Accounts of China's contributions to world culture have progessed far beyond the “paper and gunpowder” stage, but even today they seldom emphasize the Chinese role in developing techniques essential to what is known as “the modern, centralized, bureaucratic state.” This is somewhat curious, since complex organization on a vast scale is more characteristic of our age than any other activity, and it is in precisely this field that the Chinese have probably made their most important contribution.

The history of Chinese painting is a relatively new discipline. None of us who work in that discipline can as yet rely on a binding tradition, accepted methods, or even on established facts of historical significance. It is possible for several critics to arrive at surprisingly contradictory judgments about one and the same work, or sequence of works, or about the meaning of the same evidence. Our judgments, naturally, will change; the work adjudged will not. We have to come to terms with it in the end. Coming to terms, however, does not mean a compromise between opposed views or viewers. It means that the right understanding of the work or sequence in question will sooner or later prevail—that is, the right understanding of the work as a historical monument. But how is this understanding achieved? It is this seemingly simple question, the basic problem facing the historian, that I shall discuss.

As the legend goes, the reign of Sui Yang-ti was a great heroic age. The heroes were destined to fight either on the side of or against the great emperor to come, T'ang T'ai-tsung. Before the fall of Sui, however, Sui Yang-ti summoned all the rebels to Yangchow for a tournament. The champion was to win'the title of the Supreme Rebel, to whom would be accorded the honors due a king. The plot was to let the rebels kill each other with their own hands, and the survivors would then be killed by mines set off soon after the contest was over. If there were still some survivors left, a gate which weighed one thousand chin would be lowered into the city wall to block their retreat so that a massacre might be carried out by the Imperial troops. But since Sui Yang-ti was to lose the mandate of heaven, his plot did not work. An insufficient number of rebels were killed in the arena, and the mines did not explode as planned, thanks to the happy intervention of an ancient fox who had to save the life of the true dragon, T'ang T'ai-tsung, among all the rebels. When the gate was lowered, it was caught by a giant-like bandit who supported it long enough to let the eighteen princes and the lesser rebels from all over China escape to safety. But the gate proved too much of a burden even for such a hero, and he was crushed to death.

Japanese literature of the war years (1941–45) has hardly been discussed abroad, and in Japan the tendency, until very recently, was to dismiss the entire production as “sterile,” or even to deny that any existed. Obviously more than strictly literary criteria have occasioned this reluctance to consider a most important though painful period in modern Japanese writing. Foreign scholars have hesitated to uncover dirty linen; the Japanese, embarrassed by old remembrances, naturally prefer to allude to the war in terms of its suffering, rather than in terms of the joy which most people had experienced when sharing certain ideals. On occasion, polemicists have attempted to discredit an opponent by quoting his wartime publications, but the sting of their attacks is dulled by the unspoken awareness that almost everybody was involved and, if guilty, equally so.

A Study of the Ch'ing legal system, the culmination of the experience of many dynasties, provides clues to the understanding of Chinese political behavior before extensive Western contact. For this period, the decisions of the Board of Punishments (hsing-fu) recorded in the collection of cases known as the Hsing-an hui-lan form an important body of law. Of these, the cases pertaining to the illegal punishment of prisoners by government officials are particularly interesting. An analysis of thirty of these cases suggests answers to the following questions: 1) Did the Board of Punishments have the attributes of an independent law court? 2) Was the law which the Board of Punishments applied internally consistent and capable of growth ? 3) Was protection from official brutality adequately guaranteed by law?

The Board of Punishments, one of the six ministries of the central government, was the formal organ most responsible for the administration of justice. In judicial matters, it served as a buffer between the provincial authorities on the one hand and the emperor on the other.

While Russian and Chinese wage and distribution policies in general differ from each other in terms of specific provisions and regulations, they are also generically very similar, if not identical. To provide some insight into the nature of this unity and diversity of policy, it seems best to discuss first the distributive implications of their common ideological reference, i.e. Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

Distributive Strategy and Tactics

Both the Russians and the Chinese deal with any human action as a process of material transformation, and consequently view the totality of man's actions as a chain of material transformation processes, conditioned by the distribution of ownership of the means of production as the determinant of social relations of production. Both hold that while human action is governed objectively by material and social nature and its laws, it is determined subjectively by man's technical and social awareness and thus by man's technical and social experiences. Both assert that man's increasing comprehension of nature and its laws manifests itself in increasing accumulation and in enlarged reproduction, i.e., in economic growth. Both aim for the unity of objectivity and subjectivity, i.e., for the complete reproduction of nature by man at the earliest possible moment, and both strive therefore for the most rapidly enlarging accumulation over time.

Some attention has been paid in recent years to the sociological analysis of political élites in the “new nations” of Africa and Asia with a view to understanding better their political behavior. W. H. Morris-Jones and Myron Weiner have both considered the characteristics of some of the politicians in post-independence India. But little has been done on the leadership of minority groups.

In many cases (eg., the Armenians, Copts, and Maronites in the Middle East, the Parsis in India, and the Chinese in Southeast Asia), the members of religious and linguistic minorities adapted more rapidly to modern ways than the majorities among whom they lived. Although the former sometimes enjoyed privileged status as go betweens for the European colonial rulers, they were also among the first to absorb the Western concept of nationalism. They even provided some of the early leadership for nationalist movements, until the mobilization of broader and lower levels of the population around neo-traditional religious symbols began to exclude them from the national self-definition.