How much grain does Communist China produce? Is total production over 200 million tons, or is it as low as 175 million tons? The purpose of this brief article is to explore the differences among presently available estimates of grain production in Communist China and to point out some of the implications of these differences.

For a key to the Chinese stance on India, one might begin by quoting the first message Mao Tse-tung sent to that country after taking over as Chairman of the People's Republic. Ironically, it went to B. T. Ranadive, who was then the anti-Maoist General Secretary of the Indian Communist Party (CPI), and who is now the doubtfully Maoist editor of the weekly journal of the supposedly pro-Chinese or Marxist Communists (CPI[M]). “The Indian people is one of the great Asian peoples with a long history and a vast population,” said Mao, in reply to a message of greetings from Ranadive; “her fate in the past and her path to the future are similar to those of China in many points.” When India became free, like China after liberation, Mao went on to add, “that day will end the imperialist reactionary era in the history of mankind.”

Mao's cultural revolution is perhaps the most extensive effort in history to transform a nation by changing the character of its people. It is a moralistic and inner- as well as outer-directed revolution. In the simplest ideological terms, “good men and good deeds” is a central theme, and “selfishness” is the principal enemy. To personify these ideals and to illustrate the method of attaining them, a succession of heroes have been put forward for nation-wide emulation.

As a result of the split between the Communists and the Kuomintang at Wuhan in July 1927, the Nationalists managed to set up a unified régime of their own at Nanking. But T'ang Sheng-chih, the KMT military leader at Wuhan, rebelled against that unified régime. So Nanking decided to send troops to fight him on October 24. This KMT civil strife led immediately to an intra-Party power struggle among the Communists who had been forced underground since July. The Communist struggle took the form of a dispute over a proposed insurrection at Wuhan in the event of T'ang Sheng-chih's defeat.

The history of Western industrialisation and the recent experience of developing countries both indicate that rapid industrial growth is usually accompanied by serious urban housing problems. The pressure to minimise infra-structure investment, which is expensive and only indirectly productive, is very great. The existence of this problem in China has long been recognised in general terms, but its exact dimensions have only recently been brought into question in articles by Kang Chao and William Hollister. Kang Chao has produced estimates for all urban areas which show that per capita living area approximately halved between 1949 and 1960. Hollister, in his work on capital formation, argues that a decline of this magnitude has not taken place. The difference between these two views arises first from Hollister's addition of 70 per cent, to the official housing construction figures for socialist enterprises for the years 1950 to 1955. This addition is the estimated extent of housing construction in the private sector. The second difference between the two estimates arises from the treatment of depreciation and repair work. Kang Chao makes no allowance for repair work and estimates depreciation to be 2 per cent, annually. Hollister on the other hand considers that 1 per cent depreciation is sufficient and estimates that repair work to this value has been done. Neither writer offers any systematic statistical evidence for his estimate of depreciation and repair. This is unfortunate, since these differences, over periods of ten years or more, lead to radically opposed appraisals of the housing situation.

On October 7, 1967, Indonesia's Foreign Minister, Adam Malik, told anti-communist student demonstrators in Jakarta that Indonesia was moving in the direction of a complete break in diplomatic relations with China. On October 9, after a special cabinet meeting, the Indonesian government announced that it was “suspending” relations with the Peking government, thus effecting a kind of de facto diplomatic break. On October 29, Peking followed suit ordering the “temporary closing” of its embassy in Jakarta. On October 31, a Chinese plane flew the eight remaining Indonesian diplomats in Peking home to Jakarta and picked up the 20 or so remaining Chinese diplomatic staff in the Indonesian capital. These developments climaxed a two-year period of declining Sino-Indonesian relations which began with the abortive communist coup of September 30, 1965. During this time, the erstwhile Sino-Indonesian partnership, once conceived by its creators as the nucleus of a world movement against “neo-colonialism, colonialism and imperialism” deteriorated into bitterness. Three factors in this rapid deterioration deserve particular attention:

Peking's alleged involvement in the September 30 coup (usually called Gestapu—from Gerakan tigah puluh September—by acronymminded Indonesians) and her reportedly subsequent subversive burrowing in Indonesia, the anti-communist momentum of Indonesian politics since the coup and its impact on the three million Chinese minority in Indonesia, and the pattern of steadily escalating tensions between the two countries following their respective diplomatic ploys and counterploys.

In the latter half of 1927 the Chinese Communist Party suffered the most disastrous defeat of its history. The debacle of that year not only very nearly destroyed the Party's apparatus, it shattered beyond repair an entire conception of revolutionary strategy: the use of peasant mass organisation as a power base for the seizure of hegemony within the revolutionary movement. The repercussions of this traumatic reverse are being felt to this very day.