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It is frequently implied that there is something peculiarly "Chinese," derived from the millennia of a separate and remarkable cultural tradition, which operates to motivate the foreign relations of the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.). It is, of course, absurd to expect that there would be no residue of the past at work in the present, even after the profound revolutionary changes that China has undergone in the past century. That persistence of tradition, however, is not simple and unproblematic. Precisely what out of the past has a functional role in contemporary China requires explication. A distinction between influences from the pre-nineteenth-century "Great Tradition" and those growing from the importunate impact of the outside world on China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must be made. And the weight of tradition/history must be compared with that of other factors influencing the formation and execution of foreign policy. This paper examines five components which have determined the foreign relations of the P.R.C. and suggests that they may be ranked in the following order of importance: 1) nationalism; 2) the politics of the international Communist movement; 3) China's domestic politics; 4) Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology; and 5) a strategic-political imagery based on a traditional spatial-ideological world order.

How much of the increased consumption of machine-made cotton yarn and cloth in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China represented a net increase in the total consumption of cotton goods? What part of the increment merely denoted a shift of the source of supply from rural handicraft to factory production—in Shanghai and Tientsin and, in the form of imports, in overseas mills? These questions, of course, are only part of the more inclusive problem of the effects of expanding foreign trade and the beginnings of domestic industrialization upon the agricultural sector in modern China. The most important household handicraft in rural China was, however, the spinning and weaving of cotton. An examination of its fate, while it will not dispose entirely of the larger problem, is a critical step toward that end.

It will be evident to a reader of historical works produced in the People's Republic of China that this article, in the choice of subject-matter and in its treatment, is decidedly influenced by the current domestic and foreign political "line" of the Communist Party and Government. This is a relative matter, not absolute, but I would suggest that the dominant "class viewpoint" of the first decade of the Peking régime which produced an anonymous history of dynasties without "feudal" emperors or bureaucrats, literature minus the landlord-scholar-official literatus and nameless peasant rebellions as the central matter of China's history, was to a degree correlated with the process of the internal consolidation of power which may more or less be said to have been accomplished with the completion of the collectivisation of agriculture. The more recent "historicist" trend, which while not rejecting entirely its predecessor concentrates on what may be "positively inherited" from the "feudal" past, represents a quickening of Chinese nationalism fanned to a red-hot intensity, one cannot resist the temptation to conjecture, by the increasingly severe quarrel with the Soviet Union. Soviet Russian commentary on recent Chinese historiography, for example, accuses the Chinese of the "introduction of dogmatic, anti-Marxist and openly nationalistic and racist views." The Chinese, for their now relatively favourable view of the thirteenth-century Mongol conquests (which are seen as calamitous by the Russians and other Europeans), for their claim that Chinese "feudalism" is the classical model of this historical phenomenon, and because they exaggerate the role of Confucian ideas and their influence on Western philosophy, are roundly condemned by the Russians for "bourgeois nationalism."