For both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Guomindang (GMD), the experience of their political association from 1922 to 1927 had a profound effect on the later course of their development. This period has come to be known as the First United Front, though in fact this term cannot be used without initial reservation, since only the CCP spoke of a united front between it and the GMD. For the latter party, with its well-established revolutionary history, the term “admission of the communists” (rong gong) was invariably used to denote the opening up of GMD membership to members of a smaller and definitely junior political movement. The adoption of the communist designation in later years by many students of the period reflects in part the attention given by western scholarship to the development of the CCP during the critical years of the 1920s. However, even if the term “united front” is retained for convenience as a general rubric for the 1922–27 period, it is important that the Guomindang be subjected to careful scrutiny in its own right, so that the GMD-CCP relationship may be understood more fully. This is to be stressed, since the categories often applied to the GMD, such as “left” and “right,” while of value in some instances, on the whole blur or distort the wide range of opinion within that party on the question of communist involvement in it. Until the purge of the CCP took place in 1927, GMD attitudes towards the communists were characterized by much fluidity.

According to an official Chinese report, the population of China has increased from 540 million in 1949 to 960 million in 1978, an average annual rate increase of about 20 per 1,000 population. In view of adverse socio-economic effects of the rapid population growth in the past the Chinese Government has recently begun encouraging the one-child family in an attempt to achieve the target of zero population growth by the turn of this century, as part of the effort to promote the Four Modernizations in the fields of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defence.

The destruction of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) main base areas in Jiangxi province was regarded by the Nationalist government as a major accomplishment, and in many respects it certainly was. In the last of the five great encirclement campaigns launched under Jiang Jieshi's direction 800,000 soldiers, thousands of civilian cadres and political workers, and myriads of ordinary citizens were mobilized into a huge organization which, like some giant anaconda, ponderously coiled its long lines of roads and blockhouses around the Soviet areas in South Jiangxi, squeezing more and more tightly for a year and a half until, in late 1934, a tattered and worn remnant of the CCP was able to slip wearily between its folds and set out on the epic Long March. Behind in Jiangxi it largely abandoned the wasted carcass of the Central Soviet Area to the Nationalist government.

Since the overthrow of the “ gang of four” and the rejection of the Maoist strategy for economic development, Deng Xiaoping and his allies have initiated new policies about the hiring, paying and rewarding of industrial labour. These labour policies are designed to raise the productivity of factory labour by increasing work incentives and utilizing workers more efficiently than in the past. The implementation of piecework-type wages and bonuses, point systems for bonuses, and examinations for hiring and promotion, represent a shift towards a new, efficiency-oriented, meritocratic industrial organization in China. The old organizational models which prevailed in the past - the seniority based model of the pre-1966 era as well as the politicized, “ virtuocratic” model of the Cultural Revolution decade - are being repudiated. Reforming industrial organization in China has been no easy task. The meritocratic norm, “ to each according to his work” is difficult to translate into concrete distributive rules. Different groups of employees disagree about the fairness of various distributive criteria. Informal patterns of group behaviour often subvert the intentions of managers and policy-makers. And managers themselves hand out bonuses indiscriminately in a manner which enhances their own popularity but not productivity.

Obviously, literature is a question of quality rather than quantity. In a speech given on 19 June 1961, which was only published in the Literary Gazette (Wenyi bao) in February 1979 as the cultural testament of the late premier, Zhou Enlai drew a crude parallel between literary and industrial outputs: “Certain laws governing material production also hold good for mental production. When pressed too far mental production will suffer, perhaps even more seriously. Quotas and pressures of time are vexing problems for mental workers. Take the writing of poetry as an example. Among our leading cadres, Comrade Chen Yi likes to write poems. He composes very quickly and is a prolific writer. He is a genius in this respect. But, it is different with Chairman Mao. He writes only after much deliberation. Though he writes less, he writes with such magnificence and vitality and produces extremely concentrated poems. We should not demand a poem a day from Chairman Mao, nor should we interfere with Comrade Chen Yi and ask him to write less. Mental work cannot be uniform.”