2* I wish to express my gratitude to Thomas Bernstein, Steven Butler, Victor Falkenheim, Andrew Nathan, Brian Shaw, and David Strand for reading earlier drafts of this paper and providing many useful suggestions for its revision. Needless to say, all errors are the responsibility of the author.

Because the Chinese do not publish detailed industrial and economic data, the analysis of the petroleum industry is very difficult indeed. Its defence significance makes it additionally hard to establish a firm picture of the situation. Despite the speculative content of any article on the subject, however, it seems worthwhile attempting to evaluate what information is available on Chinese oil because of the industry's growing domestic and international importance.

One of the striking contrasts between a Communist revolution and one of the “nationalist” variety lies in the differing attitudes held by the revolutionary elites towards the traditional culture. Nationalist leaders tend to come to power with a vague commitment to restore the values of the traditional society in a modern context; yet a good deal of their energy in the early years of nation-building is expended trying to relate cherished cultural doctrines to the often incompatible demands of modernisation.

Despite his claim to have advanced beyond Marxism and arrived at an entirely new conception of the nature of traditional non-Western societies, it is somewhat surprising to learn that Professor Karl Wittfogel still feels the need to seek the testimony of no less an “authority” on Asia than Karl Marx. In a recent article in this journal Professor Wittfogel has once again examined the canons of Marxism in order to find support for the theory of “Oriental despotism.” In this case the articles that Marx and Engels wrote on China during the 1850s have been rescued from obscurity and presented as major canonical texts in the evolution of the doctrine of “Oriental despotism.”

Alone of the world's Communist leaders, Deng Xiaoping has charted a course that has combined for his country rapid economic development, successful economic reform and openness to the capitalistic international economy with continued dictatorship by the Communist Party. Under his leadership Communist rule in China has survived the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union-the motherland of Communism. In the process the regime has weathered the ending of the Cold War and has become more engaged with the Asia-Pacific region. But Deng's reputation at home and abroad has been badly tarnished by his ruthlessness in masterminding the Tiananmen massacre of 4 June 1989. But that ruthlessness is absolutely central to Deng's political philosophy and strategy. For him it is the basis of order at home which alone ensures that the economic policies of reform and openness can be carried out without undermining Communist Party rule through the spread of liberal influences. In so far as statesmanship requires moral dimensions it will be necessary in assessing the quality of Deng's statesmanship to consider the meaning of statesmanship itself.

President Chiang Kai-shek's death on 16 April and President Gerald Ford's announcement that he would visit Peking in the autumn of 1975 once again direct attention to the political future of the Republic of China and the 16 million inhabitants of Taiwan. Progress towards diplomatic normalization between the United States and the People's Republic of China has been slower than many would have expected following President Nixon's visit to the mainland in February 1972. For the island's inhabitants any dramatic change in their political status may spell a permanent alteration in their life style, which has become substantially different from that of the mainland. Precisely because of this, one needs to look closely at their political aspirations and the socio-political changes that have occurred. Any political solution for Taiwan's future should be analysed with respect to its impact on these vital human interests.

According to current Chinese views, in 1949 China was liberated from three major evils: feudalism, imperialism and bureaucratic capitalism. The present article takes a closer look at the relationship between the two last mentioned. The period chosen is the early and mid 1930s, which was marked by growing tensions between the powers in East Asia, by acute economic depression and subsequent recovery, and by the gradual extension of the Nanjing Government's control over the country. On the foreigner's side, the focus will be on the British experience at a time when Great Britain's political position in the Far East was being overshadowed by Japan's thrust towards hegemony. It will be argued, the widening gap between Britain's political and economic presence in China was partly bridged by increasingly close co-operation between British business and the Chinese ruling elite.

Actually we could have picked a different name, such as the Chinese People's Party, the Revolutionary Party, the Liberation Party – any of these would have been OK. But no matter what, our intention remains to resolve the “property” (chan) issue. What are we fighting for? What is our goal all about? Getting “property” – not private property, but public property. For everybody to get rich, for everybody to lead a good life. That's why there has to be a revolution.

In their effect on marriage and the family, as in so many other domains, the reforms can be seen as having a dual thrust. On the one hand, by giving the land in long-term leases back to the family, and allowing it to invest in a variety of small and medium-sized ventures, they have restored something like the situation in rural China before the collectivization of 1956, when the family estate was the source of income and investment in opportunity for most rural Chinese. On the other hand, the reforms have been undertaken explicitly in the name of modernization, and the increases in both agricultural and rural industrial yields, along with the rise in household entrepreneurship, have taken China in some ways even further from the feudalism of pre-revolutionary days than it was during the collective era.

Chinese culture has always been considered unique in its enduring concern with morality. There is a commonly used phrase which well expresses this: guyou daode wenhua, which may be translated as “a culture which is traditionally moral.” This phrase is often used to describe the Chinese as opposed to other cultures which lay their emphasis on knowledge, religion, law, and so forth. A Chinese educator has recently made this point in contrasting Chinese and western philosophies of education. Whereas western cultures have traditionally stressed science (knowledge), religion and law, he says, Chinese culture has always stressed morality and art.

A seismic change in the residential pattern is emerging in rural China today: traditional rural houses have been rapidly erased from the face of the countryside with large numbers of peasants being relocated to modern high-rise buildings. This process of “peasant elevation” has had a monumental impact on rural China. It redefines the entitlement to land use by the rural citizenry and negotiations for a new regime of property rights concerning land administration, while, most importantly, it undermines the position of the local state in rural China, whose authority is an aggregation of three distinctive elements: coercive power inherent in the state apparatus, control over economic resources, and resonance with local morality. Based on original data collected in Chongqing, Nantong and Dezhou, this paper argues that the comprehensive uprooting of the Chinese peasantry from the land and the resulting complications have caused moral disorientation among the relocated peasants and fragmentation of local authority. The difficulty in establishing community identity in the new setting has further undermined local governance. This may in turn trigger a wave of social and political tensions that may eventually turn out to be a major political challenge to the regime for years to come.

Did growing up as singletons (only-children) convince young adults born under China's one-child policy of the superiority of singleton status and therefore the desirability of not having more than one child? This article draws on interviews with 52 childless newlyweds in Dalian, China, to help answer this question. We found that far from convincing them of the superiority of singleton status, the feelings of loneliness experienced by singletons in childhood and adulthood have convinced most of them that it is better to have a sibling than to be a singleton and thus it is better to have two children instead of one. Moreover, interviewees who did have siblings tended to corroborate singletons’ beliefs about how valuable a sibling can be in both childhood and adulthood.

Drawing on ethnographic data from the sanitation industry in Wenzhou and Guangzhou, we investigate different patterns of work organization in each city. We find that supplementary informal work can serve to subsidize low family income and therefore stabilize formal but exploitative work. In Wenzhou, the family team model creates time and space for one spouse to engage in informal work while still receiving a wage from the employer. This additional informal work significantly increases net family income, which neutralizes worker demands for better wages and working conditions in the formal sector. In contrast, Guangzhou workers are subject to relatively rigid spatio-temporal controls, impeding them from participating in informal work to supplement their formal wages. Despite receiving higher wages and more benefits, these workers are highly wage dependent and express much greater discontent than their equivalents in Wenzhou. Theoretically, we contribute to the literature on informality through a discussion of “ancillary informal work,” highlighting how access to certain kinds of informal work both subsidizes and is facilitated by formal sector employment.

Once again, the “grain problem” has emerged as a key concern for the Chinese leadership. In his report to the second annual meeting of the Eighth People's Congress in March 1994, Premier Li Peng urged authorities at different levels to place top priority on agricultural development. A Central Work Conference on Rural Development was held immediately after the close of the People's Congress. It is particularly notable that this was the second Conference since October 1993, and the National Work Conference on Agriculture and National Work Conference on “Vegetable Basket,” Grain and Edible Oil had already been held in January 1994.

A systematic concern with political culture has its heritage in the Enlightenment and 19th-century sociology, if not ancient times, but came to the fore in political science with the post-Second World War behavioural revolution and the emergence of new states whose formal institutions were similar to Western models but whose politics did not follow the Western pattern. The mainstream political science version of political culture was associated with structure-functionalism and modernization theory; a premise was that technological change could help generate modernizing mentalities, while traditional mentalities could inhibit modernizing technical change. Modernization theory went out of fashion in the late 1960s for a variety of ideological, intellectual and empirical reasons, and the political cultural approach fell from favour along with it. More recently, it seems, scholars have returned to an interest in culture, and some even place culture at the heart of emerging political cleavages.

An interesting reconstruction and description of the Nanchang Uprising of August 1, 1927, which the Chinese Communist Party and the people on the Mainland now celebrate as Red Army Day, was given by Colonel Guillermaz in The China Quarterly, No. 11. As a footnote I present translations of four accounts by three participants—Li Li-san, Chang Kuo-t'ao and Chou I-ch'ün—all written within a few weeks of the smashing of the revolt on about October 1 near Swatow, together with four other nearly contemporary Communist items.

Within the short span of twelve years since their rise to power in 1949, the Chinese Communists have completely revamped their educational system. Private institutions of higher learning have been abolished and the number of universities vastly reduced; in their place hundreds of technical institutes have been created, with an unprecedented increase in enrolment and graduates. The faculties of various universities and colleges have been amalgamated in an effort to train more and more scientific and technical personnel. New types of instruction, known as “specialty” (spetsial'nost) and “specialisation” (spetsializatsiia), have been introduced to accelerate the training of industrial experts. Emphasis on science and technology has completely replaced the traditional respect for the humanities; the highest learned organisation in Communist China today is the Academy of Sciences, and not the Academy of Letters (Hanlin Yuan) of Imperial China. A Twelve-Year Science Programme was adopted in 1956 with the avowed objective of producing 10,500 top scientists and some two million technicians by 1967, and towards this end a new University of Science and Technology was established in 1958.

This article offers a preliminary estimate of what has happened to Buddhists and Buddhist organisations in mainland China during the eleven years since the Chinese People's Republic was founded. Much of the data belongs to the year 1958 when the most rapid changes occurred. Early in 1959, the China mainland press, from which nearly all the data comes, began to give less news on Buddhism. In November 1959 the most important single source, Modern Buddhism, was withdrawn from general circulation abroad. Several sentences in the October number, suggest that Peking had become increasingly sensitive to stories of a persecution of Buddhism, and had resolved that the mainland press, at least, would not supply any more evidence of it. The picture is fairly complete, however, with the evidence already in hand.

There have been enthusiastic reports in the Chinese Press about the collectivisation movement in agriculture and animal husbandry among the forty million people of the national minorities in China. But it now appears that the socialist revolution has not developed successfully in the non-Han frontier regions of the country.