The Resolutions of the Tsunyi Conference published recently in The China Quarterly will not fail to attract the attention of all those who take an interest in the history of the Chinese revolution. The importance of this document is indeed evident. It constitutes one of the missing links, and not the least, in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. With this document serving as a junction, one can henceforth make one's way through the Juichin-Tsunyi-Yenan stretch of the “Chinese way to communism” if not with a great deal more comfort, then at least with a little less uneasiness.

Traditional Chinese culture may be facing extinction. In the last two decades, since Mao Tse-tung's capture of the Mainland and Chiang Kai-shek's withdrawal to Taiwan, Chinese culture has been subjected to intense stress, not only in Communist China but on Taiwan as well. On the Mainland the Chinese tradition has been under attack from the government, the most recent and most violent assault being the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Communists under the leadership of Mao have consciously sought to destroy the old ways and to rebuild society and culture along new lines. The threat to traditional Chinese culture on Taiwan is more subtle, but none the less real. Cut off from its mainland base, Chinese tradition on Taiwan has been threatened from within by popular indifference and from without by strong western influences. The Nationalists, however, under the leadership of Chiang have inaugurated the Cultural Renaissance Movement on Taiwan for the avowed purpose of saving China's culture.

During the long-sustained diplomatic polemics which accompanied and expressed the Sino-Indian boundary dispute, each side accused the other of refusing to negotiate. The argument became involved and finally confused, with each blaming the other for setting unreasonable pre-conditions. All that is clearly appreciated is that, after the abortive Nehru-Chou En-lai summit meeting of April 1960, the boundary dispute between India and China was never submitted to negotiation. Since both parties to this dispute had repeatedly affirmed their commitment to negotiations as the only proper means of resolving international differences, the failure to resort to negotiations in this instance is striking—and it left the quarrel to the arbitrament of force in the 1962 border war. This article will follow the subject of negotiations through the diplomatic exchanges, and attempt to show why the dispute remained un-negotiated. This isolation of a single—though crucial—element in an extended and complex dispute will inevitably leave some questions unanswered and loose ends in the narrative: these, the writer hopes, are dealt with in his full study of the Sino-Indian dispute.

For the years before 1958, because Communist China published data on the physical output of a large number of industrial commodities, it was possible to construct an index of industrial production that could be used with confidence. As early as 1959, however, there was a noticeable drying up of official reports as a source of data and objective commentary and, since the collapse of the Leap Forward in 1960, the regime has imposed an almost complete blackout on the disclosure of specific economic facts and figures. As a result, the number of commodities for which physical output can be estimated has been reduced sharply, and the estimates are subject to a wide range of error.