The recent spate of English-language exposés of Mao Zedong, most prominently that written by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, seems to announce a culmination of the tendency towards the temporal-spatial conflation of 20th-century Chinese and global history. This sense was only confirmed when the New York Times reported in late January that George W. Bush's most recent bedtime reading is Mao: The Unknown Story, or when, last month, according to a column in the British paper The Guardian, “the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the ‘crimes of totalitarian communist regimes,’ linking them with Nazism…” The conflation, then, is of the long history of the Chinese revolution with the Cultural Revolution, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, of Mao Zedong with every one of the most despicable of the 20th century's many tyrants and despots. In these conflations, general 20th-century evil has been reduced to a complicit right-wing/left-wing madness, while China's 20th century has been reduced to the ten years during which this supposed principle of madness operated as a revolutionary tyranny in its teleologically ordained fashion. In this way are the dreams of some China ideologues realized: China becomes one central node through which the trends of the 20th century as a global era are concentrated, channelled and magnified. China isglobal history, by becoming a particular universalized analytic principle, in the negative sense. That is, universality becomes a conflationary negative principle.

Economic development of a remote, mountainous region poses a challenge anywhere. Based on field research and documentary evidence, this article examines how such a development challenge has been addressed in Daocheng county, Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan province. In doing so, it investigates the different forms of economic development, how such development comes about, and the role played by government in economic development. The article also probes the broader socioeconomic consequences of economic development. The fact that Daocheng is a predominantly Tibetan county adds a nationality dimension to the issue of economic development.

For both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Guomindang (GMD), the experience of their political association from 1922 to 1927 had a profound effect on the later course of their development. This period has come to be known as the First United Front, though in fact this term cannot be used without initial reservation, since only the CCP spoke of a united front between it and the GMD. For the latter party, with its well-established revolutionary history, the term “admission of the communists” (rong gong) was invariably used to denote the opening up of GMD membership to members of a smaller and definitely junior political movement. The adoption of the communist designation in later years by many students of the period reflects in part the attention given by western scholarship to the development of the CCP during the critical years of the 1920s. However, even if the term “united front” is retained for convenience as a general rubric for the 1922–27 period, it is important that the Guomindang be subjected to careful scrutiny in its own right, so that the GMD-CCP relationship may be understood more fully. This is to be stressed, since the categories often applied to the GMD, such as “left” and “right,” while of value in some instances, on the whole blur or distort the wide range of opinion within that party on the question of communist involvement in it. Until the purge of the CCP took place in 1927, GMD attitudes towards the communists were characterized by much fluidity.

Since the founding of The People's Republic of China, research on the world economy has been developed on an unprecedented scale, although not without setbacks. The Cultural Revolution and the activities of the “ gang of four ” seriously affected such research and virtually brought it to a halt for 10 years. However, the removal of the “ gang of four ” has meant that work on the world economy has revived and reached a completely new stage of development.

Hsiung Hsiang-hui, Peking's Chargé d'Affaires in London, is one of the extremely few American-educated Chinese Communists. Now in his mid-forties, Hsiung comes from a large and well-to-do gentry family (his father was once a district judge) in which, as the second son, he bridled under the petty tyrannies of his elder brother. By the mid-1930s he was a student in one of China's finest universities, Tsinghua, where he first came into contact with left-wing elements. After the war broke out in 1937, he studied briefly in Changsha but then joined the First Army of Hu Tsung-nan, a top KMT general. After a year's schooling in the Central Cadets School in Sian, Hsiung became aide-de-camp to General Hu, a post he held from about 1940 to 1943. Hu began to suspect him of being a communist and, to get him out of the way, assigned him back to the Cadets School. Towards the end of the war Hsiung attended a training course established by Hu in preparation for taking over areas held by the Japanese. After this, Hsiung took and failed a government scholarship examination. But then Hu provided the necessary funds for Hsiung to study in the U.S.

Among the minority of Communist Parties supporting China at the Moscow Conference last November was the Australian party. The feuds that have riven that Party since then illustrate the most damaging result for the Communist movement of the Sino-Soviet dispute—the end of the era of unique ideological authority.

Some 150 Germans in all served as advisers to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) in the decade between the Guomindang's Northern Expedition against the warlords (1927–28) and the end of the first year of Japan's full-scale invasion. Their importance to a government struggling to survive and modernize in the face of Japanese aggression and the threat of rural-based communism is recognized, and several studies describe the diplomacy and work of the unofficial mission at Nanking. But it is difficult in military as in civil reform to uncover how policies worked in practice. Chinese plans and pronouncements tended to gloss over contemporary realities, of which the most intractable were the persisting habits of warlordism within ex-warlord and even nominally Central armies. A cross-check of German, American, and British assessments with evidence from the Chinese side can indicate how genuine were the reform efforts, how influential the German officers, how intrusive warlord-style habits, and how impressive the results. I shall focus here on the neglected topics of German-directed officer education and troop training, and the much misunderstood German role in Chiang Kai-shek's strategy.

During the period of the Readjustment China has faced numerous and difficult problems in the sphere of energy. The two greatest difficulties now confronting the Chinese are energy supply and energy transport. Even if we put aside for a moment the long-range aspects of these problems, the immediate issues are complex. At present energy investment is directed towards securing the supply in the long run, but while this is occurring shortages remain acute, and conservation and increased efficiency of utilization are critical.

The purpose of this article is to describe the developments in rural trade following on the formation of the rural people's communes in 1958, but first it is necessary to say something about the events leading up to the situation in the summer of that year. This topic has been treated by the author at greater length elsewhere. A brief summary of certain points must, however, be made in order to sketch the background of the present subject.

On October 15, 1957, Communist China and the Soviet Union signed an agreement on new defence technology according to which the Soviet Union would supply China with technical data for manufacturing nuclear weapons. In May 1958 Foreign Minister Ch'en Yi told German correspondents in Peking that China would make atomic bombs. On June 20, 1959, the Soviet Union, according to China, unilaterally abrogated the 1957 agreements on weapons development. On July 31, 1963, China issued a statement denouncing the Moscow Partial Test Ban Treaty as “a big fraud to fool the people of the world.” On October 16, 1964, China announced that an atomic device had been exploded in western China and proposed that “a summit conference of all the countries of the world be convened to discuss the question of the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons.”