The years 1927 and 1928 are crucial in the history of the Chinese Communist Movement. But because of the lack of primary source material in the past, these years have not received adequate attention from scholars, and therefore have not been well understood. In contrast, the years up to 1927 have received extensive scholarly treatment, because of the availability of key policy documents for the Communist movement during that period. Similar conditions apply concerning the study of the movement beginning in 1930. Rich primary materials exist illuminating internal policy debates and political struggles that helped shaped Communist programmes and actions during those later years.

It has long been recognized that there is a particularly close relationship between art and politics in post-1949 China. And indeed this is true. The relationship, however, has usually been viewed only in “macro” terms, as one in which the Party – or the Party through its agents – stifles dissent and makes demands on writers and artists for works reflecting “the Party line”. As a general description of course there may be more than a grain of truth in this, but put in this way nothing could be less interesting. A more complex and dialectical picture emerges when one focuses more sharply on the process of artistic production in its immediate social context. The study of village-level drama and song-and-dance is ideal for this kind of investigation, in spite of the fact that it is “mere propaganda”: not only does it allow us a closer look at the actual implementation and effects of cultural policy, rather than just policy formulation, but often evidence is sufficient for us to discern salient features of the local cultural context and the ways in which artistic form and content have been adapted to specific local issues and local personalities. At this level in Chinese society, where relationships between cadres, artists and their audiences are personalized and the deeds of local labour heroes re-enacted on stage, the distinction between art and reality is not all that clear, stage action mimics political action, and vice versa, and the roles of the Party cadre and stage director are intertwined.

Bands of young men took to the streets of Shanghai in late 1978, shouting slogans, vandalizing stores, putting up wall posters, imprisoning municipal officials in their offices and disrupting rail traffic. To many Shanghainese, it was déjà vu, a replay of Red Guard activities during the Cultural Revolution (CR), and small wonder, as the participants were those same youths who had rampaged through the city and then foresworn the urban security of Shanghai to go up to the mountains and down to the countryside to build socialism. Now, a decade later, disillusioned, alienated, in dire economic straits, unmarried and abandoned, they had ridden a “back to the city wind” and were determined to stay.

Ten months after the PRC's State Statistical Bureau (SSB) published -for the first time in two decades - a reasonably comprehensive set of national economic data (XINHUA, 27 June 1979), these were amended, up-dated and supplemented in an even fuller statement, issued by the SSB at the end of April (and early in May) 1980 and covering the results of the national plan for 1979. As on the previous occasion, most of the items published were given in such a way as to facilitate comparisons with the information available for the year prior to the first plan (1952) and the year in which it was completed (1957). Whilst the data for the early years fall short in part, particularly in the agricultural sector, of being perfect, the years 1952 and 1957 nevertheless serve as useful landmarks on China's long, and often winding, path from the past to the present. Thus the China-watcher now has a dossier of economic and social data from official sources against which he can check his own estimates and those made - in the absence of official statistical documentation - by various national and international agencies concerning themselves with the successes and shortcomings of the PRC since its inception in 1949. Where he is not satisfied with the newly published information, he must, of course, reserve the right to ask questions even where no answer may be given for some time to come.

Despite the flood of Mao's previously unknown works released by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, no pre-liberation versions of his “celebrated philosophical essays” On Contradiction and On Practice came to light from that source. This gap in the Red Guard material may have been viewed as significant, confirming suspicions held by some that there were in fact no pre-liberation versions of these essays, and showing more conclusively the mendacity of the Chinese claim that they were originally written in 1937. Arthur Cohen, perhaps the most vociferous critic of Mao's “originality” as philosopher, argued in 1964 that both essays had been written in the period 1950 to 1952, and that the Chinese claim “appears to be fraudulent.” Doolin and Golas also contest the Chinese claim that On Contradiction was written by Mao in 1937. In both cases, the motivation for this falsification of the date of composition is interpreted as being the desire to backdate Mao's status as a Marxist theoretician to the early Yan'an period. Schram and Wittfogel, however, have both accepted the possibility that On Contradiction and On Practice could have been written in 1937, while not denying that the 1950 and 1952 texts could represent heavily revised versions of earlier pieces. Schram, in fact, has argued that Mao's Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism, On Practice and On Contradiction belonged to “a single intellectual enterprise, namely Mao's attempt to come to terms with the philosophical basis of Marxism from the time he was first exposed to it in July 1936 until the Japanese attack of September 1937 turned his attention to more practical things.”