Among the cardinal weaknesses of existing studies on British land policy in Ceylon is the almost total neglect of any reference to the theoretical foundations of this policy, and the tendency to study the situation in Ceylon in isolation instead of against the background and within the wider context of a colonial land policy. These weaknesses are all the more glaring for the years from c. 1830 to 1855 when a common land policy was gradually but systematically imposed throughout the British Empire, and an institutional apparatus controlling land policy and emigration was built up. The basis of the land policy of these years was an adherence to some of the fundamental principles of the theories of Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

Mao Tse-tung and his associates in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appear to have a penchant for reducing an important and complex policy or strategy to a relatively simple set of rules that their followers can easily understand and implement without undue deviation. In the military field, for example, Mao laid down, at a very early stage of his revolutionary career, the now well-known rules governing guerrilla warfare which read in part:

… The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.

To extend stable base areas, employ the policy of advancing in waves; pursued by a powerful enemy, employ the policy of circling around.

Arouse the largest numbers of the masses in the shortest possible time and by the best possible methods.

One of the striking differences between the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions was the Chinese use of rural bases (Soviet Areas) to capture national political control—surrounding the cities with the countryside. Remarkably, these bases, their evolution, characteristics, and role in the various intra-Party struggles remain one of the least studied or understood elements in our knowledge of Chinese Communist history.

When the Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850, Tseng Kuo-fan (1811–1872) had been residing in Peking for more than a decade. He earned a distinguished scholarly reputation as a member of the Hanlin Academy, and between 1847 and 1852 he was a high official of the metropolitan administration; he was Acting Senior Vice-president of the Board of Civil Appointments when he left the capital in 1852. Particularly in the three years 1850–1852, his official duties gave him many opportunities to express himself on the urgent problems of his time. While Tseng's later career is well known and while studies have been done on his scholarship and philosophy, his early political ideas have so far not been analyzed in detail. Yet surely Tseng's views on government before he became involved in the campaigns against the Taiping Rebellion would have a bearing on his remarkable performance as military and administrative leader after he became so involved.

One of the most recurrent themes in the descriptions and analyses of political development in Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912) is the emergence of the genrō as the primary decision and policy-making group. Surprisingly, however, while a great deal has been written by both Japanese and Western scholars concerning the individual members of the genrō, very few attempts have been made to explain the origins of the group and especially the form which it took. A major obstacle to the analysis of this problem appears to be the failure to distinguish clearly between the genrō as an informal collegial decision and policy-making body and membership or participation in the organization. Failure to view membership and organizational structure as two separate aspects of the development of the genrō has had serious consequences for those attempting to explain the place of the genrō in Japanese political development. The emphasis placed on the nine men who are usually designated as the genrō has diverted attention from the more important problem, from the viewpoint of political development, of why the genrō as a decision-making structure emerged at a particular time and took a particular form. Absence of serious concern over the origins of the genrō structure on the part of historians has led them to ignore the question completely or to assign the informal collegial character of the genrō to the general tendency in Japanese society to make decisions through group consensus. The latter is too general an explanation since it does not tell us why consensus in this case should be arrived at through an informal collegial body rather than through some other structural form.

Economic development makes resources available for a variety of desirable social goals. However, many of these goals are not automatically related to the economic mechanism of production and income distribution in a private enterprise economy. The social values that sustain economic development are often hostile to a non-market redistribution of resources. This dilemma between the welfare potential of economic development and the social values that make development possible has long been a subject of intense interest to sociologists. In recent years, economists have been paying increasing attention to the problem.