Chiang Kai-shek rebuilt his régime on Formosa not through his military might alone. Rather, he succeeded through rallying a group of intellectuals who could help him consolidate his rule on Formosa, work on propaganda, attract foreign aid and organise military control.

China lost her Soviet experts. But this did not mean the end of foreigners working in China. Instead of employing engineers and technicians from the motherland of Socialism, the Chinese Government is now employing a motley assortment of foreigners, almost exclusively from non-Communist countries, as language teachers and as “polishers” for foreign language publications.

It would amount to a serious error of judgment to treat North Vietnam's economic development as a mere pocket edition of the Chinese or Soviet experiment. It is, of course, true that many features of economic policy adopted by the bearded ruler of Hanoi show clear signs of their Pekingese or Muscovite parentage. As far back as 1954 Ton Duc Thanh, chairman of the Vietnamese Popular Front, Lien Viet, had pointed to the current Soviet scene as his country's target for the future.

The proposition needs no arguing that it would be desirable from everybody's point of view if some way could be found of bringing the 600 million people of mainland China back into effective, approximately normal relations with all the rest of the world. It is often argued that the early realisation of what the present Communist régime on the mainland claims as its legal and moral right—to represent China in the United Nations—would go very far towards accomplishing the purpose. I must confess to a considerable scepticism concerning the predictions often made about the changes in attitude and behaviour the Chinese Communists would display if they were admitted to the United Nations. Communist China's external relations depend on a number of factors besides her standing in the United Nations. There has been nothing in China's actions or declarations over the years to indicate that U.N. membership is so highly valued by the Chinese that they would of their own accord significantly modify any of their other major goals in order to achieve this one. The record indicates rather that the contrary is true.

This essay is an attempt to recreate the events of 1955–57–the “high tide” of co-operativization – in a single province of China (Jiangsu). Whereas the other articles in this Special Issue of The China Quarterly view the same events with the benefits of hindsight, as provided by documentary materials and other evidence that have become available since the end of the Mao Era, the account given here is based on contemporary reports – above all, provincial press reports. The intention is thereby not only to give a flavour of the extraordinary atmosphere that surrounded one province's response to Mao's 31 July 1955 speech, but also to convey the tensions and policy dilemmas that emerged during the second half of the year and into 1956. Even allowing for the bias of official media reports, the evidence and analysis presented here vividly highlight the complex factors – economic and social – bearing on policy making and policy implementation during 1955–56.

The Chinese and Russian Communists, as Marxist-Leninists, are fundamentally hostile towards religion, and are committed to its ultimate eradication. Although their attitudes towards religion are similar, their prescriptions for dealing with it are different. In essence, this difference arises from two divergent conceptions, one optimistic, the other pessimistic, regarding the progress of religion towards oblivion in a situation where the Communist Party has assumed leadership and where the “social” roots of religion have supposedly disappeared. The Chinese hold the optimistic view, a position which may be explained in part by the fact that institutional religion has traditionally been weak in China. I quote here C. K. Yang's description of institutional religion in China as it emerged in the modern period:

As an organised body, modern institutional religion had a very small priesthood, divided into minute units of two or three priests each, largely unconnected with each other. It had barely enough financial resources for subsistence for this scanty personnel. It was deprived of the support of an organised laity. … It did not participate in various organised aspects of community life such as charity, education, and the enforcement of moral discipline. There was no powerful centralised priesthood to dominate religious life or to direct operation of the secular social institutions.

Representatives of the Communist and Workers' Parties have discussed at this Meeting urgent problems of the present international situation and of the further struggle for peace, national independence, democracy and socialism.

What pessimistic observers have lamented as the collapse of Chinese civilisation is exactly the necessary undermining and erosion without which there could not have been a regeneration of an old civilisation.… The product of this rebirth looks suspiciously occidental. But scratch the surface and you will find that the stuff of which it is made is essentially the Chinese bedrock which much weathering and corrosion have only made stand out more clearly—the humanistic and rationalistic China resurrected by the touch of the scientific and democratic civilisation of the new world.