In this article, I shall attempt to give an overview of the most important political and ideological developments during the past six years, and in this context, to assess current trends in China. The three-word title is, of course, deliberately modelled on the Great Leap slogan “Politics in command”, and is intended to evoke the problem of whether or not policy-making since 1978 has been largely shaged by economic realities, and/or by the economic goals of the, leadership I have placed a question mark after it because, though I shall certainly express some opinions on this topic before I have done, I doubt that the issue can as yet be regarded as finally settled.

In the past three decades Taiwan has gained in terms of its economy but has substantially waned in terms of its international status.

Economically, Taiwan has performed so impressively that it has become one of the newly industrialized countries (NICs) that are the envy of many developing nations. Its sustained high growth rate over a fairl, long period commands respect from economists all over the world. In 1983 the GNP of the country approached US$50 billion and its per capita income reached US$2, 444. It is one of the world's top 15 trading nation" and has enjoyed a favourable balance of payments for many years. The 1983 exports and imports were valued at US$25, 117 million and 20, 285 million, respectively.

Much has occurred in Taiwan's domestic politics since The China Quarterly last reviewed them in December 1975. Taiwan has completed one cycle of succession in the leadership of its governing institutions and is now beginning another. Following his father's death in 1975 Chiang Ching-kuo achieved both firm control over the Nationalist political establishment and apparent popularity with the Taiwanese public. Now, in the mid 1980s, President Chiang continues to maintain an intricate balance between the generally conservative senior generation still in power and the somewhat progressive junior generation he is positioning to succeed them.

Just as the Greek hero Odysseus faced many misfortunes and great challenges and yet overcame them before returning to his beloved Ithaca, so, too, the Republic of China on Taiwan in 1949–50 faced insurmountable odds and difficulties and year-to-year crises thereafter, and yet also overcame them to achieve economic modernization and prosperity.

Just below the glass-sheathed surface of Taiwan's modern cities, urban life is structured by webs of social ties that may be among the closest knit and farthest flung in the world. Family-centred, these personal networks bind urban residents to one another, to kin in the countryside, and to kin all over the globe, obliterating the neat social distinctions between urban and rural, domestic and foreign. Family networks undergird both the society and the economy of Taiwan. Over the past 35 years Taiwan's families have been if not the island's greatest, certainly its least appreciated resource. Family mobility strategies have both speeded development and tempered disparities due to ethnicity, class and spatial location. Yet these same families may be the greatest obstacle to further, capital-intensive development, for they are insular and atomistic, and their resources are limited and subject to periodic break-up. However, social change is underway that is likely to reduce the size of the family per se, and increase the importance of supra-family kinship networks. Such shifts would have far-reaching effects on the society and economy of the island.

Owen Rutter's somewhat idyllized picture of an essentially agricultural Taiwan could have portrayed the 1950s, or, equally, Taiwan at any time in the more than 300 years of Chinese settlement there. Most of the Chinese who crossed the Taiwan Straits to settle in Taiwan were peasant farmers, and, as they had done on continental China, they made their living by agriculture. In 1945, when the island reverted to China after 50 years as a Japanese colony, agriculture was still very much the predominant sector, and the majority of the population continued to rely on farming. But, from the late 1950s onwards, in the space of less than three decades, the pattern of more than three centuries has been radically altered. Industry has burgeoned to replace agriculture as the key sector, and, concomitantly, Taiwan's population is no longer characteristically rural. A massive outflow of rural people into the cities has left only one person in four living in the countryside

At first glance, it would seem that over the past two decades Chinese Communist Party (CCP) power and policy in the distant Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of the People's Republic of China have travelled full circle. By late 1981 the region's foremost pre-Cultural Revolution leader, Wang Enmao, and many of the more moderate and pragmatic policies he had come to advocate for consolidating CCP (and Han) control without unduly provoking the sensitivities of the majority non-Han (and primarily Islamic) indigenous population, had returned.2 Thus, the stage was set for Xinjiang's de novo overall integration with the rest of China. Against a brief historical backdrop this article will analyse recent leadership and policy trends in strategically-located Xinjiang, particularly the significance of Wang's return. It will then assess subsequent socio-economic developments and discuss their relevance to security and defence-related issues. Finally, some conclusions will be made concerning the always complex process of integration, in terms of both its nature and degree and its interaction with the processes of ‘modernization.’

Soon after the People's Republic of China resumed publishing economic data series in the late 1970s it became clear that current definitional conventions for statistical categories often differed from those of the 1950s. For example, tractor stock, in standard 15 horse-power units from the 1950s, was recorded in series linked with current physical unit data. Sporadic efforts have been made clearly to define categories in different periods, pin down transition dates, and occasionally develop consistent series. In some instances, Chinese statistical organizations have produced series making adjustments for specific inconsistencies in previously published data. Soybeans, for example, are now included in the entire official series for foodgrain production and sown area from 1949 to the present; they were previously excluded from 1949–57 data. Articles by Walker and by Field and Kilpatrick were among attempts to correct for this inconsistency, considerably pre-dating the official published adjustment. At around the same time several researchers noted that roots and tubers were valued at one-fourth natural weight in the 1950s, but one-fifth under current convention. For a few years the transition date was open to question and arguments were tendered in support of 1977, 1970 and 1964. Members of a United States Department of Agriculture delegation to China seem to have ended the debate by simply asking their Chinese hosts. They were told categorically that the official change was in 1964, although it is always possible that the effective date differed somewhat among reporting units or even among provinces. Some four years later the date was confirmed in the 1983 Statistical Yearbook.

The currency stabilization scheme announced by the Hong Kong Government on 15 October 1983 and implemented from 17 October represents a return to the modified colonial currency board system which had operated in Hong Kong from 1935 until June 1972, which in turn was a modified version of the currency system that had operated in Hong Kong from the earliest days of British administration up to 1935. Before describing the new system it is useful to review briefly the various systems that have operated in Hong Kong in the past: the silver standard, which existed almost from the outset and continued until 1935; the sterling standard, maintained from 1935 to mid 1972; the short-lived quasi-US dollar standard in operation from July 1972 to November 1974; and the floating exchange rate system or pure Hong Kong dollar standard, which survived from November 1974 until October 1983. Emphasis throughout will be placed on the determination of the quantity of money or money supply in circulation.