The current belief is that China is a country where most land belongs to landlords who do not till their soil but suck the blood of their tenants. Dr. Sun, founder of the Chinese Republic, was under this impression when he specified in his program that “all tillers must own their soil.” The Chinese Communists took this as one of their most basic points of attack. To quote Edgar Snow:

Now, wherever the Reds went there is no doubt they radically changed the situation for the tenant fanner, the poor farmer, the middle farmer, and all the “havenot” elements. All forms of taxation were abolished in the new districts for the first year…. Secondly, they gave land to the land-hungry peasants…. Thirdly, they took land and livestock from the wealthy classes and redistributed among the poor. Redistribution of land was a fundamental of Red policy.

Until 1945, the Japanese nation had never suffered a really major defeat. Humiliations, actual as well as imaginary, had been imposed, but never outright and final loss of a war, never invasion and occupation since the descent of the Yamato people themselves from the high plain of heaven. Her remoteness in fact, and in the calculation of her leaders, her unique polity under the rule of a dynasty established for ages eternal in the minds of her people had saved Japan on each previous threatening occasion. But this time there was no escape. Japan lost the war, and all Japanese know that she lost. Just as, at an earlier date, the country provided a unique laboratory for the student of social stability and of cultural integration–a much neglected laboratory, unfortunately–so, now Japan offers the opportunity for a study of society under the most extreme forms of stress. What have been the effects of war, of catas-trophically losing war, upon Japanese society?

More than one hundred textbooks in American and world history, geography, modern problems and civics were examined recently by social studies and Asiatic specialists to evaluate the accuracy and adequacy of the material included on the Far East. Their report, Treatment of Asia in American textbooks (104 p. 40¢), has been published by the American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations, New York. Dr. Howard E. Wilson, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, coordinator and editor of the report, writes that “There may be arguments over what pupils need most to be taught about Asia; there can no longer be argument over the necessity of their being well informed.” One significant recommendation made by all the analysts was that experts in Asiatic affairs should be consulted more frequently by textbook authors and publishers to insure “accuracy, relevancy, and comprehensiveness of information included” on Asia.

In the transition of Japan into the modern world, the role of those who first introduced the techniques, institutions, and ideas of the West deserves special attention. Performing the service of what Toynbee has called “the human counterpart of the ‘transformer,’” these were the men who learned the secrets of a foreign civilization and adapted them to their own community to enable it to adjust its life to the intrusive Western society. To some degree the whole leadership of Meiji Japan carried out this function, for soon after the Restoration the pursuit and application of knowledge from the West was made official policy. For the most part the military and political leaders were concerned with the mastery of Western military techniques and administrative and economic forms. But among the intelligentsia there were those who performed the broader task of learning and teaching the manners and morals, customs, and beliefs of European society. As advocates of Westernization they were important agents of change before as well as after the Restoration.

The 1953 Chinese census reported a total population on the Chinese mainland of 582.6 million. This figure came as a surprise to Western observers, since the population figures most frequently quoted for China during the preceding twenty years had been on the order of magnitude of “about 450 million,” the 1933 estimate of the League of Nations. Although the inadequacies of Chinese population statistics and their controversial nature are well known, some understanding of the latest figure is possible by viewing it in historical perspective. Such an analysis is here presented, and is confined to the 1953 census data referring to the size of the population and its distribution among the provinces.