Details a statement by Premier Zhou Enlai regarding the Indian government's agreement to hold a meeting between the prime ministers of both countries, preparations for spring fishing activities, adjustments to rural commerce management, and further plans to develop agriculture and aquaculture.

This document summary was generated by an artificial intelligence language model and was reviewed by a Wilson Center staff member.

This issue details the State Council's revocation of a court decision regarding railway and water transportation construction, measures for appointing and removing administrative personnel, the creation of a disaster relief committee, guidelines for cotton collection, plans for mass gold production, instructions for improving the production and quality of cash crops, and administrative regulations on managing business account documents from former private industries and commerce. It also includes content on establishing the Tujia-Miao Autonomous Region, abolishing the Xiangxi-Miao Autonomous Region, and creating the Honghe-Hani and Yi Autonomous Region.

The bulk of this long article, published in a London magazine and aimed at the British public, discusses international relations in the Far East, and in particular the Russian advance into the Chinese seas. The Middle East only receives cursory attention, with the exception of the Persian Gulf which Mahan describes as a geopolitical flashpoint. The American admiral defines the Middle East as a zone with fluid borders situated between South and West Asia and centered around the Gulf. More specifically, for Mahan it was a region where Britain’s dominance of the strategic land and sea communication routes between London and India was increasingly being threatened by the encroachments of imperial rivals.

This issue contains content on the State Council revoking the court's decision on construction of railways and water transportation, measures for appointment and removal of administrative personnel, creation of a committee on disaster relief, instructions for collecting cotton, mass production of gold, and instructions for strengthening production and quality of cash crops. The State Council also approves administration of industry and commerce and state archives bureau to handle business account documents related to former private industries and commerce, and instructions to how to handle the business account documents of former private industry and commerce. Finally, the Tujia Miao autonomous region is established and the Xiangxi Miao autonomous region is abolished, and the Honghe Hani and Yi autonomous region is created.

This issue contains content on summary of 1956 state budget and draft of 1957 state budget, campaign to increase production and saving, maintain stable market prices, finance management, note to British authorities in Hong Kong to let loose of murderer who robbed Chinese sailboat, China-Poland economic exchanges, China-East Germany economic exchanges, Ministry of industry and commerce expenditures, and addressing student dropouts in higher learning institutions and schools of industry and agriculture. 

Fu’ad Mursi (1925-1990), the author of the text printed here (an English excerpt translated from an Arabic-language monograph), was an Egyptian economist trained in Alexandria and the Sorbonne. While in Paris, he joined the French Communist Party. Back in Egypt, he in 1949 co-founded al-Hizb al-shuiu‘i al-misri, or the Egyptian Communist Party (ECP).

Born 27 years after a communist party had first been opened in the country, the ECP, also known as Rayat al-sha‘ab (The People’s Banner) after the title of its organ, was the smallest, most clandestine, and most intellectual communist group then operating in Egypt. It favored a two-state-solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, was opposed to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970), and in 1958 initiated the merger of Egypt’s communist parties (under the condition that Jews would be excluded), a story told e.g. in Joel Beinin’s Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (1990). Nasser’s regime, which from the start had a difficult relationship with domestic communists, turned to open repression in 1959, locking up many party members in brutal desert prisons until 1964. The next year the party dissolved itself under pressure from the regime, which, however, also co-opted some individuals. Mursi was one of them.

Moreover, after Nasser’s death, Mursi early on continued a government career under the new president Anwar Sadat (1918-1981). In 1971, he became director of the state Industrial Bank and member of the Central Bank board, and in 1972 Minister of Supply and Domestic Commerce. The following year he resigned, however. Still a Marxist, he disagreed with Sadat’s policy of economic opening, infitah. While prepared from 1971, this policy became official in 1974—a story whose classic treatment is John Waterbury’s The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (1983) and whose social dimension is told by Relli Shechter’s The Rise of the Egyptian Middle Class: Socio-Economic Mobility and Public Discontent from Nasser to Sadat (2019).

The text printed here reflects a key component in Mursi’s analysis of the infitah. He diagnoses a cooperation between private Egyptian capitalists—who were now on the rise again after the decline of Nasserite state capitalism (aka socialism)—and foreign capitalist colonialism that, while not any more occupying Egypt, again wishes to exploit the country

In 1866, US Presbyterians who had been working for half a century in the Ottoman city of Beirut founded the Syrian Protestant College (SPC), to compete with Arab and French endeavors in higher education. Chartered in the State of New York, the American University of Beirut (AUB), as the SPC has been called since 1920, came to employ American, European and Arab professors. It soon turned into a foremost institution of higher education for Arab Christians and Muslims alike from Greater Syria (present-day Syria, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan), and especially after World War I attracted more and more students also from other Arabic-speaking countries, a history told in Betty Anderson’s The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education (2011). AUB’s educational quality and missionary institutional bedrock gave it some clout in the United States.

Hence, when the New York-based Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation in 1924 added an international layer to a US-centered social science grant program it had been running since 1922, it in 1925 asked the AUB president, Bayard Dodge, whether his institution would apply for such a grant. AUB did. Making its case in a way that reflected the establishment of League of Nations Mandates in the post-Ottoman Iraq and Greater Syria and the rise of anticolonial nationalisms there, AUB received a US$39,000 grant to develop its social science offerings in 1926-1931, and three additional grants through 1940.

The text published here is an excerpt of an initial report by AUB professors to Rockefeller Foundation grant officials.

This issue contains content on China's relations with Nepal. It also has sections on the demobilized soldiers, business and commerce, coal production, forestry, ideological and political education, and the 1956 natural science awards.

Prime Minister Nakasone brings up points of Chinese taxation on Japanese industrialists and Japanese schools in China.

Harriman gives the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, a brief account of Eric Johnston's and Stalin's impressions of each other.