Observers of the current Chinese scene have found the anti-Confucian campaign which dominated the Chinese press from the autumn of 1973 through 1974 to be extremely puzzling. At one level, most observers agree that the attack on Confucianism was what it appeared to be – a continuation of the communist effort to eradicate traditional habits and attitudes that have persisted despite the revolution. It was a campaign against elitism, bureaucratism, scorn of physical labour, and the inferior condition of women. Most important, it was the rejection of the Confucian values of idealism, humanism and conservatism.

In my article, “Before and after the Cultural Revolution” (Report from China, The China Quarterly, No. 58), I reported that while “most” graduates of Chinese universities were slated to return to their original production units some received assignments from the The Assignment of University Graduates in China, 1974 state. At the time (September–October 1973) Chinese officials were unable to provide a breakdown of the two types ostensibly because no university classes had yet graduated. In November 1974, a discussion with members of a delegation from the Academia Sinica to Australia provided important new information on this question. Speaking of Peking University which graduated its first post-Cultural Revolution class in January 1974, delegation members did not give a precise or even rough statistical breakdown but did say “most” had returned to their original posts or original localities – a significantly more elastic formulation than that used in 1973. Moreover, they further stated that students selected from factories mostly returned to those factories while students who had been educated youth sent to the countryside were mostly allocated by the central planning agency to various departments. The body doing the actual allocation is the Office for Science and Education under the State Planning Commission.

This essay attempts to describe and contrast the social and political norms which the governments of China and Taiwan encourage their respective citizens to adopt. It endeavours to highlight contrasts in the goals of socialization in the two societies, so different in their vision of the ideal Chinese polity, by examining the norms presented to children through elementary school textbooks.

Not since the acquisition of the classified military periodical Kung-tso t'ung-hsün has the outside world been given so rich a store of material on the inner rationale behind Chinese foreign policy as is provided by the two volumes of Cultural Revolution compilations, Mao Tse-tung ssu-hsiang wan-sui. Although these documents cannot be authenticated as to accuracy of transcription and are obviously selective as well as edited, they nonetheless provide a wealth of insight into Mao's views on China's external affairs. In particular they throw new light on the 1958 Quemoy crisis with surprisingly frank admissions of miscalculation on Mao's part, both in terms of his objective in the bombardment and his underestimation of the American response thereto.

One of the most notable features of post-1949 China has been its striking periodicity. Through their pronounced policy changes and frequent political campaigns, Chinese leaders have incidentally provided the foreign analyst with a set of periods according to which events may be readily classified. Indeed, the temporal variable is the chief qualifier on which our generalizations must be contingent. There are few statements about the People's Republic, particularly those dealing with its conscious efforts at “development,” which can be made without a modifying phrase such as “before the cultural Revolution …” or “as a result of the Great Leap….” Thus, though considerations of time are obviously important for any developmental analysis, they are particularly significant with regard to China where one is struck by the frequency, suddenness and apparent disjointedness of change. The untidy set of events since 1949 which comprises China's developmental experience violates the sense of orderly progress on which so much of our thinking about development has been based.

I travelled in China in February 1974 as member of an academic group from the Pennsylvania State University, led by the university president, John W. Oswald. I visited the following institutions of higher learning: Canton Medical College, Chungshan University in Canton, Futan University in Shanghai, Nanking University, Nanking Normal (Teachers') College, Peking University, and the Central Institute of Nationalities in Peking. A member of our group (an engineer) visited Tsinghua University in Peking. In each of these institutions our group held lengthy conversations with personnel of the Revolutionary Committees, faculty members, and some students. In Shanghai I gave a lecture on the U.S. economy to faculty members from the departments of economics and international politics of Futan University.

During the Cultural Revolution, many of the attacks directed against the university system which prevailed till the spring of 1966 were aimed at the methods by which students were recruited. According to evidence gathered by western scholars and expounded by Chinese educational authorities, China's educational system was contributing to social stratification and was essentially elitist. The system by which students were recruited allegedly rested on scholastic excellency and therefore discriminated against students of rural background or of simple origin. Ultimately, according to Chinese claims, it was the children of the educated who had access to education, while university recruitment tended to favour more and more the offspring of cadres and of former members of the “exploiting classes.”