In January 1977, People's Daily announced that the scholarly journal Historical Research (Li-shih yen-chiu) had since 1973 been one of the “ periodicals of the ‘ gang of four.’ ” Collective contributors such as the Liang Hsiao and Lo Ssu-ting groups were accused of presenting a dogmatic line only corrected after October 1976, when the “ gang of four ” was smashed and the editorial authority of the journal was handed back to the Academy' s Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences.

Information obtained during a research tour of communes in rural China in the summer of 1979 clarified, among other things, the structure of grain marketing by production teams and other basic units of production. Explanations advanced by officials at various levels above and within the communes Showed that the grain sold by units to the state included a tranche, named “ discussion grain ” (yigou), Which was unfamiliar to us although it was said to have been introduced generally in 1972–73, and in Guangdong Province as early as 1963. We obtained the following understanding of the system currently in operation throughout China.

Sheng and I are in essential agreement that between mid-1935 and late 1936 repeated interventions by the Comintern induced changes in CCP policy which brought it successively closer to a united front with Chiang Kai-shek. We disagree about whether there were significant discrepancies between CCP and Comintern line on this issue at specific points. I argue there were. Sheng argues there were not. The Comintern did not itself adopt a true policy of a united front with Chiang until late 1936, Sheng implies. The Comintern's policy of a united front with Chiang evolved slowly, and as it inched towards this goal it communicated the ideas to Mao who adopted them fully and promptly. “Mao was amenable to Stalin's advice,” Sheng says; he was “sensitive and responsive” to Comintern directives. Any discrepancies between Comintern and CCP lines were differences emphasis, not of substance, according to Sheng. I, on the other hand, argue that Mao's policy was consistently more anti-Chiang than the Comintern's.

The Department of Economics at Nanjing University (NanDa) was established over 60 years ago. In 1952, however, when China's universities and colleges were restructured along the Soviet pattern, the department was merged with Fudan University's Economics Department. The combined department was housed in Shanghai. In 1978, after some 26 years, a department was reinstated at NanDa, but none of the university's former faculty returned. At present NanDa has the only Economics Department in Jiangsu Province. Furthermore, there are no institutes of economics and finance in the province as there are in many other provinces and municipalities.

The task of readjusting the national economy has been basically accomplished; there has been an all-round upsurge in agricultural and industrial production; and the entire economy has taken a turn for the better and is entering a new period of development.

Chou En-lai, “Report on the Work of the Government,” December, 21–22, 1964.

It would be only a mild exaggeration to say that China has been dominating the international conference on Laos. Certainly the weight of the Chinese presence has made itself felt in ways that were not true of the Far Eastern conference held in the same city—Geneva—in 1954. In various respects, indeed, the Chinese seem to have been determined from the start to make an impact on other participants commensurate with their own estimation of China's international stature. To this end, they sent the largest of all the sixteen delegations to Geneva and—though willing on occasion to display a proper co-existential courtesy towards carefully selected other delegations—they have consistently stuck to a line that is, in most respects, markedly more intransigent than the Soviet Union's.

At the beginning of the “Great Leap Forward” campaign of 1958, Mao Tse-tung declared the now much publicised “eight-character constitution of agriculture” for the technical transformation of agriculture. This “constitution” was essentially a condensed and more appealing version of the National Agricultural Development Programme for 1956–67, promulgated in 1956, which contains twelve important measures to improve agricultural production. The eight Chinese characters referred to are: shui, water conservation; fei, fertilisation; t'u, soil conservation; chung, seed selection; mi, dense planting; pao, plant protection; kung, tool improvement; and kuan, field management.

The events of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” have resulted in Lin Piao becoming the heir apparent of Mao Tse-tung while the armed forces have become the principal power factor in Communist China. However, much of the basis for the greatly expanded roles and power of Lin and the military establishment was actually laid in the period 1959–66. In considerable part, Lin Piao and his lieutenants gained power by establishing themselves as “the most loyal” supporters and potential heirs of the venerable, charismatic Mao Tsetung. In addition, for several years they have been carefully infiltrating into numerous key institutions of the state and Party and have played an important role in seeking to purge the opposition. Many of Marshal Lin's supporters and some of his opponents are professional party-soldiers, who have long been the Party's senior specialists in military affairs. Legally these men no longer have the title of marshal or general, for ranks were officially abolished in June 1965. However, since these powerful figures continue to dominate the massive armed forces, while extending their influence much further into the battered party and government structure, it will help to clarify a complex struggle if those who are primarily party-soldiers are still designated by their previous military ranks. For example, after the party reorganisation of August 1966 there were eight former marshals on the list of members of the new Politburo of the Party.

Previous sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC), with their voluminous official reports on the ups and downs of Government work —particularly economic work—have provided some of the best data for tracking the course of political change in China during the last decade, and for trying to co-ordinate apparent changes of policy with the rise or fall of individual politicians. Although this year's NPC produced little more than a guarded summary of Chou En-lai's Report on Government Work, a Resolution on it and a People's Daily editorial, when these are read with the rest of current propaganda and compared with previous form, an attempt can be made to draw some tentative conclusions about the present political climate in Peking.

In January 1935 the harassed, decimated main forces of the Chinese Communist movement paused in the course of their epic Long March from Kiangsi to rest and regroup at Tsunyi in the hills of northern Kweichow. During their brief occupation of this remote, provincial town the top political and military leaders present held a conference which has come to be regarded as the major turning point in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the time, however, no such significance was attached to the stop-over in Tsunyi and, indeed, the very fact that an important political meeting was convened there was not revealed for some years after.

For the years before 1958, because Communist China published data on the physical output of a large number of industrial commodities, it was possible to construct an index of industrial production that could be used with confidence. As early as 1959, however, there was a noticeable drying up of official reports as a source of data and objective commentary and, since the collapse of the Leap Forward in 1960, the regime has imposed an almost complete blackout on the disclosure of specific economic facts and figures. As a result, the number of commodities for which physical output can be estimated has been reduced sharply, and the estimates are subject to a wide range of error.