Four decades have passed since the 1949 Communist Revolution divided China into two political entities. These culturally similar polities adopted different ownership systems and divergent development strategies in their early decades, but they have witnessed nearly identical elite transformations and convergent social transitions in recent years.

At their recent respective 13th party congresses, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) both promoted a great number of new leaders who can be identified as “technocrats” to top Party positions. In the Mainland, this new group of leaders has only recently come to power, while in Taiwan it emerged at the beginning of the 1970s and has continuously increased in number since then. This is a new generation of leadership, whose socialization, educational background, political experience and value orientation differ significantly from those of the old elite.

Parallel to this leadership transformation, a profound social transition has also occurred in both Mainland China and Taiwan. The Chinese people in both places have made great economic achievements and have moved rapidly from isolationism towards mercantilism. This is particularly obvious in Taiwan, but it can be seen to a lesser degree in the Mainland. Less noted, but equally significant, has been the change in their political systems. In Mainland China, although the June Fourth Incident (1989) has impeded the momentum of political reform, the relationship between state and society has been significantly altered. It seems that political reform, which includes institutionalization, decentralization and liberalization, will continue its zigzag but progressive journey.

Recent studies of China's economic system have focused, unsurprisingly, upon the nature and progress of the reforms. As a byproduct of these studies, however, many Chinese writers seem to have settled upon a common characterization of the pre-reform system. One writer summarizes key elements of this characterization as follows

The considerable increase in educational attainment of Chinese women from virtual complete illiteracy 50 years ago to current levels can be traced systematically for the first time on the basis of the 1982 census of China and a large sample survey of the same year. Until very recently we had known only the broad outlines of this major social transformation. Although even the newly available data are imperfect, their significance is illustrated by their strong and consistent association with such vital facts of life as the age at which women marry and the number of children they bear. Educational levels can be shown to have varied with degree of urbanization and rural development from the earliest days of the People's Republic.

Major regions of China have distinctive educational histories. In all regions examined here, however, the course of educational change was affected to a greater or lesser degree by such major historical events as the great famine, the Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao reforms. It is now possible to measure with some precision the influence of these events on educational progress. This paper utilizes census and survey data to describe change in female education nationally and for four major regional populations from 1952 to 1982. Because it is plausible that the educational trends and differentials are related to other aspects of Chinese social, political and economic history, they are presented here in some detail.

Our findings can be summarized as follows:

1. The rise of female education occurred mainly in two periods the 1950s to 1958, and the late 1960s to mid 1970s.

Thirty-seven years have passed since the Korean War ended in July 1953. The Korean War, which was one of the most dramatic events of the cold war, resulted not only in huge casualties on the two sides, but also in a deep wound in Sino–American relations which took more than two decades to heal. Vast amounts of research have been done on the war, but one important aspect–the motivation behind the decision of the People's Republic of China to enter the war – remains mysteriously masked, or at least unconvincingly explained.

Why did Beijing involve itself in a military conflict with the United States, the world's most powerful country, at a time when the newly established regime needed to be consolidated? What were the factors that led the Chinese to decide that they had to enter the war on behalf of North Korea? It has been generally accepted in the west that the Chinese were motivated by a combination of Chinese xenophobic attitudes, security concerns, expansionist tendencies and the communist ideology. To what extent is this perspective historically correct? What is the Chinese perspective on this issue?

The purpose of this article is to try to explain from a Chinese perspective the motivation of China's leaders in making such a momentous decision, as revealed by Chinese sources recently released in China.

Historical Roots

China's decision to intervene in the Korean War on behalf of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) had its historical roots. It was the natural result of gradually developed animosity between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and what it regarded as the foreign imperialist powers, especially the United States, and of the fear of a threat from the latter.

For anyone who studies modern Chinese political thought, the revival of interest in federalism is one of the most striking features of the current scene. It has been particularly visible abroad in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, and its most conspicuous spokesman has been the former director of the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Yan Jiaqi. In remarks delivered to the First Congress of Chinese Students and Scholars in the United States, held in Chicago in July 1989, Yan proposed a Chinese “federation” (lianbang guojia) having a democratic system as the best hope both for reforming China's internal politics and ultimately for resolving the problems of Hong Hong, Taiwan and Tibet. He made similar remarks in other speeches in America and at the founding meeting of the Federation for Chinese Democracy, of which he was elected president, held in Paris in September 1989. Some other mainland Chinese intellectuals, among them Ge Yang, former editor-in-chief of Xin guancha, have supported such views, as have members of the China Spring movement. A recent official denunciation of such views is testimony to their growing influence.

These are surprising developments. Federalist programmes for China have long been seen as little more than relics of an era which ended in the 1920s. As the Cihai entry for liansheng zizhi (one of the phrases for the idea in Chinese) puts it, while certain warlord politicians of the 1920s believed that federalism was the appropriate political system for China, “after the Guangdong revolutionary government launched the Northern Expedition in 1926, no one advocated federalism again.”