A Double explosion took place in mid-October 1964, producing strong shock waves around the globe. Khrushchev fell from power on October 14, while on October 16 Communist China became the fifth nation to explode an atomic weapon. The first Chinese test (like the second and fourth that followed in 1965–66) had a yield comparable to the Hiroshima bomb in 1945—about 20 kilotons. But, as Radio Prague noted soon after, a “small bomb” can do “great evil.”

The recent events in China are surely drama of the highest order, but at times it has seemed that the actors themselves were not entirely sure who was writing the lines. In fact what we seem to be witnessing is a form of commedia dell'arte: improvisation within a certain tacitly understood framework. The cultural revolution appears to have taken new turns and to have broken into new channels precisely because the actors have been faced with new and unforeseen circumstances as it has run its course. No faction in the struggle has been able to impose its will on the Party or the country by fiat; new devices and stratagems have been brought into play in what has looked like desperate attempts to gain the upper hand. It has clearly been a battle of the utmost seriousness, but there appear to have been limitations on the resultant chaos. Economic disorganisation does not seem to have occurred on the scale of the later stages of the Great Leap Forward. Nor, despite the clashes, confusion and bitter infighting, have new centres of power, totally divorced from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself, arisen. The cultural revolution has been pre-eminently a struggle within the Party.

The Afro-Asian Conference held in Bandung in April 1955 presented a rare occasion for diplomatic contact between the People's Republic of China and Thailand, and represents a milestone if not a watershed in China's Asian relations, including those with Thailand. According to one well-informed commentator on the conference, a mutual educative process for both communist and anti-communist participants lay behind the purposes set forth by the sponsoring Colombo Powers, a process which “would serve both to enlighten the Chinese as to the realities of their international environment and to educate leaders of those non-communist Asian and African states which had little or no contact with Communist China as to the actual attitudes of Peking's leaders towards both non-communist Asia and the West.” It was assumed that although China was genuinely devoted to a policy of peace for a number of years to come, a genuine and not entirely unfounded fear of China as a threat to national independence existed among certain Asian powers.

There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the facts of Miss Chao's suicide. It happened this way. Miss Chao Wu-chieh, of Nanyang Street, Changsha, was engaged to marry Wu Feng-lin, of Kantzuyuan, on November 14, 1919. As a matter of course the match had been arranged by her parents and the matchmaker. Although Miss Chao had had only the brief ritual encounters with the fiancé, she disliked him intensely and was unwilling to marry him. Her parents refused both to undo the match and to postpone the wedding date. On the day of the wedding, as Miss Chao was being raised aloft in the bridal chair to be delivered to the home of the groom, she drew out a dagger which she had previously concealed in the chair and slit her throat.

The Soviet collectivisation campaign of 1929–30 and the Chinese campaign of 1955–56 were similar in that both turned out to be attempts at achieving nationwide breakthroughs in agriculture. Both régimes attempted in the course of about six months to make the radical transition from small-producer to collectivised agriculture. The plans and forecasts that had been formulated by both the Soviet and the Chinese leaders had not called for such a breakthrough. These plans had envisaged the completion of collectivisation at a fairly slow pace.i The following graph indicates the rapidity and scope of the changes that actually took place, as well as the dramatically different outcomes of the two campaigns.