The Cold War is over, but international violence, and preparations for it, are not. Despite the end of the bipolar world and “balance of terror” associated with the United States-Soviet confrontation, peace has not broken out. The militarization of world politics continues, as shown by the Gulf War, ethnic and religious conflicts in central Europe and Asia and nuclear proliferation. Global military spending has somewhat diminished, but at somewhere between $900 billion and $1 trillion annually, it still is a major factor in the budgets and ambitions of most countries. Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War provides opportunities for governments to re-examine their priorities and shift military resources to promote economic and social development, the so-called “peace dividend.” Although in recent years China has dramatically increased its official military expenditures (nearly 100 per cent between 1988 and 1993), beginning in 1979 the Chinese leadership inaugurated a major reorientation of its military-industrial complex.

The “Wenzhou model” is a controversial one in China. Wenzhou, situated in south-eastern Zhejiang Province, is characterized by its lively private or unofficial economy. This pattern of development caused Wenzhou to be pulled into the vortex of national politics, policy-making and reform in the 1980s. As a result, policy implementation and development in Wenzhou has a wider significance than just as an example of local variation.

Analyses of rural reform in post-Mao China have focused mainly on changes in the production unit, the incentive system and the expanded decision-making power of the rural household in production and marketing. They have largely neglected the evolution in policy toward the- inputs of agricultural production: farm machinery, fertilizer, soil, irrigation, seed and plant improvement, and so on. There have been few studies about the relationship between the changes in rural production organizations and incentive systems on the one hand, and peasant choices among various production input options on the other. On the whole, post-Mao agricultural policies slighted what could be called the mechanical package of agricultural inputs in favour of the biological package. Yet no Western analyses have dealt exclusively with this, which is quite surprising, given the enormous significance attached to the mechanical package in general and mechanized farming in particular during the whole period of Mao's rule.

China's present leadership sees universities as being of key importance for the country's economic development and for its relationship with Western countries. This is a kind of two-edged sword. On the one hand, considerable support and encouragement for scientific and technological development is provided, together with pressures for scientific findings to be applied to specific economic development needs. On the other, the reflective and theoretical social sciences and the humanities are being purged of Western influences in efforts to mobilize all resources against what is seen as the Western strategy of fostering “peaceful evolution” towards capitalism. The kinds of tension that arise out of this highly contradictory situation are severe.

Nearly four years have passed since China's leaders ordered the military to crush student demonstrators and their supporters in and around Tiananmen Square. Since then, students at all levels have been given a massive infusion of political “re-education” in an attempt to forestall a recurrence of the turbulence and, more ambitiously, to win back the hearts and minds of Chinese youth. The methods employed by the authorities have included an extended programme of military training, tighter political control over the job assignment system, more time in the curriculum for politics courses, a renewed stress on familiar model personages from the pre-Cultural Revolution era, an upgrading in the status of political work cadres, and an abandonment of the more flexible political and moral education courses and textbooks introduced in the 1980s in favour of a return to more traditional “classical” Marxist approaches.

The Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has experienced many vicissitudes since its founding in July 1979. These have reflected both the struggle and changes in fortune in China's theoretical circles after the Cultural Revolution, and the struggle between the reformists and the die-hard conservatives.