There are two sources of world civilization: one is the study, another is the prison. We the youth must make up our minds to enter the prison once out of the study, and enter the study once out of the prison. Only these provide the most lofty and sublime life. And only those civilizations born in these two places are true civilizations with life and value.

We can be grateful that Edgar Snow once wrote, in his straightforward uncompromising style, a book about himself. He called it Journey to the Beginning. At a later point in the book he returned (briefly) to talk about his origins, but the “beginning” (Chapter One, line one) was: “When I first reached Shanghai. …”

Unlike the Bolshevik revolution, the Chinese revolution had little impact on the Indian nationalist elite. The liberation of the working class from the shackles of capitalism in Russia had stirred the minds of many leaders of the Indian nationalist movement, including Nehru. The liberation of the masses of the peasantry from the shackles of feudalism in China had no comparable impact. The Indian Communist Party (CPI) hailed the Chinese revolution as an epoch-making event, but continued to regard the Soviet Union as the fountainhead of doctrinal as well as tactical directions.

News of industrialization in China contains two special features which indicate that Chinese efforts in this field differ significantly from those in many other developing countries. The first is the strong emphasis on local industries and the other is the importance given to small and medium enterprises. Local industries include all industrial branches not attached to the central industrial departments, and all industrial enterprises run by provinces, administrative regions, counties, people's communes or production brigades. A number of these industries are attached to schools and hospitals, but the majority are small or medium enterprises run by counties, people's communes or production brigades. In this report I shall deal mainly with these enterprises, only discussing those at higher levels in so far as they have important relations with the lower level enterprises.

From 12 October to 13 November 1971 I listened to various forms of Chinese as it is spoken in the People's Republic. I listened with the ear of a Chinese educated – after leaving Amoy as a small child – in various dialects as they are spoken by Chinese in South-East Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States. I was pleased both as a Chinese and as a professional linguist to discover immediately that language as well as a Chinese face remains a social passport in the People's Republic just as in Chinese communities elsewhere. I entered at Shumchun through the gate for Chinese with my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Leta. Leta is even more fair-skinned and blonde than her American father, and an army guard on the bridge was somewhat startled to see a westerner coming in that way.

The object of this article is to take a new look at what has been called the “great debate” between Chinese leaders during 1965 and the first half of 1966 arising out of American escalation in Vietnam.