I visited China for 46 days in the months of July and August 1974, almost exactly two years after my first visit in 1972. The interval between my two visits coincided very closely with the growth of the campaign to criticize Lin Piao and Confucius, which reached an intense level at the time of my most recent visit. In my own view, the campaign was the second wave of the Cultural Revolution in succession to the first wave formed by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In both, the educational movement or revolution has played and is playing a very prominent role and has in turn produced very visible effects on China's science and technology.

Vague and often somewhat contradictory impressions of equality and inequality in China abound. Some recent visitors to China have reported that income differentials there have been reduced to nominal levels. At the same time the recurring themes of the class struggle and the dangers of revisionism alert us to the continuing conflict within China over the inequalities that still exist. In this paper I try to draw together the scattered pieces of information already available in order to examine, first, the kinds of inequalities that do continue to exist in China, and then the policies designed to affect the transmission of these inequalities over time and from generation to generation, or, in other words, stratification. Although the available information is not precise enough to permit any systematic comparisons with other countries, I hope to be able to arrive at some rough impressions of the extent to which the Chinese elite has been successful in producing a society with more equality and less stratification than is generally the case elsewhere.

I paid a two-week visit to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (or North Korea) in April–May last year. Being a Sinologist by training, the standards I used to evaluate what I saw there were those of a person steeped in the study of Mao's China. If I had brought with me a background in Soviet or Japanese and, most importantly, Korean studies, I would have had more insight into the distinctive characteristics of the Korean road to socialism. But the contrasts between North Korea and China are so startling in many fields and the implications for the wider study of socialist societies so important that I intend to couch this paper in terms of a comparison between the two systems.

This article presents data on the gross value of industrial output (GVIO) by province for the years 1949–73 and shows their relationship to GVIO figures published for the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a whole. From the founding of the People's Republic on 1 October 1949 until the Great Leap Forward in 1958, Chinese statistical authorities made conscious and sustained efforts to copy Soviet statistical organization and practices. Consequently, the Chinese statistical system, as it developed in the 1950s, mirrored the Soviet system. Descriptions of the Soviet statistical system give valuable insights into the functioning of the Chinese system, and an understanding of problems noted in western studies of Soviet statistics has often been important to an understanding of statistical data from China.