When one becomes an official, the entire family prospers … they host banquets and send presents (ch'ing-k'o sung-li). … One can see no organization. Personal acquaintances (ssu-jen) are employed, factions are active, and there are feudal relationships (kuan-hsi) …

Why were the big and small “fleets” [of Lin Piao's anti-party group] openly able to carry out the schemes of forming cliques, engaging in factionalism, and carrying out conspiracies by such acts as hosting banquets (ch'ing-k'o), sending gifts (sung-li), offering official positions and making promises?

In addition to providing himself with extravagant pleasures, Wang Hungwen used the illegally obtained money and goods to host banquets (ch'ing-k'o), and send presents (sung-li) in order to recruit corrupt cadres and conduct anti-party factional activities. So many filthy political exchanges are just so happily arranged in an atmosphere of wine and women. Eat, Eat, Drink, Drink had already become a gauge by which Wang Hung-wen and his “little brothers” measured political relationships (kuan-hsi).

In the course of establishing an interpretative chronology of the post-1949 political and economic development of China, scholars have often assumed that in the early and mid-1950s there was a continuum in terms of the progressive application of Soviet organizational methods and strategic perspectives in China. In other words, the Chinese Communist leadership in the early 1950s not only “leaned to one s side” in international terms, it endorsed and implemented an essentially Stalinist strategy with its consequent implications of rigid hierarchical management and lop-sided investment patterns in favour of rapid heavy industrialization at the expense of agricultural production in the countryside.

After completing his trilogy The Eclipse in the spring of 1928, a physically and mentally exhausted Mao Tun went to Japan, where he stayed from the summer of 1928 to the spring of 1930. The series of catastrophes that had befallen his party in 1927–28 continued to torment him, and party politics followed him even to Tokyo. Attacks from several groups on the left in Shanghai directed at the three novels that made up The Eclipse provoked Mao Tun to an angered defence, “From Ruling to Tokyo” (16 July 1928). A storm of polemics ensued.

In the early 1950s Chou En-lai, in his capacity both as premier and foreign minister of the People's Republic of China, strongly advocated that the non-aligned states could be employed to improve China's diplomatic position. To reduce western influence in China's neighbouring states and to maximize Peking's diplomatic flexibility, Chou began to emphasize the relevance and necessity of “winning over” the international middle-of-the-road forces. This new policy, both in theory and practice, demonstrates his political sagacity in refusing to allow dogmatic communist ideological theories to interfere with his realistic assessment of the world situation.

Recent reports from China, based mostly on the travels of North-American and European scholars, have broadened our knowledge of social conditions in that country. In most cases, the journeys of these scholarly visitors have been greatly facilitated by the availability of Chinese guides and interpreters who at times become their main source of contact with the people, especially in non-Mandarin speaking regions. Thus, great strides have been made in our understanding of the new society. But there is another source of traveller's reportage from China — the hundreds of ordinary overseas Chinese, especially those between the ages of 50 and 90, who every day visit their relatives on the mainland — and about whose personal observations and experiences we know very little. Consequently, there are gaps in our knowledge of every-day life in China, especially in the remote countryside of provinces such as Fukien, which are least frequented by delegations from Europe and America.

This is a report on some aspects of the publicity activities of the “planned fertility” (chi-hua sheng-yu) campaign in parts of Kwangtung Province. I shall make special reference to three rural communes, namely, Huan-ch'eng (population: 59,000) of Hsin-hui Hsien, Ta-li (population: 68,000) of Nan-hai Hsien, and Ch'ang-sha (population: 59,500) of K'ai-p'ing Hsien, each of which I visited in December 1976 as a member of the research team of the Social Research Centre of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Based on personal observations and conversation with various individuals during that trip, including officials and ordinary peasants, I propose to describe in some detail the ways in which the principles of planned fertility are transmitted to the masses.

Opportunities to observe a people's court in action dealing with a criminal cases are relatively rare. Therefore, the following summary of the trial of an embezzler at the Hungkou District People's Court, Shanghai, which I attended on the morning of 14 December 1977, may offer some additional understanding of the way the legal system currently works in China. The visit to the court formed part of a tour by a group mainly drawn from the University of Adelaide. The fact that we were invited to attend the court, however, was mainly due to the presence among us of the attorney-general of South Australia, Mr Peter Duncan. The visit was preceded by a meeting with two judges of the Shanghai Higher People's Court who outlined in fairly familiar and general terms the basic structure of the Chinese legal system. The judges also accompanied us to the district court.