On 9 September 1976, at 4 p.m., Peking time, Radio Peking announced that Chairman Mao Tse-tung had died that morning at ten minutes past midnight, at the age of 82, because of his steadily worsening physical condition. The actual cause of death, beyond his age, was not given, but it was generally believed that he died of advanced Parkinson's disease or cerebral arteriosclerosis.

Obviously, literature is a question of quality rather than quantity. In a speech given on 19 June 1961, which was only published in the Literary Gazette (Wenyi bao) in February 1979 as the cultural testament of the late premier, Zhou Enlai drew a crude parallel between literary and industrial outputs: “Certain laws governing material production also hold good for mental production. When pressed too far mental production will suffer, perhaps even more seriously. Quotas and pressures of time are vexing problems for mental workers. Take the writing of poetry as an example. Among our leading cadres, Comrade Chen Yi likes to write poems. He composes very quickly and is a prolific writer. He is a genius in this respect. But, it is different with Chairman Mao. He writes only after much deliberation. Though he writes less, he writes with such magnificence and vitality and produces extremely concentrated poems. We should not demand a poem a day from Chairman Mao, nor should we interfere with Comrade Chen Yi and ask him to write less. Mental work cannot be uniform.”

The Canton rising of December 1927 was an event of international significance in Chinese Communist history. In order to understand it in proper perspective it is necessary to trace Comintern policy on rural and urban revolutions in China from 1920 to 1927. From the beginning the Comintern approach to the revolution in the East was different from that in the West. In the West the revolution was one of the industrial proletariat against the bourgeoisie with the rural toilers as the auxiliary revolutionary force. In the East, where there was almost no industrial proletariat or where, in some relatively advanced countries the industrial proletariat was just beginning to grow up, the Comintern supported the native bourgeoisie temporarily and the peasantry permanently in its grand strategy against “capitalist imperialism” and “feudalism” represented chiefly by landlords. While Comintern support for the bourgeoisie of the East was not expected to hinder future communist work against the native bourgeois democratic tendencies, Comintern support for the peasantry was so complete that no communist programme was considered possible in the pre-capitalist countries if it was not based on the peasant movement. The proletarian revolution was not a problem in the East at the outset.

In a famous article written in 1928 when the Left-wing writers of the Sun and Creation Societies were criticising Lu Xun for being behind the times, Qian Xingcun (A Ying) asserted that the age of Ah Q was already past. Fifty years later Chen Baichen's dramatization of Ah Q Zhengzhuan, which was staged in 1981 as part of the Lu Xun centenary celebrations, ends with the narrator declaring that although Ah Q had no women it was not true that he would have no descendants, because his line would continue for generations to come. It is, of course, possible to reconcile these two apparently contradictory statements. Qian Xingcun was referring to the fact that the peasant masses were becoming politically organized, having played an important role in the revolutionary movements of those years. He did not claim that people like Ah Q no longer existed. Chen Baichen, on the other hand, was referring to the Ah Q mentality which still lives on in people's minds, long after Ah Q himself has been executed. He did not see this mentality as the dominant force in society. Nevertheless there have been striking changes of attitude towards Ah Q in recent years. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution it has been generally recognized that the Ah Q mentality is still a force in China which is holding back attempts at modernization and that many other aspects of the Chinese traditional society and culture which Lu Xun criticized in his stories and essays have still not been eradicated 45 years after his death.

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.

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 first round of elections for local people's congresses was an important moment in the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to create an image of the common people as the “masters of the country.” Lower-class people were portrayed in official propaganda as “masters” who were also supporters of the Party. Yet, those “masters” nevertheless displayed diverse political attitudes that were influenced by different local political cultures, particularly in Beijing and Shanghai. The official propaganda promoting the “masters” was a Communist strategy to gain political legitimacy that ironically created the foundation for heterodox mass movements.