“Human nature changes” – a vague statement acceptable to Marx and to Engels, to Stalin and to Mao. The point is: what is it that changes, under what conditions does it change, and what is the nature of the change? The article that follows is a case study of the interaction between the concrete cultural and social dimensions of a given country and a philosophical concept that has made its way into that country's official ideology. It examines the idea of the malleability of human nature in contemporary China. The concept is of monumental importance in Chinese Marxism, and examination of its evolution and implications will illuminate the Chinese definition of social class, and the causes of a nationwide crisis in the educational system in 1958 that foreshadowed the dramatic 1966 closing of all schools and their subsequent restructuring. Most important, the analysis clarifies the meaning of a term so often used in discussions of Chinese thought and so rarely understood.

During the eight years of war with Japan, the strategy and tactics of the Communist movement in China matured to become a viable revolutionary programme. Recent scholarship leaves little doubt that in these years the Communists were successful in winning the allegiance of the majority of the people in areas under their control and in mobilizing them for the further pursuit of revolutionary goals.

The visit of the Australian Labour Party (ALP) delegation to China in July this year provided an interesting and representative example of Chinese diplomacy in action.* Although the ALP is in opposition, the delegation was dealt with by China as the representatives of a possible future Australian government, and its leader, Gough Whitlam, as the alternative Australian Prime Minister. The discussions were pitched accordingly. The visit also had some general relevance because of the importance China now attaches to relations with “small” powers, including countries like Australia (which see themselves rather as middle powers); indeed, China's new diplomatic contacts with such powers illustrate the whole thrust of China's global diplomacy in 1971. The Australian case is interesting also because in Australia, as in the United States and a number of other countries, the “China problem” has been such a central issue in foreign policy that it has spilled over into a complex involvement in domestic politics.

The formative years of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have long remained one of the most obscure periods in the recent past of China. There remain many puzzles about why and how the alliances, between the CCP and the Kuomintang (KMT) on the one hand and Soviet Russia on the other, came about in the early 1920s.

For the last four years I have been studying the establishment and first years of the CCP, at the same time paying attention to the foundation and first years of the Indische Sociaal Democratische Vereniging (ISDV), which was later to become the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI). In this connexion I have been specially interested in outlining the origins of that strategy whereby Communist Party members entered a nationalist mass movement and tried to capture it from within.

In the areas controlled by the Central Government, the Chinese student movement between 1945 and 1949 was essentially an anti-war movement. As the Civil War progressed during those years, the student protests became one of the Government's major political problems, referred to by Mao himself as the “second front” in the struggle against the Chiang Kai-shek Government. As such, the student anti-war movement assumed its place within the twentieth-century tradition of Chinese student activism.