The AAAS Symposium on the Sciences in Communist China covered pretty thoroughly all of the scientific literature from that isolated land that is available in the Western world. The amount of such literature turns out to be substantial, but the scientists analysing it are faced with the problem of sorting out facts from propaganda, real achievements from grandiose claims. That there has been a great deal of real achievement in the ten years of Communist rule emerges beyond doubt. China, for years torn with external war and internal revolution, began the decade of the fifties with no systematic programme in science, no schools capable of training scientists and technicians at an advanced level, and only a handful of scientists—mostly Western trained—capable of doing the research, planning and building needed to get industrialisation under way, while at the same time taking on the enormous task of educating the new generations of scientists and technical specialists required to operate an industrialised economy.