The gross value of agricultural output in the People's Republic of China increased as much in the eight years from 1978 to 1986 as it did in the 21 years from 1957 to 1978. In per capita terms, the average annual rate of growth rose from 0·4 per cent to 4·8 per cent, the most rapid growth for any comparable period since 1949. How was this dramatic turnaround achieved?

A People's.Daily editorial of 24 August 1989 heralding the early return of students to university campuses, blamed the events of May-June 1989 on students's lack of appreciation of “national essence!” (guoqing) and the fact that bourgeois liberal ideas from the west had flooded in to fill an ideological vacuum created by the lack of serious attention to education in Marxist-Leninist thought on Chinese campuses in recent years. In a long speech given before a national higher education meeting in mid July and published on 30 August, Li Tieying, head of the State Education Commission, specifically linked bourgeois liberalism and what he called “democratic individualism” with “certain courses in the social sciences” that had uncritically introduced bourgeois social theories. The suggested solution to the problem was to strengthen Party leadership on university campuses and reassert political education and education in patriotism and national identity.

The actual response has been much harsher than that. Regular undergraduate enrolments for autumn 1989 were cut from a planned 640,000 to 610,000, with these cuts mainly affecting social science and humanities specializations and national comprehensive universities directly under the State Education Commission. It was these universities which pioneered new work in the social sciences over the past decade, and many of their students took a leading part in the democratic movement. There is thus little subtlety in the attack now being made upon them. To give some specific examples, Fudan's enrolment was cut from a planned 2,000 to 1,200, Nankai's from a planned 1,200 to 800 and Beida's from a planned 2,000 to 800.

The 1946 Constitution of the Republic of China was a product of 13 years' effort by the most liberal elements of the Kuomintang to create a permanent constitution for modern China. The Constitutionalists' goal was to synthesize “autochthonous” norms from the Chinese tradition and modern western liberal values, in accordance with the pre-existing syncretism that Sun Yat-sen had created a generation before. They hoped, thereby, to reach a just balance between the claims of the individual and the claims of the collective in the modern Chinese polity.

This report is based on a visit to Hua-tung people's commune in Kwangtung province. The visit was arranged as part of the programme of the New York State Study Group on Modern China, which travelled in China during July 1973.

Among the various classes of legal documents which have become publicly available in China in recent years, few are more interesting than the growing body of reported decisions by courts and other institutions. Usually resulting, directly or indirectly, from litigation or some similar process, these interpretative rulings and decided cases have appeared in increasing numbers in the nine years following the first publication of the Supreme People's Court's own gazette. Since then a number of general collections of judicial interpretations and abstracts of court decisions have been brought out, some of which pre-date the Cultural Revolution. The Supreme People's Court now supplements its gazette with periodical collections of reports of cases, and more specialized collections of interpretations and cases have been published to meet various specific needs, academic and professional.

Access to material of this kind on a larger scale than hitherto sheds light on various aspects of the Chinese legal system itself which for foreign observers were previously obscure. Moreover, although most of the cases and decisions which are published emanate from the higher levels of the legal hierarchy, they bring the reader closer both to the practical workings of the legal system and to the thought processes which guide it.

The question which inevitably arises is whether these newly available materials should be regarded as providing more than just a heightened awareness of the dynamics of Chinese society and its legal system. Outside China, the study of Chinese law is increasingly regarded not merely as a discipline for the description and analysis of a specialized category of Chinese institutions, but more importantly as a source of detailed prescriptive norms of the kind expected from legal systems in the world as a whole.

This paper is intended to serve as a contribution to the study of school textbooks in the People's Republic of China, and, in particular, as a first look at such books since the Cultural Revolution and the death of Chairman Mao Zedong. Because of the nature of the sample it makes no claim to being definitive. But the near-impossibility of obtaining such books abroad and the dominant role they play in the Chinese classroom give the subject some importance.

Xiang Jingyu was executed in 1928 at the age of 33 and has since been enshrined as a communist martyr in China. Historically her life is of interest both as the record of an individual woman and of a specific group within a particular generation who embraced Marxism-Leninism as the solution to warlord–imperialist power in China. As a result of her martyrdom, however, it is not easy to separate the actual record of her life from her posthumous persona. This consideration is especially significant with regard to her position in the early Chinese Communist Party, and since she was charged with responsibility for building a communist women's movement, it is equally important in understanding aspects of the woman question in relation to early Party history. Careful examination of Xiang's activities tends to support the conclusion that the women's movement was accorded a low priority and that Xiang's position in the Party reflected this in spite of her posthumous elevation to high status.

We were worrying over the continuance of workers' pay differentials and wondering how to recognize the time when communism would arrive.

The current controversy between Great Britain and China regarding the legal status of Hong Kong, having lain dormant for many years, was made explicit by a public exchange of statements between the governments of the two countries during and after the visit to Beijing of British Prime Minister Mrs Margaret Thatcher in September 1982.

Few men have placed their stamp on an era as Mao Zedong did on 20th-century China. Few destinies are more ambiguous. Welcomed by many in 1949 as a liberator from the corrupt, oppressive, and ineffectual government of the Kuomintang, and as the protagonist of a great revolution in the countryside, he came to be seen as a harsher tyrant than ever Chiang Kai-shek had been, and the bringer not of liberation but of slavery and starvation to the peasantry.

Although organised by students and young intellectuals, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has had a love-hate relationship with these groups. Throughout most of a quarter century of rural insurgency, the CCP was hard put to manipulate political activities among individualistic young urban intellectuals. In the mid-twenties, the Communist Youth League (YCL) resisted the Stalinist directives of Party leaders. During the war against Japan, thought reform was deemed essential to insure the loyalty even of those who had undertaken the arduous trek to the Border Regions. Furthermore, the CCP laboured under a doctrinal handicap: although students were invaluable for organising intellectuals, workers and peasants, it was embarrassing for the party of the proletariat to have to rely upon this educated eélite. During the united front periods of the mid-20s and after 1937, students were defined as “petit bourgeois,” which made them acceptable allies. After the CCP's break with Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, a more radical party line blamed these petit bourgeois for such Stalinist follies as the Canton Commune. Throughout the “united front from below” of the early 30s, students were divided into “progressive” proletarian and “reactionary” bourgeois elements, the former to be utilised, the latter to be excluded. The ideological conundrum remains even today.

In a speech delivered at the rally commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the liberation of Korea, the North Korean Premier announced that the peasants in North Korea were now the owners of large-scale collectivised farms and that they had the firm technical foundation for bumper crops every year without strenuous efforts. He declared: “This is the beginning of a world for our farm villages.” Another spokesman of the North Korean regime has stated: “It is easy (or good) to work and enjoyable to live in the co-operativised North Korean farms. There is a bumper crop every year in the constantly changing collectivised fields and the peasants' work and living are literally song and dances.”

This research investigates the contentious use of temple assets amid widespread local state-led religious commodification in contemporary China. Based on a comparative analysis of 22 historic temples, this paper argues that given the choice, temple leaders strive for property-management autonomy, which they negotiate on two fronts. Externally, owing to the immobility of historic temple assets, temple leaders avoid antagonizing local state agents by demonstrating political conformity and the temple's economic contribution. Internally, they seek to build a donation-based merit economy to sustain the monastic institution. Since such autonomy must operate within the authoritarian state's regulatory framework, the restrained contestation of the religious leadership actually helps to strengthen state control over religion.

Non-medical costs, including costs associated with carers, travel, food and accommodation for family members who care for older people during their medical visits, can constitute a substantial part of total healthcare costs, especially for older people. Using data from the 2015 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey, this study examines the effects of such non-medical costs on catastrophic health payments and health payment-induced poverty among older people in China. Results indicate that non-medical costs account for approximately 18 per cent of total inpatient costs. The percentage is highest for those in the lowest economic brackets. Rural populations are more likely than urban populations to incur catastrophic health payments and suffer from health payment-induced poverty. Non-medical costs increase the chances of older people incurring catastrophic health payments and suffering from health payment-induced poverty. These findings suggest that policymakers should look to develop new policies that facilitate reimbursement of non-medical costs, particularly for the rural population.

Using newly available documents from the PRC Foreign Ministry Archive, this article traces the evolving legacies of the War of Resistance in the first seven years of the People's Republic. Analysis is offered of PRC campaigns against Japanese bacteriological war crimes, criticisms of American dealings with Japanese war criminals, and the 1956 trial of Japanese at Shenyang. Throughout, behind-the-scenes tensions with the Soviet Union and internal bureaucratic struggles over the Japanese legacy regarding these matters are revealed. The article thereby aims to shed light on how the War of Resistance affected post-war China's foreign relations, demonstrating how the young Republic advantageously used wartime legacies as diplomatic tools in relations with the superpowers and within the orchestrated clangour of domestic propaganda campaigns.

A farm survey conducted in Wuxi county in the 1950s found that the Chinese Communist Party had successfully “preserved the rich peasant economy” in the “newly liberated areas”: the landlords were indeed the only social class whose properties had been redistributed, yet without compromising on the magnitude of benefits received by the poor peasants. A higher land inequality in that region, coupled with an inter-village transfer of land, allowed these dual goals to be achieved. Our study further reveals that class status was determined both by the amount of land a household owned and whether it had committed certain “exploitative acts,” which explains why some landlords did not own a vast amount of land. Conversely, it was the amount of land owned, not class status, that determined redistributive entitlements, which was why 15 per cent of the poor peasants and half of the middle peasants were not redistributed any land.

In the dozen years or more since the Cultural Revolution Chinese social scientists have been through a period of relative inactivity. This is now said to have been the direct result of the interference of the “gang of four.” Since the disappearance of the “gang of four” in October 1976, social science has undergone a revival and social scientists are once again active.

The second half of 1927 is one of the most obscure periods in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. From a large and well-organised force openly playing a major role in the political and military affairs of the country, the Chinese Communist Party rapidly found itself reduced to a few small remnants fighting for their existence. As a result, the printed sources available for future historians were drastically reduced. The Communists cut their output of publications both for lack of the means to produce them, and because it was no longer prudent to reveal even as much about their plans as they had done before. The Nationalist authorities further decimated this scanty output by confiscation and repression. So much of what has been written about this period is based on verbal testimony or secondary sources, and cannot be regarded as altogether reliable.

Early in March this year visitors to China reported seeing in Canton a wall-poster with the headline “ [I]t's not a ‘gang of four’ but a gang of five!” (pu shih ‘ssu-jen-pang,’ erh shih wu-jen-pang!). The poster alleged that the new chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and premier of the State Council, Hua Kuofeng, had been a loyal follower of the Cultural Revolutionary Left led by Chiang Ch'ing, Wang Hung-wen, Chang Ch'un-ch'iao and Yao Wen-yüan from the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. It went on to claim that although he had turned against the personnel of the Left, he nevertheless remained a supporter of Leftist policies even today. We do not know whether the wall-posters “vilifying Chairman Hua,” for which seven men and two women were reportedly executed in Hangchow on 11 March 1977, and 26 people in Shanghai in early April, had carried the same accusation. But there is some evidence that certain, as yet unidentified, forces in China take a different view of the policies and attitudes of Hua Kuo-feng during the intra-elite conflict of the last few years, from that of most foreign observers of Chinese politics. Such observers have generally argued, since the spring of 1976, that Hua is a “middle-of-the-roader,” a politician having more in common with the ideas and values of the now dominant complex of veteran cadres and generals than with those of their “radical” Cultural Revolutionary adversaries.

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.