This volume assesses the state of the People's Republic of China on its 50th anniversary by asking leading scholars in various fields to give their views of developments since 1949 with emphasis on recent decades. With the exception of the contributions by Bob Dernberger and Michael Sullivan, the papers were presented and discussed at a conference cosponsored with the Centra de Estudos Asiáticos of the Universidade de Aveiro in Aveiro, Portugal from 28 to 31 January 1999. The China Quarterly wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Universidade de Aveiro, its Rector, Júlio Pedrosa de Jesus, and the efforts of the staff of the Centro de Estudos Asiáticos, in particular Pedro Vilarinho, António Miranda and Helena Costa.

In the very first sentence of the first article in the first issue of The China Quarterly, Howard L. Boorman, seeking to summarize the first decade of the PRC, wrote: “The man who faces his typewriter to set down a thousand words of coherent comment on the Communist revolution in China confronts not only a massive experiment in social engineering but also the fact that his interpretation of that experiment will expose as much of the author as it does of the revolution.” Except that now it is a computer and not a typewriter, little is different for anyone who would try to summarize what is now 50 years of the PRC. True, enough time has gone by for us now to have not just the initial standard interpretations as to what transpired in China but revisions and then further re-revisions of the story, so that even though we cannot be so bold as to say that we now have the full truth, we probably are a bit closer.

After 50 years of revolutionary transformation and uneven consolidation, and a generation of economic re-structuring, the political institutions of the People's Republic of China remain essentially Leninist. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to enjoy monopoly power, and independent media, autonomous trade unions and other manifestations of civil society are almost wholly absent. Yet the environment within which the Party now operates has changed fundamentally. Marxist-Leninist parties in power around the world have collapsed and to stay in power the CCP has abandoned central planning for market economics. Living standards and literacy rates have improved dramatically and ordinary people now have more control over their own lives. Some analysts have suggested that as a result of these changes, the regime is facing imminent institutional collapse. Others have suggested that the regime cannot but democratize. This article argues that the regime is more resilient than either of these interpretations allows. In spite of the formal trappings of Leninism and its neo-authoritarian political reform programme, the CCP has adapted to the new situation. The reforms, which date from the early 1980s, have considerably strengthened the country's political institutions. Although there is disagreement on the content and pace of reform, China's elite with few exceptions appears to agree that further political reform is necessary. Yet the Party is caught in a dilemma: if it moves too slowly, it could fail because it cannot meet the demands of the people; if it moves too quickly, it could fail because it further undermines its already weakened position.

Actually we could have picked a different name, such as the Chinese People's Party, the Revolutionary Party, the Liberation Party – any of these would have been OK. But no matter what, our intention remains to resolve the “property” (chan) issue. What are we fighting for? What is our goal all about? Getting “property” – not private property, but public property. For everybody to get rich, for everybody to lead a good life. That's why there has to be a revolution.

The dynamic growth of the Chinese economy over the past 50 years under the policies and administrative management of the People's Republic of China must rank among the most important developments of the 20th century. When I began my serious study of China's economy in the early 1950s, Western economists were preoccupied with a single question, “how are they ever going to feed all those Chinese?” Today, after 50 years in power, we must respect and even admire not only their ability to feed a population that has more than doubled in size, but also to provide the Chinese consumer with watches, washing machines, sewing machines, colour television sets, and tape and video recorders. A small, but significant and rapidly expanding, share of China's consumers is using mobile phones, computers and even private cars.

China's countryside has been the target of dramatic change since 1949. The CCP directed redistribution in land reform, the transformation away from private farming to collectivization, and, most recently, the move back to household production. Throughout the PRC's 50 years, agriculture and peasants have paid for the regime's ambitious programme of industrialization, as the price scissors consistently favoured the urban over the rural producers. The state struggled with its food producers over the grain harvest, using ideology and organization to maximize both the production and extraction of the surplus from the countryside.

Using euphemisms and albeit haltingly, the leaders of the PRC in its 40s began blasting the barricades their forebears had constructed to design what they had considered a fully pristine, orthodoxly socialist, separate urban realm. The result of this recent demolition is that, as the system turns 50, its political elite – along with the markets they have licensed – is remodelling the metropolises into places less distinct socially from the rural areas outside them and much less homogeneous internally than the urban areas from which they are metamorphosing.

This article describes and analyses changes in the environment and related policy developments in the People's Republic over the past 50 years. When discussing the quality of China's environment it must be remembered that the population of the country has doubled over the past half century and the economy has grown rapidly, particularly over the last two decades. Pessimists argue that the current population of over 1,200 million has exceeded the number which can be supported at a good living standard. Despite such views, there has been some ground for optimism in recent years, with China's greater environmental awareness and increased openness, its realization that the environment can be a tool in international diplomacy, and the increasing importation of environmental protection techniques. Yet overall, China has not done enough to maintain environmental quality and has not chosen to make many environmentally friendly transport investments.

As we mark the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China (PRC) we have the opportunity to assess China's experience over five decades in accommodating itself to the outside world. It is an opportunity to take stock and to consider in the light of this experience what is China's current international standing and what may be said to be its agenda for the future with regard to the conduct of foreign affairs.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) may not have had the opportunity to celebrate 50 years of statehood had it not been for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) – nor, for that matter, is it likely that the PRC would have come into existence in the first place were it not for the PLA (as is evident in Mao's often-cited observation that, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun!”). As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rode the military to power in 1949, the army also subsequently acted on several occasions to rescue the regime, maintain the Party in power and ergo sustain the People's Republic. The PLA has also been the designated protector of “state sovereignty” and “unifier” of China – acting to incorporate Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Manchuria and border regions in the south-west and north-west during the early 1950s, and fighting several border wars against China's neighbours thereafter – and it is the PLA that is ultimately charged with ensuring both that Taiwan does not seek “independence” and that China's territorial claims in the East and South China Seas are protected.

On the 50th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, the legal system plays an increasingly significant role in social, economic and even political relationships. Legal norms drawn largely from foreign experiences have been selected and applied through a plethora of newly established institutions. The role of law as a basis for government authority has become a legitimate and significant issue in the broader political discourse. Despite these achievements, law in China remains dependent on the regime's policy goals. Particularly where political prerogatives are at stake, legal requirements appear to pose little restraint on state power. In this sense, the ten years that have passed since Tiananmen appear to have had little impact on the willingness of the party-state to dispense with legal requirements in pursuit of political expediency. If we are to rely upon Dicey's dictum on the rule of law being in effect when the state becomes just another actor, the rule of law in China still seems a distant prospect indeed.

The acceleration of economic reform in the early and late 1990s has highlighted repeatedly the importance of social welfare for maintaining economic growth, social stability and political authority. Indeed each of these decade-long goals of China's government can be seen to rest on either establishing or maintaining an accessible social welfare package. Economic growth requires further enterprise reform which in turn requires alternative forms and funding of worker social welfare. Sporadic reports of urban unrest resulting from lay-offs and loss of welfare benefits and of rural discontent resulting from the continued absence of welfare benefits suggests that social stability and political authority are dependent on the government's ability to reform social welfare provisioning. Simultaneously the process of economic reform itself has altered urban and rural socio-economic and political environments and had far-reaching consequences for welfare demand, service supply and notions of security.

Although dissident intellectuals and students continued to be persecuted in the post-Mao Zedong regimes of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, China's intellectuals were no longer denigrated as a class, harassed, suppressed, imprisoned and persecuted to death as they had been during the Mao era. Like the 19th-century self-strengtheners, Deng and his appointed successors regarded intellectuals as essential to achieve their goal of economic modernization and make China once again “rich and powerful.” Those intellectuals involved in the sciences, technology and economics in particular enjoyed elite status as advisers to the government, similar to that which intellectuals had enjoyed throughout most of Chinese history until the 1949 revolution.

Since the Communists came to power in 1949 Chinese art has seen extraordinary changes. For 30 years, the Party apparatus and its Marxist-Maoist ideology exerted so tight a control over cultural life that it is natural for the art of that period to be viewed primarily as a reflection or expression of political forces. To some degree that is unavoidable, and it is the approach taken by the authors of two important books on post-1949 Chinese art, while Jerome Silbergeld's monograph on the Sichuan eccentric painter Li Huasheng is a fascinating study of the way in which these forces affected the life and work of an individual artist.

The profound silence that followed immediately after the 4 June massacres in 1989 was short-lived. As it became clear that the regime would stay in power, writers reacted as opportunity and circumstances allowed. Dissident writers associated with the protest movement were in danger of arrest and imprisonment: Duo Duo only just managed to get his flight to London on 4 June, joining those like Bei Dao who were already abroad and had no choice but to remain. Writers in high positions were also vulnerable: Wang Meng was forced to resign as Minister of Culture in 1989 and dropped from the Party's Central Committee at the 1992 Party Congress. Less prominent writers waited for a more propitious time to publish; younger writers barely paused.