A leading figure in the field of modern Chinese philosophy, Fung Yu-lan (Feng Yu-lan) has lived and worked amidst the intellectual and political tensions which have characterised the recent history of his country. His major work, Chung-kuo Che-hsueh Shih (History of Chinese Philosophy), was published in the 1930s, and is known in the West through the monumental translation into English prepared by Professor Derk Bodde of the University of Pennsylvania. Fung's technical philosophical theories were defined and articulated in his wartime writings during the 1940s. Like many of the leading Chinese intellectuals, he has now embraced Marxism-Leninism, the new orthodoxy which provides the doctrinal creed for contemporary China even as Confucianism did for the scholar-officials of the imperial period.

This article is concerned with the nature, functions and scope of the institution in the People's Republic of China that is commonly referred to as contracts. The paper as a whole ultimately focuses on three problems: (1) the nature of this institution; (2) whether this institution, if it is of a different nature from the Western contract, performs tasks in the Chinese context not unlike those of the institution of contracts in the West: and (3) how it performs those tasks.

In the November 9, 1962, issue of the People's Daily, a cartoon shows President Kennedy seated at a restaurant table waving a broken missile on the end of a fork and giving his order to a bald, obsequious waiter who stands with pad and pencil in hand. The caption: “His Appetite Grows With The Eating.” Kennedy says “I'll have fried Il-28 bombers next and sugar machete for the sweet course.” The waiter can hardly be mistaken for anybody but Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Since the end of the Second World War, which brought the division of the country into northern and southern halves, North Korea has become a thoroughly orthodox Communist state with but few deviations from the Russian type. The “Marxist-Leninist line” has been followed with fidelity and enthusiasm in the field of economic planning and organisation as laid out in both the early Five-Year Plans of Soviet Russia and in the similar pattern of socialisation in Red China. What deviation exists is said to be characteristic of the transitional period in building Socialism or a “people's democracy,” where exploiting elements still exist, as contrasted with the Soviet Union, where it is claimed “Socialism” is a reality. The government so far has launched the two One-Year Plans of 1947 and 1948, the first Two-Year Plan of 1949–50 with emphasis on Soviet assistance, the Three-Year Plan of 1954–56, the first Five-Year Plan of 1957–61, and the Seven-Year Plan of 1961–67.

On October 23, 1962, Premier Kim Il-song outlined the foreign policy of his government before the Supreme People's Assembly, meeting in Pyongyang. His lengthy speech, entitled “Immediate Tasks of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea,” ranged over both domestic and foreign policy issues. To set forth the major themes of that speech is a convenient method of introducing the foreign policy of North Korea.

In a speech delivered at the rally commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the liberation of Korea, the North Korean Premier announced that the peasants in North Korea were now the owners of large-scale collectivised farms and that they had the firm technical foundation for bumper crops every year without strenuous efforts. He declared: “This is the beginning of a world for our farm villages.” Another spokesman of the North Korean regime has stated: “It is easy (or good) to work and enjoyable to live in the co-operativised North Korean farms. There is a bumper crop every year in the constantly changing collectivised fields and the peasants' work and living are literally song and dances.”

It is the aim of this paper to examine the Chinese Communist movement in 1930 and in particular the policies which bore the name of Li Li-san. The Li Li-san “line” was essentially an attempt to use the rural based Red Army to gain an urban base for the Communist revolution in China. As such it marked a transitional period between the emphasis on urban uprisings of earlier years and complete withdrawal to the countryside after this period. Similarly it was a transitional period in the relations between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Communist International (CI), moving from the complete direction of the CCP from Moscow to the relative seclusion of the CCP in the 1930s.

In 1962, commemorative activities were held in Communist China to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Mao's Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. In the same year, a group of scholars and writers working in America and Britain gathered near Oxford to ponder over Chinese Communist literature. Though the coincidence was not intentional, it did force on one's mind a disturbing sense of history. For no review of Chinese Communist literature, from our point of view or theirs, can escape the fact of control, and the control began with Mao's Talks. The success of the control, of course, is something to be celebrated in Communist China, but the defects in the Chinese Communist writing, noted at the conference in England, indicate the costs paid for that success. For these defects are made to order. It is beyond the power of any single writer in Communist China to correct them. He is bound to contribute to the collective errors if he wishes to avoid a political offence.

“Where ideology restricts, art frees …”: the opening section of T. A. Hsia's paper provides an eloquent statement of a fundamental distinction, a distinction which is at the centre of a dilemma. How is a group of men whose inclinations and commitments are to literature as art to approach a literature which is ideological in inspiration and intent? For this, we agreed, is a fair statement of the nature of Chinese Communist literature. It is more than a matter of guidance, or direction or control. It is not at all to be taken for granted that control is disastrous for literature. Great works of literature emerged in the past from under the control of despotic monarchs and authoritarian religions. Dante did not necessarily understand the authority of the Church to impose some kind of fetter on his work; it was a measure of restricted freedom that Chinese writers of the past knew and felt at home in. Great literature endures, as Mao Tun maintains, “not because literature is independent of politics but because it serves in a way much more profound than can be assessed at the moment.”

Modern Chinese literature, which I date from the deliberate new beginnings made at the time of the May Fourth movement, is distinguished by its conscious effort at Europeanisation, which is in itself a catchall term embracing a whole assembly of themes and techniques, images and linguistic features taken and adopted from the vast literature beyond the seas and vaguely and often incorrectly designated as European. To be European was in fact simply to be non-traditional Chinese.

What pessimistic observers have lamented as the collapse of Chinese civilisation is exactly the necessary undermining and erosion without which there could not have been a regeneration of an old civilisation.… The product of this rebirth looks suspiciously occidental. But scratch the surface and you will find that the stuff of which it is made is essentially the Chinese bedrock which much weathering and corrosion have only made stand out more clearly—the humanistic and rationalistic China resurrected by the touch of the scientific and democratic civilisation of the new world.

Poetry and politics are rare companions in the competitive world of practical affairs today. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev, with peasant shrewdness, is addicted to Russian proverbs to enliven his rhetoric; but there are few indications that he is sympathetic with the creative writer and none that he himself will rank with Pushkin in the annals of his nation's literature. In Washington, the appearance of Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in January 1961 was an event at once exceptional and gratifying to admirers of Frost's artistic integrity; the elderly poet's advice to the young president of the United States to stress the Irish and underplay the Harvard hi his background may yet have enduring significance. Only in Peking, however, do we find a world leader who combines distinctive political abilities and literary talents. Indeed the juxtaposition of strategic and artistic instincts hi Mao Tse-tung is so unusual in the post-Churchillian world that the case merits more than passing note.