Deng Xiaoping has been the subject of several biographies, most of which contain little information about the leader's “French” period. Yet the five years he spent in France cannot be passed over in silence, for it was there and during that time that he first became active politically and joined the Chinese Communist Party. These facts are not in dispute, but the episode as a whole has been illuminated only briefly and in contradictory ways. According to Boorman, for example, “Deng, after attending classes in a special preparatory school in Chengdu […] went to Shanghai, and thence to Europe early in 1920. […] There is no record of Deng's having attended classes at any school or university in France; nor is it clear what type of work he did there.” As far as Boorman is concerned, Deng's stay in France was marked only by his joining the local branch of the CCP and by his (purely technical) activities as a roneographer for Chiguang. On the basis of Soviet sources and of comments made by Deng himself to Edgar Snow, D. W. Klein and A. B. Clark supply further details. Deng Xiaoping, they tell us, was involved in the Chinese worker-student movement in Lyon in 1921; he joined the Chinese Communist Youth in 1922 and the Party in 1924. Some time after that he left France for Moscow: in 1926, according to Klein and Clark, while Boorman puts his departure in the previous year. The Chinese texts available until recently are scarcely more helpful. A famous biographical note put out by the Red Guards informed us, for example, that Deng joined the party in 1925! According to this document

It has been observed on many occasions that Chinese changed greatly since the turn of the century, especially during the last 30 years, perhaps more rapidly and more profoundly than any other one of the principal world languages. The changes led to the birth of a branch of Chinese linguistics specifically concerned with them, and beside numerous textbooks and dictionaries, there appeared a voluminous series of studies dedicated exclusively to their description. Chi Wen-shun, the compiler of one of the dictionaries, noted the feeling of having become illiterate on the part of an educated Chinese émigré reading the People's Daily, while others, including the present author, have gone so far as to speak of Chinese as a divided language, in a sense similar to that of a divided country in the political sphere.

Social historians and social anthropologists may differ in respect to methodology but they often study the same kinds of problems and ask similar questions of their data. This is particularly true in the field of Chinese studies. Anthropologists who work in Chinese villages, towns or cities cannot help but be aware of historical issues; if they are not their hosts will soon set them straight. Historians, in turn, must become anthropologists of sorts if they hope to understand the complexities of Chinese social institutions.

When Chiang Kai-shek and his government retreated to the island of Taiwan after the loss of mainland China to the Communists in 1949, they submitted themselves to a high degree of soul-searching in order to determine the reasons for their defeat. One conclusion drawn from their reflections was that factional conflicts within the Guomindang, lack of discipline, and a decline in morale were as responsible, if not more responsible, for their overthrow than any superior military strength which the Communists might have come to possess. They judged also that they had lost the initiative in the political and psychological battle by countering the Communists' “unlimited war with limited war,” and by having too negative an attitude towards literature. During this evaluation of past performance the Guomindang felt no need to apologize for the imposition of censorship and oppressive publishing restrictions, nor for its suppression of those Left-wing writers who, since the expulsion of Communists from the Guomindang Government in 1927, had made a point of discrediting the Guomindang in the eyes of the people. These were considered to be necessary measures in the fight against Communism. What they did regret was not having used literature as the Communists had, thereby losing the battle for the minds of the people.

The biographical sketch for Shinya Sugiyama contained in issue No. 90 should be amended to read as follows: Shinya Sugiyama received his Ph.D from the University of London and is now a research officer at the International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines of the London School of Economics; his main research interest is East Asian trade in the 19th and 20th centuries.