In Chinese Communist fashions, Confucius seems to be “in” this year. Earlier, certainly in the nineteen-twenties, revolutionaries were quite ready to see him out, and even now, in the first decade or so of the People's Republic, there are plenty of people with little patience for the sage of the old intelligence. Indeed, “despise the old” and “preserve the national heritage” have been chasing each other down the mneteen-fifties and incipient sixties, and contemporary historians, hi this area, should perhaps not dwell too seriously on trends pro and anti, so foreshortened, if discernible at all, in the foreground of our age. What seems historically significant is the range, not the petty successions, of recent Communist options in evaluating Confucius. For all the possibilities are equally modern, all plausible and consistent within a new Chinese view —an essentially anti-Confucian view informing even the pro-Confucius minds.

The question of who will succeed Mao Tse-tung is a fascinating and important question. The related question of the composite group of leaders which will emerge in about a decade is, if less fascinating, of at least equal importance, particularly given the increasing complexities of an industrialising society on the China mainland.

Are we actually nearing a period when the present hierarchy will begin to fade away? Seemingly we are, as a quick flashback to 1949 will illustrate. When the Chinese Communists came to power thirteen years ago, they were rightfully considered a young group of leaders. Their triumphant general in the field, Lin Piao, was just over forty, Chou En-lai just over fifty, and Mao himself in his mid-fifties. Among his international peers, Mao was fifteen years younger than Stalin, eleven younger than Attlee, and almost ten younger than Truman. To emphasise their youth hi another way, only two men among the forty-four elected as full Central Committee (CQ members hi 1945 died a natural death from that time until 1960.

The activities and functions of youth organisations are important factors in the life of most, if not all, political movements of the twentieth century. This is true of totalitarian, as well as of more liberally conceived political movements; however, special attention and emphasis has been given to youth organisations in Fascist and Communist societies, where the young people have been forced, pressured, or cajoled into such organisations from an early age and subjected to powerful influences designed to make them faithful and reliable tools or willing helpers of the ruling group or party. Nazi Germany's Hitler Jugend, Fascist Italy's Ballilla, and Soviet Russia's Komsomol are the best known examples of the totalitarian variety of youth organisation. In non-totalitarian societies the young are also given the opportunity to join such groups as the Young Conservatives in the U.K., Young Republicans and Democrats in the U.S., Junior Chambers of Commerce, YMCA, YWCA, Boy Scouts and the like. The difference between youth organisations in the two types of societies, from the Western viewpoint, is that our youth organisations are primarily created for the sake of the young people, who join them voluntarily for the sense of participation and outlet for their energies and talents which such organisations can provide, whereas the totalitarian youth organisations are created for purposes pursued by the ruling political group in those societies, to mould the thinking of youngsters along the desired lines, and to establish an apparatus for control both of the young members and of their relatives and friends. From the Communist viewpoint however, Western youth organisations are politically unsophisticated picnic and camping clubs, which insufficiently prepare young people for the responsibilities facing them in later years and fail to provide them with the ideals for a “correct” political outlook.

The sudden death of Dr. Hu Shih in Taiwan on February 24, 1962, inflicted on many of the people of that island a sense of irreparable loss. This was not because the present situation in Nationalist China is likely to be much affected by Dr. Hu's passing, for in spite of his great reputation as a scholar, his considerable personal popularity and the prestige of his position as President of the Academia Sinica, he remained a peripheral figure there. He was, however, the last surviving representative of the great generation of revolutionary intellectuals who, nearly half a century ago, undertook the enormous task of creating a cultural “renaissance” in China, and with his death a final link with that optimistic era was forever severed.

Hu Feng was a Marxist literary critic who for almost thirty years allied himself closely with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and left-wing groups. In 1955 the Chinese Communists launched an intensive nationwide campaign against him in which he was branded as everything from an exponent of bourgeois idealism to an agent of imperialism and of Chiang Kai-shek.

In a previous article I outlined briefly the development of the situation on the campus of Peking University (Pei-Ta) before, during and after the momentous events of the spring of 1957, the period of the “rectification campaign.”

The sequence of events in the past four years permits us to view the rectification campaign as a dividing date in the history of Communist China. The rectification campaign was the culminating point of a period that had seen the post-revolutionary reorganisation of the country, the assertion by the Communist Party of total control over the political, economic and ideological life of the nation and, following a campaign of liquidation of counter-revolutionary elements in the summer of 1955, a sudden “thaw.”

In the present context we need not trace in detail the changes Lenin made in Marx's socio-historical views on the eve of and after the revolutions of 1917. Having previously described Lenin's doctrinal engineering of institutional history in general and of Russian history in particular, I shall here indicate only the change in the image of China that Lenin initiated after 1917 and that after his death Stalin and the Chinese Communists completed.

When the Chinese Communists spelled out their policy of regional autonomy for ethnic minorities, it appeared to many observers that a significant break with the past had been made. Throughout China's modern history, central governments sought to amalgamate the various ethnic minorities with the dominant Han group. Now, hi 1949, it seemed as if, for the first time, a central Chinese government was determined to end this process of sinification and to give its non-Chinese subjects a degree of autonomy. This self-rule, as outlined hi official documents of the Peking regime, included the administrative, economic, educational and cultural spheres of life.

Since the change of political régime on the Chinese mainland in 1949, new values and attitudes have been consciously introduced by the Communist Party. The family institution has undergone a rather drastic alteration not only in form but also in composition, structure, roles of its members and especially in values and patterns of mate selection and marital adjustment. According to traditional Chinese social values, one should marry a person of relatively similar social background consistent with the concept of homogamy discussed by Burgess and his associates. The traditional Chinese sentiment often referred to the marriage of two individuals whose family front doors faced each other as a good match, implying that they had matched family backgrounds in residence, social class, occupations, education, economic status and other values held important in pre-Communist China. The strong emphasis laid by the Communist Party on indoctrinating every citizen in the political ideology of socialism and communism in true totalitarian form covers every phase of his life, including that of marriage. In the course of Communist rule, slightly more than a decade, this political emphasis has often come in direct conflict with the traditional value of social homogamy in mate selection and marriage.

In the months prior to the recent fighting with India, China initiated a new policy in Tibet and towards the Himalayan border countries in order to recover the ground lost—in the case of Tibet—by its previous policies, and—in the case of the neighbouring Himalayan territories—by its suppression of the Tibetan revolt. China's recent successful attacks in the border areas will probably lend added strength to her diplomacy in the border states whatever the immediate reactions of some local statesmen.

Early in the eighteenth century the European traveller Desideri who made a journey through Tibet and visited Lhasa wrote of the Cong-bo region of south-eastern Tibet that “all the Congo-bo provinces lying to the south of the river [the Tsangpo] march with the people called Lhoba which means Southern People… Not even the Tibetans, who are close neighbours and have many dealings with them, are allowed to enter their country but are obliged to stop on the frontier to barter their goods.”

Anyone who has been scanning the news sections of the world press over the past few months must have come across headlines proclaiming Peking's “revived birth control bid” and the “renewal of the birth control campaign in Communist China.” The implication, as suggested by most of the articles, is that since China has suffered a series of grave agricultural reverses she is finally coming to her senses and again instituting controls over fertility. Has there recently been a change in the régime's attitude with respect to the population problem, and are the present measures likely to produce significant results in the rate of growth of China's population?

Let us briefly review some of China's population policies over the past ten years. The initial jubilation over the results of the 1953 census, showing a population of almost 600 million on the Chinese mainland, was gradually modified to concern over the economic and social implications of both the size and the rate of growth of this population. The official propaganda, however, never admitted the economic problems inherent in a rapidly growing population, and the birth control campaign which started slowly in late 1954 and 1955 stressed the health and educational advantages of having a small family. After the campaign reached its peak in the middle of 1957 and the early part of 1958, it began to lose its impetus; and by the autumn of that year it became obvious that Communist China had reversed its recently introduced policy of birth control, at the same time introducing the communes and the “great leap forward.” The new policy proclaimed a severe labour shortage and attacked all proponents of controlled fertility as Malthusians and rightists. The labour shortage, proclaimed in 1958 as an excuse for the reversal of the birth control policy, became a reality in 1959, when the overzealous cadres created an artificial labour crisis by conscripting millions of men into a variety of mass projects.

When the Geneva agreements of July 1954 at Jast brought a measure of peace back to Indo-China, the Viet-Minh régime found itself in legal and recognised possession of that section of the country which lay north of the seventeenth parallel and which is officially known today as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. By then, part of this area, comprising the Viet-Minh's war-zones I, II, III and most of IV, thirty-three provinces in all, had already long been held by Ho Chi Minh's troops and in much of it a semblance of the new order's system of local government had been in regular operation for some years back. In a good deal of the rest, clandestine and fragmented centres of rebel control had perilously co-existed throughout the war with the old administration maintained at great cost by the French authorities. Finally, in many places, particularly the urban concentrations, no appreciable degree of Viet-Minh influence had managed to last out the conflict.