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321 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. viii (1959)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0321 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD It is impossible that our merchants and our missionaries can course up and down the inland waters of this great region, and traffic in their cities and preach in their villages, without wearing at the crust of a Chinaman's stoical and skeptical conceit. The whole present system in China is a hollow thing, with a hard brittle surface: we try in vain to scratch it; but some day a happy blow will shiver it. It will all go together.1 As the China correspondent of England's most influential newspaper a century ago, Mr. Cooke wrote in those far-off, fortunate days when observers of Far East- ern affairs prepared their dispatches at leisure and sent them off by fast clipper ship clearing Shanghai or Canton every fortnight. His judgment that the whole present system in China is a hollow thing, with a hard brittle surface has linger- ing echoes today, though a happy blow which will shiver mainland China appears to be the least likely solution to the problem of Chinese Communism. The present situation on the China coast is at once more complex, more refrac- tory, and more explosive than any which existed in the nineteenth century. It has grown out of a half century of Chinese history and out of four specific develop- ments in the Far East during the past decade: First, the Chinese Communist Party has consolidated total political and military power on the mainland of China. Second, Communist China has emerged as a major Asian power. Third, the Sino-Soviet alliance has become a key factor in the structure of world politics. Fourth, Nationalist China has been driven from the mainland to a new base in Taiwan. As a result of these changes, the Chinese political landscape has altered dras- tically and decisively. This issue of THE ANNALS, designed to update the Report on China issue of September 1951 edited by Professor H. Arthur Steiner, presents the results of some current thinking and research on some of these alterations. The first three articles provide perspective: they review the trends in China during the 1900-1950 period, appraise the general dimensions of the present situation, and delineate the assumptions underlying current United States policy. The major portion of the volume is devoted to the domestic scene and to the international relations of Communist China, and the final papers deal spe- cifically with Taiwan and with the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. While this volume appears at the beginning of 1959, all articles were of necessity com- pleted in the autumn of 1958. The overwhelmingly dominant segment of the China scene today is Communist China. During the past decade, the Chinese Communists have welded the main- land into a single political unit for the first time in the experience of living Chinese. They have established a unified structure of organizational control embracing roughly a quarter of the earth's population. And they have embarked upon a program of total mobilization of mainland China's energies and resources 1 George Wingrove Cooke, China: being The Times special correspondence from China in the years 1857-58 (London: G. Routledge and Company, 1858), p. v. viii

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