The counterpoint of radical change and durable continuity which has characterised the Communist upheaval in China is nowhere so marked as in the ambivalent attitudes towards youth and age. Traditional China was a backward-looking civilisation, espousing a view of life and of history which esteemed past over present, age over youth, authority over innovation. The twentieth century has seen a definite, often violent, conflict between the generations, with the revolt of 1911, the May Fourth movement, and the Northern Expedition each expressing an aspect of the upsurge of youthful aspiration. The emergence of a Communist government has been marked by a drastic change in the official attitude, a new preoccupation with the future rather than the past, and sustained attention to the organisation of the youth of China, from which group will come the national leaders of the generation ahead.

Within the short span of twelve years since their rise to power in 1949, the Chinese Communists have completely revamped their educational system. Private institutions of higher learning have been abolished and the number of universities vastly reduced; in their place hundreds of technical institutes have been created, with an unprecedented increase in enrolment and graduates. The faculties of various universities and colleges have been amalgamated in an effort to train more and more scientific and technical personnel. New types of instruction, known as “specialty” (spetsial'nost) and “specialisation” (spetsializatsiia), have been introduced to accelerate the training of industrial experts. Emphasis on science and technology has completely replaced the traditional respect for the humanities; the highest learned organisation in Communist China today is the Academy of Sciences, and not the Academy of Letters (Hanlin Yuan) of Imperial China. A Twelve-Year Science Programme was adopted in 1956 with the avowed objective of producing 10,500 top scientists and some two million technicians by 1967, and towards this end a new University of Science and Technology was established in 1958.

China's rulers in 1961 surveyed their shattered dreams and then, with studied self-confidence, hailed the vitality of their revolutionary “mass-line” credo. This resolute re-affirmation of standard principles had a hollow ring, however, and doubts about the “real methods of control” employed during the years of retreat and readjustment coincided with angry charges that the language of the “mass-line” disguised terror and brutality on an appalling scale. In the confusion, fact has until recently seemed entwined irretrievably with propaganda and invective, but now a unique collection of the Kung-tso T'ung-hsun (Bulletin of Activities) makes it possible to disentangle the contradictory methods of control and leadership used in 1961 and to evaluate their widely varied effects in that crucial year.

Among the most significant polemical fall-out of the past year has been the increasing indication that modern weapons questions lie near the heart of Sino-Soviet estrangement. Whether or not the recent Chinese Communist charge is true, that the Russians later reneged on a 1957 “advanced technology” commitment, Soviet and Chinese behaviour since 1957 testifies to considerable Russian long-range concern over a nuclear-armed China, Russian reluctance to assist China to gain this end quickly, and accumulating Chinese anger at such un-comradely behaviour. The only unique ingredient in recent polemical exchanges is added explicitness; the modern weapons messages have been there all along. This is not to say that the Sino-Soviet schism is not the product, as well, of competing revolutionary strategies, theological pretension, struggle for supreme Communist authority, and fundamental disagreement over whether Stalin should be praised or buried. Underlying such antagonisms and contributing to them, however, have been deep-seated differences over modern weapons central to the initiation and aggravation of Sino-Soviet estrangement.

China's “Everyone a Soldier” movement of Autumn 1958 represents on paper perhaps the most ambitious military enterprise in the history of mankind. Two hundred and twenty million men and women of a predominantly agricultural population were to be transformed into an “ocean of soldiers,” equipped and prepared to defend their homeland against the invader.

The second half of 1927 is one of the most obscure periods in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. From a large and well-organised force openly playing a major role in the political and military affairs of the country, the Chinese Communist Party rapidly found itself reduced to a few small remnants fighting for their existence. As a result, the printed sources available for future historians were drastically reduced. The Communists cut their output of publications both for lack of the means to produce them, and because it was no longer prudent to reveal even as much about their plans as they had done before. The Nationalist authorities further decimated this scanty output by confiscation and repression. So much of what has been written about this period is based on verbal testimony or secondary sources, and cannot be regarded as altogether reliable.

One of the most pressing needs of the Chinese Communists when they established their régime, was to convert the sprawling semi-guerrilla force which had brought them to power into a modern army capable of maintaining that power. China's leaders were acutely aware of this need and they lost little time in launching the armed forces on the long march to modernisation. No modernisation, however, could have succeeded without large numbers of officers skilled in running a complex military establishment. The Red Army commanders, though resourceful and battle-tested, were by and large not equipped for this task. It was necessary, therefore, to develop a professional officer corps.

An interesting reconstruction and description of the Nanchang Uprising of August 1, 1927, which the Chinese Communist Party and the people on the Mainland now celebrate as Red Army Day, was given by Colonel Guillermaz in The China Quarterly, No. 11. As a footnote I present translations of four accounts by three participants—Li Li-san, Chang Kuo-t'ao and Chou I-ch'ün—all written within a few weeks of the smashing of the revolt on about October 1 near Swatow, together with four other nearly contemporary Communist items.

Mao Tse-tung, the Marxist, may believe in the “objective” and “inevitable” forces of history, but Mao, the politician, general and revolutionary has argued that Communist success depends on the “subjective factor of ability of direction.” This article analyses the variation in the Chinese Communist definition of good military leadership and the relationship between this definition and officer training programmes.

Perhaps the most significant development affecting the Chinese army in recent months has been the campaign to “Learn from the Experience of the People's Liberation Army in Political and Ideological Work” launched by the People's Daily editorial of February 1, 1964. In the context of the nation-wide emulation movement, the Liberation Army's achievements in this field of political work make it a model for the whole nation to “learn from, study and compare with.” Industries, commercial enterprises, government departments, trade unions, rural work cadres and other important sections of the community are reported to have taken up the challenge to “learn from the People's Liberation Army.” At the same time there has been an exceptional quantity of news about the political achievements of the Army and of its model soldiers and companies.