Bill Brugger - Contemporary China

To those of the hundred-odd students who read the first draft of this book and felt able to break through the student culture of deference and apathy. To N. Blewett, S. Chan, D. Corbett, J. Hall, P. Schwartz, B. Thomas, A. Watson, D. Woodward and G. Young for their detailed comments on a highly condensed text. To H. Leng for saving me from too much arrogance and to N. Wintrop for helping me, in a dialectical sense, to preserve just a little. To N. Hunter, D. Jaensch and G. OLeary who, from very dissimilar political and intellectual standpoints, combined to persuade me that I was not wasting my time. To M. Grieve for her help with indexes and style. To G. Willoughby and A. Little for map-work. To C. Cameron for the logistic support necessary to mount the original operation. To L. Koop, S. Stewart and the secretarial staff of the School of Social Sciences, Flinders University, for typing and retyping various barely intelligible drafts with a conscientiousness and good humour that the drafts scarcely deserved. Finally, to my wife Suzanne whose sharp criticism has always protected me from being eroded by academic complacency.

It is presumptuous to claim responsibility for a work that is ninetenths plagiarism, but I cannot avoid carrying the burden for the many errors that must remain. Perhaps the slogan I am looking for is that beloved of the Chinese radicals, collective initiative and individual responsibility.

Bill Brugger

The Flinders University of
South Australia
July 1975

In writing this simple history of contemporary China, I do not aim at originality but base myself firmly on secondary sources. It is perhaps inevitable, therefore, that I shall be open to the charges of plagiarism and over-simplification. In my defence, all I can say is that there is a need for a chronological account of events in China from the 1940s and, pending the arrival of some sinological E.H. Carr, a synthetic account must rely directly upon the work of others.

My aim is to produce a textbook to accompany a course in contemporary Chinese politics or history. I am not attempting to write an introductory history complete in itself and which may be read in isolation. The original intention to write such a book grew out of student complaints about the excessive amount of factual material I was compelled to include in my lectures. In introducing China to students, however, I was unable to avoid presenting a large amount of empirical data. On the other hand, I felt that the function of lectures should be not to inform but to entertain and to stimulate thought. A course of lectures should ideally serve to keep a group of students oriented to a field of study and to maintain their interest in it. Once such a course usurps the function of the written word, it inevitably becomes dull. I decided, therefore, to transfer the bulk of the empirical data used in my lectures to a textbook which hopefully would provide the take-off point for further reading.