We can be grateful that Edgar Snow once wrote, in his straightforward uncompromising style, a book about himself. He called it Journey to the Beginning. At a later point in the book he returned (briefly) to talk about his origins, but the “beginning” (Chapter One, line one) was: “When I first reached Shanghai. …”

When the history of Sino-American relations since 1949 is written in years to come, it will very likely lump together much of the two decades from the Korean War to the Kissinger-Chou meeting as a period of drearily sustained deadlock. Korean hostilities will be blended rather easily into Indochina hostilities, John Foster Dulles into Dean Rusk. The words and deeds of American East Asian intervention, of the containment and isolation of China, will seem an unbroken continuity. And at the end, under most improbable auspices but for commonsense balance-of-power reasons, will come the Zen-like Nixon stroke that cut the Gordian knot and opened a new era.

10 1969 was not only the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese People's Republic (C.P.R.); it also marked the culmination of China's fifth year as a nuclear power. During this five-year period there were 10 detonations, three of which were thermonuclear and one of which was tested underground. At least one of the warheads was fired from a guided missile. According to one estimate, current defence expenditures amount to 10 per cent. of China's gross national product, and one-fifth of this outlay is devoted to nuclear research and development alone. A large portion of China's advanced scientific and technical manpower has also been assigned to this field. Although an adequate delivery system for this limited nuclear capability, as of November 1971, is not known to be operational, China's progress in the research and development of advanced weapons has clearly been substantial. The launching of Chinese satellites in 1970 and 1971 and the likelihood of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test in the near future are further evidence of major technological achievement. Peking's entry, then, into the “nuclear club” has been a major concern of China's leaders; it has also had significant consequences for American defence planners. The explicit rationale for the Nixon Administration's expansion of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system in early 1970, for example, was to guard against the possibility of a Chinese attack in the 1980s and thus to assure the reliability of American defence commitments in East Asia and the Pacific.

Unlike the Bolshevik revolution, the Chinese revolution had little impact on the Indian nationalist elite. The liberation of the working class from the shackles of capitalism in Russia had stirred the minds of many leaders of the Indian nationalist movement, including Nehru. The liberation of the masses of the peasantry from the shackles of feudalism in China had no comparable impact. The Indian Communist Party (CPI) hailed the Chinese revolution as an epoch-making event, but continued to regard the Soviet Union as the fountainhead of doctrinal as well as tactical directions.

There are two sources of world civilization: one is the study, another is the prison. We the youth must make up our minds to enter the prison once out of the study, and enter the study once out of the prison. Only these provide the most lofty and sublime life. And only those civilizations born in these two places are true civilizations with life and value.

News of industrialization in China contains two special features which indicate that Chinese efforts in this field differ significantly from those in many other developing countries. The first is the strong emphasis on local industries and the other is the importance given to small and medium enterprises. Local industries include all industrial branches not attached to the central industrial departments, and all industrial enterprises run by provinces, administrative regions, counties, people's communes or production brigades. A number of these industries are attached to schools and hospitals, but the majority are small or medium enterprises run by counties, people's communes or production brigades. In this report I shall deal mainly with these enterprises, only discussing those at higher levels in so far as they have important relations with the lower level enterprises.

From 12 October to 13 November 1971 I listened to various forms of Chinese as it is spoken in the People's Republic. I listened with the ear of a Chinese educated – after leaving Amoy as a small child – in various dialects as they are spoken by Chinese in South-East Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States. I was pleased both as a Chinese and as a professional linguist to discover immediately that language as well as a Chinese face remains a social passport in the People's Republic just as in Chinese communities elsewhere. I entered at Shumchun through the gate for Chinese with my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Leta. Leta is even more fair-skinned and blonde than her American father, and an army guard on the bridge was somewhat startled to see a westerner coming in that way.