1995 is the 35th year of publication of The China Quarterly. London has been the home of the journal throughout its existence and, as the world's leading scholarly journal on modern China, The China Quarterly has long been a distinguishing feature of British sinology. Since its inception The China Quarterly has been recognized world-wide as the journal of record on 20th-century Chinese affairs, publishing timely, reflective, informed and new research on a wide range of subjects. The journal's Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation (so ably compiled by Robert F. Ash since 1982) is a venerable history of all but the first decade of the People's Republic. The extensive list of books received and books reviewed (195 in 1994) are also histories of the China field in themselves.

In 1980 when I took over the editorship of The China Quarterly from Dick Wilson, I was conscious of two main challenges. One was the administrative and managerial challenge of editing the journal with the degree of efficiency that would be required; the other was the editorially strategic challenge posed by the unfolding of events in China as reform and opening to the world gained pace.

When David Wilson was appointed editor, one of the best-known American sinological professors who knew both of us wrote to congratulate me, saying I had the ideal qualifications for the job. But I was surprised all the same when my name was put forward to succeed David in the editorial chair. He had made it such a distinctively academic journal, with far more footnotes and those more abstruse, than Roderick MacFarquar ever provided. The idea seemed to me a bit out of character. I had some good degrees, it was true, and I had in early days produced a few learned legal articles with all those footnotes. But I had used my degrees to stray from the legal path into journalism and writing books about East Asia.

The year which I spent as acting editor of The China Quarterly was a time of turmoil and transition for China studies which now seems very far away. How contemporary China should be perceived was a matter for intense and sometimes bitter argument. This was part of the wider controversy over the whole nature of Asian studies and its relationship to government policy which had arisen out of the American intervention in Vietnam. The difficulty of understanding the Cultural Revolution and the lack of scholarly access to China only sharpened the debate. Yet Western China scholarship was on the verge of a new leap forward which would soon make China more penetrable than at any time since 1949. For the year of 1971–72 led from ping-pong diplomacy to Richard Nixon's on-the-spot discovery that the Great Wall of China really was great. Before long even those scholars who had maintained that China was better studied from a safe distance found that their institutions were able to secure tempting access to the mainland.

In 1968, when I took over the editorship, The China Quarterly had already established itself as the leading English-language journal on China in the world. Great credit is due to the founder editor, Rod MacFarquhar, for this achievement. It was a time for consolidating that position of pre-eminence and giving the journal a firm academic basis. The stars were right. At the School of Oriental Studies in the University of London, the Contemporary China Institute was being set up under Stuart Schram, with generous support from the Volkswagen and Ford Foundations. The China Quarterly, with its new editor, moved from an upstairs room in Oxford Street to a modern office block near the University and then into the faded grandeur of Fitzroy Square.

In the beginning was Soviet Survey, published in London by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The Hundred Flowers episode sparked a special issue, the communes a special supplement. The editors of Soviet Survey persuaded Paris HQ that China had become interesting enough to merit its own journal. I had contributed to the Soviet Survey Hundred Flowers issue and in 1958 the CCF had commissioned me to prepare a documentary volume on the theme (The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals in the United States). In early 1959, Walter Laqueur, then Soviet Survey's principal editor, asked me to edit a new journal on China.

This article examines the extent to which labour markets are emerging in the Chinese countryside, focusing on nonfarm work, and whether women participate in those new markets. The examination is based on a 1993 survey that provides new detail on types of work, employment channels, migration and income

The Chinese reforms that began in 1978 mercifully ended one of the most brutal and misguided economic regimes in modern history… [responsible for]… a manmade famine that killed millions during 1959–1961, and for state-promoted social upheaval that destroyed the lives of millions, including almost the whole intellectual class, while paralysing rural development for more than a decade between 1966 and 1978.

It all began when angry villagers accused the Party secretary of turning off the electricity to an ice lolly (binggunr or popsicle) factory whose owner had refused to pay bribes. The lolly maker had not been paying his rent but that was no reason, they said, to melt his stock and to cause the bank to foreclose on the village's most profitable enterprise.

Civil-military relations in China demonstrate a unique fusion of military and political leadership within the Communist Party. Variously described as a “symbiosis,” “dual-role elite” or “the Party in uniform,” this feature rooted in the guerrilla experience of the Chinese Communist Party was sustained over six decades by the political longevity of the Long March generation. The civil war experience formed political leaders skilled in both civil affairs and military command. Analysts of civil-military relations in China must therefore define the scope of “civil” in relation to the Chinese Communist Party.

China's recent economic surge has called attention to factors that may slow down, and perhaps even reverse, this vigorous trend. There is no shortage of items to explore, ranging from brittle politics and ingrained corruption to intensifying environmental pollution and runaway unemployment. In the long run few among these considerations are more decisive than the country's ability to feed itself: it is of critical existential importance, and it subsumes a universe of political, social, environmental and technical capabilities and limitations.

National leaders need security protection against political assassinations, espionage, terrorism and many other dangers, and therefore almost every country has a specialized organization to provide such protection. In the United States, the President is protected by the Secret Service of the Treasury Department, and in the Soviet Union, the Kremlin denizens were guarded by the Ninth Directorate of the KGB. The Chinese security system for the top leadership, consisting mainly of the Central Security Bureau in Zhongnanhai, is however distinctive in several respects. Institutionally it has a peculiarly complex set of arrangements which result in some puzzling divisions of responsibilities. It also relies heavily on a military detachment, Unit 8341. Above all, the Chinese central security apparatus can, and does, play a more active and indispensable political role than is common in other countries.

During the reform era, there have been two important developments in China's administrative system. First, there has been a moderate degree of administrative decentralization in the area of cadre appointment. Prior to 1983, the central Party authorities – formally the central Organization Department (OD) – were responsible for appointing cadres down to the bureau level; the 1983–84 reforms delegated bureau-level appointments to ministries and provinces. As a result, the Centre is responsible for appointing fewer cadres than before; as of 1983, it had 7,000 cadres on its management list, a reduction of some 6,000 from the 1980 list. The second development is that the Centre has sought to regulate the appointment decisions that it no longer controls directly and to monitor officials’ performance and conduct. To this end, new and increasingly detailed procedures have been laid out to guide appointment decisions and there have been efforts to strengthen the specialized monitoring agencies.

Rarely does a researcher have the opportunity to participate in something he has described and even predicted. This reporter was therefore both honoured and fascinated to be part of the International Symposium on the Great Wall (Chctngcheng guoji xueshu yontao hui), sponsored by the China Great Wall Society, of which Huang Hua, the former Foreign Minister (1976–82) of the PRC, is chairman.

To a casual observer, Canada may appear to be very much like the United States, to which it is attached by a long and undefended land border. A more detailed inspection, however, indicates that Canada is different. The differences can be seen in many aspects, and have coloured the development of academic disciplines and the character of intellectual debate, including studies of China.