Negative Lessons Research Articles

Lessons from the Chinese Experience: China's Planned Birth Program and its Transferability

This article describes the most salient developments in the planned birth program of the People's Republic of China during the 1970s and discusses the potential for transfer of some features to other countries. Many Chinese activities are of interest because they are designed for a country with scarce resources for development and a low-income population. Some particular program features worth noting are: the encouragement of local initiative and experimentation: specific methods for the diffusion of innovation; and total integration of the health system with other development-political, administrative, economic, and social-at the grass-roots level.

Community Purpose and the Nazi Lesson

Contemplating the catastrophic course of the Nazi Revolution we may well find it all too easy to see nothing in the spectacle but the nether darkness made visible; and if we are advised that it is not merely permissible but highly advisable to learn from the enemy, we may be tempted to think that whatever the Nazi war-machine has to teach the strategist and the technician, the political history of Germany in the last decade, and in particular the political ideology that has imposed itself upon the German mind with such apparent thoroughness, can yield only the negative lesson of a warning, by displaying upon the world-wide stage the doomful consequences of wrong principles ruthlessly pushed to their extreme. But it is certainly an error to deny that nothing of more positive value has emerged out of the revolutionary cauldron: and indeed it would be more than strange, where such whole-hearted energies of mind are being enlisted in the evil cause of Nazism, if none of its votaries had ever stumbled for a time into wisdom.