The policy declaration and the appeal to the peoples of the world adopted last December by the Moscow conference of eighty-one Communist parties mark the end of one phase in the dispute between the leaderships of the ruling parties of China and the Soviet Union—the phase in which the followers of Mao for the first time openly challenged the standing of the Soviet Communists as the fountain-head of ideological orthodoxy for the world movement. But the “ideological dispute” which began in April was neither a sudden nor a self-contained development: it grew out of acute differences between the two Communist Great Powers over concrete diplomatic issues, and it took its course in constant interaction with the changes in Soviet diplomatic tactics. Hence the total impact of that phase on Soviet foreign policy on one side, and on the ideology, organisation and strategy of international Communism on the other, cannot be evaluated from an interpretation of the Moscow documents alone, but only from a study of the process as a whole, as it developed during the past year on both planes.

Representatives of the Communist and Workers' Parties have discussed at this Meeting urgent problems of the present international situation and of the further struggle for peace, national independence, democracy and socialism.

When in 1953 the Central Obrera Boliviana was examining the proposals for agrarian reform submitted by a commission appointed by the President of Bolivia, the Communist José Pereira criticised the proposals and read out a draft law on agrarian reform which, in the opinion of the Communists, adequately met Bolivian conditions. Nuflo Chavez, Minister for Peasant Affairs, stated that this Communist draft was an almost literal translation of the Chinese agrarian reform law of 1950.

Strictly speaking, recognition is a formal legal act. It involves interchangeable commitments to undertake certain mutual obligations according to international law and custom. In a broader sense, it is a formal declaration of intention to carry on relations with other states in the society of nations.

This paper attempts to develop some hypotheses concerning Communist China's political strategy toward the Asian area, with particular reference to the function in this strategy of neutralism. I have chosen November 1957 as the initial date for the period to be examined in the belief that a major shift in the overall Chinese line on both domestic and international problems took place at or about this time. At the root of this shift was the Chinese conviction that a decisive shift in the world balance of power, symbolised by Sputnik I, had occurred. I take this Chinese estimate to be genuine and to provide the essential standpoint from which all problems of foreign political strategy have been evaluated by the Chinese for the past three years.

Throughout Asia agriculture is still the largest single economic sector and the village is the principal form of human society. Outside Japan on the Pacific and Israel on the Mediterranean shores of the Asian continent the villages provide the homestead and determine the way of life of three-quarters to four-fifths of the population, and as a rule two-thirds to three-quarters of the working people are engaged in agricultural pursuits. Villagers not occupied in this way usually earn their living by processing, financing and trading the products of their communities. The town dwellers, rapidly increasing in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the total population, are rarely far removed geographically and in their mental make-up from their ancestors. As much as two-thirds of their personal expenditure is spent on foodstuffs and thus a substantial portion of urban incomes flows back to the countryside.

In his Burma in the Family of Nations (Amsterdam, 1956), Dr. Maung Maung, Burma's modern jurist-scholar, tried to dissipate the impression —created according to him by Chinese nationalist pride rather than legal rights—that Burma had at any time in her history borne tribute to the Imperial Court of China. It must have made him shudder that hundreds of his compatriots should shout “Chou En-lai wan sui” when the latter visited their country in mid–April 1960. For Burma relations with mainland China in recent years have been in many ways difficult. When China under the Nationalists had to trade space for time vis-à-vis powerful Japanese invaders in the late 1930s, the building of the Burma Road almost inevitably led to a common defence of the two neighbours in later stages of the Second World War. Between 1942 and 1945 Chinese troops were in and out of Burmese territory, and Burmese freedom fighters and independence leaders likewise used China as their shelter and planning headquarters. The Chinese Nationalist Government expressed its readiness to exchange Ambassadors with Burma in September 1947, when the latter had hardly completed the formalities of its independence pact with Britain. But no sooner had the Burmese envoy been appointed to Nanking than the latter had to face the menace of the Chinese Communists, whose leader, Mao Tse-tung, had himself supported Burmese independence as early as 1945.

In our third issue, Lord Lindsay of Birker reviewedFeng Pao Shih Nien, an account of the Communist Chinese régime given by a leader of the China Democratic League who had co-operated with it until 1956 when he fled to Hong Kong. Since then, the book has appeared, reduced in size, in an English translation entitledTen Years Of Storm. In his review, Lord Lindsay indicated the main points of interest in Mr. Chow's work. Here we print, with the kind permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, two eyewitness accounts from the book. The first describes an episode during the 1951 campaign against counter-revolutionaries; the second is even more personal, telling as it does of the attacks made on Mr. Chow himself during the “Three-Anti Movement” against waste, corruption and bureaucracy in 1952.