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.

No observer of the Chinese political scene will argue with a frontpage headline in the New York Times of June 26, 1966, which said that a “titanic struggle” was taking place in China. This struggle has thrown China into turmoil and has already claimed the political careers of at least one senior Politburo member, two top Party propaganda officials (one of them an alternate member of the Politburo) as well as numerous Party and non-Party functionaries—and the full extent of the purge has yet to come to light. The Chinese themselves, with characteristic restraint, have proclaimed that “this great cultural revolution has no parallel in scale, in sweep, in strength or in momentum.” Whatever the final outcome of this “revolution,” it can be safely said that the Chinese political landscape will be considerably altered after it has run its unpredictable course.

Millions of China's ethnic minority citizens remain subject to competing legal standards, even as state officials strive to strengthen a unified notion of state law. Minority customary law continues to bind many minority citizens in both civil and criminal arenas and often conflicts directly with state law. What happens when these laws conflict? Based on fieldwork in Yunnan, this article shows how local officials and communities navigate legal pluralism and what legal and policy provisions guide them. Granting local judges discretionary authority to set aside state law in favour of customary law, although seemingly undermining law enforcement, may in the long run be the best path to strengthening rule of law in China's minority regions.

At a meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in March 1961, Professor Bernard Morris read a paper on Sino-Soviet relations which began as follows:

Almost a decade ago, the late Franz Borkenau wrote that a profound conflict between the communist regimes of Russia and China is in the long run as certain as anything in politics. He based his prediction on the strength of two arguments. First, it is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to establish their absolute control as far as they can; they therefore cannot have genuine allies but must seek to dominate. Secondly, the unity of the communist world movement is axiomatic for every Leninist. Hence it follows that the Kremlin must exert control over all communist parties. This thrust of Soviet totalitarianism, Borkenau argued, is therefore incompatible with Mao Tse-tung's clear desire to be a leader in his own right and to preserve Chinese national independence.

Few studies on the legacies of the Chinese Civil War have examined its effects on state consolidation in the borderland area between China and mainland South-East Asia. This paper empirically examines the impact of the intrusion of the defeated Kuomingtang (KMT) into the borderland area between China, Burma and Thailand. In the People's Republic of China (PRC), the presence of the US-supported KMT across its Yunnan border increased the new communist government's threat perceptions. In response, Beijing used a carrot-and-stick approach towards consolidating its control by co-opting local elites while ruthlessly eliminating any opposition deemed to be in collusion with the KMT. In the case of Burma, the KMT presence posed a significant challenge to Burmese national territorial integrity and effectively led to the fragmentation of the Burmese Shan State. Finally, in Thailand, Bangkok collaborated with the Americans in support of the KMT to solidify its alliance relations. Later, Thailand used the KMT as a buffer force for its own border defence purposes against a perceived communist infiltration from the north. This paper contextualizes the spill-over effects of the Chinese Civil War in terms of the literature on how external threats can potentially facilitate state consolidation.

Information obtained during a research tour of communes in rural China in the summer of 1979 clarified, among other things, the structure of grain marketing by production teams and other basic units of production. Explanations advanced by officials at various levels above and within the communes Showed that the grain sold by units to the state included a tranche, named “ discussion grain ” (yigou), Which was unfamiliar to us although it was said to have been introduced generally in 1972–73, and in Guangdong Province as early as 1963. We obtained the following understanding of the system currently in operation throughout China.