Ever since the 10th Party Congress in August 1973, what had been a rather quiet anti-Confucian campaign has been combined with a much fiercer anti-Lin Piao campaign to make a very broad onslaught on all who are backward-looking and opportunistic and who seek to “restore capitalism.” In many respects, there is nothing new in this. China has gone through many campaigns since the 1950s and 1960s, and attacking Confucius is something that dates back almost continuously to 1915. Also, using the past to criticize the present, using historical analogies for current political ends, praising or condemning contemporary figures by likening them to historical heroes and villains – all these the Chinese have been doing for centuries, sometimes crudely, sometimes with sophistication. But there is at least one refinement in the present two campaigns which is new and deserves attention. This is the juxtaposition of two historical processes in the combined campaigns which are not so much Chinese as Marxist. That is to say, apart from the moral judgments and the comparisons between Confucius and his disciples and Lin Piao and his followers, there is a new consciousness about comparing two periods separated from each other by more than 2,000 years but both marked by revolutionary transitions from one kind of society to another. In the case of Confucius, the period is described as one of transition from slave society to feudal society; in the case of Lin Piao, the present is marked by the transition from capitalism to socialism. For both periods, there is the common danger of class “restoration,” that is, from restorationist forces wanting to arrest the changes and turn the clock back. Furthermore, unlike past analogies which applied to China alone, this setting side by side of two dynamic processes discovered or determined through the application of Marxist theory is not confined only to China. The present campaign warns that the same dangers that confront China confront the rest of the world as well and thus seems to serve the additional purpose of stimulating Chinese awareness of the relevance of universal history.

The economic decentralization measures introduced in the late 1950s have long been viewed as a watershed in the economic and political evolution of post-1949 China. The most widely accepted interpretation is that these edicts transferred broad economic powers from the Centre to the provincial governments and that, as a result, the ability of the central government to control the allocation of the nation's economic resources was substantially impaired. This fundamental realignment in the internal balance of economic power is, in turn, viewed as having far-reaching implications for China's capacity for national economic planning and for a broad range of other important issues related to our understanding of China's developmental experience.

The subject of this article is the development of the second united front in China between 1935 and 1938, and in particular the difference between the Comintern and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on this question. In the first part of the period these differences revealed themselves in the Comintern's criticisms of the CCP's slow rate of progress towards rapprochement with the Kuomintang (KMT). As progress towards the united front gathered speed, they more and more came to centre on how far the alliance should go and the status of the communist areas and armies in relation to the central power of the KMT. Eventually the Maoist interpretation emerged successful from this contest between the two centres, and Wang Ming, chief Chinese spokesman for the Comintern, was elbowed away from the levers of power in the Party.

Although much has been written about Maoist economic theory (about the role of material and moral incentives, for instance, and about the relation between industry and agriculture), the recent appearance of the two volumes entitled Mao Tse-tung ssu-hsiong wan-sui and in particular five pieces therein (“Reading notes on the Soviet Union's Political Economy,” the three critiques of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. and Mao's comments on Stalin's “Reply to Comrades Sanina and Venzher”), permits analysis to push beyond “Maoist” economics into the theory of Mao himself. In fact these pieces in the Wan-sui on political economy may well be compared to Mao's public speeches and the Selected Works as Marx's Grundrisse is to Das Kapital.

The following interview took place in Canton on 13 May 1974, where my wife and I met five leading members of the Kwangtung Institute of Law and Political Science – Mr Kao Kun-feng, chairman, Mr Chiang Chun-chin, Mr Koo Yue-hua, Mr Wang Tieh-hsing and Mr Hsin Ban-chi. Most of the information was supplied by Mr Kao Kun-feng, whom some embassy experts in Peking believe to be – or to have been – the president of the intermediate court in Canton. The Institute of Law and Political Science of Kwangtung Province was described as a mass organization for research into law and for facilitating meetings with foreigners. It was compared to the law department of the Academy of Sciences in Peking which, however, was said to have more specialized sections than this provincial institute.