Under the Confucian government of men, the Sino-barbarian dyarchy of the Ch'ing dynasty could be preserved only by a careful balancing of Chinese and Manchu personnel. Once the half-and-half division of posts had been set up at the capital after the Manchu conquest, the maintenance of this rough proportion became a guaranty both of Chinese participation in the central government and of Manchu control over it. The problem of Manchu control cut into the usual problems of personnel management in a clique-ridden bureaucracy. The imperial government was a political labyrinth of personal, provincial, regional, racial, ideological and functional groupings and relationships—confusing to the novice and baffling to the foreigner. Manchu domination of this bureaucracy was an exacting and delicate task: it was essential both to use the best Chinese talent and to keep it diluted with a proper proportion of Manchus. If the official hierarchy at the capital contained too many Manchu incompetents, the régime might become dangerously inefficient. If the hierarchy in the provinces became all Chinese, Manchu rule might soon collapse.

During 1951, with the release of all but a handful of Japanese business leaders from purge designation, one of the more dramatic episodes in the occupation of Japan reached its conclusion. Like the broader Zaibatsu dissolution program, to which it was related, the economic purge represented an unusual experiment in the redirection of a nation's political life through measures impinging on business power.

The Institute of History and Philology was the only one among the 13 research institutes of the Academia Sinica which evacuated Nanking and moved to Formosa in the winter of 1948. Under the able direction of the late Director Fu Ssu-nien, the entire collection of Anyang finds, the valuable library, the documents from the former Imperial Archives, the collection of ethnological material, as well as the most complete phonetic and linguistic records were shipped intact to Formosa and installed at its new headquarters at Yang Mei, Taipeh.