“To tell the truth, never, in China or abroad, has there been a revolutionary party as decrepit (tuitang) and degenerate (fubai) as we [the Guomindang] are today; nor one as lacking spirit, lacking discipline, and even more, lacking standards of right and wrong as we are today. This kind of party should long ago have been destroyed and swept away!”1

While social scientists have examined in some detail the income earning activities of Chinese peasants in communes, the primary focus of these studies has been to describe the general pattern of peasant behaviour – the orthodox, legitimate, legally sanctioned methods for increasing collective (and household) income. What these studies ignore, however, is the existence of a “second economy” in rural China, characterized by a wide range of informal, extra– or illegal strategies also designed to enhance collective income. In Guangdong from 1962 to 1974 these included: altering the size of production units; speculation; fraudulent loan applications; corruption; theft; withholding goods or services; false reporting; and violence or demonstrations. While acknowledging that these activities did not represent the norm, nonetheless, a systematic discussion of informal and perhaps deviant behaviour, highlighting time and participant variations, is necessary to form a more accurate picture of Chinese peasant behaviour.

One of the major tasks facing the post- ”gang of four“ leadership of China is that of developing and consolidating a legal system. Success in this endeavour depends in great part upon the establishment of the people's faith in legality. The popular press often refers to the Cultural Revolution years as a time of absolute lawlessness1 in which arbitrary arrests and imprisonment, procedural violations, and baseless slander were the order of the day. Personal accounts of those years tend to confirm this view. They tend also to indicate that many people have little faith in the law and are cynical about the prospects for the success of legality in China. Undoubtedly, this cynicism stems from fresh memories of the types of abuse referred to in the press. And, because it overlays the traditional Chinese distrust of law as a method of resolving social disputes, it is a peculiarly intractable cynicism.

Deng Tuo was a Party member in good standing, a veteran cadre from the 1930s, former editor of the People' Daily and in 1965 secretary for culture and education in the Beijing Party Committee. Then suddenly in the spring of 1966 attacks on Wu Han, a vice–mayor of Beijing, swelled to include Deng and by May drove him to death under an avalanche of accusations. Deng Tuo and his protector, Beijing Mayor Peng Zhen, together with most of the city' Party Committee fell in the first flashes of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution that finally spread throughout China and claimed its head of state, Liu Shaoqi.

On 1 July 1981 the Chinese Communist Party celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of its foundation. To mark this occasion, the Party itself issued a statement summing up the experience of recent decades. It seems an appropriate time for outsiders as well to look back over the history of the past 60 years, in the hope of grasping long-term tendencies which may continue to influence events in the future.