The past 15 years have been eventful ones for the Chinese economy. They have seen an ambitious attempt at economic acceleration decline into agricultural crisis, a major reversal of the direction of economic policy, agricultural recovery and resurgent economic momentum. These years have brought major changes to the Chinese economy: whole new industries have appeared; official policy towards such diverse areas as education, income distribution, regional dispersion of industry and economic specialization has shifted repeatedly; the organization of agricultural production has also changed.

Until the Cultural Revolution, the predominant western view of contemporary Chinese elite conflict was that it consisted of “discussion” (t'ao-lun) within a basically consensual Politburo among shifting “opinion groups” with no “organized force” behind them. The purges and accusations which began in 1965 and apparently still continue, have shaken this interpretation, and a number of scholars have advanced new analyses - sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, sometimes of general application, sometimes applied only to a particular time span or segment of the political system. Of these new views, perhaps the most systematic - and at the same time the one which represents the least change from the pre-Cultural Revolution “opinion group” model - is the “policy making under Mao” interpretation, which sees conflict as essentially a bureaucratic decision-making process dominated by Mao.

The object of this article is to examine changing Chinese attitudes to their place in the world from a Chinese historical and intellectual perspective, in order to provide a basis for anticipating developments in the future attuned more to a Chinese than to a western point of view. The question immediately arises whether such a perspective is in any way relevant to the recent theory and practice of international relations in the People's Republic of China, and what insights, if any, such a perspective may provide for discussing the future. This is a controversial subject concerned with the nature of cultural change, and the extent to which " imprinting" from a long continuity of accepted social and cultural values can psychologically condition people even after a decisive break in that tradition appears to have occurred.

Area studies have been under attack for many years as lacking the rigorous methods of disciplined inquiry such as are possessed by economics and political science. However, in the last decade, social scientists have attempted to bridge this academic gap. In the study of Chinese foreign policy, for instance, Charles A. McClelland employed several statistical methods for examining Chinese behaviour in international crises. Similarly, Paul Smoker undertook a serial correlation analysis to examine both the freedom of decision and interaction and reaction of the Indian and Chinese Governments.

Since 1966, there have been no articles in the Chinese press about language reform and no specialist journals to provide an alternative forum for discussion. In 1972, however, the Party's leading political publication, Hung ch'i (Red Flag), carried in its April issue a letter on what had come to be seen as an almost taboo subject, by no less a personality than Kuo Mo-jo. This letter and its manner of publication are both of great interest. Language reform is clearly on the agenda for discussion once again and the letter enables one to look both at its more recent history and at its future development. Such is the importance of the letter that I have translated it in full and discuss it section by section (the text being distinguished by bold type), adding a commentary to each section, rather in the manner in which commentaries were added to classical Chinese texts.

This note discusses the current state of publishing in the People's Republic of China and the acquisition of Chinese-language materials by American libraries, with special reference to the factors which are likely to influence the future flow of materials from China. The subject is one about which no one can be very certain in his assessment, given the rather uncertain state of Chinese publishing during the last few years. Nevertheless, some speculations are possible on the basis of Peking's official announcements, a sampling of recent publications from China, and the way in which such publications have been made available to the West. What the future will hold, I believe, depends on two main factors. One, the extent to which publishing activities return to a pre-Cultural Revolution level, and second, the Chinese Government's policy with regard to library exchanges, the export of printed materials and to the purchase and export of such materials by visitors to China.