The Soviet collectivisation campaign of 1929–30 and the Chinese campaign of 1955–56 were similar in that both turned out to be attempts at achieving nationwide breakthroughs in agriculture. Both régimes attempted in the course of about six months to make the radical transition from small-producer to collectivised agriculture. The plans and forecasts that had been formulated by both the Soviet and the Chinese leaders had not called for such a breakthrough. These plans had envisaged the completion of collectivisation at a fairly slow pace.i The following graph indicates the rapidity and scope of the changes that actually took place, as well as the dramatically different outcomes of the two campaigns.

Ever since the conquest of the mainland by Communist forces, the foreign policy of the Republic of China has revolved about a single goal: recovery of the mainland. Recovery of the mainland is, in fact, the reason d'être of the Chiang Kai-shek régime; should the government ever admit doubts about its ability or desire to return, the entire basis for KMT rule would be irrevocably undercut. It is therefore not surprising that, in the last two years no less than in the more distant past, the theme of an imminent return has dominated the pages of Formosa's newspapers, with new evidence being brought forward regularly to demonstrate that the mainland régime is on the verge of collapse. The cultural revolution has brought about important changes in the “return” theme. It has not reduced its relevance, but seems to have induced recalculations in ROC official circles over the timing and nature of the mainland recovery operation.

Chiang Ch'ing was born Li Yun-ho in 1913 in Chiucheng, Shantung Province. When she was very young her parents separated and her mother took her with her elder sister to the provincial capital of Tsinan. At the end of her primary education Chiang was sent to the Provincial Vocation School for Performing Arts in Taian, a boarding school with tuition provided free by the government as her father was no longer contributing to the support of the family. In Teturn for free education the students were obliged upon graduation to join the experimental troupe as unpaid apprentices for an unspecified period. While a student at the school Chiang had an affair with the principal, Chao T'ai-mou, who in 1930 took her to Tsingtao when he went to teach in the newly-founded National Tsingtao University. Unqualified for acceptance as a student, Chiang found a post in the university library as a junior assistant copying index cards.

Since the ousting of Khrushchev in October 1964, North Korea's relations with her neighbours have undergone a radical change. The warmth that the North Korean leaders demonstrated towards Communist China earlier has all but evaporated. The staunch anti-revisionism which used to characterise North Korean speeches and statements has given way to increasingly frequent warnings about the dangers of left opportunism, dogmatism and sectarianism. The economic and political ties between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Soviet Union which were seriously damaged during the Khrushchev era have now been more or less re-established.

The Canton rising of December 1927 was an event of international significance in Chinese Communist history. In order to understand it in proper perspective it is necessary to trace Comintern policy on rural and urban revolutions in China from 1920 to 1927. From the beginning the Comintern approach to the revolution in the East was different from that in the West. In the West the revolution was one of the industrial proletariat against the bourgeoisie with the rural toilers as the auxiliary revolutionary force. In the East, where there was almost no industrial proletariat or where, in some relatively advanced countries the industrial proletariat was just beginning to grow up, the Comintern supported the native bourgeoisie temporarily and the peasantry permanently in its grand strategy against “capitalist imperialism” and “feudalism” represented chiefly by landlords. While Comintern support for the bourgeoisie of the East was not expected to hinder future communist work against the native bourgeois democratic tendencies, Comintern support for the peasantry was so complete that no communist programme was considered possible in the pre-capitalist countries if it was not based on the peasant movement. The proletarian revolution was not a problem in the East at the outset.