The Great Leap Forward was an attempt radically to transform, or perhaps more correctly, an attempt to begin a process of radically transforming the political and economic face of China. In China's still relatively small, but crucially important industrial systems, the legacy of the Great Leap was a very ambiguous one. This ambiguity, it should be noted, flowed to a much greater extent from the tentative nature of many unprecedented experiments in organization and incentives in China's factories and planning systems, than from the application of a consistently and logically injter-related set of “radical” or “dogmatic” principles applied a priori to social reality.

One of the most effective weapons used by the Kuomintang in its struggle against the Chinese Communist Party during the Kiangsi period was probably the allegation that the revolutionaries had completely destroyed morals, collectivized women and contributed to sexual chaos. In 1931, a Kuomintang newspaper went so far as to affirm that units of the Red Army had revolted against Mao Tse-tung at Fut'ien in December 1930 because they were opposed to the partition of land and the practice of sexual liberty in the Kiangsi Soviet. In 1934, among the 42 anti-communist slogans adopted by the nationalist authorities, five had to do with the theme of sexual morality. Thus, in the “white areas” of Kiangsi, wall posters appeared bearing the words, “The red bandits wish to destroy virtue: they practise free sex. They are savage beasts who abandon themselves to debauchery!” Or, “If women wish to preserve their chastity and enjoy familial happiness, they must take up arms to exterminate the red bandits!“

This paper sets out to examine various aspects of the contemporary Chinese social system and their political implications by studying the social and political attitudes of a subgroup of Chinese society. The general area of interest is social stratification in China: the bases of social differentiation in the new society and how these are perceived by its citizens; the extent to which changes in the structure of society have been accompanied by changes in social attitudes; the extent to which ideological campaigns to change attitudes have been successful; the limitations placed by the stratified nature of society in its transitional stage of socialism on the effectiveness of ideological and political education.

In most contemporary developing societies, the responsibility for directing broad social and economic change is assumed by the government. The success or failure of these government sponsored programmes often hinges narrowly on the degree of administrative capacity at the regional and local levels. Programmes which are otherwise well designed and funded at the national level may founder for lack of effective local organization.

It is very likely that in the near future the oceans will constitute the main source of international conflict. The world has an ever increasing need for the ocean's fish and minerals, and modern technology now makes it possible to exploit these resources to a degree previously unheard of. But only the industrialized countries can afford such exploitation because of the tremendous amounts of money and expertise involved. The less developed countries are no longer prepared to accept such a situation and they have called for the establishment of international regulations that would ensure a fair distribution of the ocean's resources. An attempt to deal with these problems was made at a U.N. conference held in Caracas, Venezuela, which opened on 20 June 1974.

During a visit to China in June 1973, a group of young civil servants from the École Nationale d'Administration, myself amongst them, had several interesting interviews, particularly with Han-leï and Wang Si-yi, two experts from the People's Bank of China, in Peking. This was, as far as I know, the first time since the Cultural Revolution that visitors have had the chance to gather official information on current Chinese monetary policy and on the role of the People's Bank in the economic life of the country. One can define the Chinese monetary and financial system by the following formula: the People's Bank, the sole autonomous financial institution, receives the deposits of private individuals, enterprises, people's communes and State departments, and it grants loans to enterprises

The new improved relations with China have placed China specialists in the United States, and in some other countries as well, in an apparently contradictory position. On the one hand, direct contact is now possible: instead of being confined to libraries an ocean away or visiting Hong Kong a border away, China specialists can now look forward to visiting China itself, and to experiencing at first hand what before was principally a mental concept. On the other hand, it appears that most of the scholarly exchanges will be in areas such as physics, medicine, and the biological sciences, and that social scientists in general and China specialists in particular are low on the priority list of people being admitted to China. There are exceptions to this, of course, including fields such as population studies and early childhood development, and perhaps archaeology, art, and language. Still, it is undeniable that the opportunities for doing research in China are very limited. So near and yet so far.

Readers may be interested in the status of the concept of “alienation” and of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (where the topic is most extensively discussed) in mainstream Chinese Marxism. The topic is important, among other reasons, because it has figured so prominently in “revisionist” philosophical writings of the problem of freedom in societies where the bureaucracy becomes a new class. The points I am about to make are based both on my own research and on talks with philosophers in the People's Republic in 1973.

The performance of the Chinese economy is a subject of great interest to many people, and a number of western scholars have put considerable effort into estimating the growth of China's national product, but no one has made use, either directly in his calculations or indirectly as a check on his work, of the aggregative data that Premier Chou En-lai gave to the late Edgar Snow during the winter of 1970–71.