During the past 20 years, the politics of the Chinese in Malaya has been a subject of international interest.The Malayan Communist Party has been predominantly Chinese; it was Chinese politics in Singapore (briefly part of Malaysia) which produced the phenomenon of Lee Kuan Yew; and the Kuala Lumpur riots of May 1969 are widely thought to have been efforts to stem a Chinese challenge to Malay supremacy. The Chinese in West Malaysia, especially when taken together with those in Singapore, have earned the attention of governments, journalists and scholars alike. They form the largest concentration of Chinese outside of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong; their economic life is among the most sophisticated in Asia; their social and cultural life probably the most complex that Chinese anywhere have ever known; and, above all, their political life has been more open and exposed than that of any other kind of Chinese. This last, their political life, has been difficult to evaluate for a number of reasons. The main reason is that two contradictory views about them have long prevailed: that the Chinese are non-political and that the Chinese are political in a secretive and inscrutable way. These views are based on a concept of politics in the democratic tradition and are either anachronistic or misleading. Chinese, Malay and colonial political systems have been, in varying degrees, authoritarian, and Chinese political life must be seen in that context except in the period 1957–69.

The Resolutions of the Tsunyi Conference published recently in The China Quarterly will not fail to attract the attention of all those who take an interest in the history of the Chinese revolution. The importance of this document is indeed evident. It constitutes one of the missing links, and not the least, in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. With this document serving as a junction, one can henceforth make one's way through the Juichin-Tsunyi-Yenan stretch of the “Chinese way to communism” if not with a great deal more comfort, then at least with a little less uneasiness.

During the long-sustained diplomatic polemics which accompanied and expressed the Sino-Indian boundary dispute, each side accused the other of refusing to negotiate. The argument became involved and finally confused, with each blaming the other for setting unreasonable pre-conditions. All that is clearly appreciated is that, after the abortive Nehru-Chou En-lai summit meeting of April 1960, the boundary dispute between India and China was never submitted to negotiation. Since both parties to this dispute had repeatedly affirmed their commitment to negotiations as the only proper means of resolving international differences, the failure to resort to negotiations in this instance is striking—and it left the quarrel to the arbitrament of force in the 1962 border war. This article will follow the subject of negotiations through the diplomatic exchanges, and attempt to show why the dispute remained un-negotiated. This isolation of a single—though crucial—element in an extended and complex dispute will inevitably leave some questions unanswered and loose ends in the narrative: these, the writer hopes, are dealt with in his full study of the Sino-Indian dispute.

Traditional Chinese culture may be facing extinction. In the last two decades, since Mao Tse-tung's capture of the Mainland and Chiang Kai-shek's withdrawal to Taiwan, Chinese culture has been subjected to intense stress, not only in Communist China but on Taiwan as well. On the Mainland the Chinese tradition has been under attack from the government, the most recent and most violent assault being the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Communists under the leadership of Mao have consciously sought to destroy the old ways and to rebuild society and culture along new lines. The threat to traditional Chinese culture on Taiwan is more subtle, but none the less real. Cut off from its mainland base, Chinese tradition on Taiwan has been threatened from within by popular indifference and from without by strong western influences. The Nationalists, however, under the leadership of Chiang have inaugurated the Cultural Renaissance Movement on Taiwan for the avowed purpose of saving China's culture.

The writer on Chinese economic affairs may be forgiven for recalling an incident from early schooldays when the headmaster, introducing his pupils to The Odyssey, mused about its author: “Nobody, he said, knows for certain whether Homer ever lived; what is known, though, is that he was blind.” Turning to China, the student of contemporary affairs is similarly uncertain of his facts. He is facing the most populous, yet one of the industrially least advanced and statistically least well documented countries in the world. At the same time, China not only succeeded within two decades in developing its own nuclear striking force, but at the end of this short period of development it launched its first earth satellite. We are thus confronted with an entirely new situation, the study of which requires certain adjustments of the techniques of analysis usually applied. Today's “China-watchers” find themselves where 20 years ago the analysts of the Soviet scene were when they had to guess Stalin's intentions and successes on the strength of misleading indices related to unknown starting dates.

In the years 1955–56, when it had already become evident that the star of the Stalinist Rákosi-Gerö clique was on the wane in Hungary, Ho Te-ch'ing was the Chinese Ambassador in Budapest. It soon became apparent that he was quietly establishing connexions with the opposition. Not only did he have free access to the highest Party circles and maintained regular contact with the Foreign Ministry (as could be expected of a Party and state representative) but the Chinese Embassy sponsored an extensive intelligence apparatus and was generally regarded as the best informed foreign post in the Hungarian capital. The Cultural Attaché, who spoke Hungarian fluently, maintained contact with Hungarian intellectuals. At the same time, correspondents of the New China News Agency and the Chinese exchange students in Budapest reported to the Ambassador on the activities of the revolutionary Petöfi Circle and the universities. The Ambassador himself travelled widely in the country, becoming acquainted with the local Party secretaries, councilmen and other leaders in the towns and villages. He was also prominent in the social life of the Hungarian capital; his two cooks and staff providing a lavish Oriental touch. While the Soviet Embassy invited Hungarian Stakhanovists (elite workers) to its receptions, Ho was more interested in entertaining leading writers, artists, economists and newspapermen, even those who were not outspoken supporters of the regime.