The legacies of the Cultural Revolution have been nowhere more enduring than in the Chinese Communist Party organization. Since late 1967, when the process of rebuilding the shattered Party began, strengthening Party leadership has been a principal theme of Chinese politics; that theme has become even more pronounced in recent years. It is now claimed that earlier efforts achieved nothing, and that during the whole “decade of turmoil” until 1976, disarray in the Party persisted and political authority declined still further. Recent programmes of Party reform, therefore, still seek to overcome the malign effects of the Cultural Revolution in order to achieve the complementary objectives of reviving abandoned Party “traditions” and refashioning the Party according to the new political direction demanded by its present leaders.

To encourage economic construction and development, China is considering the reform of her system of taxation, principally the taxing of industrial and commercial enterprises. The aim of such reform is two-fold: to secure more stable revenues for the financing of key projects of national importance and, even more crucial, to try to make the tax system into a means of economic management. The latter has been called the leverage function of taxation.

This article applies standard regression techniques to examine the impact of adverse weather conditions on average grain yield per sown hectare in contemporary China. By isolating the weather impact I hope (a) to quantify the possible influence of frequent policy and organizational changes which have been so characteristic of Chinese agriculture since 1949; and (b) to show to what extent grain production in China has become more “weather-proof” after three decades of massive investment in water control and other modern inputs. I shall deal mainly with the long-term trends from 1952 to 1981, with special reference to the extraordinary 1959–61 period, during which total grain output and yield declined by an average of 21 and 12 per cent respectively (or 25 and 18 per cent for the two trough years of 1960 and 1961), measured against the benchmark year of 1957.

In the terminology of Chinese planning the “state plan” (“guojia jihua”) embraces both the central and provincial plans, while the “local plan” (“difang jihua”) refers exclusively to the one for the xian (county) and its administrative equivalent, namely the provincial municipality. This distinction is seldom made in relevant western studies. The prevalent practice is to regard provincial and local planning as synonymous, in contrast to central planning. As a result, the xian as a separate planning authority has scarcely received any attention, except for some sporadic references made in connection with studies on local, especially rural, industries.