Albania's defiance of the Kremlin, which goes back to 1956, but became “especially distinct” in the middle of 1960 according to Khrushchev himself, could scarcely have endured so long if China had not given the Balkan country considerable political and economic support. Khrushchev's open attack on the Albanian Party leadership at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961 was, of course, an attack on the Chinese Communist leadership as well. Khrushchev made his principal target plain enough when he said in his opening speech that the course laid down by the Russians at the 20th Congress in 1956 would not be changed because they could not yield on a question of principle “either to the Albanian leaders or to anyone else.” No one in the Communist world could have any doubts about who the “anyone else” was after Chinese Premier Chou En-lai had failed to applaud Khrushchev's attack on the Albanians, implicitly condemned it two days later, and abruptly returned home before the Congress had concluded. Moreover, less than twenty-four hours after the Soviet leader's attack on Albania, the Chinese Communists made public a speech delivered several days earlier by a Chinese delegate to the fifth congress of the Women's Union of Albania in Tirana; she pointedly noted that “the friendship between the Chinese and Albanian peoples, based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, is unbreakable and no force can destroy it.”

After three years of agricultural calamities, both natural and man-made, China has begun the importation on a substantial scale of foodstuffs— a dramatic departure from previous policy. The chief beneficiaries abroad are the grain producers of Canada and Australia.

Actual quantities involved may be regarded as small from the standpoint of total Chinese food consumption, but remarkably significant when considered in terms of the actual addition to domestic supplies of wheat and barley, the probable consumption of grain in the seaboard cities, the amount of foreign exchange required, the concomitant decline in other imports (including machinery and raw materials), and the enormous demands usually made upon transportation facilities by agricultural shipments from the interior to the coast. These food purchases are also significant from the standpoint of both Canada and Australia.

For the past year (especially since last March), the Chinese Communist leadership has attempted to revive the “Hundred Flowers” campaign which, Party statements notwithstanding, ended in June of 1957. Yet this revival, and the “blooming and contending” which has issued from it, is basically different from the fierce, unabashed criticism heard briefly four years ago. In 1961, the Party is seeking what it had expected in 1957: academic contention and the gratitude of non-Party intellectuals for a small, measured relaxation—not political criticism. Party leaders have long been aware of the need to secure the co-operation of China's disenchanted intellectuals if industrialisation is to go forward at a rapid pace. However, current overtures are more studied and conservative than was the case in 1957 and, as such, reflect a more realistic Party assessment of its popular support. The differences between the 1957 “Hundred Flowers” and the revival are further shown by: 1. Party emphasis on ground-rules for the present campaign; 2. The strict separation of academic discussion from political discussion and ideological contention; 3. The response of the intellectuals.

The reasons for the visit to Russia, Eastern Europe, and China last summer of a DRV (Democratic Republic of [North] Vietnam) mission led by Prime Minister Pham Van Dong and Chairman of the National Planning Board Le Thanh Nghi gave rise to some speculation in the West. The inclusion of Le Thanh Nghi suggested that it was connected with economic aid to the DRV, more particularly with aid for the carrying out of the extremely ambitious five-year plan, which was first announced during the third Congress of the Lao Dong (Communist) Party in September, 1960.

Appended to this article are two excerpts from Lao She's writings. The first comprises most of a chapter from his first novel; the second is a brief sequence from one of his latest plays. Each is concerned to establish a character, a man who has found his niche in society. Each of these men is quite peripheral to the piece in which he appears, each is a humble creature anxious only to do right by his fellows. On Chao Number Four are lavished all the colourful touches which leap from the brush of a young writer glorying in invention; Wang Jen-te is sketched with the master's economy of line. But the greater contrast appears in the resolution of the two men's respective fates: Chao, pressed down by his own ingenuousness and the cupidity of others into the trough of the “old society” as a beast of burden; Wang Jen-te, proud recipient of a new dignity as chef de cuisine to a People's Commune!

There is little reason for thinking that the anti-rightist campaign of 1957–58, which closed the Hundred Flowers interlude, was undertaken in order to overcome an organised opposition in the central leadership of the Chinese Communist Party rather than to deal with a political situation that was clearly getting out of hand. The victims were either bourgeois intellectuals and members of the so-called “democratic parties” or communist officials of the second rank, for the most part provincial administrators. Their fate presumably strengthened the hand of the doctrinaires in the Party and weakened the will of the moderates to oppose the extravagances of the subsequent “great leap forward”; and there are doubtless many in China as well as the West who believe that Mao's personal involvement in the fiasco of liberalisation may have constituted the first stage in a process which would lead eighteen months later to his withdrawal from the chairmanship of the republic. The political repercussions were, however, long-term; the immediate effect of the change of line may have been to cement rather than undermine the solidarity of the leaders.

The purpose of this article is to describe the developments in rural trade following on the formation of the rural people's communes in 1958, but first it is necessary to say something about the events leading up to the situation in the summer of that year. This topic has been treated by the author at greater length elsewhere. A brief summary of certain points must, however, be made in order to sketch the background of the present subject.

Sinkiang, that vast, rugged land in Inner Asia, rich in undeveloped resources and peopled by farmers and nomads of many races and creeds with deeply-rooted differences in ways of life and long years of conflict over political aspirations, is today in the throes of a revolution of unprecedented magnitude and intensity aimed at the achievement of sweeping cultural, social and economic changes. This prodigious effort at transformation is the keynote of Chinese Communist rule of Sinkiang. Its groundwork was laid in the first years after the Chinese Communists took control in 1949.

When the Chinese Communist régime undertook the re-examination of its educational system in the latter half of 1957 and early 1958, one of the main conclusions reached by the authorities was that the government, through its regular political subdivisions, could not afford the tremendous expenditures that would be involved in achieving its long-range educational goals. These goals included the provision of the opportunity for junior middle school (7th through 9th grade) education to all young people by 1967. The régime decided that the only realistic course to follow in pursuing its goals was to assign the major part of the task of establishing and running schools in the vast rural areas to the basic socio-economic units in those areas, mainly, in other words, to the agricultural cooperatives. Accordingly, the late winter and early spring of 1958 were marked by the announcement of the rapid establishment of great numbers of min-pan hsüek-hsiao, or “schools run by the people.”

An energetic new intellectual élite is being moulded in Communist China's rapidly growing network of higher educational institutions. Some time from now members of this “new class” are expected to replace the distrusted old-style intellectual. Each year an increasing number of young men and women enter colleges and universities and, emerging four or five years later, take up responsible positions of leadership in the country's economic and intellectual life. Many phases in the training of the present-day Chinese student are still little known to us. Who are, after all, these new students in China's new universities? On what basis are they selected? Who does the selection and how? And, last but not least: why is selection necessary? In the following pages we shall attempt to find answers to some of these questions.

The first Chinese Five-Year Plan ended in 1957, and the second began the following year. The launching of the “great leap forward” in industrial and agricultural production and the transformation of the rural collectives into “People's Communes” in 1958 accelerated the pace of work of both workers and peasants.

Many of the books dealing with the history of the Chinese Communist movement have mentioned the Hai-lu-feng Soviet as the earliest Soviet in China but as yet, with the exception of several Communist articles from the Chinese mainland, there is no study that deals with the details of the history of this Soviet or its relation to the development of the Communist movement in China.

M. N. Roy was undoubtedly the most colourful of all non-Russian Communists in the era of Lenin and Stalin. A Hindu Brahmin by birth, an ardent Indian nationalist and revolutionary in his youth, and a convert to Marxism only after the Bolshevik revolution hi Russia, he rose rapidly within the Comintern hierarchy to become the most prominent Asian exponent and theoretician of Communism for Asia. During the twenties his concepts of revolution for the colonies and so-called semi-colonies of the world were incorporated into many of the most important decisions of the Communist International, and it is no exaggeration to state that he ranks with Lenin and Mao Tse-tung in the development of fundamental Communist theory for the underdeveloped, as contrasted with the industrialised, areas of the globe.