Historians on the Chinese mainland maintain that the self-strengthening movement became “bankrupt” after the Sino-French War of 1884–1885. Their phraseology is typically value-laden, and contains the usual quotient of exaggeration. Yet these Communist scholars do point to a development in the late Ch'ing period that is usually overlooked by students in the West. During the Sino-French War, French forces had sailed almost at will along the entire coast of the empire, had temporarily occupied a part of Taiwan, and finally had snuffed out the dynasty's last pretensions to sovereignty in Vietnam. In the wake of this conflict, growing threats of Russian and Japanese aggression further raised doubts that the self-strengthening policy was effective as a means of securing the defense of the empire.

Our Association has met this year in Philadelphia, a city of historic memories, an appropriate place in which to contemplate anniversaries. There are several which come to mind.

First, the Association for Asian Studies is itself twenty years old this spring, a fact in which we can all take pride; for we have grown as a professional society from a mere handful of scholars in 1948 to an organization of over 4000 members today.

Next there is Japan, which in its modern incarnation is one hundred years old this year—a memorable national and even international event.

And finally, I am put in mind by our presence in Philadelphia, that by a bit of stretching we can think of the United States as being roughly 200 years old. (In fact it was just 200 years ago that the citizens of this city banded together to prevent imports from Britain. And in 8 more years we shall be able to celebrate the bicentennial of the moment when Philadelphia's Liberty Bell rang out the news of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.)

In this paper, I shall try to examine and identify the factors responsible for the increase in agricultural output in Communist China in the nineteen fifties. Then I shall try to discuss the implications of my findings in relation to future agricultural growth.

Agricultural Output 1949–1957. Agricultural statistics remain the Achilles' heel in evaluating the performance of the Chinese economy in quantitative terms. For foodgrains, the official statistics show an increase of nearly 43 percent from 1949 to 1952, and nearly 20 percent from 1952 to 1957. These claims are generally regarded as exaggerated. Based on per capita consumption requirements, Liu and Yeh regard the pre-1956 official figures as gross understatements. They accept, however, the official figure for 1957. They allow for no more than 5 percent increase from 1952 to 1957 for the production of food crops. After adjustment of reported cultivated area has been made, Wu's estimate shows virtually no increase in foodgrains from 1952 to 1957. Hollister, after suggesting official understatements for earlier years, accepts the official 1955 figure and estimates that the 1957 production of basic food crops and animal products was 14 percent higher than that of 1952. Jones and Poleman also maintain that the official estimates of grain production were underestimates for 1952–54; they accept the 1955–57 figures. Their estimates put the 1957 level about 12 percent higher than that in 1952. Choh-ming Li, though without making any independent estimates of his own, regards the official figure for 1955 as more reliable or least unsatisfactory for the whole period 1949–57, while considering the pre-1955 years as underestimates and the post-1955 years (that is, 1956 and 1957) as overestimates.

On May 25, 1895, amid a festive atmosphere at the governor's yamen in Taipei, China's island province of Taiwan (Formosa) was declared a republic. News of this extraordinary event was received in Peking and elsewhere with reactions of dismay and skepticism. Most Ch'ing authorities and foreign observers suspected that the creation of a republic was merely a desperate scheme to keep Taiwan from being ceded to Japan as an outcome of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Nevertheless, to a few witnesses the unprecedented move of establishing a republic in an area of imperial China suggested at first more hopeful signs for the future. James W. Davidson, then a Taipei news correspondent, initially surmised, “If it has been conceived and carried out altogether by Celestial minds we are emboldened to believe that there is, after all, a new China in the nursery from whom great things may eventually be expected.”

In 1927, Ts'ai Yüan-p'ei, one of China's eminent intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, initiated a program to reform Chinese education. In June of that year, the leaders of the Kuomintang government in Nanking approved Ts'ai's recommendation that they establish a new organization, a University Council [ta-hsüeh yüan], in place of a Ministry of Education to direct educational affairs. A month later they appointed Ts'ai to the post of Chancellor of the University Council. In the first issue of the Bulletin of the University Council, Ts'ai accounted for the change. He stated: “Looking back over the past decade, one can see that the Ministry of Education, situated in the midst of the corrupt atmosphere of Peking, was infected by the government agencies around it. There were times when those who headed the Ministry knew nothing about scholarship and education. Those ministers took advantage of their position and put members of their personal cliques into office. Word of this has spread so that the title Ministry of Education is synonomous with corrupt officialdom. It is for this reason that the Nationalist Government has decided to abolish the title ‘Ministry of Education’ and adopted the title ‘University Council’ for the body which supervises scholarship and education.”

Ongoing cultures, by virtue of the personalities they produce and the social arrangements they embody, create tensions or strains for their individual members; and they provide as well for the institutionalized expression and alleviation, if not complete reduction, of these tensions in culturally approved channels. In this view, cultural stability refers not to the absence of persisting conflict on the individual or social level; but rather to a high degree of complementarity between institutionalized sources of strain or conflict for the individual, and institutionalized arrangements for tension reduction or expression. This conception of stability does not assume that all relatively stable cultures are equally productive of psychological well-being, even assuming this nebulous condition could be specified. Nor does it assert that all stable cultures are equally adaptive in the face of external pressures. It does imply, however, that sources of conflict and channels for its expression will be sufficiently balanced to insure perpetuation of culturally standardized social arrangements and beliefs over many generations.

Literary prose is a late developer in the history of any language and in Marathi, as for most other Indian languages, it does not appear in any significant quantity until the middle of the nineteenth century when the influence of English was beginning to transform a hitherto almost exclusively verse tradition. Before this the use of prose is limited to commentaries, to a few hagiographical works of the Mahānubhāv sect written in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, to historical narratives from the time of Maratha independence and to private and diplomatic correspondence of the same period. Of course, there must always have been a flourishing popular oral literature of fables and ghost stories, adaptations of episodes from the Puranas and the Epics, but these were never written down. Even among the well known Sanskrit story collections, only the Pancatantra is found in an early prose version in Marathi.

Ancient Sinhalese rulers had a right to a share of agricultural income, a right which embraced the produce of the land as well as irrigation rates and was generally paid in kind. In effect, there was a land tax; but the term used (bojika-, bojiya-, or bojaka-pati) was more than mere land tax and connotes a tax on income corresponding to bhaga in Indian law books. By the fourteenth century, if not earlier, there had been a fundamental change. Rather than a tithe from each class of land in the village, the king received the whole of the produce of certain fields, the muttettu, which were cultivated gratis by the villagers who possessed other fields either in return for this service or in recognition of the king's suzreignty. This meant that there were no intermediaries farming (renting) the right to collect the tithe. It also meant that the villager held his paddy fields on an individual and hereditary (paraveny) basis. There was, however, no concept of freehold ownership. Authority was political. One could not distinguish private rights from political allegiance. Landholders combined rights in land with duties to the king. Service was attached to the land and was obligatory to any transferee. In some cases, this service was rendered to the king's chiefs and nominees or to the temples, for the kings distributed largesse in the form of lands and the services attached to them; these were known as nindagam, viharegam or devalegam as distinct from the king's villages, the gabadagam; such recipients were more like feudal overlords than farmers of the revenue. In other cases, villagers of certain castes performed certain specified services for the king, for other castes (usually higher castes) in their village, or for neighboring villages, and in return enjoyed certain fields. It was a system of service tenure that was girded and threaded by the caste system.

There were mines and smelters located in all the provinces of Ch'ing China before the nineteenth century. Their sizes varied greatly, as did their role in the local as well as national economy. Government policy regarding these industries was not based on a uniform code, but rather reflected a body of principles that served as guidelines for coping with each individual situation as it arose. Indeed, reading the early Ch'ing documents on mining leaves one at first with the impression that the authorities were eternally debating over the question, “to mine or not to mine.” Upon closer examination it soon becomes clear, however, that “mining affairs” were far from being administered along haphazard lines. It is the intention of this paper to describe some of the basic factors that went into the making of government decisions regarding mineral enterprises. In doing this, it would be helpful to keep these questions in mind: how did the mineral industries fit into the general framework of an agrarian-based civil bureaucracy? In the application of policy, did the government invariably let its actions be determined by a priori conceptions, or did it base decisions on pragmatic grounds? What sort of relation was generally accepted as the norm between the government and the operators of the enterprises in the instances where government interest was manifest?

Since World War II scholars, Chinese and others, have shown a growing interest in Ch'ing history, results of which have paved the way for the study of contemporary China. They are fortunately afforded facilities for research by a large number of sources housed in various libraries in this country. Of these sources a considerable number consist of records from the Ch'ing imperial archives. Naturally historians and political scientists explore these official documents for details of different aspects of the Ch'ing dynasty. Considering the importance of these official accounts, a critical study of their nature and uses will be helpful to scholars. Although it is almost impossible to thoroughly examine all of these official sources, it is practicable to bring into focus the material for a certain period of that dynasty. The present paper represents such a discussion of the five principal sources for the Yung-chêng period (1723–35), reign of Emperor Shih-tsung, who was the third ruler of the Ch'ing.