For over four years from the Marco Polo Bridge incident to Pearl Harbour China fought alone against Japanese military expansionism in the Far East. Both Britain and the United States recognized China's strategic importance but gave relatively little in the way of material help. On the one hand sufficient aid had to be given to ensure that China continued to act as a bulwark against Japanese imperialism and to keep China from gravitating to the Soviet Union (whose aid programme was more immediate, more generous and took the form of military supplies). On the other hand assistance was limited by British resource constraints, by American isolationist public opinion and by the fear, on both sides of the Atlantic, that overt military aid would provoke Japan into widening the conflict into their own respective spheres of interest.

The commercial, cultural and educational agreement between the State of Ohio and Hubei province has become a major element in Hubei's efforts to modernize its industrial and agricultural sectors. At the same time, the agreement also provides evidence of increasing provincial autonomy in China's economic development. This latter fact is seen in the negotiating practices adopted by provincial officials before and after the agreement was reached.

When the Geneva agreements of July 1954 at Jast brought a measure of peace back to Indo-China, the Viet-Minh régime found itself in legal and recognised possession of that section of the country which lay north of the seventeenth parallel and which is officially known today as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. By then, part of this area, comprising the Viet-Minh's war-zones I, II, III and most of IV, thirty-three provinces in all, had already long been held by Ho Chi Minh's troops and in much of it a semblance of the new order's system of local government had been in regular operation for some years back. In a good deal of the rest, clandestine and fragmented centres of rebel control had perilously co-existed throughout the war with the old administration maintained at great cost by the French authorities. Finally, in many places, particularly the urban concentrations, no appreciable degree of Viet-Minh influence had managed to last out the conflict.

The overall picture of Tibet today is one of complete Chinese control—not in the pre-revolt sense of control through the Dalai Lama, Tibetan officials and institutions, but direct control by Chinese personnel over Chinese institutions reorganized on the Chinese pattern through Chinese heads of departments and Chinese cadres as in China itself.* There is no Tibetan in any position of influence and trust, and all pretence that there is has been dropped, except for photographs with visiting dignitaries. Only one gesture in this connection has been made by the Chinese authorities in the past year and that was to invite the Panchen Lama, Cabinet Minister Ngabu Ngawang Jigme, chief collaborator since the signing of the 1951 Seventeen Point Agreement, and Pangdatshang Topgyay, Chairman of the East Tibetan Autonomous Government and Khamba leader, to Peking. Since they returned to Lhasa, they have not attended any major function. One luncheon party to be given to the “officials of the Panchen Erdeni Conference Committee” in the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama's former summer palace, was suddenly cancelled for the rather specious reason “due to a bad weather forecast from the meteorological department.” Since then persistent rumours have arrived in India that the Panchen Lama has “disappeared” or is dead.

Communist China is not an “Asiatic” (“hydraulic”) society; nor is Mao's government a replica of the power system called “Oriental despotism.” Comparative analysis reveals basic similarities as well as important dissimilarities between Communist totalitarianism and the absolutist régimes that prevailed in traditional Asia, North Africa and certain parts of pre-Columbian America.

Within her first decade under Communist leadership, China has been transformed from a virtual nonentity into a major world Power. International decisions which ignore her interests are unenforceable against her. Her status as one of the Big Five can in practice no longer be challenged, and must be taken into account even by countries that refrain from acknowledging the changed situation diplomatically.

After several ebbs and flows a new high-tide in population control has been gathering force since 1978. This new birth control campaign has three major features which separate it from earlier ones: consensus as to its desirability among the top leadership, the high priority being awarded to it, and a sense of urgency in achieving results.

After war, years of hostility and a long period of gradually improving Party and state relations, the study of China has begun to re-emerge in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Vietnam has had a sinological tradition for hundreds of years, linked to China by history, language, trade, a common border and in a myriad of other ways. From the mid-1950s until the early 1970s, thousands of Vietnamese students and officials studied in the People's Republic of China. Today the People's Republic remains Vietnam's key strategic threat. But the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas Chinese communities are also among Vietnam's key trade partners and a growing source of investment for its economic reforms.

Given this close relationship – including the direct hostility in the late 1970s and early to mid–1980s, one of a series of conflicts going back hundreds of years – it is perhaps paradoxical that the study of China in Vietnam has remained relatively weak. During the war against the French which led to the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and the victory at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnamese sinology was a field largely limited to one or two universities and institutes in Hanoi and some additional capacity in Hue and Saigon, with scholars trained in either the older Vietnamese or French tradition. The thousands of Vietnamese who studied in China in the 1950s and 1960s were trained largely for other fields, although Chinese studies did see some development during the 1949 to 1966 period.

The Chinese have released a new figure for grain output in 1974 that is far larger than output claimed for any previous year. At an FAO conference held in Rome in mid-November 1975, the vice-minister of agriculture and forestry, Yang Li-kung, reported that total grain output was 274.9 million tons. And a 10 December Reuters dispatch from Peking speculated on the basis of this 1974 figure that China's 1975 harvest could be more than 280 million tons.

The grain output in China in 1974 was not only, as Robert Michael Field noted in The China Quarterly No. 65, “ far larger than output claimed for any previous year ” ; it was also far larger than the estimates made by most western economists concerned with China. Such observers, believing that agricultural production in China was “ stagnating,” had estimated Chinese grain output for 1974 as being between 255 and 259 million tons. Peking's announcement that 1974 grain output was 274-9 million tons thus set up a contradiction: either those western economists had been far off the mark in their extrapolations of growth or the Chinese figure was somehow misleading. Field opts for the second explanation.