The Cultural Revolution severely shook the organizational structure of China. In its aftermath came a general weakening of the administration and a loosening of control. As a result the country has experienced an intensification of the tendencies towards a cellular economy. The forces, already strong, which encouraged individual localities and enterprises to develop on self-sufficient autonomous lines, have received a new accession of strength. At present the country seems composed of a myriad of small discrete units, although there are at work technical forces which, it would seem, ought to be breaking down this cellular arrangement. This article looks at the emphasis on self-reliance and self-sufficiency, enquires into certain consequences of these trends and hexamines and speculates on the manner in which the separate units of the Chinese economy relate to each other economically.

Western social scientists have tended to evade a central issue of the Chinese Revolution. As a consequence, our scholarship has generally misconceived and denigrated the Chinese Communist concepts and practices of mass participation. The issue evaded is twentieth-century China's need for a continuing vanguard to direct the revolutionary change that China's conditions demand. One result of that evasion has been the near-unanimous decrying of China's restrictions on democratic control, restrictions that, of course, are implicit in the very concept of a vanguard.

“The United States Government,” President Harry S. Truman announced on 5 January 1950, “will not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China.” Historians generally agree that President Truman meant what he said. American policy after the summer of 1949, writes Tang Tsou, was “to avoid, as far as possible, any further involvement in the Chinese civil war and to allow events in China to unfold themselves.” The Truman administration ruled out the use of force to prevent the fall of Formosa; non-recognition of the Communist government was adopted as “a temporary measure,” due to Republican pressure and the hope of gaining concessions from Peking. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, observes Lyman P. Van Slyke, “brought to a sudden end the policy that the administration had followed for two years, and committed us once again to involvement in the Chinese civil war.” The United States assumed a protective role towards the remnants of the Nationalists on Formosa and became the implacable foe of Peking. This article, a study of a commercial airline's participation in a major diplomatic and legal controversy during the last phase of the Chinese civil war, will suggest that there is reason to doubt, or at least to modify, the traditional interpretation of American policy towards China between late 1949 and June 1950.

A comparative study of Soviet and Chinese press propaganda on the closely related problems of Mao Tse-tung's position as a Communist theoretician and the relevance of the Chinese revolution for revolutions in other colonial and semi-colonial countries may add to a further understanding of the controversial field of Sino-Soviet relations and serve as a background against which pertinent aspects of current propaganda might be better understood. Differences in viewpoint on these questions may represent latent, but nonetheless vital, tensions in the relations between Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders. In fact, a deterioration in Sino-Soviet relations, for whatever cause, may quite probably be signalized first in divergent assertions regarding theoretical matters.

As the British historian A. J. P. Taylor once remarked, “In the Cold War apparently even the world of scholarship knows no detachment.” This statement applies with particular force to Korea, which became one of the foci of the Cold War after 1945 and turned into a bitter battleground between the supposedly monolithic World Communism and the western alliance after 1950.

We were worrying over the continuance of workers' pay differentials and wondering how to recognize the time when communism would arrive.