Even though it is a truism, it is worth pointing out that with relatively little foreign trade and even less foreign aid, Communist China's economic growth must in the main result directly from the development of her indigenous resources. In her comparatively backward economy, most of those resources were to be found initially in two traditional sectors of production: in agriculture, and in various crafts and trades. Due to limited division of labour, these two traditional sectors were not separated sharply from each other, but overlapped in the person of the peasant-craftsman who was relatively common in the countryside.

The importance of examining the location of China's steel development is not confined solely to the steel industry. It reflects to a large extent, the Communist policy on industrial location in general. The new steel centres have been planned to form the nuclei of industrial complexes. To counteract the pre-Communist concentration of industry in the coastal areas, the Communist régime has emphasised from the beginning that a wide dispersion of industry is desirable from the standpoint of economic development and national defence. In planning new capital construction, therefore, regional development constitutes a key-note while sources of raw materials and fuel supply, consumption centres, future mechanisation of agriculture and national security become the major determinants of industrial locations. As a result of adherence to this policy, a new pattern has emerged for the location of China's steel industry.

The annual sessions of the National People's Congress have always been more like a national rally than the parliamentary institution outlined in its own constitution. The leaders meet a large selected group deemed to represent the nation, outline their picture of national and international affairs, describe their plans and hopes for the future and call on the citizens to rally to the flag. From the floor of the house deferential speeches assure the leaders that all sections of the nation agree with them and will obey their call with alacrity. For the student outside China the first consideration is of course not what is said but how much is published. Six or eight years ago he had to wade through reams of material to catch the general flavour and find the occasional grain of fact in drifts of formal and repetitive chaff. In 1962, and now again in 1963, the problem was very different. The published documents are very brief and many passages are so generalised and indeed abstract that only an initiate can be sure of their meaning. The student's task is to expand these generalities and to suggest their context and their real meaning.

It is generally known that the exchange rates in Soviet-type economies are disequilibrium exchange rates in the sense that without controls they do not tend to lead to a balance on the international current accounts. Of the two economies involved, it is also known that these exchange rates are unrealistic, in the sense that they have no relation to the gold content of currencies involved, if the currencies have a gold content, and that these rates do not reflect the relative domestic purchasing power of the two currencies on internationally traded commodities. In the case of the exchange rate between the Soviet rouble and the Communist Chinese yuan, even this disequilibrium and unrealistic exchange rate has in the main been veiled in secrecy since 1950. This secrecy has caused considerable difficulties in working with the Communist foreign trade statistics.

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.