If one were to believe the official histories written in North Korea during the past few years, political developments in North Korea after 1945 and even the entire history of the Korean Communist movement would seem to have been relatively simple. According to North Korean historians, the new proletariat took over the leadership of the struggle for national liberation after the bourgeois-led March First Movement of 1919 had failed. The Korean Communist Party, first organised in 1925, ceased to operate in 1928 because the sectarians in the Party leadership failed to establish a link with the surging movement of the workers and peasants. The national liberation movement recovered its vigour and direction in the 1930s only because Kim D-song, whose strategy and tactics were the most scientific and most in accord with the principles of Marxism-Leninism, provided leadership. Kim Il-song became the “beacon” of the revolutionary movement, and the Korean People's Revolutionary Army under him fought against the Japanese “shoulder to shoulder with the Soviet Army.”

The establishment of Communist power in North Korea represents one more example of the triumph of purposive political behaviour over impersonal economic and social forces and as such merits the attention of all those who are concerned about the survival of the theory and practice of a free society in a shrinking world. If purposive Communist behaviour can become the prime mover of history, then so can the dedicated efforts of those with different conceptions of ends and means in the solution of human problems.

On October 23, 1962, Premier Kim Il-song outlined the foreign policy of his government before the Supreme People's Assembly, meeting in Pyongyang. His lengthy speech, entitled “Immediate Tasks of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea,” ranged over both domestic and foreign policy issues. To set forth the major themes of that speech is a convenient method of introducing the foreign policy of North Korea.

Since the end of the Second World War, which brought the division of the country into northern and southern halves, North Korea has become a thoroughly orthodox Communist state with but few deviations from the Russian type. The “Marxist-Leninist line” has been followed with fidelity and enthusiasm in the field of economic planning and organisation as laid out in both the early Five-Year Plans of Soviet Russia and in the similar pattern of socialisation in Red China. What deviation exists is said to be characteristic of the transitional period in building Socialism or a “people's democracy,” where exploiting elements still exist, as contrasted with the Soviet Union, where it is claimed “Socialism” is a reality. The government so far has launched the two One-Year Plans of 1947 and 1948, the first Two-Year Plan of 1949–50 with emphasis on Soviet assistance, the Three-Year Plan of 1954–56, the first Five-Year Plan of 1957–61, and the Seven-Year Plan of 1961–67.

In a speech delivered at the rally commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the liberation of Korea, the North Korean Premier announced that the peasants in North Korea were now the owners of large-scale collectivised farms and that they had the firm technical foundation for bumper crops every year without strenuous efforts. He declared: “This is the beginning of a world for our farm villages.” Another spokesman of the North Korean regime has stated: “It is easy (or good) to work and enjoyable to live in the co-operativised North Korean farms. There is a bumper crop every year in the constantly changing collectivised fields and the peasants' work and living are literally song and dances.”

It is important to know the structure of the Korean economy prior to the division of the country in order to understand agricultural development in North Korea in terms of its capital expenditure and output during the post-war period.

A knowledge of judicial and administrative structure plays a vital part in understanding the government and politics of any society. In a Communist society, the administrative apparatus plays an important role, not only in controlling the society but also in implementing Party and government directives. To fully understand the government and politics of North Korea, it may prove helpful to investigate the administrative structure by which the North Korean leaders control the society and remain in power. After a decade and a half of political rule, these North Korean leaders are faced with constant social changes and rising pressures from below. The relations between political power and political institutions, between political ideal and social reality, between the formulation and implementation of policy, have in fact been a major ideological concern for North Korea's administrators, a preoccupation they share with the leaders of other Communist societies. The amount of information made available about the North Korean judicial and administrative system has been scanty at best. This article therefore is exploratory and not definitive in nature. By utilising the materials that are available this article attempts to present North Korean views and attitudes about law and administration, and to describe the institutional framework in which the legal and administrative apparatus functions; at the same time it also attempts to examine the Soviet and Communist Chinese impact on the development of North Korea's administrative system.

When a revolutionary movement seizes power, a Communist one no less than others, it faces the extra-revolutionary task of establishing a loyal and efficient military organisation to consolidate its conquests. In order to ensure unchallenged loyalty, the leaders of the revolution must, first of all, fill the army with their supporters. In order to secure an efficient phalanx, they are at the same time compelled to professionalise their fighting force. However, in the midst of a profound sociopolitical upheaval, these two objectives are not easily fused into one. The North Korean People's Army (NKPA), however, was in a unique position for its strengthening processes from its foundation in 1945. First of all, the NKPA did not need to fight against well-equipped Japanese forces. Secondly, it did not face such complex problems as the dispersal of enemy officer cadres, the securing of enemy loyalty and sympathy, a Civil War and its aftermath, all of which had caused considerable worries to the Communists in the Soviet Union and China. When absolute loyalty is doubtful, officers' professional qualifications are a dubious asset. The Party can never relax its leadership for the sake of a more professional army.

An examination of the educational objectives of North Korea and the system which implements these objectives reveals the true image of a country only dimly perceived since it disappeared behind the Bamboo Curtain after its liberation from the Japanese in 1945.

A leading figure in the field of modern Chinese philosophy, Fung Yu-lan (Feng Yu-lan) has lived and worked amidst the intellectual and political tensions which have characterised the recent history of his country. His major work, Chung-kuo Che-hsueh Shih (History of Chinese Philosophy), was published in the 1930s, and is known in the West through the monumental translation into English prepared by Professor Derk Bodde of the University of Pennsylvania. Fung's technical philosophical theories were defined and articulated in his wartime writings during the 1940s. Like many of the leading Chinese intellectuals, he has now embraced Marxism-Leninism, the new orthodoxy which provides the doctrinal creed for contemporary China even as Confucianism did for the scholar-officials of the imperial period.

This article is concerned with the nature, functions and scope of the institution in the People's Republic of China that is commonly referred to as contracts. The paper as a whole ultimately focuses on three problems: (1) the nature of this institution; (2) whether this institution, if it is of a different nature from the Western contract, performs tasks in the Chinese context not unlike those of the institution of contracts in the West: and (3) how it performs those tasks.

It is the aim of this paper to examine the Chinese Communist movement in 1930 and in particular the policies which bore the name of Li Li-san. The Li Li-san “line” was essentially an attempt to use the rural based Red Army to gain an urban base for the Communist revolution in China. As such it marked a transitional period between the emphasis on urban uprisings of earlier years and complete withdrawal to the countryside after this period. Similarly it was a transitional period in the relations between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Communist International (CI), moving from the complete direction of the CCP from Moscow to the relative seclusion of the CCP in the 1930s.

Despite the noticeable progress registered since 1954 in the reorganisation of a civilian administrative structure in North Vietnam, after three years much still remained to be done. In particular, while the régime had, from the very start, repeatedly pledged itself to hold popular elections at the earliest possible opportunity to all organs of government, these promises had never been kept, probably out of a desire not to upset the delicate political balance between North and South engineered by the Geneva agreements and to give the South a convenient pretext for repudiating them. But, when the deadline set at Geneva for a referendum in both halves of the divided land on the question of re-unification had expired and it became apparent to Hanoi that it could no longer hope to gain control of South Vietnam at the polls, the last reason for postponing unilateral action in the North vanished. By 1957, official sources in the D.R.V. were openly acknowledging that the situation with regard to elections had indeed become anomalous and even admitting that

the state apparatus had not yet become sufficiently strong; in many places organs of people's power had not been re-elected for a long time. In some areas people's Councils have almost not been functioning at all or have functioned only formally. Some administrative committees were being appointed by higher organs, whereas they had to be elected by people's Councils.

In the November 9, 1962, issue of the People's Daily, a cartoon shows President Kennedy seated at a restaurant table waving a broken missile on the end of a fork and giving his order to a bald, obsequious waiter who stands with pad and pencil in hand. The caption: “His Appetite Grows With The Eating.” Kennedy says “I'll have fried Il-28 bombers next and sugar machete for the sweet course.” The waiter can hardly be mistaken for anybody but Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.