Shanghai is the largest city in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Once part of Kiangsu Province, it is now governed as an independent municipality consisting of the city proper and 10 suburban counties annexed to the city in 1958. Shanghai municipality ranks as the world's third most populous metropolitan area, after New York and Tokyo. However, if the rural residents of Shanghai municipality are excluded from the comparison, then Shanghai's urban population of 6 or 7 million ranks it within the 15 largest urban areas of the world.

It is now generally agreed that the intensity and magnitude of social commitment witnessed in China's revolutionary literary movement of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is unparalleled among literary movements of the modern period. Accordingly, an increasing amount of scholarly attention is being directed to the general problem of the relationship between literature and revolution in China. Unfortunately, however, our overall conception of the scope of this revolutionary activity remains exceedingly narrow. One reason for this may be that for many scholars the subject of literature and revolution immediately brings to mind the dynamic, but familiar, New Culture literary revolution and the May Fourth generation of westernized revolutionary writers. As a result, discussions on literature and revolution normally dwell on the literary activities and views of a familiar cast of literary intellectuals featuring Lu Hsün, Kuo Mo-jo, Mao Tun and a variety of new players “introduced” from time to time. Unhappily, this pre-occupation with revolutionary elites and the western culture which so profoundly inspired them tends to obscure the role of a second and equally important force on the revolutionary literary and cultural scene, the diverse popular literary and artistic movement.

The attitudes of Chinese Communist legal writers and political theorists towards international law, their conception of its functions, and their interpretation of the meanings of the key terms are predictably different from, and often opposed to, those of writers in the western tradition. Such differences existed before the establishment of the People's Republic of China, and they became more pronounced with the Chinese Communists' adoption of Marxism-Leninism as their official state ideology. The divergence has become increasingly centred on the concept of sovereignty, and on the assumptions as to its nature and its relationship to international law.

In communist theory, the state is a coercive apparatus that exercises the dictatorship of a single class. Proletarian revolution consists of seizing that apparatus from the oppressing capitalist class and establishing the dictatorship of the working class. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a transitional period in which the final remnants of capitalism are eliminated and the means of production socialized. During this peiod the Communist Party, as the vanguard of the proletariat, exercises leadership in the dictatorship in order to guide the state to full socialism and the eventual withering away of the state.

The year 1976 was the most traumatic for China since the foundation of the People's Republic, and so it is hardly surprising that the economy suffered. The death of Premier Chou En-lai in January and the declining health of Chairman Mao Tse-tung intensified a power-struggle that swiftly came to a peak when the chairman died in September. How to run the economy was one of the main issues disputed by the so-called radicals and moderates among the leadership, though there is no evidence that the radicals, Chiang Ch'ing and her associates, ever gave much real thought to the practical side of production. Both the power-struggle itself and the relaxation of authority that resulted from it did considerable harm to the economy. This was aggravated by the disastrous Tangshan earthquake in July which severely damaged the immediate area. Thereafter, relief and repair work put a great strain on rail services, fuel resources and factories elsewhere in China.

Recently there has been renewed interest among economists for a comparative analysis of Chinese and Indian economies. Such comparative analysis is natural considering the similarity of size, population, historical background and contemporary significance of the two countries. For the economist, study of the objectives, priorities, development strategies and resource mobilization techniques, and the end-result of the same in terms of growth rate, distribution and stability in the two countries, have major academic rewards.

This is a report about the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with supplementary notes on Peita and the Central Institute of Nationalities, all of which I visited while in China between 15 December 1975 and 13 January 1976.