On 9 September 1976, at 4 p.m., Peking time, Radio Peking announced that Chairman Mao Tse-tung had died that morning at ten minutes past midnight, at the age of 82, because of his steadily worsening physical condition. The actual cause of death, beyond his age, was not given, but it was generally believed that he died of advanced Parkinson's disease or cerebral arteriosclerosis.

At the National Conference on Learning from Taching in Industry, held in Peking in May 1977, vice-premier of the State Council, Yu Ch'iu-li, first publicly mentioned the recreation of regional “economic systems.” Although there has been no reference to any administration for governing these regions, the use of the term “systems” (t'i-hsi), which must be “established,” suggests organized co-ordination on a regional basis. Several Hong Kong-based journals that report on current Chinese economic or political developments took note of Yu's remarks, speculating, respectively, that they were to serve economic development or defence goals, or that they might represent a concession to provincial leaders demanding autonomy. Thereafter, no further word of these regions surfaced for over four months. Then, in mid-September, in an article on socialist construction, the State Planning Commission drew attention again to these regions.

There remains little doubt that the offcial population statistics which indicate the beginning and the end of the most recent down swing in China's “dynastic cycle” of demographic development – 430 million people in 1850 and 582·6 million on 30 June 1953 – are close approximations of the true totals. Detailed scrutiny of all evident irregularities in the reported data is unlikely to suggest corrections by more than five per cent, and such modifications are subject to questions and reservations in turn.

The years 1937 to 1941 constitute the formative period in the Maoist leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), when Mao and his colleagues developed much of the political and military strategy that was to guide the Party through the anti-Japanese war and into the civil war period. This package of revolutionary prescriptions – loosely labelled the Yenan experience – is generally recognized to have had a powerful, lingering hold on the Party leadership.

The Civil War period from 1945 to 1949 is one of the least studied periods in Chinese Communist history. Even such fundamental facts as the formal organizational structure of the Party and government and holders of official positions in the leadership have not been well established. Nor has one of the most important policies of the Party at the time, agrarian reform, been sufficiently investigated. The alleged leadership split over important policy issues in the period constitutes another area which deserves more scholarly attention than has been given.