The radical worsening of Sino-Soviet relations began in the spring of 1958 and the “ point of no return ” occurred at the latest in the summer of 1959. Indeed, since 1958 the public dispute has followed a cyclical course of escalation and partial détente. Each cycle has made Moscow-Peking relations worse than before and given other communist parties more autonomy from the Soviet Union. The apparent partial détentes have ostensibly been caused by Soviet and Chinese moves toward reconciliation, but these actually have been tactical maneuvers intended by each primarily to worsen the other's position and to gain support within other communist parties.

When China and Afghanistan signed a Friendship and Mutual Non-Aggression Treaty in 1960, they called it “a new Silk Road,” evoking nostalgic memories of a link between the two countries established 2,100 years ago. The old “Silk Road” stretching from China to Rome was opened by Chang Chien, a special envoy of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty (140 B.C.), who was seeking a military ally against the Hsiung-nu tribesmen in China's northwest. The Ta Yueh-chih people, then living in the Afghanistan area, originally lived in the Kansu area of China but migrated towards the Oxus River valley under pressure from the Hsiung-nu tribesmen. The Hsiung-nu, therefore, gave Chinese and early Afghans a common cause for alliance in the following century. As early as 104 B.C. an official envoy from the Afghan kingdom travelled the Silk Road to the Chinese Imperial Court.

On February 23, 1965, colleagues and students in Berkeley mourned the death of Tsi-an (T.A.) Hsia in his forty-eighth year. A profound sense of loss has since been shared and expressed in many other parts of the world by those who knew him and his work. Critic and literary editor for over a cataclysmic decade in China, as distinguished in creative writing as in historical research, he was first published in the West in the Partisan Review in 1955. “The Jesuit's Tale” (PR, XXII, 4)is an agonising story of a religious devotee who finally succumbs not only to the mental torture perfected by his Peking inquisitors, but ultimately to the torments of a modern dedicated individual caught in the clash of two cultures. Tsi-an's talent was to probe deeply into the human psyche, individual and collective, and to reveal dimensions of symbolism in the social, political and cultural confrontations in today's contradictory world. His fine sensibility for words and his ability to analyse propaganda jargon, folk-lore and traditional myths in cogent critiques of the Chinese socialist dream as wèll as reality, were evidenced in his Metaphor, Myth, Ritual and the People's Commune, and other brilliant monographs which he produced with us in Berkeley in our Project called Current Chinese Language: Studies in Communist Terminology.

Economists have come to depend on reports to the National People's Congress for details on China's past performance and future expectations. On the eve of the third five-year plan the National People's Congress did not meet, as had been the case in the previous year. Something seems to have gone wrong with the time-table, if not the substance, of political decisions.