In a perhaps apocryphal exchange in 1972, when, Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai what he thought the outcome of the French revolution had been, Zhou responded that it was too early to say. This remark has taken on a life of its own precisely because it rings so true. The big, messy, contested phenomena that are revolutions inspire passionate reactions – both for and against – and each generation has a strong tendency to filter its perception of a given revolution through the political, social and epistemological concerns of its own time. This offers both paradox and opportunity. At present, the great politicalsocial revolutions are largely out of favour. Their animating grand ideologies, teleological imperatives, frank human rights abuses and consequent historical narratives have become historically and epistemologically at least suspect if not downright discredited in a post-Cold War world of globalization and market triumphalism. However, now is an enormously vibrant time for the study of the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in its phase of active revolution between 1949 and 1976. In addition to the collection here, there are two other edited volumes on PRC history that have either recently been published or are due to be published in the near future.

The People's Republic of China, like the Chinese Communist Party that ruled it, was from its conception internationalist in premise and in promise. The PRC in its formative years would be Moscow's most faithful and self-sacrificing ally, a distinction earned in blood in Korea and by the fact that, unlike the East European “people's democracies,” the PRC's allegiance was not bought at gunpoint. This article researches one of the most ambitious international undertakings of that era: the effort to plan the development of half the world and to create a socialist world economy stretching from Berlin to Canton. What was China's role in this undertaking, and how did it shape the early PRC? How did this socialist world economy work (or not work)? How successfully internationalist was a project negotiated by sovereign (and Stalinist) states? Why did Mao Zedong ultimately destroy it, and with it, the dream of communist internationalism?

The early to mid-1950s are conventionally viewed as a time when China broke sharply with the past and experienced a “golden age” of successful policy implementation and widespread support from the population. This article shows that the period should be seen as neither “golden age” nor precursor for disaster. Rather it should be seen as a period when the Chinese Communist Party's key mechanisms of state reintegration and instruction of the population – the political campaign and “stirring up” via public accusation sessions – were widely disseminated throughout China, with variable results. The campaigns for land reform and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries show that levels of coercion and violence were extremely high in the early 1950s, and the campaign to clean out revolutionaries in 1955 and after suggests some of the limits of mobilizational campaigns.

In 1957 the All-China Women's Federation shifted its emphasis on gender equality and embraced a conservative theme “diligently, thriftily build the country, and diligently, thriftily manage the family” for its work report at the Third National Women's Assembly. Based on archival research and interviews, this article examines gender contestations in the CCP's central power structure and argues that formation of the conservative line was a result of strategic manoeuvres by the top women's federation leaders and Deng Xiaoping with the goal of sustaining a gender-based organization in a time of political turbulence. The article emphasizes the importance of informal relations in the formal decision-making process. Informal relations do not fall in the usual analytical categories neatly and defy historical analysis with little historical evidence for empirical studies. Yet they can be crucial in determining historical events, as is demonstrated in the article.

This article uses newly available Chinese sources to take a different look at aspects of the Chinese political system and the Chinese state during 1958 to 1965. While not challenging the literature on elite power issues, it demonstrates that much more was going on within the Chinese state than has been widely appreciated. In particular, the article focuses on the formal legal process, where it appears that the use of courts was extensive throughout the per-Cultural Revolution period and where the verdict of not guilty, not punished occurred more frequently in China than it did in American federal criminal cases; on the growing breakdown of the Party elite; and on China's preparation for war, basically an ongoing process of the Chinese state from 1962 on, with extensive militarization even earlier.

At the end of Mao's life farmers still accounted for some 80 per cent of China's population. Its declining share in GDP notwithstanding, agriculture continued to carry a heavy developmental burden throughout the Mao era. The production and distribution of grain – the wage good par excellence – held the key to fulfilling this role. But despite a pragmatic response to the exigencies of famine conditions in 1959–61, state investment priorities never adequately accommodated the economic, let alone the welfare needs of the farm sector. Thanks to the mechanism of grain re-sales to the countryside, the Chinese government's extractive policies were less brutal in their impact than those pursued by Stalin in the Soviet Union. Even so, a detailed national, regional and provincial analysis of grain output and procurement trends highlights the process of rural impoverishment which characterized China's social and economic development under Maoist planning.

This article examines incidents in which the miracle-working properties of a source of water or other substance are discovered, thereby sparking unauthorized visits by hundreds or thousands of people to gain access to it. The article examines: the meanings of holy water and the motivations of those who set off in search for it; the sociological dimension of these quests; the extent to which such episodes were a deliberate attempt by enemies of the regime, principally redemptive religious sects (huidaomen), to sow disorder; the reaction of the authorities to outbreaks of holy water fever and the measures they took to deal with it; and what such outbreaks reveal about the nature of the local state and about popular attitudes to it in the first decade-and-a-half of the People's Republic of China.

For two years after the summer of 1966, Beijing University was racked by factional conflict and escalating violence. Despite the intensity of the struggle the factions did not express didfferences in political doctrine or orientation towards the status quo. Nie Yuanzi, the veteran Party cadre who advanced rapidly in the municipal hierarchy after denouncing both the old Beida Party Committee and the work team, fiercely defended her growing power against opponents led by several former allies. Compromise proved impossible as mutual accusations intensified, and interventions by national politicians served only to entrench the divisions. The conflicts were bitter and personal not because they expressed differences between status groups, but because the rivals knew one another so well, had so much in common, and because the consequences of losing in this struggle were so dire.

This article explores cultural producation during the Mao era (1949–76) by focusing on the evolving relationship between artists and the party-state. The emphasis is on state direction of art in the all-important film industry. From 1949, well-known bourgeois Republican-era artists willingly began the complicated, painful and sometimes deadly process of adjusting to Communist Party state building, nation building and political domination. The career of influential film director Zheng Junli is examined as a case study of creative and strategic accommodation to new circumstances on the one hand, and of complicity on the other. Zheng is seen in his dual and contradictory roles as both trusted, ever loyal insider and unreliable, even degenerate, outsider. His Mao-era films, especially the spectacular Great Leap Forward production of Lin Zexu, are analysed in terms of their political thrust and reception in the difficult-to-predict world of the People's Republic.

Since the Yan'an Rectification Campaign the Communist Party of China has dominated the interpretation of modern Chinese history. With its 1981 resolution it renewed its claim, but a close look at official and unofficial publications on 20th-century Chinese history reveals its loss of control. There is no longer a CCP-designed master narrative of modern Chinese history. This article uses the case of the Cultural Revolution to show how much post-1949 history is contested in mainland China today. It argues that the CCP is unable to impose its interpretation of the “ten years of chaos” on society. Instead many divergent and highly fragmentized views circulate in society, and there is no overwhelmingly acceptable view on this period of post-1949 history. While this is a positive sign of diversification, it leaves unsatisfied both inside and outside observers who hope that the Chinese people might eventually come to terms with their own troublesome history.

When I was appointed editor of the CQ in 1959, my vision was that it should focus primarily on all aspects of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history, but that there should also be occasional articles on contemporary Taiwan and the overseas Chinese. That autumn, I did a quick tour of a few American campuses to try to drum up contributors; basically I needed social scientists. But even those universities with significant China programmes were peopled mainly by historians who were not doing research on the PRC. Benjamin Schwartz at Harvard, who had already published Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, did write articles from time to time on the current scene; at MIT, Lucian Pye was ensuring that political scientists should incorporate East Asia into analyses of comparative politics; at Berkeley, Franz Schurmann (a Yuan historian in an earlier incarnation) was engaged in what became Ideology and Organization in Communist China, S.H. Chen was interested in contemporary mainland literature, and Choh-ming Li (like Alexander Eckstein at Michigan) was studying the economy; at Columbia, C. Martin Wilbur was working on the documents captured when the Soviet embassy in Beijing was raided in the 1920s, but Doak Barnett would not get there till the end of 1960; the only real nest of social scientists examining Chinese behaviour on a daily basis that I found on that trip was located at RAND: Allen Whiting, A.M. Halpern and Alice Langley Hsieh, all working on Chinese foreign relations. The shock of the launch of the first sputnik in 1957 had already led the US government to allocate massive funds to academia for the training of specialists on Russia and China, but the first beneficiaries of the largesse did not start coming out of the pipeline until the late 1960s. With so few potential contributors available, I stopped reviewing China books in case I offended any of them! But the scarcity of talent was also an advantage, for Western and Asian China watchers – diplomats in Beijing, journalists in Hong Kong, businessmen travelling in and out – all subscribed, making the CQ the house magazine of a growing community.