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Cultural traits from China have been slowly entering Europe for more than two thousand years. Some of these, such as gunpowder, the compass and paper have been of outstanding importance while others have created but passing fads. It is impossible to identify all of the influences of Chinese origin which have entered European culture during this long period. Even in the case of clearly recognized Chinese traits the records are inadequate as to many of the details of their westward journey. Despite the incompleteness of our knowledge, a brief survey of the existing in formation throws light on some aspects of European cultural history and on some of the mechanisms of diffusion. There were four main periods of contact between China and the West. The first was the era of silk trade with Rome and the ancient Mediterranean world which lasted from the first century B.C. to the middle of the sixth century A.D. The rise of the Arab Empire in the seventh century began a long period of relations between China and the Near East in which the Moslem world acted partially as a barrier but also as an intermediary between China and Europe. The Mongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made possible brief direct contacts of Europe with China. Modem relations of China and the West began with the Age of Discoveries in the sixteenth century.

This paper analyzes critically some of the literature on Communist Chinese education. A tentative comparison with Soviet educational experience is developed, and related to the present crisis in mainland China. A select bibliography of the secondary literature is appended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes and analyzes certain methods of trade monopoly in a rustic environment in China. The field is West Town, in West Yunnan and the time of investigation is between January and May 1942. In West Town there are several guilds of which that of butchers of pigs is not the least important. This guild is said to have had its beginnings about forty or fifty years ago. It was then an independent but not formally organized thing. About six years ago the District Kuomintang Headquarters of Tali urged and helped to organize it into a definite Butchers' Guild and made it subordinate to Butchers' Guild of Tali. Family is the basis of membership in the guild. There are eighteen member families, which comprise all butchers in West Town. The Guild has an executive body of two representatives and two secretaries. The former have charge of external relations and the latter have the duty of managing internal affairs. In reality, however, secretaries only run errands to prepare for ceremonial occasions while all matters of importance are in hands of the two representatives. Officers are elected separately in both areas. Representatives are as a rule the senior-most persons in the trade in each area. But election occurs only when officer express a desire to relinquish their posts.

The article discusses a study on the frequency of dental caries in Chinese people. Researchers studied 1000 people of various ages, classes, and geographical origins who were living in Peiping, China. They studied a total of 20,778 permanent teeth and found that 2.1% were carious. Tables are presented which categorize the teeth that were studied.

The article presents a speech by Yale University medical researcher Bert G. Anderson, delivered at a meeting of the New Haven Section of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR) on December 7, 1931, in which he discusses the water sources of people with mottled dental enamel in China, the incidence of the abnormality, and the severity of the condition.

The high degree of social mobility in traditional China was achieved through the instrumentality of the civil service examinations. Under Western impact, the examinations were abolished and a modern school system was established, with study abroad as its de facto culminating stage. Whereas the cost of education was low in the old days, it became inordinately high under the new system. Study abroad in particular was the privilege of a small group of men from official, professional, and mercantile families. Because the Western- educated men had far better opportunity for advancement than had the Chinese-trained, the change from the old system resulted in greatly decreased social mobility and in a change in the channel of mobility. Both factors have powerfully affected the broad trend of social and political changes in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1953 census of Mainland China disclosed a population of 582.6 million. Demographic data from official sources seem to be reliable and useful despite defects in data collection and analysis, particularly, underenumeration of females and infants and distortion of the age-sex structure. Use of population registers for public security purposes has weakened the registration system. Data on vital rates are affected by underregistration. Urban growth data suffer from underregistration of rural migrants. Demographic field surveys fail to apply standard sampling procedures and controls. There is no evidence that demographic data are fabricated for propaganda purposes. In Peiping, policy and planning are based on these data. With appropriate adjustment, they may be used in demographic research on Mainland China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to define the traditional Chinese family system which persisted through two thousand years without any substantial change. A model of this system is described in this article, to represent the family of the gentry and officialdom, although the deviation of a peasant household would be slight, for in China the peasant is an earnest imitator of the life patterns established by the gentry-scholar class. However lasting as was China's traditional family, the early hail of the twentieth century witnessed a rapid disintegration of this age-old institution among the modern-educated intellectuals in the large cities and trade ports, and the emergence of the conjugal family as a sharp competitor. Under the impetus of the present social revolution the destruction of this system has penetrated to all groups of society and to the vast interior. The family tradition, composes of a variety of minute manners unique to each family, gives its members a strong feeling of esprit de corps. This tradition is conscientiously kept intact and proudly transmitted through generations. When strengthened by the cult of ancestor worship, it becomes the code of conduct and permeates the minds of family members. It determines the proper relations between members of the family, inheritance of the family's property, and succession to a title, an occupation, or even a craft.

Japan faces a very difficult problem in her effort to become self-supporting under the conditions resulting from her defeat in World War II. It will be impossible to discuss in any detail here the reasons for this conclusion, but it will be necessary to summarize briefly the facts of the situation if this conclusion is to be accepted as reasonable. Japan now consists of only the four main islands and Ryukyu, an area of somewhat less than 148,000 square miles, the numerous smaller islands still belonging to Japan having little economic importance. Before World War II, Japan held Formosa, Korea, and southern Saghalien as colonies. She also held the Kwantung Leased Territory in southern Manchuria. After 1931, Manchuria belonged for all practical purposes in this category, although it was not legally a colony. Before World War II, Japan Proper imported about one-sixth of her food, much of it from Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria. Clearly, the severance of all economic ties with Formosa, Korea, Saghalien, and Manchuria, and the restriction of her fisheries within relatively narrow limits around Japan Proper were bound to reduce the food supply of the Japanese.

The purpose of this article is to elucidate by quantitative data the extent of vertical social mobility in Chinese society, the Yin privilege notwithstanding. There is substantial evidence in support of the view, that a fairly high degree of social mobility existed in Chinese society during the last thousand years. The article proves beyond any doubt that: in the majority of cases prominence, chiefly bureaucratic, but also social, economic or literary, did not last over one generation; that of the families which did maintain themselves a little longer, the vast majority did not last over two generation. The basic data are collected from the biographies contained in Chinese district histories. With specifically defined criteria for the term prominence and a particular set of documentary material, the article demonstrates that roughly 50 per cent of the local prominents in any district studied came from unknown origin and that roughly 80 per cent of the descendants beyond the grandson generation of the local prominents also became unknown.

The author says that important as is the culture and social thought of ancient China as part of China's own intellectual and cultural heritage and as a component of comparative culture, it is functioning also in immediate and practical problems. That fact is one of the key notions prerequisite to understanding China and to judging current policy and program which draw on these ancient sanctions. From the practical point of view as well as the theoretical standpoint cultural development in general, it is pertinent to ask how far Chinese culture has been presented as isolated and indigenous, by those historians of social thought who have been addressing the sociologists and other social scientists of our day, and how far that conception is justified. The geographical situation had its very definite mental counterpart. Indeed, one might even contend that ancient India, the Mesopotamian civilizations, the Mediterranean world, and Europe shared, within the widest limits of variation, one system of human thought, while ancient China presents people with another.

This article examines the general trend of social change in China. The process of social change in China can be roughly described as the effects of the impact of an industrial culture upon an agrarian one. In the first place, China is essentially an agricultural country, and the law of diminishing returns effectively limits the extent of land utilisation. The fact that China has allowed its population to grow to such an inordinate size must also be looked at from the point of view of labour demands in an agricultural system where only simple tools and human energy are employed. There is thus a vicious circle in the agrarian situation. Since economic opportunities for enrichment are restricted, the ambitious are compelled to leave their villages and seek their fortunes in the service of the government, by risking their lives in the army or by engaging in even more dangerous adventures like illegal traffic. But this lack of a scientific background is only one aspect of the development of a scientific spirit in China. Modern technology demands the factory system of organisation. It is therefore clear that the process of social change in China should not be a mere transplantation of western culture, but should imply a reorganisation of social structure in conformity with the inherited spirit of harmony and integration.

The greatest of all discouragements of modern life is that of the terrific evolution of war, throughout recent history, and even of well-nigh universal threatenings of a fresh climax utterly surpassing the recent one. On the one side every War Office is busy with the basest thinkable perversions of growing command of nature, as with gases and germs, to be used, by turn or together, for the doom of cities, the destruction even of life over whole regions. Where war preparations go on, there are no less poisonous perversions of truth, such as war is an essential element of human nature, while on the opposite side people have still, even from the League of Nations, the Peace Societies, or their public of goodwill, no adequate sociological inquiry into the conditions evolving wars. But whoever cares to give thought and observation to rural occupations in his own western country, or still better in the older and gentler ones of China or of India, can see that the contact of such peasant folk with war has arisen from aggression by hunter or nomad, trader or pirate, or by the varied combination of these, more or less, as mis-rulers.

The article compares the western and Chinese civilization. The national religion of the Chinese is Fetishism in its most complete and highly-developed form. China could boast of an advanced civilization of great heroes, and of lofty moralists, before Homer sang, before Troy was built, before the Greek Gods had gathered on Olympus. China had an extensive printed literature, and an elaborate educational system, at a time when Christian emperors could hardly read or write. To what cause, then, is it due, that in the extreme West of the Eurasian continent, scientific discovery and material improvement have for some centuries been proceeding with such accelerated velocity, that to superficial observers the comparatively slow movement of Chinese civilization should have appeared retrogression or stagnation? Western Europe has for nearly three thousand years been the scene of a series of distinct and peculiar social revolutions in which the other populations of our planet have taken no share. Taking a broad view of Western history down to the close of the Middle Ages in the thirteenth century, one finds it falling naturally into three great periods, the Greek, the Roman, and the Feudal or Catholic. Speaking with the breadth necessary in the philosophy of history, it is beyond dispute that the Greek period developed the intellect, the Roman period the energies, the Catholic period the affections, to an intensity far surpassing their primeval growth in theocratic or fetishist societies.

The article focuses on the Sino-Soviet military relationship, which in the course of 1963 has further deteriorated. The recriminatory exchanges between the two countries probed step by step the origins and evolution of the dispute and included a series of disclosures on the nature of the Sino-Soviet military relationship since 1957. Those issues in the exchanges which have direct military implications for the West, namely, the question of war and peace, China's acquisition of nuclear weapons versus reliance on the Soviet nuclear deterrent, and the role of Soviet military support and assistance, are discussed.

The article examines the kind of role which can be reasonably be assigned to the United Nations (UN) in the military-security-field. It questions the possible use of the UN as a military instrument for dealing with great-power aggression that refers to the possibility of the organization's serving as a defensive bastion against aggressive actions launched by or supported by the Soviet Union or Communist China. It also explores whether the UN has a significant capability of dealing military conflict between states which lie outside the alignments of the Cold War and the interest of the major Cold War antagonists.

The article presents a study on the international political system of Sino-Soviet relation. The six variables within the international political system are the change of status quo, general effect, hostility, friendship, satisfaction and frustration. Q-Sort method of scaling was used to classify the foreign policy statements in terms of the degree of manifestation of each of the above variables. To determine the degree to which curves representing two variables were similar, it must consider the directional movement of the curves from one period to the next and the disparity between the curves on the overall vertical plane of the scale.

Before the descent of the "iron curtain," or communist system of governance, the condition of Chinese sociology was certainly flourishing. Every government and private university of any importance had a department of sociology and lesser universities and colleges offered courses in sociology. Sociologist Lung Kwan-hai says that by 1947 some 150 students had already graduated from university sociology departments and at that time there were more than 1,000 students in various departments of sociology throughout the country. At the same time there were more than 1,000 books of sociology and closely related subjects to be found in bookstores; reviews and magazines carried numerous articles and reports published in Chinese. Sociology in China was completely wiped out with the advent of communist regime. With this change, many organizations, institutions, religions, and groups which did not fit into their scheme of things were given a year or two of grace before being eliminated or rooted out. The system of education was laid in a way to emphasize more on Marxism; or undergo brainwashing.