The rural economic reforms introduced into China after 1978 have wreaked havoc on the accumulated scholarship of China specialists in the west. Dozens of books and articles that had revealed the inner workings of people's communes and the merits and faults of competing work point systems were reduced to historical curiosities by the decollectivization drive that swept the nation. In the wake of the demise of the familiar and fairly standardized pattern represented by people's communes, many questions arose for debate. How much of the collective system remained in rural China after decollectivization? To what extent did the revived system of family farming represent a return to pre-socialist organizational patterns, or was any resemblance to the past superficial and misleading? Was there a general pattern of village organization across the nation in the wake of decollectivization, or had uniformity completely given way to local peculiarities?

Field-work in north, south and west China villages reveals that prior to the establishment of the People's Republic family organization at all three sites was characterized by the same customary arrangements concerning ownership of property, economic ties among family members, family management and family division. During the collective era and the present period of family fanning changes in these aspects of family life have been along similar lines. I was in a Hebei village for four months during 1986–87, and in 1990 carried out three-month periods of field-work in villages in Shanghai county and on the Chengdu Plain in Sichuan.

Over the past 20 years, studies of grain production and use in China have figured prominently in debates concerning economic efficiency, income disparities and the contours of the Maoist development strategy. Virtually all analysts now agree that grain production in China exhibited a strong tendency toward provincial self-sufficiency and that the inter-provincial grain trade declined during the Maoist era (from the 1950s to 1978), that provincial self-sufficiency obstructed efficient allocation of agricultural resources and contributed to the persistence of poverty, and that the tendency toward selfsufficiency is attributable partly to a policy of “grain first,” which promoted concentration upon grain production in every province regardless of comparative advantage. Recent studies point to significant changes in the pattern of grain production and trade since 1978 and trace these changes to relaxation of “grain first” and introduction of institutional reforms affecting the grain sector.

China's year of upheaval, 1989, was full of incongruities. For example, students invoked the historic struggle of intellectuals to “revive China,” while at the same time erecting statues modelled after the symbol of a foreign power with a long history of objectionable conduct toward their country. One of the most interesting incongruities, however, emerged not in the streets, but in the pages of Chinese journals. Highly-placed intellectuals debated the theory of neo-authoritarianism, a doctrine new to the People's Republic, but one which reflects the policy prescriptions of pre-revolutionary Chinese leaders and contemporary Third World strongmen. Advocates of the doctrine were ideologically and, in some cases, organizationally, close to Zhao Ziyang, then the general secretary of the world's largest Communist Party, but their theory was classically conservative. The debate, moreover, was waged without reference to Marxism by either proponents or opponents.