In July 1955 Mao Tse-tung made one of his rare public policy statements when he addressed party secretaries of provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions “on the question of co-operativisation.” It proved to be one of the most important speeches in recent Chinese history, terminating a dispute about the nature and timing of agricultural socialisation which had been going on inside the Chinese Communist Party for three years. Coming from Mao, this was not merely a contribution to the debate, but the final, authoritative pronouncement on what policy should be. Its impact was swift and dramatic. At that time only 16.9 million (14·2 per cent.) of the 120 million peasant families in China were members of co-operatives, almost all of which were semi-socialist in character. Hardly any fully socialist collectives existed. But between autumn 1955 and spring 1956, a “high tide of socialism in the countryside” transformed most of Chinese agriculture, replacing the traditional small privately-owned farms by large co-operatives and collectives. By May 1956,91·2 per cent. of China's rural households had joined co-operatives, 61·9 per cent. of them collectives.

From an economic point of view, a ration coupon can serve at least three purposes: it can control the movement of people from one place to another, thereby easing employment, housing and transportation problems; it can distribute basic necessities, such as foodstuffs, more evenly in times of scarcity; and it can shift purchasing power away from certain goods, thus helping to maintain stable prices on these goods during periods of inflationary pressure. However, while each of these goals can be analysed in a narrowly economic framework, it is important to consider their political consequences as well. Inflation, for example, may cause political discontent even before it brings about economic dislocation. Any consideration of Peking's rationing policies, therefore, must touch on both the economic and non-economic aspects of the problem.

In 1958, the Chinese Communist leadership agreed on a revised set of basic principles governing the relationship between the Party and the Army, These principles, which involved a move away from the professionalisation of the Army, became summarised in the slogans “politics in command” and “the Party commands the gun. The changes reflected a decision to continue to rely on a revolutionary strategy based on people's war despite the decision to devote substantial resources to nuclear weapons. After a bitter dispute between the Party and the Army, Mao decided to reject Khrushchev's proposals for a unified nuclear command and to rely on an expanded military force to deter an American attack. Moreover, the Party emphasised the need to put military units to work in the economy. It thus turned the Army away from increased professionalism and technical training towards organising the militia and participating in economic construction work. Like other salient features of the Maoist view revealed at that time the 1958 guide lines for Party-Army relations assumed that a satisfactory balance could be achieved between professional modernisation and the role of the expert, on the one hand, and political mobilisation or “revolutionisation” (ideological “redness”), on the other. It was the Army's resistance to these moves that led to the purge of major military leaders, including P'eng Teh-huai in 1959.

During the heyday of the Hundred Flowers period the Chinese literary rebels sought their models outside China. They understood that, if liberalisation were to have any chance at all, it should reach China via the communist countries and not via the Western world. Therefore many Chinese writers studied Soviet literature, and made no secret of their admiration for those Soviet writers who had presented unorthodox views, or views that, though correct in the Soviet Union, seemed to be unorthodox in the Chinese context. Zoshchenko, Ehrenburg, Galina Nikolayeva, Ovechkin and Simonov were admired by the very Chinese writers who were later labelled as major “rightists,” such as Liu Pin-yen, Ch'in Chao-yang and Huang Ch'iu-yün. Several liberal Chinese writers also readily adopted the Soviet habit of extolling the Russian classics as literary models. Thus, in 1956, during the Chinese commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Dostoyevsky's death, one Chinese critic spoke of “humanism” (jen-tao-chu-i) as one of Dostoyevsky's contributions. Feng Hsüeh-feng praised the humanistic spirit of the old Russian literature and criticised contemporary Chinese works as untruthful. Hsiao Ch'ien, another major “rightist,” in an essay on short story writing advocated the style of Chekhov and I. A. Bunin. One dogmatic Party leader, moreover, was criticised by the non-conformists for having a low opinion of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

Any discussion of the PLA leadership over the past fifteen years is inevitably hampered by lack of information. No “Army List” is published in China, and while major appointments are usually announced, dismissals are almost always left to be inferred. The names of military office-holders have to be correlated from isolated attributions in the Chinese press, with the proviso that the protracted non-appearance of an individual's came does not necessarily indicate his absence from active duty or his demotion.

Hsiung Hsiang-hui, Peking's Chargé d'Affaires in London, is one of the extremely few American-educated Chinese Communists. Now in his mid-forties, Hsiung comes from a large and well-to-do gentry family (his father was once a district judge) in which, as the second son, he bridled under the petty tyrannies of his elder brother. By the mid-1930s he was a student in one of China's finest universities, Tsinghua, where he first came into contact with left-wing elements. After the war broke out in 1937, he studied briefly in Changsha but then joined the First Army of Hu Tsung-nan, a top KMT general. After a year's schooling in the Central Cadets School in Sian, Hsiung became aide-de-camp to General Hu, a post he held from about 1940 to 1943. Hu began to suspect him of being a communist and, to get him out of the way, assigned him back to the Cadets School. Towards the end of the war Hsiung attended a training course established by Hu in preparation for taking over areas held by the Japanese. After this, Hsiung took and failed a government scholarship examination. But then Hu provided the necessary funds for Hsiung to study in the U.S.

One of the most notorious episodes in the history of the communist movement in Manchuria, and one that involved both the Chinese and the Korean Communists, was the so-called Min-sheng-t'uan incident of 1933–36. In today's North Korean régime, where some of the veterans of the Manchurian guerrilla activities hold positions of leadership, the incident is often cited as a prime example of incorrect handling of enemy infiltration of the revolutionary ranks. Many years after the incident Premier Kim Il-song stated: “The Japanese set up an anti-revolutionary organisation called the Minsaengdan and infiltrated its members into the revolutionary district in Chientao. The object of the scheme was, through this organisation, to estrange the Koreans from the Chinese and to incite the Koreans to fight among themselves. Temporarily deceived by the trick, [we] engaged in murders within our ranks and many innocent people were sacrificed.” Indeed, the incident had a grave impact upon the Korean Communists and eventually upon the communist movement in Manchuria as a whole.

No reader of the polemics in the Sino-Soviet dispute can fail to have noticed the importance of issues of nuclear war and disarmament. Among the bitterest exchanges were the statements issued by the spokesmen of the two governments following the signing of the test ban treaty in 1963. The Chinese have launched a broad attack on the Soviet position on disarmament issues most notably in the Fifth Comment on the Soviet Open Letter published on November 8, 1963.

The chief purpose of this discussion is to suggest areas of inquiry which might illuminate the way in which China may have influenced Soviet disarmament policy in recent years. One must be careful not to exaggerate Chinese influence on Soviet disarmament policy. There are obviously many other factors: domestic political considerations, relations with the East European countries, relations with less developed countries, relations with the West, including the Soviet assessment of the strategic “correlation of forces,” and sometimes perhaps even disarmament considerations per se. In recent years there may have been a tendency to look too much to the Chinese in seeking explanations for Soviet behaviour in the disarmament field, partly because the drama of the evolving Sino-Soviet split was so fascinating that all else seemed to pale in significance and partly because “China” sometimes seemed a convenient explanation for otherwise baffling Soviet moves. I propose, rather arbitrarily, to analyse Soviet disarmament policy in four categories: (1) tactics on formal disarmament conferences; (2) the formal proposals put forward by the U.S.S.R.; (3) the general thrust of Soviet disarmament propaganda; and (4) decisions, or what appear to be decisions, by the U.S.S.R. to negotiate seriously for the purpose of actually achieving an agreement.

There is one substantial difference between Chinese and Soviet attitudes toward the spread of nuclear weapons. From the point of view of the Soviet Union, China is basically an Nth country and a potentially very powerful one at that. As a consequence, the Soviet position on the spread of nuclear weapons has been strongly influenced by the development of the Chinese nuclear programme and by the increasing cleavages in Sino-Soviet relations in recent years. For the Chinese, however, the question of nuclear diffusion refers only to the possible spread of nuclear weapons beyond the group of five powers which presently possess at least some nuclear capability. And although there are several additional powers in the international arena with nuclear potential that might eventually pose problems for China, none constitutes the immediate challenge which China herself does to the Soviet Union.