Wildlife trade policies in China and elsewhere have come under increased scrutiny following suggestions that the emergence of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 may have been linked to trade in wild animals. The breeding of and trade in most terrestrial wild animal species for consumption as food were prohibited in China in February 2020, but trade for non-food purposes such as ornamental items or traditional medicine continues to be covered by provisions in the Wildlife Protection Law (WPL). While a superficial reading of the WPL could lead to the conclusion that commercial trade in nationally protected species is generally prohibited, in practice key language is interpreted to permit commercial trade in the parts and derivatives of protected wild animal species, including those subject to the most stringent protection within China and internationally, such as leopards and pangolins.

In 1968, when I took over the editorship, The China Quarterly had already established itself as the leading English-language journal on China in the world. Great credit is due to the founder editor, Rod MacFarquhar, for this achievement. It was a time for consolidating that position of pre-eminence and giving the journal a firm academic basis. The stars were right. At the School of Oriental Studies in the University of London, the Contemporary China Institute was being set up under Stuart Schram, with generous support from the Volkswagen and Ford Foundations. The China Quarterly, with its new editor, moved from an upstairs room in Oxford Street to a modern office block near the University and then into the faded grandeur of Fitzroy Square.

As in many other Communist states (and quite a few non-Communist ones) there is in the DRV (Democratic Republic of [North] Vietnam) a sharp difference between the theoretical and the actual structure of governmental powers.

Article 4 of the DRV Constitution of January 1, 1960, adequately covers the subject of the theoretical source of power in North Vietnam: “All powers of the DRV belong to the people, who exercise them through the intermediary of the National Assembly and of People's Councils at every echelon, elected by it and responsible to it….”

Over the past 20 years, studies of grain production and use in China have figured prominently in debates concerning economic efficiency, income disparities and the contours of the Maoist development strategy. Virtually all analysts now agree that grain production in China exhibited a strong tendency toward provincial self-sufficiency and that the inter-provincial grain trade declined during the Maoist era (from the 1950s to 1978), that provincial self-sufficiency obstructed efficient allocation of agricultural resources and contributed to the persistence of poverty, and that the tendency toward selfsufficiency is attributable partly to a policy of “grain first,” which promoted concentration upon grain production in every province regardless of comparative advantage. Recent studies point to significant changes in the pattern of grain production and trade since 1978 and trace these changes to relaxation of “grain first” and introduction of institutional reforms affecting the grain sector.

In the areas controlled by the Central Government, the Chinese student movement between 1945 and 1949 was essentially an anti-war movement. As the Civil War progressed during those years, the student protests became one of the Government's major political problems, referred to by Mao himself as the “second front” in the struggle against the Chiang Kai-shek Government. As such, the student anti-war movement assumed its place within the twentieth-century tradition of Chinese student activism.

For more than a decade Western policy towards revolutionary China has been dominated by the attitude which the United States adopted in early 1950, before the Korean war broke out. This attitude arose out of conditions prevailing in the United States rather than in the Far East. Almost at once American policy lost any flexibility it might otherwise have had, when the Chinese intervened in the Korean war, an event which might have been avoided altogether if the American posture towards China had been different.

The Cultural Revolution is a struggle for power, but at the same time it is the most extraordinary coup d'état in history in the sense that the dictator is trying to destroy with the help of outside forces the existing Party, which is his own creation and the very foundation of his power, in order to produce a totally new power structure.

In the context of China's “Constructing ecological civilization” initiative, Tibetan environmentalists are proactively incorporating ecological science into their wildlife conservation efforts. This ethnographic study explores the logics, rationales and motivations behind this approach among Tibetans in Qinghai province. The article contends that Tibetan environmentalists adopt ecological science to gain legibility in the eyes of both the state and the wider environmental conservation community, thereby enhancing their political legitimacy and social recognition. On one hand, this practice counters the stigmatizing narratives that depict Tibetan pastoralists as backward. By embracing scientific discourses and practices, they challenge such derogatory views and position themselves as forward-thinking conservationists. On the other hand, this strategy indirectly preserves the traditional knowledge of pastoralists. Through their involvement with ecological science, they merge traditional insights with scientific methodologies, ensuring the protection of their cultural heritage while adapting to the sociopolitical landscape of contemporary conservation dynamics in China.

The publishing world, like everything else in China at the moment, manifests both signs of change and resistance to change. Some publishers are cautiously hopeful about the current reforms, others feel change is not happening fast enough, and yet others do not ally themselves with reform at all but would prefer to have more stringent controls. This field note will attempt, therefore, to offer a portrait of how Chinese publishing is organized at the moment with areas of likely change, as well as highlighting the relations between Chinese publishing establishments and their counterparts in the west.

A sharp contrast stands between the mood of optimism in 1958 and 1959 when official as well as unofficial reports of industrial progress continued to pour out of Communist China and the silence and complete black-out of statistical information which has characterised the Chinese scene since 1960. If the principal landmarks are retraced, the first major sign of a change in official policy appears to have come in early 1961 when the Chinese Communist Party decided to reverse the policies which had characterised the “leap forward” of 1958–59. This was followed by a drastic policy of retrenchment in investment and reorientation of industrial production during the latter part of 1961 as the economic crisis deepened. Since then the new slogan has been “adjustment, consolidation, reinforcement, and improvement”; the new order of priorities is agriculture, light industry and heavy industry; the new approach is to regard agriculture as the economic base and industry as the “leading factor.”