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An Overview of 50 Years of the People's Republic of China: Some Progress, but Big Problems Remain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Lucian W. Pye
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Extract

In the very first sentence of the first article in the first issue of The China Quarterly, Howard L. Boorman, seeking to summarize the first decade of the PRC, wrote: “The man who faces his typewriter to set down a thousand words of coherent comment on the Communist revolution in China confronts not only a massive experiment in social engineering but also the fact that his interpretation of that experiment will expose as much of the author as it does of the revolution.” Except that now it is a computer and not a typewriter, little is different for anyone who would try to summarize what is now 50 years of the PRC. True, enough time has gone by for us now to have not just the initial standard interpretations as to what transpired in China but revisions and then further re-revisions of the story, so that even though we cannot be so bold as to say that we now have the full truth, we probably are a bit closer.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 159 , September 1999 , pp. 569 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1999

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References

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