Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
In the beginning was Soviet Survey, published in London by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The Hundred Flowers episode sparked a special issue, the communes a special supplement. The editors of Soviet Survey persuaded Paris HQ that China had become interesting enough to merit its own journal. I had contributed to the Soviet Survey Hundred Flowers issue and in 1958 the CCF had commissioned me to prepare a documentary volume on the theme (The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals in the United States). In early 1959, Walter Laqueur, then Soviet Survey's principal editor, asked me to edit a new journal on China.
1 Gremion, Pierre, Intelligence de l'anticommunisme: le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris, 1950–1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1995), p. 402.Google Scholar
2 At a time when central publications like the People's Daily and Red Flag were about the only ones foreigners could subscribe to, the SWB's reports of provincial broadcasts and the Survey of Mainland China Press translations of provincial papers smuggled into the colony were invaluable.
3 For histories of the CCF, see Coleman, Peter, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1989)Google Scholar; Grémion, Intelligence de I'anticommunisme.