The communist revolution brought a fundamental change in income distribution in rural China. Wealth at the top of rural society and abject poverty at the bottom were both wiped out. The creation of new economic institutions combined the goals of production increase and greater income equality. Experience showed that it was difficult to attain both: land reform was followed by the emergence of new economic inequalities; the people's commune by economic disaster. After the consolidation of the collective production team as the basic economic accounting unit in 1962 the institutional framework underwent little change until 1980. However, an unprecedented growth of the rural population and the technical transformation of agriculture during this same period greatly transformed the economic conditions of China's peasantry.

For both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Guomindang (GMD), the experience of their political association from 1922 to 1927 had a profound effect on the later course of their development. This period has come to be known as the First United Front, though in fact this term cannot be used without initial reservation, since only the CCP spoke of a united front between it and the GMD. For the latter party, with its well-established revolutionary history, the term “admission of the communists” (rong gong) was invariably used to denote the opening up of GMD membership to members of a smaller and definitely junior political movement. The adoption of the communist designation in later years by many students of the period reflects in part the attention given by western scholarship to the development of the CCP during the critical years of the 1920s. However, even if the term “united front” is retained for convenience as a general rubric for the 1922–27 period, it is important that the Guomindang be subjected to careful scrutiny in its own right, so that the GMD-CCP relationship may be understood more fully. This is to be stressed, since the categories often applied to the GMD, such as “left” and “right,” while of value in some instances, on the whole blur or distort the wide range of opinion within that party on the question of communist involvement in it. Until the purge of the CCP took place in 1927, GMD attitudes towards the communists were characterized by much fluidity.

According to an official Chinese report, the population of China has increased from 540 million in 1949 to 960 million in 1978, an average annual rate increase of about 20 per 1,000 population. In view of adverse socio-economic effects of the rapid population growth in the past the Chinese Government has recently begun encouraging the one-child family in an attempt to achieve the target of zero population growth by the turn of this century, as part of the effort to promote the Four Modernizations in the fields of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defence.

Reverend John Leighton Stuart (1876–1962) served as U.S. ambassador to China from July 1946 until August 1949. In the many discussions of his ambassadorship the one diplomatic mission that has aroused the most speculation and debate was his abortive trip to Beijing, contemplated in June–July 1949, to meet with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Some students of Sino-American relations have claimed that had this trip been made the misunderstanding and subsequent hostility between the United States and the People's Republic of China in the post-1949 period could have been avoided; therefore, the unmaking of this trip constituted another “lost chance in China” in establishing a working relationship between the two countries. But others have thought that given the realities of the Cold War in 1949 and the internal political constraints existing in each country, no substantial result could have been gained from such a trip. Therefore, the thesis of a “lost chance in China” was more an unfounded speculation than a credible affirmation.