¹ The transfer, although announced at Lushan, had perhaps been discussed at the Wuhan plenum in December 1958 and may have been decided in principle at the enlarged meeting of the Politburo held without publicity at Chengchow in the following February. In any case, the turning point had come at Wuhan with the abandonment of the more ambitious claims made for the communes. Lushan neither halted the retreat from the communes nor reversed the trend towards the more rational planning: at the most it may have slowed down the implementation of policies which were already being put into effect.

² As pointed out below, Ch'en Yun's elimination from power may in fact have preceded the Lushan plenum.

³ The number of these reports and their general concordance on the main points at issue show how difficult it is for the Chinese Communists, at a time when they are actively encouraging contacts with the West, to keep the outside world permanently in ignorance of major political developments in the country. Some of the reports reflect the briefing which all Party members received at the time of the events. Others derive from a revival of Party interest in the 1959 affair which coincided with the exacerbation of Sino-Soviet relations in the summer of 1960. On this occasion selected cadres were told about P'eng Teh-huai's contacts with the Soviet leadership—an aspect of the case which had been concealed in the earlier general briefing. While it would be hazardous to suggest on the evidence available that the Chinese have actually wished the information to reach the West, they must have been aware that secrecy was unlikely to be maintained indefinitely in view of the wide circulation given to the information in a parly of some 17 millions.

⁴ Hsieh, Alice, in her article “Communist China and Nuclear Warfare” (The China Quarterly, No. 2, 1960)Google Scholar, having identified P'eng on the strength of a speech in 1955 as a supporter and not an opponent of Mao's “partisan” theories of war, suggested that his dismissal was intended to solve a dispute between the “Maoist” Ministry of Defence and the more professionally minded General Staff, with Lin Piao as the reconciler of the two views. Reference to Lin Piao's Tenth Anniversary speech does not however bear out Mrs. Hsieh's contention that Lin placed equal emphasis on the importance of political control and modernisation. Indeed he stressed that politics is the “predominant” side and proclaimed the Party's belief that “although equipment, and technique are important the human factor is even more important.” While P'eng may have been a comparatively late convert to the “professional” viewpoint it would have been paradoxical if he had not only been got rid of but disgraced for upholding the orthodox Maoist strategical theories which would soon be reiterated in the Lenin Anniversary, and many other articles.

⁵ He does not seem to figure in the photograph published by the People's Daily on 08 27Google Scholar. Identification is however difficult and his absence from the photograph might in any case have been due to his having come out in support of P'eng.

⁶ These incidents, which were referred to in the Chinese press at the time, included a demonstration in early June by some 2,000 peasants from Kungan and Shih Shou in Hupeh and An Hsiang and Hua Jung in Hunan who joined hands and staged a demonstration at a village called Huang Shan Tou on the border between the two provinces. This was firmly suppressed with some loss of life. Subsequently there was serious student unrest in the Wuhan area, which was widely publicised. Mass trials for counter-revolutionary activity were also reported in the press.

⁷ Reports that P'eng Teh-huai at one stage worked on the Shum Chun reservoir in Kwangtung may therefore be discounted.

⁸ The so-called Battle of the Hundred (or Hundred and Fifteen) Regiments was fought from August 20 to December 5, 1940.

⁹ According to Western reckoning, the fifth battle of the Korean War was the unsuccessful Chinese attack of April 1951, in which the Gloucesters were involved. The reference may however be to the final Chinese offensive against the South Korean troops, which was launched just before the armistice, apparently in order to secure last-minute gains of territory and overcome South Korean objections to an armistice. If this is the reference, it is strange that the Central Committee should disclaim responsibility for so political an operation.

¹⁰ Li Ta is presumably now in reasonably good odour since he served as Field-Marshal Montgomery's conducting officer in China.

¹¹ They include: Lo Shih-yü, Deputy Director of the State Council's Central Administrative Bureau of Industry and Commerce; the directorate of the Fourth General Office of the State Council on its incorporation into the newly constituted General Office for Industry and Communications, viz., the Director, Chia T'o-fu (who in 1949 had served under P'eng in the North West and subsequently under Kao Kang), and the two Deputy-Directors, Chou Kuang-ch'un and Sung Shao-wen (who however retained his appointment as Vice-Chairman of the National Construction Committee till its abolition in January 1961); a Vice-Minister of Food, Kao Chin-ch'un, who at the end of the war had been P'eng's principal civilian collaborator in Sinkiang; a Vice-Minister of Education, Ch'en Tseng-ku; a Deputy-Director of the People's Bank of China, Ts'ui Kuang: at least one Vice-Chairman of the State Planning Commission, Ni Wei; the Director of the Counsellors Office of the State Council and Deputy Secretary-General of the State Council, T'ao Hsi-chin; and two Vice-Ministers of Health, Fu Lien-chang and Wu Yun-fu.

¹² This article may be compared with the bitter and uncompromising attack on American Imperialism which appeared in Red Flag under the same pseudonym on September 16, the day Khrushchev arrived in the United States.