This article is a report on the conference on historiography in Communist China convened by The China Quarterly at Ditchley Park near Oxford, September 6–12, 1964. Many of the papers will appear in forthcoming issues of this Journal and will be published in book form next year. Professor Feuerwerker served as chairman of the conference, Mr. Kahn as its rapporteur.

In the journal Hsien-tai Fo-hsueh (Modern Buddhism), September 1959, there appeared a long article entitled “Lun Tsung-chiao Hsin-yang Tzu-yu” (“A Discussion Concerning Freedom of Religious Belief”), by Ya Han-chang, which was originally published in the official Communist ideological journal Hung Ch'i (Red Flag), 1959, No. 14. Appearing as it did in Red Flag it is justifiable to conclude that the views expressed in it represented the accepted Communist attitude toward religion. In this article, Ya wrote that the basic policy of the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China is to “recognise that everyone has the freedom to believe in a religion, and also that everyone has the freedom not to believe in a religion.”

It will be evident to a reader of historical works produced in the People's Republic of China that this article, in the choice of subject-matter and in its treatment, is decidedly influenced by the current domestic and foreign political “line” of the Communist Party and Government. This is a relative matter, not absolute, but I would suggest that the dominant “class viewpoint” of the first decade of the Peking régime which produced an anonymous history of dynasties without “feudal” emperors or bureaucrats, literature minus the landlord-scholar-official literatus and nameless peasant rebellions as the central matter of China's history, was to a degree correlated with the process of the internal consolidation of power which may more or less be said to have been accomplished with the completion of the collectivisation of agriculture. The more recent “historicist” trend, which while not rejecting entirely its predecessor concentrates on what may be “positively inherited” from the “feudal” past, represents a quickening of Chinese nationalism fanned to a red-hot intensity, one cannot resist the temptation to conjecture, by the increasingly severe quarrel with the Soviet Union. Soviet Russian commentary on recent Chinese historiography, for example, accuses the Chinese of the “introduction of dogmatic, anti-Marxist and openly nationalistic and racist views.” The Chinese, for their now relatively favourable view of the thirteenth-century Mongol conquests (which are seen as calamitous by the Russians and other Europeans), for their claim that Chinese “feudalism” is the classical model of this historical phenomenon, and because they exaggerate the role of Confucian ideas and their influence on Western philosophy, are roundly condemned by the Russians for “bourgeois nationalism.”

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.

An exposure to Chinese Communist discussions of the nature of “struggle” leaves a curious visual image. The portrait is not of two poles with a middle ground between, but of a situation in which the middle ground has moved to one of the two sides, leaving combat of one against two. For the middle ground or compromise between opposites has become an equal if not greater menace to progress (which emerges from struggle) than the obvious enemy itself. The “either-or” polarity is nothing new in Marxism, but it has taken on new significance in Chinese philosophical discourse.

The “Socialist education campaign” now in full swing in China was recently commended by Premier Chou En-lai in his report to the National People's Congress as being “of great revolutionary and historic significance.” Such campaigns are no novelty in Communist China. The student of Chinese affairs might indeed be tempted to see in the renewed effort of 1964–65 the lastest manifestation of a recurring phenomenon, for the new campaign bears many features common to post movements and at present at any rate does not promise to be so dramatic in its revelations or as severe in its measures as the Hundred Flowers of 1957. But earlier campaigns such as the Three and Five “Antis” were mainly to eradicate specific errors and failings which were often a part of the old China. Attacking corruption, tax evasion, bureaucracy, etc., these movements, harsh as they were, could be represented in principle as a necessary process in cleaning up and modernising the corrupt social structure of the past. It is true that they were accompanied by a wealth of Party jargon, and were a serious stage in the development of a Communist society, but they dealt largely with the problems of the pre-Communist era. The Hundred Flowers period, although directly concerned with the rectification of ideological mistakes, was still a movement of stern reaction to the bourgeois tendencies of the past. In contrast, the Chinese leaders seem now to have to deal with errors arising from the system which they themselves have created.

The Communists under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh enjoyed two relatively stable periods of growth and development in the south-eastern Kiangsi-western Fukien border region, from December 1929 to December 1930 and from the autumn of 1931 to April 1933. These periods of Communist expansion were possible because Chiang Kai-shek, the only leader both powerful enough to check their growing strength and aware of its potential danger to internal security, was struggling elsewhere in China against more immediate threats to the Nationalist Government. The weak provincial troops and local militia in this remote area of China were no match for the well-led, disciplined Red Army.

As Western observers generally know, China achieved very impressive progress in most sectors of its economy during the first ten years (1949–59) of the Communist régime. The rapid rise in production was mainly a result of the intensive investment programme under their five-year plans aimed at raising the productive capacity for the country as a whole.

China was the second country in the Buddhist world to have a Communist government. The first was Mongolia. But Mongolia was isolated both geographically and by its form of Buddhism (shared only with Tibet). Chinese Buddhists, on the other hand, had been building closer ties with their brethren in South-East Asia for more than half a century. Their form of Buddhism was less remote from South-East Asian forms and they felt the same need as South-East Asian to fit Buddhism into a national revival.

One of the striking contrasts between a Communist revolution and one of the “nationalist” variety lies in the differing attitudes held by the revolutionary elites towards the traditional culture. Nationalist leaders tend to come to power with a vague commitment to restore the values of the traditional society in a modern context; yet a good deal of their energy in the early years of nation-building is expended trying to relate cherished cultural doctrines to the often incompatible demands of modernisation.

Sociological research on Communist China is severely limited by the fact that western-trained sociologists, at least those travelling on an American passport, are not permitted to enter, let alone practise on, the mainland of China. Consequently, the standard techniques of the journeyman sociologist, the case method, questionaires, interviews, non-participant observation, etc., cannot be used at present. In such a situation social scientists have had to fall back upon the translation and analysis of documents issued on the mainland and intended by their authors for internal, rather than external, consumption. Whenever possible, this technique is supplemented by the results of interviews conducted with emigrés from the mainland. The senior author has used this technique elsewhere to describe changes occurring in the structure and function of the Chinese family under Communism. It should be admitted that such an approach is open to the charge that the primary data is biased. That is, that the researcher runs the risk of confusing behavioural reality with the image that the régime wishes to convey in its internal publications. There are two answers to this. First, the internal publications include a good deal of “self-criticism” which is likely to contain other than propaganda elements, and secondly, direct empirical observations are neither feasible nor possible under present conditions. The use of emigré data is probably more suspect, since those who flee the régime are likely to be biased in their interpretations of régime policies and actions.

Since illness has both socio-economic causes and effects, an analysis of public health problems and programmes can give some insight into the condition of a nation and into the social philosophy of its government.