The Transformation of the Chinese Art - Perspectives on Modern China

This study of modern China was completed during the twentieth anniversary year of the People's Republic. It embodies the results of long research checked by the personal experience gained in the course of extensive travel between 1958 and 1966. To the task of the orthodox geographer Professor Buchanan has added an interpretation of the manner in which the Chinese view their problems and an evaluation of the relevance of China's development techniques to the underdeveloped regions of the world.

The developments of the last two decades in China are seen against the background of a highly diverse environment and of a traditional society caught in a vicious circle of self-perpetuating poverty. The China of fertile lowlands, closely farmed by toiling peasant millions, is contrasted with that two-thirds of the country which are marginal to intensive agriculture because of relief, aridity or cold. Poverty, however, is shown to be due less to environmental conditions than to social structures which aggravate the impact of environmental conditions. Time restructuring of the entire society was, therefore, essential. This has involved the creation of new forms of rural society—the People's Communes—which integrate both agriculture and small-scale industry and, by spreading labour needs, overcome the problem of under-employment. Agricultural development in the early stages of China's history was based on the massive investment of labour to create complex systems of irrigation and terracing; the use of similar techniques during the last two decades has made possible the physical transformation of the countryside on an unprecedented scale.

Agricultural development has been matched by rapid change on the industrial front, which in twenty years has created an entirely new industrial map of China, with industry diffused deep into the centre and northwest of the country. Chinese policy has been a policy of 'walking on two legs'; this involves the integration of small scale labour-intensive industry with large capital-intensive modern industry.

Fundamental to both agricultural and industrial progress has been the development of the country's infrastructure—the transport system which, for the first time, has welded together the whole of China and the educational system which provides the cadres and trained workers needed by a developing economy.

The statistical blackout of the last ten years poses problems of interpretation, especially in the industrial sector, but the detailed accounts of selected communes in various regions of China and the maps of Chinese industry in the early ig6os are amongst the most detailed yet published in English.

The Chinese landscape is man-made, the creation of countless generations of farming folk. Developments since 1949, Profes€or Buchanan suggests, represent the culminating stage in this peasant epic—'the stage in which the peasant finally establishes his control over the Chinese earth and . . begins that reappraisal of the environment which will make possible the creation of a new world of plenty'.