This issue includes instructions on the treatment of rural farmers, a civil affairs work plan, the establishment of counties and the revocation of autonomous prefectures, a trade agreement between China and Egypt, and technology cooperation between China and Yugoslavia. It also discusses agriculture, measures to strengthen the Ministry of Forestry’s production level, an afforestation campaign, public health initiatives, arrangements for primary and secondary school students’ winter break, construction of school buildings and improvements in education, and an order for flags to be lowered to half-staff to mark the passing of Romania's Grand National Assembly Chairman.

Hesham Youssef is an Egyptian diplomat. He served on the Egyptian team, working on the Steering Committee and in three working groups (REDWG, water, and the environment).

In June 1938 Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), a Indian National Congress (INC) leader, one of the earliest INC members calling for full independence in 1927, and the main responsible for INC’s foreign relations, took a ship to Europe. This trip was not a first for India’s inaugural prime minister (1947-1964) to be. Already in 1905 he had left India to enroll at the elite British boarding school of Harrow, going on to study at Cambridge and work as a lawyer in London before returning home in 1912. And the last time he had sailed was in 1935, staying until 1936 as the INC representative in meetings with fellow Asian and increasingly also African anti-imperialists in Britain and Europe. Sure, by then the League against Imperialism (LAI), whose Comintern-organized foundational conference Nehru had attended in 1927, was defunct. (For the LAI see the 1927 document on Messali Hadj in this collection.) Even so, Nehru continued to see his secularist Indian nation-statist goals within an international leftist-anti-imperialist and now anti-fascist framework and web, as Michele Louro’s Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (2020) argues.

Hence, when on the ship en route to Europe in 1938 he received an invitation from Egypt’s leading nationalist wafd party and agreed to meet their leaders. Having been in contact with Egyptian nationalists before, a story told in Noor Khan’s Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (2011), and having detailed their anti-imperialism in Glimpses of World History (1934), he saw the wafd as INC’s appropriately leading anti-imperialist counterpart in Egypt. Sure, in confidential INC memoranda, he criticized the wafd’s insufficient attention to the masses, especially the peasants, which cost them an election in early 1938, he thought; indeed, the wafdists were liberal nationalists whereas Nehru was a leftist nationalist. Nonetheless, sitting down with the wafd and exchanging views about world politics and anti-imperialist strategies was called for, in his and the wafd’s view, at a time when fascism was rising and Britain continued to rule India and be very present in Egypt. Reproduced in the massive compilation Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, this text is a letter by Nehru, the first to the INC while he was on the ship en route to London.

The text printed here, an English translation, is constituted by two excerpts from the famous yet controversial Arabic book Mustaqbal al-thaqafa fi Misr (1938) [The Future of Culture in Egypt], by Taha Hussein (1889-1973).

Born in a village in Upper Egypt and blind from the age of three, Hussein was first educated in his village school. He went on to the famous Azhar Islamic university in Cairo, to the newly founded Egyptian (Cairo) University, where he received a doctorate in 1914, and to Montpellier and the Sorbonne, which in 1917 awarded him another doctorate. For one thing, Hussein was a powerful educational institution builder, as Hussam Ahmed’s The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt (2021) shows. Thus, he became a Cairo University professor in 1919, teaching Islamic history and Arabic literature, and he was the university’s Dean of Arts (1928, 1930-32 and 1936-39), a member and then president of the Arabic  Language Academy (1940-73), and Egypt’s Minister of Culture (1950-52). For another thing, Hussein was a supremely influential intellectual and a specialist of premodern and modern Arabic literature. Thus, from 1926 to 1967 he published the three-volume autobiographical novel Al-Ayyam [The Days], and in 1926 wrote Fi al-shi‘r al-jahili [On Pre-Islamic Poetry (2016)], which he revised as Fi al-adab al-jahili [On Pre-Islamic Literature (1927)] after traditionalists (unsuccessfully) took him to court. And although helping to introduce thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre to Arabs as the 1945-1948 editor of the journal al-Katib al-Misri, he belonged to the Arab Renaissance (nahda) literati who were from the 1940s accused by many younger intellectuals for not supporting committed art; in turn, he defended the necessity of not delimiting what art should be or do.

His 1938 text The Future of Culture in Egypt, excerpted here in a 1975 English translation, was very detailed—it included dozens of suggestions about how to improve Egypt’s educational system—and quite complex. On the one side, Hussein confidently took Europe to task in the main body of the work, and emphasized the need to thoroughly know one’s own culture and history. But on the other side, he saw European empires as still very powerful; thus, a lagging Egypt should embrace European concepts—an approach internalizing (self-interested) European Orientalist views, as Stephen Sheehi has argued in The Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (2004). In a sense, both of these two sides were framed by his work’s immediate historical context: the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. Maximizing Egypt’s sovereignty and allowing it to become a League of Nations member in 1937, this treaty showed strength—but also continued weakness vis-à-vis Britain, whose troops remained in the Suez Canal zone. In the same vein, the introduction’s argument about Egypt’s geo-civilizational position accepted the discourse of a dominant Europe—only to make Egypt its geographical and historical pioneer by giving it great weight vis-à-vis Ancient Greece, which was conventionally seen as the cradle of European civilization.

This issue first discusses the problem of the Suez Canal in Egypt. It also addresses Sino-Nepalese relations, the establishment of Sino-Yemeni relations, and whether the Sino-American ambassadorial talks should consider the US-China trade embargo. Other sections cover domestic topics such as disaster relief and student dropouts.

This issue features a copy of the telegram that Mao Zedong sent to Gamal Abdel Nasser when he won the Egyptian presidential election. It also includes messages that the Prime Minister of Cambodia, Khim Tit, exchanged with Zhou Enlai after their respective countries signed an economic aid agreement. Other sections discuss checking the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan, educational matters, funded medical treatment for retired state agency employees, and various provincial administrative concerns, such as transferring districts from Jiangxi to Anhui Province.

As with the previous issue, this one continues to discuss Sino-Egyptian relations and includes an invitation from Zhou Enlai for Gamal Abdel Nasser to visit China. Peng Dehuai also extends an invitation to the Egyptian Minister of Defense, Abdel Hakim Amer. Other sections cover teaching plans for normal or pedagogical schools (including early education), the cultural and entertainment tax, and various provincial administrative concerns.

This issue announces the establishment of official Sino-Egyptian relations and features a letter that Zhou Enlai wrote to Gamal Abdel Nasser. Other sections discuss mobilizing young people to plant trees, holding national university entrance exams, and preparing for Children's Day.

This issue begins with statements about Sino-Sudanese and Sino-Egyptian trade talks. It also discusses strengthening the National Archives and the status of landlords in Anhui Province. Among other concerns, such as tax exemptions for agricultural production cooperatives that plant more tree saplings, two sections address promoting standard Mandarin and guiding primary school students to read children's literature.

This issue begins with Zhou Enlai responding to questions from Filipino journalists. It also includes a report from the Xinhua News Agency, which denies American rumors that Egypt is importing military equipment from China. Other sections address education, provincial administrative bureaus, and the demobilization of soldiers in Shanxi.