As in many other Communist states (and quite a few non-Communist ones) there is in the DRV (Democratic Republic of [North] Vietnam) a sharp difference between the theoretical and the actual structure of governmental powers.

Article 4 of the DRV Constitution of January 1, 1960, adequately covers the subject of the theoretical source of power in North Vietnam: “All powers of the DRV belong to the people, who exercise them through the intermediary of the National Assembly and of People's Councils at every echelon, elected by it and responsible to it….”

Of all intellectuals, the most highly respected and appreciated by Vietnamese society are the doctors. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that they should enjoy the esteem of a society the great majority of whose members are uneducated, impoverished, and beset by chronic disease and sickness. However, the reasons are twofold; medical degrees are academically superior to all others, and medicine, of all the professions, is the most useful on the purely practical plane. The doctors themselves are accorded the honorific title of “Thay,” and the medical profession is popularly referred to by the descriptive phrase “savers of people and helpers of life.” This is why, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Indo-Chinese Communist Party and the fifteenth anniversary of the Government of the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam, the “Doctor of Doctors,” Ho Dac Di, who is Chairman of the North Vietnamese Medical Association as well as Director of the University and Specialist Colleges, was invited to make a speech. Here is what Dr. Ho Dac Di said on that occasion:

The future of the intellectuals is a glorious one, because their activities bind them closely to the proletarian masses who are the masters of the world, the masters of their own country, the masters of their history, and masters of themselves…. On this, the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the Party, all those classes who work with their brains, and the scientists in particular, sincerely own their debt of gratitude to the Party and proclaim their complete confidence in the enlightened leadership of the Party, as well as in the glorious future of the fatherland. They give their firm promise that they, together with the other classes of the people, will protect the great achievements of the revolution.

How good are Communist China's statistics? An attempt to answer this basic but vexing question has led me to investigate the working of its state statistical service. Since there was hardly any statistical system to speak of before 1949, did Peking manage to set one up that was actually workable? When did this happen and how did it develop? Where were official statistics produced and finalised? Were they used for planning purposes at different government levels? How were basic data obtained from the primary reporting units in different sectors of the economy? What mechanism was introduced to provide a degree of control over the quality of data? What were the size and quality of the statistical working force? What did occur in 1958 and 1959 when current official statistics had to be scaled down drastically from earlier officially authenticated claims? Are the revised figures satisfactory? Why have so few statistical materials been released since 1959? The search into these and many more questions has resulted in a volume on The Statistical System of Communist China, recently (1962) published by the University of California Press.

The first Chinese Five-Year Plan ended in 1957, and the second began the following year. The launching of the “great leap forward” in industrial and agricultural production and the transformation of the rural collectives into “People's Communes” in 1958 accelerated the pace of work of both workers and peasants.

Sinkiang, that vast, rugged land in Inner Asia, rich in undeveloped resources and peopled by farmers and nomads of many races and creeds with deeply-rooted differences in ways of life and long years of conflict over political aspirations, is today in the throes of a revolution of unprecedented magnitude and intensity aimed at the achievement of sweeping cultural, social and economic changes. This prodigious effort at transformation is the keynote of Chinese Communist rule of Sinkiang. Its groundwork was laid in the first years after the Chinese Communists took control in 1949.

When the Chinese Communist régime undertook the re-examination of its educational system in the latter half of 1957 and early 1958, one of the main conclusions reached by the authorities was that the government, through its regular political subdivisions, could not afford the tremendous expenditures that would be involved in achieving its long-range educational goals. These goals included the provision of the opportunity for junior middle school (7th through 9th grade) education to all young people by 1967. The régime decided that the only realistic course to follow in pursuing its goals was to assign the major part of the task of establishing and running schools in the vast rural areas to the basic socio-economic units in those areas, mainly, in other words, to the agricultural cooperatives. Accordingly, the late winter and early spring of 1958 were marked by the announcement of the rapid establishment of great numbers of min-pan hsüek-hsiao, or “schools run by the people.”

Albania's defiance of the Kremlin, which goes back to 1956, but became “especially distinct” in the middle of 1960 according to Khrushchev himself, could scarcely have endured so long if China had not given the Balkan country considerable political and economic support. Khrushchev's open attack on the Albanian Party leadership at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961 was, of course, an attack on the Chinese Communist leadership as well. Khrushchev made his principal target plain enough when he said in his opening speech that the course laid down by the Russians at the 20th Congress in 1956 would not be changed because they could not yield on a question of principle “either to the Albanian leaders or to anyone else.” No one in the Communist world could have any doubts about who the “anyone else” was after Chinese Premier Chou En-lai had failed to applaud Khrushchev's attack on the Albanians, implicitly condemned it two days later, and abruptly returned home before the Congress had concluded. Moreover, less than twenty-four hours after the Soviet leader's attack on Albania, the Chinese Communists made public a speech delivered several days earlier by a Chinese delegate to the fifth congress of the Women's Union of Albania in Tirana; she pointedly noted that “the friendship between the Chinese and Albanian peoples, based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, is unbreakable and no force can destroy it.”

Many of the books dealing with the history of the Chinese Communist movement have mentioned the Hai-lu-feng Soviet as the earliest Soviet in China but as yet, with the exception of several Communist articles from the Chinese mainland, there is no study that deals with the details of the history of this Soviet or its relation to the development of the Communist movement in China.

M. N. Roy was undoubtedly the most colourful of all non-Russian Communists in the era of Lenin and Stalin. A Hindu Brahmin by birth, an ardent Indian nationalist and revolutionary in his youth, and a convert to Marxism only after the Bolshevik revolution hi Russia, he rose rapidly within the Comintern hierarchy to become the most prominent Asian exponent and theoretician of Communism for Asia. During the twenties his concepts of revolution for the colonies and so-called semi-colonies of the world were incorporated into many of the most important decisions of the Communist International, and it is no exaggeration to state that he ranks with Lenin and Mao Tse-tung in the development of fundamental Communist theory for the underdeveloped, as contrasted with the industrialised, areas of the globe.

After three years of agricultural calamities, both natural and man-made, China has begun the importation on a substantial scale of foodstuffs— a dramatic departure from previous policy. The chief beneficiaries abroad are the grain producers of Canada and Australia.

Actual quantities involved may be regarded as small from the standpoint of total Chinese food consumption, but remarkably significant when considered in terms of the actual addition to domestic supplies of wheat and barley, the probable consumption of grain in the seaboard cities, the amount of foreign exchange required, the concomitant decline in other imports (including machinery and raw materials), and the enormous demands usually made upon transportation facilities by agricultural shipments from the interior to the coast. These food purchases are also significant from the standpoint of both Canada and Australia.