Since September 1976 new provincial population figures have been appearing in news items from the People's Republic of China, most of which are much larger than those previously available for the same provinces. The figures seem to point to a new order of magnitude for the total population of China that is well above most current estimates.

During the two years I spent as an exchange student in the People's Republic of China, from October 1974 to July 1976, under the auspices of the Sino-Canadian Student Exchange Programme, I was witness to such major political events as the convening of the Fourth National People's Congress, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat Campaign and the Campaign to Criticize Water Margin. This report focuses on the events that occurred in the last 10 months of my stay, and most particularly on the Educational Debate of late 1975, the passing of Chou En-lai, the campaign against Teng Hsiao-p'ing, and the events surrounding the T'ien An Men Incident. My sources include personal observations: in the first few months of 1976 I witnessed the uneven unfolding of the “Educational Debate,” and I was in T'ien An Men Square on 3 and 4 April, when the first open attacks against the “Shanghai four” took place, on the eve of the riot of 5 April; material I collected from posters at Peita and in Shanghai; conversations with other foreign and Chinese students; and various contacts with Chinese teachers and officials. I also had contact with some members of the foreign community.

The Chinese have broadcast a number of statements on industrial performance in Kweichow during 1977. Piecing these statements together shows that the political events of the past two years–the death of Chou En-lai, the activities of the “gang of four,” the death of Mao Tse-tung, and the struggle over the restoration of Teng Hsiao-p'ing-have seriously disrupted production. Even though Kweichow is not a major industrial province, the results are worth considering because they give month-by-month changes in industrial production from January through October 1977 as well as levels of output for two months in 1976. The level of industrial output in Kweichow was depressed for more than 12 months far below that of September 1975, the previous peak month. This pattern may be similar to declines in industrial production in other more important provinces for which similar but much more fragmentary statements have been broadcast.

In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, a dramatic surge of rural industrialization occurred in China. Thousands of small-scale enterprises using intermediate technologies were set up in the rural hsien and communes.

On the morning of 8 November 1977 I was given the opportunity to interview the director, Jen Chien-hsin, and another member of the Legal Affairs Department of the China Council for the Promotion of Foreign Trade. We discussed the Chinese legal system in general and some legal aspects of the law of foreign trade in particular

[W]hat the Soviet leadership is practising is certainly not socialism but, as Lenin put it, socialism in words, imperialism in deeds – that is, social-imperialism.… A simple but important principle of Marxism-Leninism is that one must judge a person not merely by his words but [also] by his deeds (Ch'iao Kuan-hua, 1971).

The extent to which the Cultural Revolution has transformed the world-view of the Chinese masses remains among the psycho-cultural imponderables, but clearly it has revolutionized the western view of Chinese politics. The dominant pre-1966 image of a consensual solidarity disturbed only rarely by purges, also handled in an orderly way by a consensus excluding only its victims, was challenged by a sudden multitude of polemical claims to the effect that a struggle for power and principle had been raging behind the scenes for decades. This struggle was characterized as a “struggle between two lines”: a “proletarian revolutionary line,” led by Mao Tse-tung, and a “bourgeois reactionary line,” led by Liu Shao-ch'i and Teng Hsiaop'ing. This struggle allegedly represented a deep underlying ideological cleavage within the leadership that had repercussions on every aspect of Chinese life: foreign policy, strategies of economic development, techniques of leadership and administration, pay scales and living standards, delivery patterns for education, medicine, and other services; even scientific method. Allegations concerning this struggle were supported by a wealth of documentary evidence, culled from hitherto confidential Party and government files. Initially greeted with scepticism among western journalists and academic circles, some variant of the “two lines” paradigm has made increasing inroads into our attempts to understand the origins of the Cultural Revolution. The time has come to re-evaluate the conception of a two-line struggle in retrospect and to try to determine just what it means and how it functions.