In recent years a number of visitors to China have remarked on the rather surprising preservation and even revival of the country's ancient native medical tradition. To Westerners, so accustomed to associating modern medicine with progress and scientific advance, the continued existence of this obviously prescientific art has been one of the more curious anachronisms in the new society. Moreover, for a revolutionary government so firmly committed to science and modernisation, this support and encouragement of traditional medicine has seemed paradoxical indeed.

China had a system of medicine long before the advent of scientific medicine in the West. The first book about it, the Su Wen Nei Ching, was written about 300 B.C., and its detailed description of some medical phenomena cannot be surpassed even today. Despite the fact that much of the terminology is metaphysical, this traditional system of Chinese medicine is at the same time very much down to earth, being largely the result of minute observations. Consequently the symptoms of many diseases are much better described in traditional Chinese textbooks than in their modern scientific Western counterparts. Reading the Chinese books indeed opens up a new vista to a Western doctor, transforming the small range of obvious symptoms he learned at a Western medical school into a vast panorama of interconnected phenomena. It would seem that, with his reliance on laboratory procedures, the Western doctor may have been gradually losing this art of close observation; perhaps it is only artists who retain it today.

One of the tragic phenomena in Chinese history is the frequent occurrence of natural calamities. It has been estimated that there have been 1,035 droughts and 1,037 floods in a period of 2,142 years from 206 B.C. to 1936. The Chinese Communist Government puts the blame for the failure to alleviate them on “feudalism” and, over the past century, on the combination of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism. They have proclaimed: “Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the People's Government have paid much attention to water conservancy. During the period of national economic recovery and the period of socialist industrialisation, the main tasks of water conservancy are to alleviate the disasters of flood and drought to insure a steady in-crease of agricultural production, and to promote the development of industry and river navigation.” The Draft Outline of the National Agricultural Development for 1956–1967 proclaimed the determination of the Chinese Communist Government to eliminate ordinary floods and droughts within a period of seven to twelve years beginning from 1956. This is a truly bold and far-reaching programme. The success or failure of this attempt will have great influence on the stability of the Government and on the life of the people. The purpose of this article is to study the degree of success the Communist Government has achieved in this field and also the implications of this record as an index of its overall effectiveness and future prospects.

In terms of Western political science or military doctrine it seems somewhat irrational that the leaders of Communist China should refer to great powers as “paper tigers.” It appears even more illogical that they should call atomic bombs “paper tigers,” especially when they themselves place the highest priority on the development of a nuclear capability. Yet, since the first Chinese nuclear explosion on October 16, 1964, the official Communist Press has again referred to the United States, Great Britain and the “revisionists” (both Khrushchev and the present leaders of the Soviet Union) as “paper tigers.” This same metaphor has also been applied to “imperialism” and “all reactionaries,” as well as to nuclear weapons, air-power and sea-power.

In May of this year Lin Feng led a delegation to Moscow for the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany. In reporting this, a news agency described Lin as a “little known middlerank” politician. Lin is indeed little known to the outside world, but within Communist China he is a top Party leader and one who has made an impressive record despite a somewhat unorthodox path to power. Unlike most top Peking leaders, he was not born in central-south China, he did not serve in the Kiangsi Soviet, and he did not make the Long March. Rather, Lin hails from Manchuria where he was born about fifty-six years ago, thus making him one of the youngest of the senior Party leaders—although already a veteran of twenty years on the Party Central Committee. Sources vary widely on Lin's educational background; he is reported to have studied at Nankai University in Tientsin, at Peking University, in Japan at famed Waseda, as well as in Moscow. By the mid-1930s Lin was deeply involved in the Party underground in North China. He was working behind the scenes in an attempt to win over to the Communists the highly nationalistic students who were bitterly opposed to Japanese incursions into North China. Among those whom Lin won was his future wife, Kuo Ming-ch'iu who has become one of the outstanding women leaders in Communist China. At that time Kuo was a high-school girl and acting head of the Peiping Students Federation.

Archaeology has a long history in traditional China where it served as the handmaiden of history, lexicography and geography, as well as preserver of art and literature. References to ancient material remains are common in the early Chinese literature. In the early fifth century b.c. Feng-hu-tzu, presumably after a study of early implements, proposed a four-stage sequence for the ancient period, each characterised by a weapon made of stone, jade, copper and iron, respectively. The grand historian of the second century B.C., Ssu-ma Ch'ien, made special efforts to visit as many ancient sites and monuments as possible to substantiate his records. In the second century a.d. Hsü Shen compiled a dictionary of 10,516 characters, many of which were drawn from ancient bronze and stone inscriptions. In the sixth century Li Tao-yuan wrote his commentaries on the Book of Rivers, which was fully documented with archaeological data. Throughout the ages many important discoveries were recorded and large numbers of ancient art objects and literature preserved. By the twelfth century Chinese archaeology had become a specialised subject, known as Chin-shih-hsueh, literally, a study of bronze and stone objects. A vast literature began to accumulate, reaching its height in the last two centuries.

In antiquity, China was far from being the China we know today, neither in extent, nor in political and social organisation. To the south it did not extend beyond the Yangtze River, to the north it stopped short of the Mongolian steppe, to the north-east, only a small part of the south Manchurian plain was included, whereas in the west it merely went up to the easternmost part of what is now Kansu Province; the Szechwan plain was only included at the end of the fourth century B.C. Politically, the King of Chou was theoretically the overlord of most of this area, but in actual practice, independent rulers reigned over a congeries of larger and smaller states. As a result of wars of conquest, seven large states had come to be formed by the middle of the fifth century B.C. and these were engaged in a ceaseless struggle for supremacy. The time between the middle of the fifth century and 221 B.C., when the western state of Ch'in finally conquered all its rivals, is known as the period of the Warring States.

Historical writing in China today, whether by scholars who are members of the Communist Party, or academic writers who are not themselves Communists, has paid scant attention to the long period of time which may be called the Chinese Middle Ages, roughly from A.D. 316, the date of the partition of north and south following the nomad invasions, down to the end of the Sung Dynasty in A.D. 1278. This period of nearly a thousand years is considered by the Communist philosophy of history to be “feudal” and no real change in the social structure is supposed to have taken place under the long succession of “feudal” dynasties. Compared with the important transformation of ancient “slave society” to serf-owning feudalism, which is considered to have been completed somewhat before the Han Dynasty came to power, this long interim of feudalism drags on until, with the Ming, the first signs of nascent capitalism are to be detected, ushering in the still more dramatic events of imperialist aggression, revolution and the final triumph of the Communist Party. The scheme is not Chinese; it was borrowed, or adopted, from the Russians, who in turn seem to have based it upon a reference of Marx, contained in one of his letters, to the view that the general progression from primitive society to slave-owning monarchies, and then to feudalism, appeared to be a law of history. It may well be that this scheme is roughly applicable to several Western societies, but it is very hard to thrust Chinese history onto this procrustean bed—and still make sense of it.

As in all living scholarly traditions one can see in traditional Chinese historiography a wide range of divergent opinion as to what history is and how it should be written. On one point, however, all schools of Chinese historiography agree, and this is the clear awareness of the evaluative character of their trade. The historian of every school was an arbiter who, by passing judgment assessed the value of, and gave meaning to, events. This consciously evaluative character of Chinese historiography demanded self-reliance and courage on the part of the historian, who was not only the keeper of documents and the recorder of events; his assessments assumed normative status like the sentences of a judge.

Communist literature on “Contemporary (post-May 4) History” in which China begins a “bourgeois democratic reVolution” is more than an ideological exercise; it is autobiographical. The leading character is none other than the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself. The emotional inVolvement of mainland scribes is comparable to that of a public figure writing his biography. Every event from 1919 to the present is regarded in the light of the CCP's role. Communist leadership is even attributed to the May 4 Movement, which antedated the Party's formation by two years.