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476 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1984)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0476 and id is 1 raw text is: OPENING REMARKS AT THE EIGHTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING Welcome to the eighty-seventh annual meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, founded in 1889 and incorporated in 1891. One of my functions as president of the academy is to prepare for and to organize these annual meetings. The board of directors and I regularly try to plan a meeting around a topic that will be important and timely, but we must plan it nearly a year in advance. Traditionally, the topic one year is international, and the next year it is domestic. Two years ago our topic was international terrorism, an equally viable topic today, considering bombings in Israel and a United States officers' club and the firing from the Libyan embassy in London. This year our topic, China in transition, is obviously international, and we were fortunate to choose it, not knowing how newsworthy it would be at the end of April. Indeed, this week Time magazine is featuring on its cover China's New Face and Newsweek is featuring on its cover The Terms of Endearment, a study of President Reagan's visit to Beijing. Yesterday the president landed in Beijing. We are today and tomorrow talking about China, a country in which the United States has a major interest. We have an interesting and informative program. Some of the most illustrious members of the academic and political science community will present new and fascinating papers on the internal politics of China, population control, migration, the relationships among China, the USSR, and the United States, rural agriculture and modernization, and the development of legal education. Approximately 130 American firms now have offices in Beijing, and trade between our two countries amounts to about $5.5 billion, a fiftyfold increase since our last annual meeting dealt with the topic of China, in 1972. Moreover, 10 years ago only a handful of Chinese were allowed to study overseas, while today there are 12,000 students in the United States alone. I am excited by this meeting because it concerns a people that represents 1 billion of the world's population. More people speak Chinese as their native tongue than any other language on earth. If one combines both native and second languages, English is the most commonly used language. Together we rule the linguistic world. China is huge in space and people. China is significant in size and for future development, far beyond any part of the globe. Ethical issues of population control and migration control, legal issues of criminal justice and civil rights, even copyright issues of printed ownership, and investment of capital in hotels, in high technology, and in nuclear power are all of major concern as the United States and China together move through the 1980s and 1990s. On the population issue, we note that there has been a significant rise in life expectancy in China, from age 40 in 1950 to over 60 in 1983. China's population has increased by more than 500 million since World War II. That is roughly, says 9

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