This is my fourth book, following the completion of such works as Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1920-1921), The Final Consciousness of the Chinese National Liberation Movement (1929-1931), and Rural Reconstruction Theory (1932-1936). During the spring of 1941, I gave a two-month series of specialist lectures at Guangxi University, and during the next spring, I set out to write the book in Guilin, a city in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in China. By 1944, I had finished six successive chapters totaling about 80,000 Chinese characters, but I stopped in the middle of writing when Guilin was invaded by the Japanese. After China's victory, I promoted domestic peace throughout China and could afford no time to do any actual writing. In November 1946, I returned from Nanjing to Beibei, a district in China's southwest Chongqing City, where I resumed my writing; meanwhile, I was also delivering some lectures. The original manuscripts I had prepared in Guilin, however, only served as the raw material, which had to be reorganized and restructured. But now (i.e., June 1949), the whole book has been finished at last, after a struggle of nine years’ duration from the beginning to the end.

In these four books, which have been written successively, it has become essential to restate certain ideas. This is because certain issues under discussion are basically related to each other or are simply different versions of the same issue. Moreover, my thought continues to derive from the same tradition, and though there might be a difference in the maturity of these ideas, my philosophy is fundamentally unchanged. Indeed, as the fourth book is connected to the third, there is a closer relationship between these books. As a result, if you have managed to read the third book, you can better understand the key points in the fourth book. The third book, Rural Reconstruction Theory , once entitled The Future of the Chinese Nation , consists of two parts. Part I is concerned with gaining an understanding of the problems in China and Part II with finding solutions to the problems in China. To resolve a problem, efforts must be made to understand it. Problems in China arise out of the international exchanges over the last hundred years, as Western influence and Western culture spread to the East.