According to the conventional periodization of post-1949 China, the Great Leap Forward of 1958 marks the end of direct Soviet influence and the beginning of a new Chinese road to socialism. The single, unified nationwide objective was to produce laborers with socialist consciousness and culture. But many different forms of schooling would be used in pursuit of that single aim, including schools run by the state and those run by collectives; general education and vocational training; education for children and for adults; full-day schools, work-study schools, and spare-time schools; and schools that charged tuition as well as those that did not. Both in city and countryside, the min-pan idea was now applied to the secondary level. The Kiangsi Communist Labor University was a unique institution not only because it was so successful but also because of its provincewide scope and its continuing reliance on a part-work part-study curriculum. The peasants themselves looked down on the work-study agricultural middle schools.

This bibliographical essay presents a list of titles that help the reader to understand the concept of Chinese political problems. The essay talks about the reunification of China, establishment and consolidation of the new regime, China's economic development, and Chinese education. Cultural Revolution sources that appeared in 1966-69 are of two types: highly polemic "revelations" about the alleged crimes of various leaders in the pre-1966 period. The official Chinese newspapers, journals, and the occasional compendia of state laws comprise the major source materials. The easily accessible route to the Chinese originals lies through the clipping file service of the Union Research Institute, which ceased to exist in 1983. The essay also talks about the party and the intellectuals, foreign relations, and the Sino-Soviet split. The relative recentness of Sino-Soviet split precludes access to standard US Department of State sources, while the secretiveness of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China limits the value of Soviet and Chinese materials.

The distinction between modern and traditional-style schooling was an important one, for it coincided with and reinforced the urban-rural dichotomy. Traditional elementary schooling was diffused throughout the countryside and was not confined to towns and cities, although it was prevalent there. Another institution was the public elementary school inherited from the late imperial era, which was intended to serve children from poor families. In this manner, education in Republican China became more differentiated: The new Westernized learning was concentrated at the national and elite levels and in the cities, while the rural areas remained to a greater degree the preserve of traditional values and learning. The authority of the education bureaucracy was bypassed at the central as well as the local levels of the Border Region Education Department to an advisory capacity. The conference announced the new principles that would guide the education work plan drawn up to coordinate educational development with the first year of the 1st Five-Year Plan.