Historians of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (or the Taiping Rebellion) have so far discovered forty-two books officially published by that regime. About thirty more titles are verified, but the books have not been found. Students working with archives and other sources should be on the lookout for these unfound documents.

Studies of Asian agriculture have argued that land-tenure systems have often retarded agricultural development, in that unequal land distribution and widespread tenancy have given peasants little power to resist landlord efforts to squeeze and rack-rent them. Because landlords have been disinclined to devote their wealth and energies to improving the land, agriculture has stagnated and peasants have became poorer. A conspicuous weakness in this argument is that it begs the question whether a land-tenure system of more or less equal holdings best promotes agricultural development. The land-tenure system influences income distribution in agriculture, but it is impossible to say how a given income distribution influences landlord consumption, saving, and investment decisions unless more is known about the social and political institutions of a given rural society.

The general purpose of the Community Development Programme in India is to induce village communities (through extension methods and offer of financial and technical assistance) to participate actively, and to take initiative ultimately, in matters which directly concern their welfare. The approach to community development administration has been to create within each district separate administrative units for rural planning and development called blocks; to give each block a unified organization consisting of government personnel specially trained to work with village people; to provide each block with assured funds according to the provisions of schematic budgets formulated by the Government of India; to establish it as the common agency for all development departments working in rural India; and to ensure its efficient working through a series of co-ordinating committees and controlling authorities at the district, state, and national levels. National objectives have been stated in the five-year plans in terms sufficiently flexible to allow adjustment within each state to suit local circumstances.

China is known for a long and outstanding tradition of historical writing, but it has been only in this century that an examination of history has developed in periodicals. The earliest of these periodicals was Hsin-min Ts'ung-pao, which was published in 1902 in Yokohama, under the chief editorship of Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. Since that time, there have been numerous other periodicals, the most recent being Wen Shih, first published in October 1962, in Peking. Little effort seems to have been made to study the development of these historical journals. There have been many discussions of Chinese historiography, by Ku Chieh-kang, Chin Yü-fu, Wei Ying-ch'i, Teng Ssu-yü, and J. Gray, to name a few, but these scholars have largely overlooked periodical writings.

The study of Chinese differs in some important respects from the study of the other languages that figure importantly in American college curricula. This is because the structure and nature of the language itself are so different, and because Chinese culture is so distinct. Santayana said that to learn another language is to acquire another soul; we might add that in the case of Chinese there is less certainty about which is the possessor and which the possessed.