Mao Tse-tung's proposal in 1938 for the “Sinification of Marxism” remains one of the most intriguing issues in the ideological history of 4 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Strangely, although this concept is given passing treatment in any number of studies of the Chinese Communist movement, little attempt has been made to subject it to a more detailed historical or theoretical analysis. Broadly, the concept has two interrelated, though distinct, dimensions. In its political aspect, it refers to the specific ways in which the foreign theory of Marxism-Leninism can be adapted to the concrete historical realities of modern China, including the under-development of capitalism, the absence of a large urban proletariat, the central role of the rural peasantry, and so forth. These are difficult problems of political theory, and they have not yet been resolved satisfactorily either in Chinese or western scholarship. Whether Marxism has been truly Sinified in this sense – and whether it has survived the process intact – are highly controversial issues, and I do not propose to deal with them here.

An old saw of administrative theory holds that the structure of any institution should be generated from the goals for which it was established. This is an ideal, a means by which leaders explain programmes to followers, and thus also a road to understanding for outsiders.

The dispatch of urban people to rural places in China is a plan that has often been analysed in terms of its aims, and it may throw light on the limits of usefulness of this approach to policy programmes in general. Rural resettlement, which contravenes the usual patterns of increasing urbanization in the economic development process, is not unique to the People's Republic of China. Cambodia and Vietnam have recently established major rustication schemes. Other examples can be traced back to earlier days in the Soviet, German and even the old Roman and Chinese empires. Israel has its kibbutzim. The philosopher Berkeley advised young men to go west, where large cities had not yet grown. The very breadth of the possible comparisons suggests a question: is this one institution or several?

This paper attempts to assess just how much and in what ways behaviour has changed between the generation that experienced the Son-fan, Wu-fan Campaign in 1951–52 and the generation that pitched itself into the Cultural Revolution of 1966–69. We focus in the first instance on the confluence of the San-fan with a thought reform movement in the schools in 1951–52, in which students “drew a clear line of demarcation between self and family,” often denouncing their parents, and in which a youth vanguard forced their teachers as well to criticize themselves. Impressionistic comparisons between that campaign and the Cultural Revolution of the ways in which adoles-cents tried to establish continuity between patterns of behaviour learned in childhood and adult social-political roles may reveal differences in the direction and nature of their rebelliousness and may reflect changes in family relationships and in socialization patterns.

I had the opportunity to participate in the five major negotiations between China and Japan from 1972 to 1975 (i.e., the talks over the normalization of diplomatic relations, and the aviation, trade, shipping and fishery agreements), and to observe the tactics, both offensive and defensive, used by the Chinese participants. Personal impressions are bound to be biased, but fortunately there are at least two books which give us detailed accounts of negotiations between China and Japan in the post-war period. These are The Record of Fishery Talks between China and Japan and The Secret Memorandum of Sino-Japanese Negotiations. The former, written and edited by the Japan-China Fishery Association, whose leaders negotiated with China in 1955, is a complete record of the first fishery talks between the Japanese fishermen's organization and Chinese authorities. These negotiations centred on the regulations which Japanese and Chinese fishermen were to observe in the East China and Yellow Seas in order to avoid collisions and other accidents. The negotiations also covered some conservation measures, such as the establishment of several conservation zones along the coast of China and seasonal restrictions of the catch of some types of fish.

From the frequency of its employment and the scope of its use, the concept of “fascism” would seem to be one of the most important cognitive tools in the analysis of modern China. At least from the time of Sun Yat-sen, Marxists, of whatever sort, have regularly employed the characterization “fascist” to identify their Chinese opponents. Since Chinese Marxists now employ the same term to identify the Soviet Union, and the Soviets use it to identify Chinese Marxists, some have counselled the abandonment of the expression as serving only polemic purpose.

Students of contemporary Chinese society must confront early in their training a problem that has become a dominant feature of their area of interest: the scarcity and crudity of useful information. Most successful efforts to cope with this central problem have been based on the sound strategy articulated by such practitioners as Michel Oksenberg and Martin Whyte: intimate familiarity with the variety of sources available, and a careful cross-checking between them for consistency. Good research on China, as a result, is often a function both of total immersion in existing sources and of an active sociological imagination. The field has apparently been blessed with people who have both of these attributes in abundance: not only is there a large body of sound descriptive and analytical work, but there also exists a number of competing, theoretically-important hypotheses about social processes in China since the Revolution.

In the dozen years or more since the Cultural Revolution Chinese social scientists have been through a period of relative inactivity. This is now said to have been the direct result of the interference of the “gang of four.” Since the disappearance of the “gang of four” in October 1976, social science has undergone a revival and social scientists are once again active.