Since the death of Mao Zedong in the autumn of 1976, Beijing's economic advisers have been trying to explain what went wrong with the Chinese economy during the past 25 years and, in particular, why the growth of productivity has been so slow. Their findings are pieced together in the series shown in Tables 1 and 2. These Figures demonstrate the impact of the Leap Forward (1958–60), the Cultural Revolution (1966–69), and the final struggle against the “gang of four“ (1976).

On 27 October 1982 the State Statistical Bureau (SSB) issued a communiqué giving the eagerly awaited preliminary results of China's third national population census, taken as of 1 July 1982. The figures consisted mainly of national data based on responses to eight of the 19 items on the census questionnaire – those that could most easily be tabulated manually by local census personnel within a short time. In December the State Council Population Census Office and the SSB Population Statistics Division published a 55-page pamphlet giving both national and provincial figures on the population by sex; by rural, urban, municipal and town residence; by educational level and literacy; on births, deaths and vital rates in 1981; on households by type and residential status; on average size of household; and national data on minorities. National figures have also been provided on the frequency of overcount and undercount in the population totals and error rates in the data on age, sex, and births and deaths in 1981. The most interesting of the national data are given in Table 1, together with comparable figures from the 1953 and 1964 censuses and from other sources for more recent years. Selected provincial data are given in Table 2.

The Chinese distribution system is markedly different from its American equivalent. The bulk of the nation's products, especially producers' goods, are allocated according to the state plan and distributed through state-controlled channels and facilities. As most of the products are purchased by the state there would appear to be no need for sales marketing; the primary function of the distribution system is merely to handle the physical flow of goods. However, goods are often in short supply. Therefore, to ensure an adequate supply of inputs to fulfil the production quotas, numerous purchasing agents are used to locate the necessary inputs for enterprises. Basically, the commodity flow is pulled by the buyers rather than pushed by the sellers. This supply insufficiency leads to many problems, including commodity hoarding by users and producers alike. Consequently, the level of idle inventory is unnecessarily high and the size and speed of the commodity flow reduced.

Poetry in the People's Republic of China during the past 30 years has been dominated by works intensely political in nature – a kind of poetry known by the name zhengzhi shuqing shi (political lyric). The function of this poetry was to eulogize current political movements and to generate public support for them. This phenomenon reached its height during the xin minge yundong (New Folksong Movement) of 1958 when millions of peasants were mobilized to write poetry to praise the Great Leap Forward and the people's commune. Even when the Great Leap backfired and a widespread famine ensued, poetry was still boasting of “commune members piling rice all the way to the sky.” The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76) proved a greater disaster than the Great Leap Forward, hence, the greater need for poetry to supply optimism. It was also a time of personality cult and xiandai mixin (modern superstition); poetry was therefore obliged to provide eulogies. To meet these demands, large quantities of what poet Gong Liu called “huanhu shi” (hail-to-the-chief poems) flooded the market. Many of them were considered to be little more than “rhymed lies.”