The outbreak of war in North China during the summer of 1937 was the watershed in the growth of the revolutionary movement in China. Seemingly overnight the Communist Party made rapid new gains in strength and territory. From a small, isolated soviet in the desolation of North-west China on the Shensi-Kansu border, the Party enlarged its territories, and by the end of the war communist-backed resistance governments ruled huge portions of North and Central China. In the same period Party membership grew from a little over 20,000 members in 1936 to nearly 1,250,000 members at the Seventh Party Congress in April 1945, and the Red Army, which had dwindled to a mere 30,000 men in the course of the Long March, swelled to over one million men by the war's end. This new political and military framework formed the structural backbone which enabled the Communists to come to power four years later.

That Chinese policy since 1949 has been characterized by a pattern of left-right oscillations is one of the most widespread, but least examined, assumptions among analysts of Chinese politics. In the popular press, we often read of a “return to a moderate phase” or a “resurgence of radicalism,” while in academic writing, we frequently find contemporary Chinese history set in periods according to the alternate ascendancy of “bureaucratic” or “mobilizational” “models” or of “realist” and “visionary” groups of leaders. Of course, to some extent the policy oscillations model is only a kind of shorthand, convenient for summarizing the content of policy and its changes. We all understand that there have been secular changes in China both in what has been accomplished and in the terms of policy debate. Thus, it has become increasingly common to describe the pattern of policy change in China in terms of a combination of cyclical and secular patterns, to refer to policy oscillations in passing while presenting a chronology which actually indicates secular change, to offer the oscillations model explicitly as just a convenient simplification; or to ignore oscillations entirely in discussing the development of policy.

Professor Nathan's pungent essay raises important issues for the politics of development in general and for drawing comparative conclusions from the Chinese case in particular. His cleansing scepticism demolishes some positions which may be held by authors in the China field and reminds others that the unstated assumptions in their models need better articulation. However he goes too far. What needs to be re-established is that clear and modest formulations of short-term recurrence, interdependence among policies, and two-sided policy disagreement are not avoidable errors but indispensable heuristic devices in the conceptual repertoire of China watchers. In fact it would be a great disservice to stùdies of contemporary China and to comparative study of the Chinese case if Professor Nathan were allowed to succeed in his attempt to identify all such analyses with his reductio ad absurdum of some of them. Let us try to rescue the possibility of constructive social science modelling of the three principal issues Professor Nathan raises.

Several years ago, while going through the Mochizuki Collection in the sub-basement of Keiō University Library, I came across a small book bearing the title Hunan tzu-chih yün-tung shih (shang) [History of the Hunan Self-government Movement, Part I (Shanghai, December 1920)] by a Fukienese journalist with the curiously Taoist name of Wang Wu-wei. The book turned out to contain four hitherto unexamined and uncollected articles by Mao Tse-tung, written during September 1920, and a lengthy proposal written by Mao and others in early October. Asa whole the book throws considerable light on an important phase of the search by enlightened members of the Chinese polity for a way out of the twin dilemmas of warlordism and foreign penetration. Mao's articles show the 26-year-old teacher, far from being the obscure figure many have thought, as already something of a primus inter pares, a notable thinker and respected leader in the context of a rather chaotic and creative situation. Although I wrote a short introduction (in Japanese) and republished these pieces (in Chinese) in Hogaku Kenkyu, the journal of the Keio University Faculty of Law, neither is readily available to western audiences. What follows is a completely new introduction, together with translations of the five documents in question.

Scholars of politics in literate and semi-literate societies must study the press for two important reasons. First, the press, as a key line of com-munication, often plays an integral part in the political process. Secondly, the press often provides important politically-relevant information not readily available elsewhere. This article begins with brief comments on the communications functions of Taiwan's press and then discusses types of newspapers, particular newspapers of special importance, reporters and the journalistic profession, and press control. It concludes with a discussion of the press as a research resource.

Prior to the mid-1950s, infectious diseases, including venereal disease (now essentially eliminated), were the main causes of Chinese mortality. In 1951 cancer was ninth on the list of fatal diseases. Presently, in some areas of China it has become first. For example, in the northeast there are very distinct pockets of carcinoma of the oesophagus. In southern areas (e.g. Kwangchow) one finds high incidences of carcinoma of the nasopharynx and in eastern China a high incidence of liver cancer. Cancer investigation in these three areas is organized and pursued, for example, by the staff of the Peking Tumour Institute and Hospital.

The issue of equality has become the focus of increasing attention in both China and the west in the past several years. But the empirical basis for analyzing the extent and nature of equality in modern China remains weak, relying as it has on impressions and scattered statistics brought back by visitors. The most systematic summary of available data on one form of equality – income distribution – is Professor Martin Whyte's recent article in The China Quarterly (No. 64) entitled “Inequality and stratification in China.” Whyte's measure of inequality is the ratio of the income of the highest earner to that of the lowest. In his treatment of rural income, Whyte reports intra-team ratios for 18 communes visited by Keith Buchanan as around 3:1, a ratio of 14:1 for Liu-lin village visited by Jan Myrdal in 1962, and 3:1 or 4:1 for villages in his own interview research. On the basis of this kind of data, Whyte concludes that income inequality within China's production teams is relatively low but not outstandingly so in comparison with pre-1949 China or with other Asian countries. He suggests that the “modest” level of income inequality in rural China today may be as much the result of a relatively equal distribution before 1949 as of post-Liberation agricultural development and redistribution of the means of production.

The grain output in China in 1974 was not only, as Robert Michael Field noted in The China Quarterly No. 65, “ far larger than output claimed for any previous year ” ; it was also far larger than the estimates made by most western economists concerned with China. Such observers, believing that agricultural production in China was “ stagnating,” had estimated Chinese grain output for 1974 as being between 255 and 259 million tons. Peking's announcement that 1974 grain output was 274-9 million tons thus set up a contradiction: either those western economists had been far off the mark in their extrapolations of growth or the Chinese figure was somehow misleading. Field opts for the second explanation.