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The article focuses on culture contact in China. The study of contemporary culture contact is concerned with the behavior of individuals and groups in any culture, toward manufactured products, customs, social institutions, ideas, and people that come from an alien culture. In his attempt to understand changes in Oriental society resulting from the impinging of such new features upon it, the investigator of these reactions believes in scrutinizing and analyzing the changes while they are going on, instead of leaving it to posterity to draw inferences on the basis of fragmentary sources and half-hidden trails. Much of the data, seems to relate to futile ventures of all sorts which spring up and die down, with little chance of leaving records for the future historian. Yet the ventures which fail, are as significant for an understanding of the process of culture contact and change as are the ventures that succeed. In general, this field of interest and study, though theoretically preempted by certain anthropologists, is being actually attacked only in the usual more or less routine-statistical, descriptive and historical, anecdotal, and preliminary manner by various practical organizations and students of contemporary history.

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.