Scholarly interest in a cellular model for sectors of the Chinese economy dates at least to G. William Skinner's “Marketing and social structure in rural China,” published in 1964–65, but based on his field work from 1949 to 1950 and on a theoretical foundation developed by Christaller and Löch in the 1930s and 40s. New interest was sparked by Audrey Donnithorne's 1972 article in this journal, in which she attempted to demonstrate that China had recently “experienced an intensification of the tendencies towards a cellular economy,” which she claimed had been strong even before the Cultural Revolution.

The subject of this article is the development of the second united front in China between 1935 and 1938, and in particular the difference between the Comintern and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on this question. In the first part of the period these differences revealed themselves in the Comintern's criticisms of the CCP's slow rate of progress towards rapprochement with the Kuomintang (KMT). As progress towards the united front gathered speed, they more and more came to centre on how far the alliance should go and the status of the communist areas and armies in relation to the central power of the KMT. Eventually the Maoist interpretation emerged successful from this contest between the two centres, and Wang Ming, chief Chinese spokesman for the Comintern, was elbowed away from the levers of power in the Party.

Although much has been written about Maoist economic theory (about the role of material and moral incentives, for instance, and about the relation between industry and agriculture), the recent appearance of the two volumes entitled Mao Tse-tung ssu-hsiong wan-sui and in particular five pieces therein (“Reading notes on the Soviet Union's Political Economy,” the three critiques of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. and Mao's comments on Stalin's “Reply to Comrades Sanina and Venzher”), permits analysis to push beyond “Maoist” economics into the theory of Mao himself. In fact these pieces in the Wan-sui on political economy may well be compared to Mao's public speeches and the Selected Works as Marx's Grundrisse is to Das Kapital.

Ever since the 10th Party Congress in August 1973, what had been a rather quiet anti-Confucian campaign has been combined with a much fiercer anti-Lin Piao campaign to make a very broad onslaught on all who are backward-looking and opportunistic and who seek to “restore capitalism.” In many respects, there is nothing new in this. China has gone through many campaigns since the 1950s and 1960s, and attacking Confucius is something that dates back almost continuously to 1915. Also, using the past to criticize the present, using historical analogies for current political ends, praising or condemning contemporary figures by likening them to historical heroes and villains – all these the Chinese have been doing for centuries, sometimes crudely, sometimes with sophistication. But there is at least one refinement in the present two campaigns which is new and deserves attention. This is the juxtaposition of two historical processes in the combined campaigns which are not so much Chinese as Marxist. That is to say, apart from the moral judgments and the comparisons between Confucius and his disciples and Lin Piao and his followers, there is a new consciousness about comparing two periods separated from each other by more than 2,000 years but both marked by revolutionary transitions from one kind of society to another. In the case of Confucius, the period is described as one of transition from slave society to feudal society; in the case of Lin Piao, the present is marked by the transition from capitalism to socialism. For both periods, there is the common danger of class “restoration,” that is, from restorationist forces wanting to arrest the changes and turn the clock back. Furthermore, unlike past analogies which applied to China alone, this setting side by side of two dynamic processes discovered or determined through the application of Marxist theory is not confined only to China. The present campaign warns that the same dangers that confront China confront the rest of the world as well and thus seems to serve the additional purpose of stimulating Chinese awareness of the relevance of universal history.