Foodstuffs comprise the largest single category of urban supply in China, and food accounts for over half the expenditures of the average urban household. Grain and other starchy staples constitute the major component of urban food supply, followed by vegetables and meat. In terms of weight or volume, far more vegetables than meat are consumed by city dwellers, though in terms of value meat may have the edge. The focus here is on vegetables, in particular the ecology of production, the organization of procurement and the structure of the marketing system. The logistics of feeding urban populations is critical in any complex society, indicative inter alia of priorities and procedural preferences in the social system. To examine the organization of urban vegetable supply therefore offers clues to these social priorities as well as to prevailing levels of organizational sophistication.

An organization must have rules, and so must a state. A constitution is a set of general rules, it is the fundamental law.… Constitution-making is a matter of science.Mao Tse-tung On 5 March 1978 the People's Republic of China promulgated its second constitution in little more than three years and the third since its establishment in 1949. What functions does a constitution serve in the Chinese political-legal system? Is it a sham not worth the paper on which it is printed? Is it an artifice of propaganda designed to impress and mislead foreigners? Does it have legal as well as political significance? The 1954 Constitution was not revised for two decades – why then was its 1975 successor so quickly overtaken by events? What are the differences among these basic documents?

Less than three years ago, in the early stages of the anti-Teng Hsiao-p'ing campaign of 1976, the Chinese press abounded with statements of the following kind:

[Capitalist roaders] energetically peddle the economic thinking of the bourgeoisie, saying that science and technology are most important… They advocate letting experts run factories, oppose putting proletarian politics in command and advocate material incentives… They oppose the activation of both central and local initiatives and reimpose the practice of “direct central control” …by the ministry concerned, oppose walking on two legs, lay onesided stress on things big and foreign, and oppose independence and selfreliance.

What was the role of Tachai, Mao Tse-tung's model village meant for emulation in agriculture, in the 1975–76 struggle towards national power of the Chiang Ch'ing group? In getting the facts straight on this matter, I will throw light on some facets of local and national political power in China. I will especially highlight the question of the extent to which ruling groups at the state centre have a somewhat independent basis for more or less autonomous action.

In January 1977, People's Daily announced that the scholarly journal Historical Research (Li-shih yen-chiu) had since 1973 been one of the “ periodicals of the ‘ gang of four.’ ” Collective contributors such as the Liang Hsiao and Lo Ssu-ting groups were accused of presenting a dogmatic line only corrected after October 1976, when the “ gang of four ” was smashed and the editorial authority of the journal was handed back to the Academy' s Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences.