The detonation of a nuclear device by the People's Republic of China on October 16, 1964, made it unmistakably clear that China attached a very high priority to becoming a militarily effective nuclear power as soon as possible. Although the effect on Chinese economic development has probably been relatively limited thus far, the Chinese are devoting substantial resources to their nuclear programme and may be expected to have militarily effective systems within this decade. The Chinese appear to be considerably further along in the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems than had been previously anticipated.

If the shade of a Ch'ing mandarin who had been alive in October 1864—just after the collapse of the T'ai'ping rebellion—had attended the celebrations this year of the fifteenth anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese People's Republic, he would have found much that was strange to him, but also a great deal that was familiar and many things of which he could approve. He would learn that, as in his own time, the empire had been reunited after a period of civil war, and he would further note with satisfaction that the vigorous new dynasty which now held the Mandate of Heaven had established the authority of the central government to a degree which in his time he had never known. He would find that with the exception of those tiresome people, the Khalkha Mongols, who had apparently succeeded in breaking away from the empire with the aid of the Tsar of Russia, almost all the territory which in his recollection had been held by the Ch'ing was now subject to an unprecedently firm administration from Peking. He would also observe that the position of the imperial government in relation to foreign states had greatly improved. His own memory would go back to the capture of Peking by the British and French armies in 1860, the hurried departure of the Court of Jehol to escape from the invasion of the barbarians, and the humiliating treaties which had to be concluded with them because of their irresistible weapons.

What can be said at this point about the broad goals and motivations of the present Chinese Communist leadership? The question is, of course, distressingly imprecise and begs further definition. Is the leadership a monolithic group? Have its goals remained constant and unchanging? Is there a rigid Chinese Communist “goal structure,” etc.?

Writing some four hundred and fifty years ago, the founder of the modern realist school of political analysis struck the mark. “The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains,” Machiavelli observed, “is from seeing the men that he has about him.” To the student of the terrain of post-1928 Chinese political history, the prominent positions of Chiang Kai-shek's Chekiang clique in the Kuomintang and of Mao Tse-tung's Hunan faction in the Chinese Communist Party are obvious landmarks. Yet the difference in the political styles of Chiang and Mao, as revealed in the men around them, has been less emphasised. Chiang Kai-shek's trusted political and military associates, with some exceptions, have been either members of his own family or natives of his own province of Chekiang in east China. Mao Tse-tung, while revealing similar parochialism in selecting and retaining associates from his native province of Hunan, has nevertheless shown more imagination and less inflexibility than Chiang.

On October 15, 1957, Communist China and the Soviet Union signed an agreement on new defence technology according to which the Soviet Union would supply China with technical data for manufacturing nuclear weapons. In May 1958 Foreign Minister Ch'en Yi told German correspondents in Peking that China would make atomic bombs. On June 20, 1959, the Soviet Union, according to China, unilaterally abrogated the 1957 agreements on weapons development. On July 31, 1963, China issued a statement denouncing the Moscow Partial Test Ban Treaty as “a big fraud to fool the people of the world.” On October 16, 1964, China announced that an atomic device had been exploded in western China and proposed that “a summit conference of all the countries of the world be convened to discuss the question of the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons.”

The detonation of a nuclear device by the People's Republic of China on October 16, 1964, made it unmistakably clear that China attached a very high priority to becoming a militarily effective nuclear power as soon as possible. Although the effect on Chinese economic development has probably been relatively limited thus far, the Chinese are devoting substantial resources to their nuclear programme and may be expected to have militarily effective systems within this decade. The Chinese appear to be considerably further along in the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems than had been previously anticipated.

Recognising that pre-Communist China in the 1930s was not a very prosperous or well-ordered community, even before the Japanese invasion, we should nevertheless examine what information is available about the level of its productivity and well-being, as a standard with which to compare such information as we can obtain today. This is fairer than comparing productivity in recent years with that of 1949, which is what Communist propagandists prefer to do (and many western economists are naïve enough to follow them). In 1949 the country was so disorganised that a substantial improvement in productivity was to have been expected as soon as any stable government was established.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with a particular evaluation or interpretation of the 1953 census registration—“the first modern census of China”—one must admit that the few published statistics have been thoroughly covered and analysed. Not enough attention, however, has been given to the system that was established to produce the population data published since 1953. Most of the analysis has naturally focused on acceptability of the figures themselves and reasonableness of the indicated rates of growth, rather than on the capabilities of the responsible institutions and individuals to collect the necessary data for current population statistics—the only means of determining a nation's population and its rate of growth during the intercensal period.