With the proclamation of Document 1, 1983, reform of marketing became one of the major targets of agricultural policy in China. This official emphasis on the need to liberalize the marketing system was, however, little more than a confirmation of a process which was already taking place. The initial reforms of labour management and prices in 1978 had led to a decentralization of economic authority to the household level. The commune system was in decline and the number of small-scale free markets was increasing rapidly as peasants took advantage of their new-found freedom to trade their surplus production as they wished. Responding to the economic stimulus offered by the new structure of prices and to the organizational flexibility offered by the decentralization of management, some households began to plan at least part of their production for sale on the market, there by initiating a process of specialization and commercialization. Once begun, this process fed backwards into production by encouraging further specialization and diversification and forwards into marketing by stimulating the emergence of longdistance trade carried out by specialist merchants and traders. In effect, the free market began to act as an engine of economic change, shaping both the structure of agricultural production and employment and the network of new economic linkages through the emerging hierarchy of market centres.

The role of the Comintern in the formation of the second Chinese Communist Party-Kuomintang (CCP-KMT) united front has long been the subject of debate. Scholars have long recognized that an understanding of Moscow's role during the pivotal year and a half prior to the Xian Incident, and especially of possible conflict between the Comintern and Mao Zedong over the issue of a united front with Chiang Kai-shek, was essential to an evaluation of subsequent CCP-Soviet relations. This article is a contribution to our understanding of this important problem.

There is a common policy bias against creating an appropriate economic environment for rural growth in many less developed countries as governments attempt to strive for rapid industrialization through various interventions in both the urban and rural sectors. As a result, signals for resource flows are distorted and incentive to raise agricultural productivity is destroyed. Such structural distortions and the low level of income mean that investment in agricultural production is often unattractive and therefore funds for that purpose are scarce. Many developing countries have, over the past 40 years, attempted to alleviate this perceived inadequacy of credits, which was seen as the only inhibiting factor to rural development, by the provision of highly subsidized and controlled finance through the creation of specialized credit institutions. However, there is an increasing recognition that this conventional approach has failed to achieve its aim and its premises are seriously challenged.

In a market economy, wages are determined by supply and demand. However, in China the government has a set of guidelines that explicitly determines the wages of workers in industry and the public sector. Although these guidelines are known to researchers on the Chinese economy, whether the actual wages truly reflect the guidelines has not been studied extensively.

The idea of building a massive dam in the Yangtze gorges has fired the imagination of Chinese and foreign engineers, adventurers and entrepreneurs since the 1920s. Politicians, financiers, presidents and chairmen have been bombarded and bamboozled with the nuts and bolts of Three Gorges and the impassioned views of project proponents and opponents. The crescendo of debate has risen steadily through decades of civil unrest, war, revolution, and national upheaval and reconstruction. Still, despite this long gestation, Chinese and foreign perspectives on the place and purpose of the proposed dam are remarkably limited in concept and substance.