Western curiosity about the distribution of inequalities in contemporary China is not easily satisfied. The most obvious impediment to our understanding is that the government of the People's Republic does not publish even the most elementary social statistics, so that our efforts to gauge the shape of Chinese social stratification are by necessity impressionistic and often unsatisfying. The best recent assessment, offered in this journal by Martin King Whyte, draws upon an impressive (and an imaginatively motley) array of sources in support of well-reasoned, yet tantalizingly tentative conclusions.

The publication, on Mao Tse-tung's birthday, of an official text of his crucially important speech of 25 April 1956 “On the 10 great relationships” (reproduced below in the Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation, pp. 221–38) adds significantly to our knowledge both of Chairman Mao and of his successor. On the one hand, it constitutes a substantial document which will be closely scrutinized by all those interested in the thought of Mao Tse-tung. On the other, the way in which the text has been edited, and the fact of its publication, provide some hints about the thinking, and perhaps even about the policy intentions of Hua Kuo-feng.

The outbreak of war in North China during the summer of 1937 was the watershed in the growth of the revolutionary movement in China. Seemingly overnight the Communist Party made rapid new gains in strength and territory. From a small, isolated soviet in the desolation of North-west China on the Shensi-Kansu border, the Party enlarged its territories, and by the end of the war communist-backed resistance governments ruled huge portions of North and Central China. In the same period Party membership grew from a little over 20,000 members in 1936 to nearly 1,250,000 members at the Seventh Party Congress in April 1945, and the Red Army, which had dwindled to a mere 30,000 men in the course of the Long March, swelled to over one million men by the war's end. This new political and military framework formed the structural backbone which enabled the Communists to come to power four years later.

That Chinese policy since 1949 has been characterized by a pattern of left-right oscillations is one of the most widespread, but least examined, assumptions among analysts of Chinese politics. In the popular press, we often read of a “return to a moderate phase” or a “resurgence of radicalism,” while in academic writing, we frequently find contemporary Chinese history set in periods according to the alternate ascendancy of “bureaucratic” or “mobilizational” “models” or of “realist” and “visionary” groups of leaders. Of course, to some extent the policy oscillations model is only a kind of shorthand, convenient for summarizing the content of policy and its changes. We all understand that there have been secular changes in China both in what has been accomplished and in the terms of policy debate. Thus, it has become increasingly common to describe the pattern of policy change in China in terms of a combination of cyclical and secular patterns, to refer to policy oscillations in passing while presenting a chronology which actually indicates secular change, to offer the oscillations model explicitly as just a convenient simplification; or to ignore oscillations entirely in discussing the development of policy.

Our attention has been drawn to an error in the section on oil in the Quarterly Chronicle in issue number 67 of The China Quarterly. Line 20 on page 677 should read “Speculation that a major fire had occurred at the Taching oilfield….”

Prior to the mid-1950s, infectious diseases, including venereal disease (now essentially eliminated), were the main causes of Chinese mortality. In 1951 cancer was ninth on the list of fatal diseases. Presently, in some areas of China it has become first. For example, in the northeast there are very distinct pockets of carcinoma of the oesophagus. In southern areas (e.g. Kwangchow) one finds high incidences of carcinoma of the nasopharynx and in eastern China a high incidence of liver cancer. Cancer investigation in these three areas is organized and pursued, for example, by the staff of the Peking Tumour Institute and Hospital.