Even before the completion of land reform, the Communist regime had introduced in most parts of China the two new institutions through which it planned eventually to socialize rural trade, namely the state trading companies and the supply and marketing cooperatives. The former, wholly owned by the state and controlled by governmental departments of commerce, were normally established in cities and central market towns. Each company specialized in certain lines—e.g., grain, edible oils, marine products, stationery supplies—and established branches in nearby market towns as required for sales or purchases. With few exceptions, free competition obtained between the state trading companies and private firms until November 1953, when the companies began to acquire official monopolies of important commodities. By the end of 1954, state concerns had absorbed a number of larger private firms and captured a major share of the wholesale market.

Ever since its first draft was written by a small group of Americans and presented to the Japanese Government in February, 1946, the present constitution of Japan has been a source of political controversy. Even under “normal” circumstances the enactment of a new constitution in modern democratic societies is almost certain to exhume and revivify all sorts of latent political conflicts and to add to these its own measure of new dissensions. Controversy is even more probable in the case of a constitution drafted by aliens and conquerors for a nation completely subject to their occupation and control and, in the Japanese case, the nature of the document itself still further increased this probability. The American-authored constitution of 1947 was in spirit and provisions almost a complete inversion of its predecessor, the Meiji Constitution of 1889. Where the latter did its brilliant best to protect the legal and political heartlands of the imperial system and a traditionally oligarchic and authoritarian form of government against popular encroachments, the former uniformly espoused concepts and institutions that are among the world's most democratic and progressive. It is difficult to conceive of two modern constitutions more diametrically opposed in spirit and in basic mechanics. The new constitution thus labored under the dual handicaps of alien authorship and of a radical departure from the traditionally ascendant norms and institutions of Japanese politics. It provided ample substance for bitter controversy.

There is something particular, though perhaps not unique, about Ceylonese nationalism, or, to be more precise, about recent Ceylonese nationalism. In the last years of colonial rule, Ceylon appeared to be sliding gently and quietly along the road to independence, with properly conducted constitutional change to mark the milestones; when colonial rule ended on February 4, 1948, it seemed that the gentleness and quietness was to continue into the era of independence itself. But with the 1956 elections there came an apparently sudden change. In the elections themselves, a landslide overwhelmed the long-dominant United National Party in a way that has not so far afflicted the Indian Congress or other similar parties, and a new Government came into power borne, it seemed, on the crest of a second wave of nationalism, of a different and more violent quality than its predecessor. There followed a period of rapid change, of communal strife, riots and emergencies, of political assassination; and, in 1962, there was an attempted coup d'état followed by political arrests. Such is still the instability of the contemporary scene in Ceylon that he would be a bold prophet who would dare to forecast the next political surprise.

In this paper I am concerned with an examination of symbolic and social dual organization. Does “dual organization” refer to those rare social systems in which the total community is in one way or another bisected into two definable “groups” which have certain formal relations with each other? Or, alternatively, can we speak of “dual organization” when the society is not so divided, or when the social divisions are obscure, but where there is a symbolic system in which binary categories are prominent? And furthermore, just what is the relationship between dualism as a symbolic order, which appears quite widespread, and dualism as bisected social structure, which has rarely been satisfactorily analyzed ?

The Seventh Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), which was held between November 22 and December 16, 1926, principally to consider the Chinese question, met at a crucial period in the history of the Chinese Communist movement. During the previous summer, Chiang Kai-shek had launched his famous Northern Expedition against northern militarists and the legal government in Peking. His Communist allies had participated by arousing peasant discontent behind enemy lines and by infiltration of northern armies. It was now feared that the Communists might soon become the victims of their own success. Chiang had already given evidence of his displeasure of Communist activities. In March he had staged a “coup” against his Russian advisers and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but a reconciliation had been effected. In October Stalin had telegraphed instructions to the CCP directing them to restrain the peasant movement in order to avoid antagonizing the officer corps of the Kuomintang army, which was largely recruited from the landholding class.