The importance of “face” (lien or mien-tzu) has long been recognized as a prime determinant of Chinese behavioural patterns whether those of an individual or of a group. We also know that the Confucian emphasis on “harmony” (ho-p'ing) has long constituted a basic ideal in Chinese inter-personal relations. Recently social scientists have drawn attention to “impression management” and to the relatively great disparities in some societies between an individual's or group's “front region,” “front-stage” or “public sphere” behaviour and the contradictory “back region,” “back-stage” or “closed sphere” behaviour. Applying these concepts in a Chinese society which still purports to uphold Confucian ideals we find that the front-stage impression a group seeks and often manages to convey is one of unity and harmony. Closer inspection may reveal, however, that, back-stage, factionalism is rife.

Although the People's Republic of China attaches little importance to elections in parliamentary democracies, elections are seen as important in societies going through the transition between capitalism and communism.1 Elections of local level leaders were carried out in the CCP-controlled base areas before 1949, and throughout the period after Liberation. The attention devoted to election propaganda and voter turn-out attest to the importance placed on mass electoral participation by the Chinese leadership.2* I wish to express my gratitude to Thomas Bernstein, Steven Butler, Victor Falkenheim, Andrew Nathan, Brian Shaw, and David Strand for reading earlier drafts of this paper and providing many useful suggestions for its revision. Needless to say, all errors are the responsibility of the author.

After the technological revolution in dry farming of the Sui Dynasty (581–618 a.d.) made possible the rapid spread of wheat farming, this crop gradually became important for farmer and consumer alike. By the 20th century wheat had come to occupy about one-fifth of the total foodgrain sown area and ranked second to rice as the most important foodgrain. More than one-third of the population consumed wheat. Roughly two-thirds of the total wheat production came from the north China plain and nearly another third from the central provinces. Winter wheat made up 87 per cent of the wheat sown area with the remaining being spring wheat.

This article will examine the constitution and evolution of the concept of “intellectual property” in the People's Republic of China through an analysis of policy regarding incentives for inventive activity – which in western legal systems would be generally covered by patent law. Hopefully, such an analysis will not only enable us to understand incentives for inventive activity in China, but also to understand crucial property concepts in China, especially “private” or “individual” ownership, during its “socialist transformation.” This, in turn, may shed additional light on the debate on the nature and future disposition of “bourgeois rights.”

By 1975, after a period of widely divergent estimates for Chinese grain production, a consensus appeared to be emerging. Consider, for example, the estimates that were published at the time (in million tons):

Not only was there a consensus, but it was widely assumed that the figures were consistent with those published in the late 1950s. Since then, evidence has been accumulating that the definition of grain has changed and that not all of the figures released in any given year conform to the definition commonly used at the time. We will review the changes in the definition of grain and present our interpretation of the data that have been released in the past 20 years.

During my brief stay in the People's Republic of China I sought to obtain systematic and reliable information which would enable me to begin to answer the following questions: (1) How are decisions about drug safety, distribution, production levels, and price made and what have been the implicit or explicit trade-offs? (2) How do the pharmaceutical, research, public health, and population bureaucracies interrelate, how is inter-agency co-ordination achieved, and what have been the successes and problems encountered in this regard? (3) How are decisions made to initiate and discontinue research? (4) How extensive has decentralization of drug research and pharmaceutical production become in the post-Cultural Revolution period? If decentralization has occurred, what tangible consequences has it had? (5) What mechanisms exist to assure public health and environmental quality and what problems have arisen in the process of trying to achieve results in these areas? While there is much that I was unable to learn, if for no other reason than I had no opportunity to meet with relevant government officials, I was able to learn a great deal from the factory managers, researchers, doctors, and administrators with whom I spoke.