The Social System

Abstract

For some thirty years following the 1949 revolution, it was difficult for foreigners to obtain first-hand information about developments within Chinese society. Even before the communist revolution, attitudes towards China were often based on fragmentary reports. European philosophers of the Enlightenment admired aspects of China’s social system, but most of their information came from a handful of Jesuit missionaries. From the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries the Empire was virtually closed, and public opinion, at least in the West, was coloured by colonialist prejudice, as it was later by anti-Communist rhetoric. A good deal of foreign material on China dates from the period between the late nineteenth century and the 1940s, when businessmen, officials and missionaries travelled relatively freely throughout China; again since the late 1970s there has been a great improvement. Foreign academics have been able to work in China, albeit with some restrictions, and countless overseas journalists, business persons, and tourists have visited the country.