In both China and India agriculture is the key sector and yet detailed comparisons of agricultural development in the two economies are difficult to obtain. A major problem is, of course, the availability and reliability of data. This paper puts together some of the information that is now available and assesses its reliability to draw some rough generalizations.

On the whole it seems that agricultural production in the two countries has grown at fairly similar rates. In terms of absolute level Chinese yield per hectare in most crops, of course, exceeds that of India by a significant margin, but this has been true for quite a long time in the past.

In provision of inputs like organic and inorganic fertilizers and irrigation water the Chinese performance has been much better than that of India. Both countries have devoted not a very low proportion of their total gross investment to the agricultural sector. But the effectiveness of this investment has been quite unsatisfactory on account of, among other things, technical deficiencies and faulty planning in both countries, and the excesses of over enthusiastic but unskilled party cadres in China and a very much restricted framework of village institutions and administrative setup in India. In land policy much of the period under consideration was taken up in China in bold experimentations—with the inevitable advances and retreats—in search of the optimum size of land management in a backward peasant economy, while in India in spite of copious land legislation some of the crucial land relations have remained basically unaltered. The Chinese policy of moving away from age-old small-scale family farming and of emphasizing joint management of land and labour has, on the one hand, significantly strained peasant incentives, but on the other hand rid Chinese agriculture of the burden of uneconomically small and fragmented holdings, tenurial insecurity and crop sharing which still afflict a substantial part of Indian agriculture. The problem of ensuring enough marketed surplus of foodgrains to feed the nonagricultural sector has, however, remained unsolved in both countries, in spite of all changes in institutions and production.

The late Yuan popular rebellions began in 1351 when two independent White Lotus Societies, in north and south China, both purveying a chiliastic Buddo-Manichean ideology, recruited to their cause a following of socially miscellaneous elements who called themselves Red Turbans, and provoked an empire-wide attack upon the landlords and the local officials. One key to the failure of the rebels to rise above the rioting phase lay in their inability to gain massive and sustained peasant support. The result was that the landlord gentry, leading peasant militia (i-ping), were able to contain and suppress these riots by 1353–54 in cooperation with the Yuan bureaucracy. However, when the Yuan Chancellor Toghto was for political reasons cashiered in January 1355, the dynasty lost control of the pacification process. In these circumstances, new leadership emerged from both of the original rebel organizations, and stepping into the control vacuum left by the Yuan, pressed an entirely new policy of cooperation with the landlord gentry and their i-ping. The main leaders in this were Ch'en Yu-liang and the future Ming founder, Chu Yuan-chang. Chu's victory over Ch'en, his chief rival, is due largely to the tighter centralization of his embryonic imperial regime.

The Yuaikai (Friendly Society) was the only large, national labor organization in 1912–1919 Japan. Its founder, Suzuky Bunji, an intellectual and Christian humanist, believed that cooperation between labor and management was the key to developing the Yuaikai into a true labor union movement in a day when organized labor was held in suspicion. Accordingly, Suzuki organized the Yuaikai workers into potential unions and tried to persuade business and government to accept a moderate union movement. Suzuki's gradualist tactice resulted in expansion of the Yuaikai. By 1917, after two trips to the United States, Suzuki had become the symbol of Japanese organized labor at home and abroad. But Suzuki's moderate approach to reform was jolted by repression of the Yuaikai in 1917–1918 by business and government and his moderate leadership in the Yuaikai was challenged by militant workers who resented intellectual domination of their movement and by radical university graduates who sought to turn the Yuaikai into a revolutionary organization. These two groups conspired to turn the Yuaikai into the relatively militant Sodomei (General Federation) in 1919 and to reduce Suzuki's power in the movement but their revalry for power greatly undermined the capacity of the Sodomei to build further on the institutional foundations laid for organized labor by Suzuki Bunji.

Through an examination of the career of Liang Shih-i (1869–1933) and the “Communications” clique of railway and financial administrators, the intention is to illuminate the nonmilitary side of the late Ch'ing to early Republic transition. Although Liang and such associates as Yeh Kung-cho and Kuan Keng-lin dealt with modernization of communications and financial institutions, the patterns of their careers fit a more traditional mold. Liang held a chin-shih degree; the others also had scholarly gentry backgrounds. Unlike their well known contemporary, Sheng Hsuan-huai, they were not entrepreneurs as well as bureaucrats. Crucial to the rise of these men first to bureaucratic and then, during the Republican period, to political power were their ties to Yuan Shih-k'ai. Between 1906 and 1911, Yuan helped nurtured Liang and his clique to control of the Ministry of Posts and Communications (Yu-ch'uan pu); during and after the revolution of 1911–12 Yuan depended on them and their communications and financial network of influence for support of his presidency of the Republic. Thus Liang and the Communications Clique represented the non-military side of Yuan Shih-k'ai's power during the late Ch'ing and early Republican periods.

The diffusion of Indian Civilization and its “great tradition” to the extreme south of the peninsula occurred in the earliest stages by sea, not by land. Such characteristics of civilization as script and literacy, kingship and the state, and organized religions, developed at first in the earliest urban centers in Tamil Nadu, which were located on the coast opposite Ceylon. In the half millennium before Christ there was sea traffic between the coasts of Gujarat and Sind, and Ceylon, which laid the basis for the development of civilization in that island. Early civilization in soutliern Tamil Nadu developed parallel with this, and most of its intrusive features were analogous with those in the island, or were inspired by them. The earliest attractions of the far southern coasts were pearls and gems, which brought merchants, and ultimately, script, religions, and the Pandiyan dynastic traditon. Early civilizations characterized by the Colas and Keralas, as well as in the Andhra deltas, were inspired by sea traffic. Sources are early Tamil and Ceylon Brahmi inscriptions, Tamil Sangam literature, early Ceylon chronicles, etymologies, legends, and some archeology.

Historians have overstated the role of adoption as a channel of upward social mobility for poor but bright young samurai in Tokugawa Japan. An analysis of family histories and public service records of four han shows that adoption helped to preserve both samurai lineages and the political system of daimyo rule. It also created opportunities for younger sons to remain in the elite class under a system of primogeniture. Adoption in the middle and upper (shi) ranks of the class was normally between related families of roughly the same social status. Where status differences were involved, the adopted son usually represented a higher status than the adopting family. The few records available for lower ranks (sotsu) reveal some marriage and adoption with commoners, but none with the higher ranks of the samurai class. In sum, adoption clearly supported the system of hereditary status, but rarely provided opportunities for poor but bright samurai to get ahead in society.

It has been said that poetry is the voice of the heart. In Mao Tse-tung's first poem Changsha, and Swimming written after his success, we have a picture of his aspiration and inspiration, his classical literary background, and the vicissitudes of his life and times.