The man who faces his typewriter to set down a thousand words of coherent comment on the Communist revolution in China confronts not only a massive experiment in social engineering but also the fact that his interpretation of that experiment will expose as much of the author as it does of the revolution. Some observers, moved by a deep attachment to the distinctive cultural unity of China and by an antiquarian admiration for the achievements of her traditional elite, seek, as if by public subscription, the preservation of China's relics. Others, more concerned with Communism than with China, see in Mao Tse-tung's progress only the relentless efforts of a new, technological despotism to mould man to the purposes of the totalitarian state. In this revolution, as in others before, the contemporary observer is prone to apply his own measure and thus to fall victim to his own distortion.

A few days after the Japanese occupied Peking in the early days of July 1937, the correspondent of a leading British newspaper wrote his verdict on these events. “With the Japanese occupation,” he said, “the fate of Peking and China has been settled for at least a hundred years.” At that time many would have agreed. China had been drifting to disaster for forty years, and few believed that the Chinese people had the energy, courage or ability to reverse the course of events. Today, more than twenty years later, and after ten years of the Communist régime, the question is no longer what some outside power may do to China, but what China may do to her neighbours. The disorderly aftermath of the Chinese Empire has been settled, the state is once more all too powerful; enormous changes have taken place in the economy and social system. These changes have been initiated and carried through by the Communist régime, in the name of the Chinese people, but in accordance with the theory and practice of Marxist-Leninism. The Chinese Communists will be the first to claim that this is so, even if, here and there, the facts do not always support such a claim.

In the original doctrine of Marx, the proletarian Socialist revolution was to be the climax of the process of industrialisation through private capitalist enterprise and was therefore to be expected to begin in the most highly industrialised region of the world. It would occur when capitalist relations of production were no longer adequate to contain the forces of production which they had developed, when the ownership of the means of production had been concentrated in the hands of a small minority and when the great majority of the population had been transformed into propertyless wage earners. That the Socialist revolution should take place first in predominantly agrarian societies and that it should be, not the effect of a fully achieved industrialisation, but the means of bringing it about, was not a possibility contemplated by the early Marxists. But so it has happened, and in Asia and Africa today Communism makes its appeal less as a creed of social justice and welfare than as a system providing a short cut to industrialisation—and its corollary, national power—for weak and underdeveloped countries. The main task of the revolution is no longer to carry out a redistribution of surplus value from an economy already highly productive, but to promote a rapid growth of productivity from low, and largely pre-industrial, economic levels. The Soviet Union, after more than four decades of Communist Party rule, presents itself to the world not as a land where people have equal incomes—which Bernard Shaw regarded is the essence of Socialism, but which are as remote from actuality in Russia as in any bourgeois society—but as a country which by intensive efforts of planned production has overcome an initial economic backwardness and emerged as an industrial and military power of the first rank. In its ten years of history, Communist China has been striving to follow the same path, but the effort required has been even greater jecause of the very small margin available at the outset for capital armation from the national income and the vast leeway to be made up fot “overtaking and outstripping” the most highly industrialised lations of the world.

China is credited with having “gat on her feet.” But the metaphors must be mixed—like the feelings of the Chinese themselves. China also leans on Russia, and is “riding a tiger” (or the modern equivalent, a tank or a rocket). In 1949, Chinese Communism was apparently the only decisive component in the “China Problem”; not now. The decade saw swift and brutal intensification of Communist purposes, internally on the mainland and externally in outward thrusts, leading to great stresses, much loss of the initial support and toleration enjoyed by the régime, and increasing opposition.

What is the best hypothesis to explain the development of the Chinese People's Republic since 1949? Perhaps that, in the view which has dominated the Chinese Communist leadership, the policies of the Yenan period (1935—45) were a deviation from the preferred line of development; the true road was that along which the Party had started in the period of the Chinese Soviet Republic (1931–34) and to which it returned as soon as its power was sufficiently consolidated. This can explain both the considerable practical differences between Chinese-style and Russian-style Communism during the Yenan period and also the failure of predictions based on the assumption that the trends of the Yenan period would continue.

What facts stand out in bold relief when one surveys the turbulent history of Communist China during the last ten years? It is by no means easy to answer this question. Ten is a good round number, but there are few indications that the tenth year of Chinese Communism marks a terminal point in any sense. The shifts and fluctuations of the last three years have been, if anything, more violent than those of the previous period. It is as difficult as ever to distinguish relatively enduring facts from sensational, transitory facts.

Within her first decade under Communist leadership, China has been transformed from a virtual nonentity into a major world Power. International decisions which ignore her interests are unenforceable against her. Her status as one of the Big Five can in practice no longer be challenged, and must be taken into account even by countries that refrain from acknowledging the changed situation diplomatically.

In my judgment the most striking fact in the new China is the creation of state power. Traditionally, in the agrarian empires of Asia, the government has had relatively little power: at least power of a fundamental kind. It might take arbitrary and startling action; but the total result of such deeds was small. A government, however impressive its trappings, could seldom carry through a sustained reforming policy. In China, custom or Confucius was sovereign, not the emperor.

Communist China is not an “Asiatic” (“hydraulic”) society; nor is Mao's government a replica of the power system called “Oriental despotism.” Comparative analysis reveals basic similarities as well as important dissimilarities between Communist totalitarianism and the absolutist régimes that prevailed in traditional Asia, North Africa and certain parts of pre-Columbian America.

In the ten years of Communist rule since late 1949 a thoroughgoing revolution has taken place on the Chinese mainland in economic organisation, savings and investment, and distribution, with profound effects on the daily lives of the people. Peking has claimed that immense progress has been made on all economic fronts, including the real income of industrial and agricultural workers. It has felt confident enough to shorten from fifteen to ten years (beginning 1958) the target period at the end of which its output of electric power and certain major industrial goods would match or exceed that of Britain. In the non-Communist world, commentators vary greatly in their judgments; they range from those who reject all the official statistics and consider no important progress to have been made during the period, to those who not only accept the claims in tato but have advanced all sorts of arguments to defend even those claims that Peking has later had to repudiate.

Western visitors to the Soviet Union report a growing Russian anxiety about Communist China and its inclinations and potentialities. The Soviet “man in the street,” who recalls what Leningrad and Kiev and Minsk and Odessa experienced during the Second World War, maintains a sober respect for the world's new weapons—whether nuclear, bacteriological or something even more dreadful that is only whispered about. He is increasingly ready to believe, moreover, that Western capitalist peoples share this sober respect, but Communist China gives him cause for deep uneasiness. Is it possible that China might trigger a war which both the Soviet Union and the West would prefer to avoid?

The foreign policy of Communist China was born in the loess caves of Yenan during the period 1935–45. For the first time after years of fighting, the Communists had leisure for reflection. Their government began to be a magnet for the younger members of the intelligentsia who repudiated the Kuomintang because the Kuomintang had proved unable to defend China's national interests; they were willing to try Communism as the cure for Imperialism. Already the Communist leaders were confident that in the long run they would come to power. In Yenan, in lectures and seminars, they built up concepts and the world picture which, with surprisingly little modification, have governed their foreign policy ever since.

A number of months ago I discussed in an article some conceptual weaknesses in the study of Chinese Communism. To illustrate my point, I briefly reviewed the “Maoist” thesis—the claim that Mao Tse-tung, in 1927 and subsequently, violated basic principles of orthodox Marxist-Leninist Communism.

The awakening Tibetan national sentiment foreseen by Sir Charles Bell has exploded into a major revolt against China. It has brought the Sino-Indian “Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence” policy into disrepute, has altered the balance of power in Asia and may yet in its continuing repercussions be the prime cause, in the solemn words of Prime Minister Nehru, of the Third World War. In 1960 it is imperative that Sir Charles Bell's warning concerning the importance of not overlooking ethnographic Tibet should be heeded. The cartographic manipulation which has taken place in the past has been possible because of the peculiar isolation of Tibet and can be partly ascribed to foreign ignorance. It will no longer be possible now that the Dalai Lama and his government is in India and the new generation of leaders is educated. It must be remembered that those responsible for the success of the revolt themselves come from what has been casually referred to as “ethnographic Tibet,” “de facto Tibet,” “Inner Tibet,” Sikang-Chinghai, Kham-Amdo and Szechuan, according to preference. Not only did the revolt begin in this area, it was carried on with increasing success until this year, and it is not unlikely that it will explode again at any time.