In what light does the Communist Party wish to project itself to the people? Is the local party secretary presented as the remote symbol of authoritarian efficiency, a reflection of the absolute power above? Or is he supposed to be a model of the nutrient “helper,” responsive to the people's needs and governed by humanitarian considerations? The actual quality of these relationships is of course inaccessible for direct observation, but we can examine some of the Communist presentations of the image and expectations in officially approved literary publications.

In the preface to her biography of Sun Yat-sen, Lyon Sharman writes of the difficulty of drawing a realistic portrait of the symbol of modern Chinese nationalism. Even working in China immediately after Sun's death in 1925, the author attempting an untrammelled biography was hampered not only by the paucity of reliable data but also, and more seriously, by the fact that the Kuomintang had forbidden overt criticism of Sun and of his ideas. The fact that her volume on Sun is still the best available nearly thirty years after publication is a tribute both to the author's assiduousness and to her empathy for China and the Chinese.

The two stretches of Sino-Soviet frontier which lie on either side of the Mongolian Republic differ from each other in at least one important respect: whereas the Soviet population on the eastern stretch is predominantly Russian, or at any rate non-Asian, and faces the solidly Asian population of Manchuria, that of the western stretch is predominantly Turkic-Muslim and faces the predominantly Turkic-Muslim population of the Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region formerly known as the Province of Sinkiang.

The Treaty of Peace and Friendship signed in Katmandu on July 31, 1950, by Nepal and India, declared that “The two Governments hereby undertake to inform each other of any serious friction or misunderstanding with any neighbouring State likely to cause any breach in the friendly relations subsisting between the two Governments” (Article II). Moreover, Nepal was “free to import, from or through the territory of India, arms, ammunition or warlike material and equipment necessary for the security of Nepal” (Article V). With the Chinese Communists preparing to reassert China's claim to Tibet, it was obvious that India sought “to ensure” that Nepal, together with Bhutan and Sikkim, should not be “included in the Communist Chinese sweep” along the Himalayas.

The rural people's communes, launched in the summer and autumn of 1958, purported to be a grand new social, political and economic organisation. They were supposed to be like “a fine horse, which having shaken off its bridle, is galloping courageously directly towards the highway of Communism.” An organisation had been created where collective living was actively promoted and the “Five-togethers” practised, where women were “freed from the drudgery of home life” and Idrawn into full time participation in the commune production, where labour could be shifted from area to area or even occupation to occupation according to needs and requirements, where the rural areas were not only the scene of agricultural production, but were also new centres of workshops producing steel and machine tools, and where the previous village, township and even county administration was now merged into the new commune administration, which thus undertook multifarious activities.

During the first decade of their mainland rule, the Chinese Communists sent considerable numbers of people from the densely populated provinces to develop China's frontier regions and to ensure that the minority peoples there were assimilated into the new Chinese Communist order of things. While some Chinese were sent to the minority areas of the southwest, the overwhelming majority migrated to the North-West and Inner Mongolia. From examining the available evidence, which has not been used comprehensively before, it becomes clear that the pattern of migration is essentially the same for each region in the three phases of migration which took place during the period under consideration—the small scale migration until 1955; the first organised mass migration which coincided with the Leap Forward of 1956 and the subsequent period of consolidation in 1957; and the migration during the Great Leap Forward of 1958.

Mongolia has unexceptionably, unqualifiedly, and unhesitatingly supported the Soviet Union in all aspects of its dispute with China. It signed the test-ban treaty (on August 8); it publishes all the Soviet attacks on China immediately, and publishes Chinese attacks on the Soviet Union only after the Soviet press does so; it vilifies Albania; and praises and deals with Yugoslavia. A semi-weekly Russian-language newspaper was inaugurated in Ulan Bator on January 1, 1963 (Novosti Mongolii), and the introduction of an expanded and intensified programme of Russianlanguage instruction throughout the country was announced on May 24. In August, the Mongolians reorganised its State Planning Commission to include a separate division for agriculture and one for industry, along the lines of the reorganisation of the Soviet Communist Party. Mongolia supported the inclusion of the Soviet Union in Afro-Asian councils (at the conference of journalists in Indonesia), and in the United Nations moved that Iraq be condemned for its attack on the Kurds. Every day in every way it has been a firm supporter of the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet quarrel and in all things.

At the lowest level of state administration in China some direct popular control of government is formally sanctioned. It is, therefore, at this level that the apparent conflict between the Chinese Communist Party's desire for mass participation in government and Party leadership over policy formation and execution can be analysed. The rural communes serve as a logical point of departure in this analysis. When formed in 1958, the rural communes replaced the hsiang as the basic unit of government administration for roughly 80 per cent, of the population. At the same time “democratic management,” a Party term for all kmds of mass political activity was emphasised, and by the autumn of 1958 a movement for the “Democratisation of Management” was under way. By December of the same year, however, the Central Committee of the Party warned that “militarisation of organisation” (another battle cry of that period) must not be used as a pretext to impair “democratic life” in the communes. From then on, the rural communes have been, in effect, a testing ground for the Party's policy towards popular participation in government.

Despite his claim to have advanced beyond Marxism and arrived at an entirely new conception of the nature of traditional non-Western societies, it is somewhat surprising to learn that Professor Karl Wittfogel still feels the need to seek the testimony of no less an “authority” on Asia than Karl Marx. In a recent article in this journal Professor Wittfogel has once again examined the canons of Marxism in order to find support for the theory of “Oriental despotism.” In this case the articles that Marx and Engels wrote on China during the 1850s have been rescued from obscurity and presented as major canonical texts in the evolution of the doctrine of “Oriental despotism.”