This article offers a preliminary estimate of what has happened to Buddhists and Buddhist organisations in mainland China during the eleven years since the Chinese People's Republic was founded. Much of the data belongs to the year 1958 when the most rapid changes occurred. Early in 1959, the China mainland press, from which nearly all the data comes, began to give less news on Buddhism. In November 1959 the most important single source, Modern Buddhism, was withdrawn from general circulation abroad. Several sentences in the October number, suggest that Peking had become increasingly sensitive to stories of a persecution of Buddhism, and had resolved that the mainland press, at least, would not supply any more evidence of it. The picture is fairly complete, however, with the evidence already in hand.

Throughout China's history widespread famine has been a frequent occurrence. While natural calamities have been primarily responsible for its appearance, there is no doubt that consistent lack of communications has always been a serious obstacle to the relief of famine areas. During, for example, the great drought famine of 1877–78, which affected Shensi, Shansi, Honan and Hopei, efforts to get food into the Shansi plateau foundered because of the difficulty in sending supplies up the only direct track from the eastern ports, where food was arriving in abundance. As a consequence of these conditions up to thirteen million people may have lost their uves. Since then there have been a number of other severe droughts and floods, but with the introduction of railways and gradual improvement of the existing system of communications, distribution of relief has undoubtedly become more effective and loss of life less widespread. This brief survey will accordingly examine China's present transportation system and its ability to alleviate the hardship caused by last year's natural calamities.

Communist China is entering yet another year of calamities of major proportions. They stem chiefly from its unbalanced fanning industry and affect every sector of its economy.

Chinese and Western analysts have come full circle in their assessment within the last three years. In China the exuberance of the Great Leap Forward has given way to the gloom of austerity programmes and emergency regulations. Abroad, the voices praising the miracles of 1958 have been displaced by those reporting disaster and starvation. Those advising caution and moderation in the face of obvious Chinese exaggerations tend to be dismissed now as they were then.

Victimised by its strategic location throughout history, North Korea appears once again to be the scene of competition for dominant influence between its powerful neighbours. As the recent statement by Chairman Kim Il-sung quoted above suggests, the Communist régime in North Korea was apprehensive about the mounting crisis in Sino-Soviet relations in the summer and autumn of 1960. What it did not reveal is that the issues involved in the Sino-Soviet dispute had already exercised a profound effect on the domestic and foreign policies of this Asian satellite for a period of several years.

The overall picture of Tibet today is one of complete Chinese control—not in the pre-revolt sense of control through the Dalai Lama, Tibetan officials and institutions, but direct control by Chinese personnel over Chinese institutions reorganized on the Chinese pattern through Chinese heads of departments and Chinese cadres as in China itself.* There is no Tibetan in any position of influence and trust, and all pretence that there is has been dropped, except for photographs with visiting dignitaries. Only one gesture in this connection has been made by the Chinese authorities in the past year and that was to invite the Panchen Lama, Cabinet Minister Ngabu Ngawang Jigme, chief collaborator since the signing of the 1951 Seventeen Point Agreement, and Pangdatshang Topgyay, Chairman of the East Tibetan Autonomous Government and Khamba leader, to Peking. Since they returned to Lhasa, they have not attended any major function. One luncheon party to be given to the “officials of the Panchen Erdeni Conference Committee” in the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama's former summer palace, was suddenly cancelled for the rather specious reason “due to a bad weather forecast from the meteorological department.” Since then persistent rumours have arrived in India that the Panchen Lama has “disappeared” or is dead.

China is a vast country, varying widely in its land, its climate, its agriculture and its people. Extending across some 35 degrees of latitude, and with extreme ranges in elevation and in precipitation, it has many types of agricultural production. At one extreme are the intensively cultivated rice fields of the south. On some of these, two crops of rice are grown per year; some are drained after the rice harvest for the production of a crop of winter vegetables. At the other extreme are the grassland areas of the northern Manchurian provinces, Inner Mongolia, Kansu, Chinghai, west Szechwan, Tibet and Sinkiang, with their herds of sheep, goats, cattle, yaks and camels. In between is the so-called wheat area, north of the Chingling Mountains and extending to the edge of the grasslands.

When China's Communists came to power in 1949, they began to outline ambitious plans to thrust China into the company of modern, industrial and scientifically advanced countries. They were not prepared with blueprints for the task which fell to them, for national responsibilities came sooner than they had anticipated. Their appraisal of what steps were required, what priorities to assign, the best allocation of resources at hand and to be developed, and the national goals which might be realistically achieved, took time to determine. After an initial period of consolidation and consideration, they set their course of development in the First and Second Five-Year Plans. These were intended to bring about the modernisation of the world's most populous nation at the fastest possible pace in ways which would not jeopardise the state's political control and ideological commitments.

In his Burma in the Family of Nations (Amsterdam, 1956), Dr. Maung Maung, Burma's modern jurist-scholar, tried to dissipate the impression —created according to him by Chinese nationalist pride rather than legal rights—that Burma had at any time in her history borne tribute to the Imperial Court of China. It must have made him shudder that hundreds of his compatriots should shout “Chou En-lai wan sui” when the latter visited their country in mid–April 1960. For Burma relations with mainland China in recent years have been in many ways difficult. When China under the Nationalists had to trade space for time vis-à-vis powerful Japanese invaders in the late 1930s, the building of the Burma Road almost inevitably led to a common defence of the two neighbours in later stages of the Second World War. Between 1942 and 1945 Chinese troops were in and out of Burmese territory, and Burmese freedom fighters and independence leaders likewise used China as their shelter and planning headquarters. The Chinese Nationalist Government expressed its readiness to exchange Ambassadors with Burma in September 1947, when the latter had hardly completed the formalities of its independence pact with Britain. But no sooner had the Burmese envoy been appointed to Nanking than the latter had to face the menace of the Chinese Communists, whose leader, Mao Tse-tung, had himself supported Burmese independence as early as 1945.

When in 1953 the Central Obrera Boliviana was examining the proposals for agrarian reform submitted by a commission appointed by the President of Bolivia, the Communist José Pereira criticised the proposals and read out a draft law on agrarian reform which, in the opinion of the Communists, adequately met Bolivian conditions. Nuflo Chavez, Minister for Peasant Affairs, stated that this Communist draft was an almost literal translation of the Chinese agrarian reform law of 1950.

Strictly speaking, recognition is a formal legal act. It involves interchangeable commitments to undertake certain mutual obligations according to international law and custom. In a broader sense, it is a formal declaration of intention to carry on relations with other states in the society of nations.

Representatives of the Communist and Workers' Parties have discussed at this Meeting urgent problems of the present international situation and of the further struggle for peace, national independence, democracy and socialism.

The policy declaration and the appeal to the peoples of the world adopted last December by the Moscow conference of eighty-one Communist parties mark the end of one phase in the dispute between the leaderships of the ruling parties of China and the Soviet Union—the phase in which the followers of Mao for the first time openly challenged the standing of the Soviet Communists as the fountain-head of ideological orthodoxy for the world movement. But the “ideological dispute” which began in April was neither a sudden nor a self-contained development: it grew out of acute differences between the two Communist Great Powers over concrete diplomatic issues, and it took its course in constant interaction with the changes in Soviet diplomatic tactics. Hence the total impact of that phase on Soviet foreign policy on one side, and on the ideology, organisation and strategy of international Communism on the other, cannot be evaluated from an interpretation of the Moscow documents alone, but only from a study of the process as a whole, as it developed during the past year on both planes.