Speaking to his comrades at the important Chengtu meeting in March 1958, nearly two months after he had already announced his intention to resign the chairmanship of the People's Republic, Chairman Mao described the dynamics of Chinese politics:

Comrades working in the provinces will sooner or later come to the Centre. Comrades at the Centre will sooner or later either die or leave the scene. Khrushchev came from a local area. At the local level the class struggle is more acute, closer to natural struggle, closer to the masses. This gives the local comrades an advantage over those at the Centre.

Western curiosity about the distribution of inequalities in contemporary China is not easily satisfied. The most obvious impediment to our understanding is that the government of the People's Republic does not publish even the most elementary social statistics, so that our efforts to gauge the shape of Chinese social stratification are by necessity impressionistic and often unsatisfying. The best recent assessment, offered in this journal by Martin King Whyte, draws upon an impressive (and an imaginatively motley) array of sources in support of well-reasoned, yet tantalizingly tentative conclusions.

Since the Cultural Revolution, 12 million urban youths, for the most part graduates of secondary schools, have been resettled in the countryside under the programme of “up to the mountains and down to the villages” (shang-shan hsia-hsiang). Urban youths have been sent to the countryside for three reasons. First, the transfer seeks to alleviate difficulties in finding employment for them in the urban sector, as well as to contribute to China's goal of limiting urban growth. The second reason is ideological: because urban opportunities are limited, the values and expectations of young urbanites have to be changed and it is hoped that the experience of the transfer will lead to attitudinal change. More broadly, the programme is seen as contributing to such ideological goals as the restriction of “bourgeois rights” and as the elimination of the “three great differences” (between town and country, worker and peasant, and manual and mental labour). The third goal of the transfer is that it should contribute to the development of the rural areas, including particularly those of frontier provinces such as Heilungkiang.

The social structure of Hong Kong is dominated by three elements – economic change, population growth (specifically in-migration) and colonialism. The three are closely interrelated. The extent of economic change and the effects of enormous population growth have been dramatic. The impact of colonial policy is less obvious but nonetheless crucial for it has provided the framework within which economic and demographic changes have made their effect. Colonial policy in Hong Kong can have a dual impact, for administratively Hong Kong has two distinct parts – the leased New Territories and the ceded parts of Hong Kong island and part of Kowloon.

The publication, on Mao Tse-tung's birthday, of an official text of his crucially important speech of 25 April 1956 “On the 10 great relationships” (reproduced below in the Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation, pp. 221–38) adds significantly to our knowledge both of Chairman Mao and of his successor. On the one hand, it constitutes a substantial document which will be closely scrutinized by all those interested in the thought of Mao Tse-tung. On the other, the way in which the text has been edited, and the fact of its publication, provide some hints about the thinking, and perhaps even about the policy intentions of Hua Kuo-feng.

Gregor Benton's article “The ‘Second Wang Ming Line’ (1935–38)” is the first major attempt to explore the internal ideological debates in the CCP during the Second United Front Period, the complexities of which have long been overlooked by other historians. In line with the prevailing tendency among historians to look upon Wang Ming as a young, inexperienced and dogmatic theoretician, Benton elaborates and confirms the official Chinese Communist interpretation of Wang's “rightist opportunism” or “capitulationism” in relation to the Kuomintang (KMT). He further asserts that Wang was simply a spokes-man for the Comintern, who framed his policies with “one eye on Moscow's foreign policy needs.” Proceeding on the assumption that Mao's internal statements do not provide conclusive evidence against Wang since the latter's secret reports are not available, he draws comparison between the public statements of Mao and Wang to support his view that fundamental and far-reaching conflicts existed between the two over various policy issues of the united front from 1935 onwards.