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"Thirty years ago, China was a basket case, ravaged by long years of domestic political struggle and the worst famine in human history. Today China has the world's second largest economy and is a major player in world diplomacy. Is China a threat or will it rise peacefully? This volume has been written by leading experts to explain China's extraordinary transformation and to give readers a basis for assessing what China will mean for their lives"--

When the editor asked me along with other ex-editors to offer some thoughts on the occasion of The China Quarterly's 50th anniversary, I was at a loss. At the celebration which David Shambaugh held for the 35th anniversary in 1995, I wrote fairly extensively about the founding and early development of the journal (No.143, pp. 692–96) and did not have much to add. So I made the suggestion that I should reprise a special feature of the first China Quarterly. For that founding issue, I solicited a number of senior Sinologues to give their appraisal of the PRC on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. Could I, now senior, be given a similar opportunity to look back at the founding of the PRC on the occasion of its 60th anniversary? This article is the consequence of the editor's kind agreement.

When I was appointed editor of the CQ in 1959, my vision was that it should focus primarily on all aspects of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history, but that there should also be occasional articles on contemporary Taiwan and the overseas Chinese. That autumn, I did a quick tour of a few American campuses to try to drum up contributors; basically I needed social scientists. But even those universities with significant China programmes were peopled mainly by historians who were not doing research on the PRC. Benjamin Schwartz at Harvard, who had already published Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, did write articles from time to time on the current scene; at MIT, Lucian Pye was ensuring that political scientists should incorporate East Asia into analyses of comparative politics; at Berkeley, Franz Schurmann (a Yuan historian in an earlier incarnation) was engaged in what became Ideology and Organization in Communist China, S.H. Chen was interested in contemporary mainland literature, and Choh-ming Li (like Alexander Eckstein at Michigan) was studying the economy; at Columbia, C. Martin Wilbur was working on the documents captured when the Soviet embassy in Beijing was raided in the 1920s, but Doak Barnett would not get there till the end of 1960; the only real nest of social scientists examining Chinese behaviour on a daily basis that I found on that trip was located at RAND: Allen Whiting, A.M. Halpern and Alice Langley Hsieh, all working on Chinese foreign relations. The shock of the launch of the first sputnik in 1957 had already led the US government to allocate massive funds to academia for the training of specialists on Russia and China, but the first beneficiaries of the largesse did not start coming out of the pipeline until the late 1960s. With so few potential contributors available, I stopped reviewing China books in case I offended any of them! But the scarcity of talent was also an advantage, for Western and Asian China watchers – diplomats in Beijing, journalists in Hong Kong, businessmen travelling in and out – all subscribed, making the CQ the house magazine of a growing community.