There has been an impression among students of China that foreign trade data published by Peking are generally more reliable and accurate than its other statistics. This confidence is based on the following grounds. First, since the early years of the régime most foreign trade has been handled by a small number of state companies under the Foreign Trade Ministry. These companies are large in size and well organised, hence they must have respectable accounting and statistical systems. The exports and imports by private firms existing in the early 1950s were recorded by the customs office. Therefore, foreign trade turnovers for the period as a whole are relatively complete and free from serious errors. Secondly, since foreign trade always involves other countries as trading partners, which usually publish their trade statistics in great detail, it is unwise, if not impossible, for the Chinese authorities to falsify their own foreign trade statistics.

The Chinese and Russian Communists, as Marxist-Leninists, are fundamentally hostile towards religion, and are committed to its ultimate eradication. Although their attitudes towards religion are similar, their prescriptions for dealing with it are different. In essence, this difference arises from two divergent conceptions, one optimistic, the other pessimistic, regarding the progress of religion towards oblivion in a situation where the Communist Party has assumed leadership and where the “social” roots of religion have supposedly disappeared. The Chinese hold the optimistic view, a position which may be explained in part by the fact that institutional religion has traditionally been weak in China. I quote here C. K. Yang's description of institutional religion in China as it emerged in the modern period:

As an organised body, modern institutional religion had a very small priesthood, divided into minute units of two or three priests each, largely unconnected with each other. It had barely enough financial resources for subsistence for this scanty personnel. It was deprived of the support of an organised laity. … It did not participate in various organised aspects of community life such as charity, education, and the enforcement of moral discipline. There was no powerful centralised priesthood to dominate religious life or to direct operation of the secular social institutions.

The thesis of this article is that Mao Tse-tung's materialistic dialectics has a definite place of its own in the realm of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist philosophy. Although it is undoubtedly consanguineous with the dialectics of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the modern Russian and other Communist philosophy, it is also discernibly different. In addition, it is also somewhat related to the dialectics of classical Chinese philosophy. One demonstrable reason for all these relationships is that Mao Tsetung's readings in Marxian classics were not very extensive, possibly less extensive than his readings in Chinese classics. The rest of the differences and peculiarities came from his own thinking.

Until late in 1961, the leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party gave no public indication of the conflict within the international Communist movement. That they were aware of the worsening dispute is evident: for example, from 1958 to 1961, inclusive, they sent an average of five delegations to the Sino-Soviet bloc each year. But they chose to concentrate their energy on strengthening and guiding their own Party. This they had built into the largest Communist Party outside the bloc, with a membership at the end of 1961 of almost two millions, and with a network of mass organisations claiming over ten million members. After the Twenty-second Soviet Party Congress, however, the existence of conflict was public knowledge. D. N. Aidit, the Chairman of the Indonesian Communist Party, who had led his Party's delegation to the congress, felt compelled to explain the Party's position.

More than forty years have passed since Hu Shih and Ch'en Tu-hsiu wrote their polemics on literary reform and revolution. During this period many important so-called literary works have appeared, but they are more important as documents of social protest and political propaganda. We have yet to see anything which is important as literature in its own right. There have been many explanations for this literary paucity, and the most often repeated one is that of the political millstone around the writer's neck. This was one of the reasons Hu Shih gave.1 While it is true that political pressure accounts for most of this unhealthy literary phenomenon, I believe a more direct reason can be found in the fact that many critics have tried to make literature subservient to social and political interests.

The counterpoint of radical change and durable continuity which has characterised the Communist upheaval in China is nowhere so marked as in the ambivalent attitudes towards youth and age. Traditional China was a backward-looking civilisation, espousing a view of life and of history which esteemed past over present, age over youth, authority over innovation. The twentieth century has seen a definite, often violent, conflict between the generations, with the revolt of 1911, the May Fourth movement, and the Northern Expedition each expressing an aspect of the upsurge of youthful aspiration. The emergence of a Communist government has been marked by a drastic change in the official attitude, a new preoccupation with the future rather than the past, and sustained attention to the organisation of the youth of China, from which group will come the national leaders of the generation ahead.

Within the short span of twelve years since their rise to power in 1949, the Chinese Communists have completely revamped their educational system. Private institutions of higher learning have been abolished and the number of universities vastly reduced; in their place hundreds of technical institutes have been created, with an unprecedented increase in enrolment and graduates. The faculties of various universities and colleges have been amalgamated in an effort to train more and more scientific and technical personnel. New types of instruction, known as “specialty” (spetsial'nost) and “specialisation” (spetsializatsiia), have been introduced to accelerate the training of industrial experts. Emphasis on science and technology has completely replaced the traditional respect for the humanities; the highest learned organisation in Communist China today is the Academy of Sciences, and not the Academy of Letters (Hanlin Yuan) of Imperial China. A Twelve-Year Science Programme was adopted in 1956 with the avowed objective of producing 10,500 top scientists and some two million technicians by 1967, and towards this end a new University of Science and Technology was established in 1958.

China's rulers in 1961 surveyed their shattered dreams and then, with studied self-confidence, hailed the vitality of their revolutionary “mass-line” credo. This resolute re-affirmation of standard principles had a hollow ring, however, and doubts about the “real methods of control” employed during the years of retreat and readjustment coincided with angry charges that the language of the “mass-line” disguised terror and brutality on an appalling scale. In the confusion, fact has until recently seemed entwined irretrievably with propaganda and invective, but now a unique collection of the Kung-tso T'ung-hsun (Bulletin of Activities) makes it possible to disentangle the contradictory methods of control and leadership used in 1961 and to evaluate their widely varied effects in that crucial year.

Among the most significant polemical fall-out of the past year has been the increasing indication that modern weapons questions lie near the heart of Sino-Soviet estrangement. Whether or not the recent Chinese Communist charge is true, that the Russians later reneged on a 1957 “advanced technology” commitment, Soviet and Chinese behaviour since 1957 testifies to considerable Russian long-range concern over a nuclear-armed China, Russian reluctance to assist China to gain this end quickly, and accumulating Chinese anger at such un-comradely behaviour. The only unique ingredient in recent polemical exchanges is added explicitness; the modern weapons messages have been there all along. This is not to say that the Sino-Soviet schism is not the product, as well, of competing revolutionary strategies, theological pretension, struggle for supreme Communist authority, and fundamental disagreement over whether Stalin should be praised or buried. Underlying such antagonisms and contributing to them, however, have been deep-seated differences over modern weapons central to the initiation and aggravation of Sino-Soviet estrangement.

China's “Everyone a Soldier” movement of Autumn 1958 represents on paper perhaps the most ambitious military enterprise in the history of mankind. Two hundred and twenty million men and women of a predominantly agricultural population were to be transformed into an “ocean of soldiers,” equipped and prepared to defend their homeland against the invader.