Mao Tse-tung, the Marxist, may believe in the “objective” and “inevitable” forces of history, but Mao, the politician, general and revolutionary has argued that Communist success depends on the “subjective factor of ability of direction.” This article analyses the variation in the Chinese Communist definition of good military leadership and the relationship between this definition and officer training programmes.

Perhaps the most significant development affecting the Chinese army in recent months has been the campaign to “Learn from the Experience of the People's Liberation Army in Political and Ideological Work” launched by the People's Daily editorial of February 1, 1964. In the context of the nation-wide emulation movement, the Liberation Army's achievements in this field of political work make it a model for the whole nation to “learn from, study and compare with.” Industries, commercial enterprises, government departments, trade unions, rural work cadres and other important sections of the community are reported to have taken up the challenge to “learn from the People's Liberation Army.” At the same time there has been an exceptional quantity of news about the political achievements of the Army and of its model soldiers and companies.

On January 27 a communiqué was issued in Paris and Peking which read, somewhat baldly:

The Government of the People's Republic of China and the Government of the French Republic have decided in mutual agreement to establish diplomatic relations.

For this purpose, the two Governments have agreed to appoint their ambassadors within three months.

Chou en-lai's recent “western expedition” to Africa and the Mediterranean was Peking's greatest diplomatic effort to date outside the Communist world. Coming at a time when China had openly split from Russia and yet remained at odds with America, India, and most other countries, it marked a turning point in Peking's foreign policy and perhaps in the entire post-war structure of international relations.

Peking's pronouncements in the Sino-Soviet dispute have left the public with an image of a reckless and bellicose Chinese Communist régime. This image has been reinforced by the Soviet Union, which has exaggerated the Chinese statements and their significance to paint an over-simplified contrast between the supposed Chinese addiction to war and Soviet dedication to peace.

The Sino-Indian conversations that followed the border clashes of late 1959 were undertaken partly for the purpose of examining in detail the historical evidence with which both sides supported their border claims. It is always difficult, however, to use historical evidence to bolster claims to areas which have for centuries been removed from the main stream of human existence. The Aksai Chin, in the extreme north-east of Ladakh, upon which much of the negotiations centred, is such a region; a bleak uninhabited highland which in the past was visited only by the inhabitants of adjacent territories in quest of salt and by occasional hunters. In 1717, however, the Aksai Chin was traversed by the Tsungar invaders of Tibet and 233 years later it was used for the same purpose by the Chinese. The success of this second venture led to the construction of a major road link between Sinkiang and Tibet, the existence of which precipitated the hostilities of 1959 and the discussions of 1960.

On August 5, 1963, the State Department released a set of secret Chinese military papers, which is the most illuminating first-hand material that scholars have had on the Chinese Communists since the Hoover Institution acquired the Yenan Documents in the mid-forties.

The angry outbursts of Chinese intellectuals against the Chinese Communist Party at the time of the Hundred Flowers in 1956–57 revealed that China's intellectuals, even those who were oriented towards the left, were in conflict with many of the Party's practices. Actually, this tension between the Party and the intellectuals had been smouldering for a long time. It had come to the surface many years earlier during the Cheng Feng movement in Yenan in the early 1940s. At that time the Party, as it did later in the Hundred Flowers period, embarked on a drive “to rectify the style of work” of both Party members and intellectuals. One aspect of this drive was that the Party encouraged intellectuals and lower-rank cadres to speak out on the misuses of Party power.

The present situation in China's heavy industry is a strange sequel to the programme for rapid industrialisation that took place from 1950 to 1960. Production of steel and other heavy industrial products were once proudly broadcast to show China's progress. Now the Chinese planners stress only the ways in which heavy industry can support agriculture. The priority once given to heavy industry is now a political liability rather than a basis for feelings of national pride. Behind the euphemistic description of present objectives in industry as “work to readjust, consolidate, fill out and raise standards” is a situation where the planners show little interest in maximising production in heavy industry. This serious setback to the programme for rapid industrialisation needs to be interpreted in the light of the trends in capital formation that have occurred since 1950.

The development of the ideological controversy between Communist China and the Soviet Union in recent years has aroused increased interest in a more careful evaluation of Sino-Soviet economic relations. In this paper, I attempt to deal with one specific aspect of this broad area, that is the price problem in Sino-Soviet trade.

A sharp contrast stands between the mood of optimism in 1958 and 1959 when official as well as unofficial reports of industrial progress continued to pour out of Communist China and the silence and complete black-out of statistical information which has characterised the Chinese scene since 1960. If the principal landmarks are retraced, the first major sign of a change in official policy appears to have come in early 1961 when the Chinese Communist Party decided to reverse the policies which had characterised the “leap forward” of 1958–59. This was followed by a drastic policy of retrenchment in investment and reorientation of industrial production during the latter part of 1961 as the economic crisis deepened. Since then the new slogan has been “adjustment, consolidation, reinforcement, and improvement”; the new order of priorities is agriculture, light industry and heavy industry; the new approach is to regard agriculture as the economic base and industry as the “leading factor.”