Not until the Tenth Party Congress in August 1973 did the Chinese mass media openly refer to the “Lin Piao affair.” Yet, almost all Chinese - including Kwangtung commune members - had been given an explanation for his demise sometime previously, so the revelations of the Tenth Congress came as no surprise. Without help from the mass media, but with guidance from the network of political study groups, the Chinese had been taught how to decode such esoteric phrases as “Liu Shao-ch'i type swindlers” which appeared in the media. The dissemination of information about Lin Piao was the most dramatic but not the first indication of China's dual communication network: the open, mass media and the closed system contained within the bureaucracy (except for the final link to the populace). To cite other prominent examples, a recorded tape of Mao's important 27 February 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” was played for select audiences long before the revised version was published in June 1957. The series of edicts on agriculture and the socialist education campaign in the early 1960s were widely disseminated; yet the open press only reflected the spirit of the documents. Mao's interview with Edgar Snow that explained and sanctified Nixon's visit went unrecorded in the open media, but circulated widely among cadres.

It is remarkable how little is known about current contraceptive practice, family planning, and population growth in the People's Republic of China. Since so little is published by the Chinese themselves - virtually nothing since the mid 1960s - nearly all western literature on these topics comes from professional “China-watchers” (primarily social scientists) and from occasional first hand reports of travellers. This latter group has not included experts in contraception and family planning nor, with one notable exception, have physicians who have recently written on medicine in China addressed themselves to the topic of fertility control, so that, until now, hardly anybody seems to have bothered about “contraceptive hardware” especially of the sophisticated type such as steroid oral contraceptives. Yet this is precisely the area where one could gain a real insight into Chinese chemical and clinical competence. Indeed, if production figures of such contraceptives could be ascertained, this would be the first hard numerical evidence about the extent of contraceptive practice in the People's Republic. I am convinced that, at this stage, it is impossible to write a definitive treatise on contraceptive practice in China. The country is too large, national statistics are unavailable, many areas are not yet open to foreigners and the extent of contraceptive usage - qualitative and quantitative - is still very uneven. The current need is for individual reports by professionally qualified observers citing data which, as far as possible, are backed up by hard facts. Once a sufficient number of such studies has appeared, then the time might be ripe for someone, ideally a Chinese author, to discuss the topic authoritatively from a national perspective.

Foreigners, whether inside China or abroad, have been left in ignorance of the fate of the Chinese legal system during and after the Cultural Revolution. In particular, with the exception of a few obviously temporary decrees of the Cultural Revolution period, virtually no major legislation of any kind has reached the outside world or even been mentioned in the Chinese press. The appearance of a pamphlet published by the Ministry of Communications in February 1972 and containing the Regulations for the Carriage of Goods by Water (hereafter referred to as the Regulations) is therefore an event of some interest.

It has long been known that, after superintending the secret foundation of the Indochina Communist Party (ICP) in Hong Kong on behalf of the Comintern, between February and October 1930, Ho-chi-Minh stayed on in disguise and was eventually detected and detained by the colonial authorities. What happened to him whilst in custody, and how long he so remained, has often been related but, unfortunately, this has never been done accurately and has sometimes been done fancifully. Indeed, in part because of Ho's own lifelong efforts to mislead the rest of the world about his identity, movements and purposes, error has persisted over the Hong Kong episode, including the version of the late Bernard Fall. To cite but one of many examples, when Ho died in 1969, The Times published an obituary in which the story of his detention in Hong Kong, and of the subsequent appeal on his behalf to the Privy Council on a suit for writ of habeas corpus, was highlighted and accompanied by the gloss that he had been defended by no less a luminary than Sir Stafford Cripps. At once, the late Mr D. N. Pritt, the communist Q.C., (senior attorney) wrote to correct this error, explaining that he himself had been retained as counsel for Ho, while Cripps had acted on behalf of the Hong Kong Government, in his capacity of United Kingdom Solicitor-General. But Pritt fell into error himself here: not only would it have been inappropriate for the Solicitor-General to plead on behalf of the Hong Kong Government, but at the time in question (June 1932) Cripps had been out of office for 10 months. As we shall see below, Cripps's true standing in the matter was as defence counsel retained by the Hong Kong Government's London solicitors, Messrs Burchells. In his version of the story, Pritt's memory had betrayed him into misdating the whole episode from 1931–32 to 1930–31; and, indeed, even J. H. Brimmel, usually such a careful author, had made the same mistake 10 years before.

The Nixon administration's new China policy has had many political repercussions in the world, among the most important being the Sino-Japanese rapprochement. From a long-term point of view, such a rapprochement would, of course, have occurred regardless of the Nixon policy. As early as 1951, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida made the realistic remark: “Red or white, China remains our next-door neighbour. Geography and economic laws will, I believe, prevail in the long run over any ideological differences and artificial trade barriers.”

The spectacular rise of Wang Hung-wen, who was elected as second Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Tenth Party Congress in August 1973 and now officially ranks number three in the Party hierarchy behind only Chairman Mao Tse-tung and the first Vice-Chairman, Chou En-lai, has aroused a great deal of speculation. The biographical sketch below is an attempt to consider, and answer where possible, some of the questions raised about his personal and political background.

During March 1973, I was part of a study tour visiting, as is common with such groups, a variety of units in China. My own particular subject is education and I was therefore particularly interested in the various educational institutions we visited as a group: such as the Canton Medical College, Peking University, Nanking University, Futan University, Canton Province Teachers’ Training College and middle and primary schools. At Nanking and Futan universities I was also able to have discussions, separately from the main group, on purely educational issues

Readers of this journal who, like myself, have been interested by Colin Mackerras’ article on “Chinese Opera after the Cultural Revolution (1970–72)” in The China Quarterly, No. 55, may like to have some comments on the fate of traditional Peking opera in Taiwan. There, too, there has been “reform” although not generally in such an obvious or dramatic form as on the mainland. At first sight indeed, one might think that ways in which opera is treated on the mainland and in Taiwan are completely different, with the one concentrating on opera as a weapon in the social and political struggle and the other on the development of opera as an artistic form. Nevertheless, in studying aesthetic and theatrical aspects of the changes taking place in Taiwan, which is my main academic interest in the subject, I have been struck by the fact that these can in no way be disentangled from social and political forces.

Although many readers would probably interpret William Parish's article in the previous issue of The China Quarterly (“Factions in Chinese Military Politics,” CQ, No. 56, pp. 667–699) as an attack on my 1969 assessment of the historic role of the Field Army in post-1950 Chinese politics, I am nevertheless sincerely grateful to him for keeping the dialogue about “loyalty systems” alive. Indeed, I am struck by the irony of our respective positions. He seems to argue that, while the Field Army loyalty system apparently (according to my statistics) had little demonstrable impact on elite assignments before the Cultural Revolution, the same system apparently (according to his statistics) helps clarify factional behaviour within the PLA during and after the Cultural Revolution. The irony of this is doubled since the statistical evidence which I now have available argues that “the old boy net” of the Field Armies actually had a diminishing impact on the domestic politics of China in the late 1960s. By then the Military Region as a geo-political unit had replaced the Field Army as a temporary focus of individual and collective PLA loyalties.

William Parish in “Factions in Chinese Military Politics,” ( The China Quarterly, No. 56, p. 667) argues that military factions only assumed political importance during the Cultural Revolution. Part of this argument is based on the claim that Yang Ch'eng-wu, when acting chief of staff and secretary-general of the Central Committee's Military Affairs Committee, attempted to influence the appointment of PLA cadres to provincial revolutionary committees in favour of the 5th Field Army. This influence, he demonstrates, by considering the distribution of PLA cadres with known Field Army affiliations on two groups of provincial revolutionary committees: those formed before and those formed after 8 March 1968 – the date of Yang's last public appearance. Parish argues that a significantly greater proportion of military cadres with a 5th Field Army background were appointed to those Provincial Revolutionary Committees formed before 8 March 1968, than one would have expected given the distribution of such cadres in military posts in 1966. Since he had previously argued that military appointments before 1967 were made without reference to Field Army affiliations, he concludes that Yang was engaged in factional politics. However, Parish's account of Yang Ch'engwu's activities is very much open to question on the grounds that the available evidence suggests that most military appointments to the leading positions (i.e. chairman or vice-chairman) on Provincial-level Revolutionary Committees were determined well before the formal establishment of these institutions and before Yang's dismissal.