That Mao Tse-tung owes his rise to power to the support of the Chinese peasantry is an obvious and undisputed fact. The oldest controversy regarding his career concerns the degree of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy which can be attributed to such a peasant-based revolution in an agrarian country. Considerable attention has also been devoted to the guerrilla methods by which this revolution was carried out, and to the relative importance of the appeals of nationalism and of social justice in Tallying the peasants to Mao's banner. The fact that Mao himself has his roots among the Chinese peasantry has, of course, not been overlooked, but it has been considered primarily in the light of the advantages which Mao drew from this background in understanding and manipulating the peasantry. There is not the least doubt that Mao, who has been a Marxist revolutionary for some forty-five years, has endeavoured throughout his political career to exploit his knowledge of the Chinese masses in order to lead them towards goals lying partly outside their tradition-bound universe. But at the same time, he has, even yet, not totally transcended the inheritance of his youth although he is making a furious effort to do so through the current “cultural revolution.” When the patterns of his thought and action were taking shape, roughly in the decade 1926–36, he was still closer to his origins. It is therefore imperative to study not only what Mao Tse-tung has done with (or to) the Chinese peasantry, but what he owes to the fact that he was originally a part of it.

In December 1957, after the rectification-turned-anti-rightist campaign, an eleven-month series of provincial purges began. They affected twelve Chinese provinces and autonomous regions, in roughly chrono-logical order: Chekiang, Anhwei, Kansu, Tsinghai, Shantung, Hopei, Yunnan, Kwangtung, Sinkiang, Kwangsi, Honan, Liaoning and Shantung, again. With the exception of the Liaoning and second Shantung purges, all of these cases were reviewed at the second session of the Eighth Party Congress in May, 1958. The victims of the purges included four alternate members of the Central Committee, one provincial first secretary, eighteen members of standing committees of provincial committees, five secretaries of provincial committee secretariats, ten members of these secretariats, four governors, and ten vice-governors as well as approximately twenty-five other officials holding Party or government positions on the provincial level. In brief, this was no minor matter.

The theory of price formation has been vigorously discussed in Communist China since 1953, but the main themes of the discussion have varied. Generally speaking, the discussion may be conveniently divided into two periods. The first period covers the years prior to 1960, during which there were a large number of articles dealing with the role of the “law of value” in socialist planning and the problem of price formation for producer goods transferred within the state sector. The discussion was partly a result of Stalin's publication of Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. A number of Chinese economists disagreed with Stalin's assertion that the law of value and the concept of commodity production and exchange did not apply to the state sector.

In the continuing debate on whether to establish normal diplomatic relations with the government in Peking, those who favour such a step invariably assert that recognition would, besides other alleged advantages, reduce the risks of a war born of mutual ignorance. A clear presentation of this view is found in the recent Quaker proposals for a A New China Policy: “American public ignorance of contemporary China and Chinese ignorance of us are among the chief reasons for the tension and hostility between us. This is dangerous in itself, and it threatens the peace of the world.”

Any attempt to gauge the magnitude and composition of Soviet and Chinese economic assistance to North Vietnam since 1955 comes up against the problem of statistical secrecy. The North Vietnamese are the worst offenders: they have published no foreign trade returns, and their general statistical reporting is in the worst Stalinist percentile tradition. In reply to a question put to him by a French correspondent, a Dao Nai coal mine official stated: “Here in the mine we are not interested in tons; we are interested only in percentages. Tons are a matter for the Ministry of Heavy Industry in Hanoi.” A Soviet specialist stationed in Hanoi confided to the same correspondent: “They no longer permit us to get near the machines which we furnished them with.… It is worse here than in China.” Unfortunately, Chinese statistics, though more plentiful, are not much better. Soviet figures are the best of a bad lot, but they give only a partial, not unbiased, picture. Analysis of the North Vietnamese economy therefore reduces itself to the kind of detective work by which Western economists from 1929 to 1954 tried to piece together such information on the Soviet economy as Stalin's security-minded statisticians released.

Ambitious aspirations for railway development in China had long antecedents prior to the establishment of communist rule in 1949. During the First World War, Sun Yat-sen presented a programme calling for the construction of 100,000 miles of railroads. A quarter of a century later, in 1943, Chang Kia-ngau, Kuomintang Minister of Communications, presented a ten-year plan for railroad construction. He called for 14,300 miles of railroads to be built within ten years following the end of the war. The new lines he envisioned were to be added to a total of 12,036 miles of railroad which had been built by 1942. Of this meagre existing mileage, “3,726 miles were lost through the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and 6,566 miles were lost or destroyed during the first five-and-one-half years of the Sino-Japanese war.” While lines lost but not destroyed could presumably be utilised after the war, the scope of his programme, as can be seen from comparison with the existing mileage, was considerably beyond what China could hope to achieve with her own resources. Like Sun Yat-sen before him, Chang Kia-ngau hoped that massive conversion of Western war industries to the production of construction goods would provide the material inputs to make his programme feasible. A plan based on the expectation of a beneficence the West has yet to display to the underdeveloped world was of course foredoomed to failure.

Remote and sparsely settled Tibet is a most unlikely region for demographic analysis. In view of the complete absence of current population statistics from China, however, the recent publication of a few figures for Tibet make it unique among Chinese provinces. Nonetheless, the figures themselves are only of secondary importance. Their primary significance is in the indirect commentary on the general handling of population statistics by the Chinese Communists.

No observer of the Chinese political scene will argue with a frontpage headline in the New York Times of June 26, 1966, which said that a “titanic struggle” was taking place in China. This struggle has thrown China into turmoil and has already claimed the political careers of at least one senior Politburo member, two top Party propaganda officials (one of them an alternate member of the Politburo) as well as numerous Party and non-Party functionaries—and the full extent of the purge has yet to come to light. The Chinese themselves, with characteristic restraint, have proclaimed that “this great cultural revolution has no parallel in scale, in sweep, in strength or in momentum.” Whatever the final outcome of this “revolution,” it can be safely said that the Chinese political landscape will be considerably altered after it has run its unpredictable course.

FOR more than twenty years, Chou Yang was chief guardian of Mao's literary policy. Next to Mao, he determined who was to write and what was to be written. In a series of relentless campaigns, he ruthlessly purged the ranks of China's most creative writers. Then suddenly in the summer of 1966, Chou Yang himself became the public target of the “great proletarian cultural revolution.”

The current cultural rectification campaign in Communist China, which is to “sweep away all monsters” and “touch people to their very souls,” surpasses all previous campaigns in intensity, but more importantly it has revealed a serious political breach within the Chinese Communist Party itself.

The political demise of Politburo member P'eng Chen in 1966 is one of the most significant political events in the Chinese Communist movement since Mao Tse-tung gained control of the Party in the late thirties and early forties.

The 64-year-old native of Shansi is a tall, robust man who worked in north China in the labour movement during the twenties and early thirties. He has been a Party member since 1926. P'eng allegedly spent some time in jail in the early thirties, but by the mid-thirties he was a top Party operative in the Peking area where he played a major role in contacting and recruiting students into the CCP. In these endeavours he seems to have been working directly under Liu Shao-ch'i.