Mao Tse-Tung utilised the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution to lecture delegates attending the Moscow Communist Party Conference on the correct method for dealing with erring comrades. Mao appeared to be offering his formula “unity-criticismunity” to other Bloc parties as a substitute for the violence and terror inherent in Stalin's periodic purging of the Soviet party. At the same time, Mao appeared to be giving assurances that Stalin's errors connected with the “cult of personality” could not possibly develop within the Chinese party.

When the victorious Tokugawa rulers of early seventeenth-century Japan brought an end to decades of warfare, the warrior class, the samurai, no longer had any wars to fight. However, the ideals of the samurai warrior did not die quickly, and new generations of samurai continued to learn the “martial arts” and to give obeisance to the model of the loyal and fearless warrior. In fact, however, under peaceful Tokugawa rule, the samurai gradually became an administrator-bureaucrat and took up the study of the “literary arts” which were more suited to his daily activities than studies of the martial arts.

While the partisans were expanding on the Shen-Kan border in 1932, San Yuan hsien became the centre of the peasant movement in the Wei Pei area. Developments seemed sufficiently promising for the Shensi Party to resolve on June 6, 1932 that a new soviet be created in the three hsien of San Yuan, Fu P'ing and Yao Chou, where land redistribution had begun and a revolutionary committee established.

Social critics and intellectuals since Sir Thomas More have subjected growing urban industrial centres to sweeping criticism. Much of city planning in the West is characterised by reassertion of rural values and rural self-sufficiency. The anti-city approach often takes the form of ‘planning Utopian communities in the country, free from the “excesses of urbanism.” However, in an industrialising country like China a different theme underlies the view of country-city relations. In predominantly rural China, and in the U.S.S.R. during early years of industrialisation, the emphasis of city planning shifts to the need to bring cities and industry to the land. The aim has been to spread industrial values and techniques to rural areas.

“The anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles of the people in Asia, Africa and Latin America,” says the Proposal Concerning the General Line, “are pounding and undermining the foundations of the rule of imperialism and colonialism. … In a sense therefore the whole cause of the international proletarian revolution hinges on the outcome of the revolutionary struggles of the people of these areas, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the world's population.”