Szechwan province remain backward and poor, and the Chinese Communists say the "cultural revolution" and the "gang of four" were to blame. According to a Chungking dispatch in the Toronto Globe and Mail, the 90 million people in Szechwan work hard, many of them under primitive conditions.
Chinese Communist fishing vessels pulled out of the Tiaoyutai Islands in the South China Sea after harassing Japanese patrol ships for five days, the Maritime Safety Agency of Japan reported.
APRIL 17 - Chinese Communist boats reentered waters off the Tiaoyutai islands again, the Japanese Maritime Safety Agency said.
APRIL 18 - Canadian newsman Michael Enright, who visited the Chinese mainland recently, said "By any objective standards, the country is poor." In an article in MacLean's magazine, Enright said: "Rationing is still in effect in (Red) China. Coupons are necessary, for instance, to buy cotton products. Before a man can buy a new battery for his radio, if he has a radio, he must turn in the old one."
The Chinese Communists admit that they are now 15 to 20 years behind the scientific capabilities of the West, Daniel Greenberg wrote in the Washington Post.
APRIL 19 - Tank battles have taken place between Red China and Vietnam and fighting continues along their border, Swedish television reported.
Liu Shih-kun, Yeh Chien-ying's son-in-law and a pianist, was jailed for six years and his fingers were broken by the followers of the "gang of four" during the Peiping regime's "cultural revolution. "
Red China and India, whose populations increase by about one million people a month, are expected to have populations of over one billion each by the year 2000, the Population Reference Bureau Inc. reported. Red China now has an estimated population of 930 million, PRB said.
APRIL 20 - With deep hatred for Communist despotism, people on the Chinese mainland have been rebutting the Peiping powerholders in a variety of ways for their empty words in clamoring for modernization, according to intelligence reports from the mainland. Peiping citizens have called for "four fundamentalizations" against Peiping's cry for "four modernizations." The "four fundamentalizations" proposed are "bicycles as a means of transportation, wrist watches to keep time, sewing machines for clothes making and television sets for recreation."
Mao Tse-tung's favorite English interpreter has been put under arrest and is being interrogated, according to the Youth Warrior Daily. Miss Tang Wen-sheng was arrested as a hostage to prevent her father's defection in the United States, said the paper's Hongkong correspondent without naming the source of the information. Tang Chao-ming, the father, is currently one of the deputy secretaries general of the United Nations.
Government spokesman Syintaro Abe of Japan said any further incidents with Red China would make it difficult to resume "peace treaty" talks. Abe said the Red Chinese explanation as an accident of a prolonged infringement of waters around the Tiaoyutai Islands was hard to believe.
Amnesty International, a non-governmental organization advocating human rights, has deplored widespread arbitrary arrests on the Chinese mainland over the last 10 years. In its annual report for 1977, the organization said it had written and cabled Hua Kuo-feng several times during the year inquiring about detentions and executions of political offenders.
Adverse weather has caused damage to crops on the Chinese mainland this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The department said a cold snap on the North China plain in mid-April may have resulted in damage to wheat and barley.
APRIL 21 - Chinese Communist "ambassador" Wang Yu-ping failed to appear at a Moscow ceremony to mark the 108th anniversary of Lenin's birth, sparking speculation of a further downward slide in Soviet-Red Chinese relations.
Two educators on mainland China's southern island of Hainan have been expelled from the Communist party and two others reprimanded for helping their own children pass college entrance examinations, a Hongkong Communist newspaper reported.
APRIL 22 - The United States cannot accept Red China's terms for "normalizing relations" without diminishing the credibility of U.S. commitments around the world, former U.S. Ambassador George Bush said. Bush, who headed the U.S. liaison office in Peiping until 1975, said acceptance of Peiping's demand that the United States terminate its mutual defense treaty with the Republic of China would have serious implications for U.S. relations with its friends and allies.
Red China is transforming Cambodia's peasant guerrilla army into a force armed with modern weapons, according to Western analysts who predict Cambodia is in for a long and bloody conflict with Vietnam.
APRIL 23 - People on the Chinese mainland continue to voice their resistance and challenge against the despotic Peiping regime by denouncing the "people's congress" as anti-democratic and exposing the capriciousness of the Communist leaders, according to intelligence reports from the mainland.
Communist cadres at various levels in Peiping have not only been perfunctory in studying "documents of the 11th national congress" of the Communist party, but have often ridiculed the Communist party "central" and Communist leaders by quoting words or lines of Teng Hsiao-ping.
APRIL 24 - President Jimmy Carter should openly criticize human rights violations on the Communist-controlled mainland of China instead of keeping silent in face of charges of hypocrisy and expediency, according to Jerome Alan Cohen of Harvard.
John Fraser, Peiping correspondent of the Toronto Globe and Mail who visited Szechwan province recently, said "provincial daily newspapers are never available to foreign journalists and they are as hard to get hold of as anything in (Red) China."
Poor management and low wages appear to be still plaguing production modernization projects, according to an Asian Wall Street Journal report from Canton.
APRIL 25 - Colina MacDougall, a British Red China-watcher, said Peiping-Moscow relations have worsened appreciably in recent weeks. Writing for the Financial Times, she said Peiping's alarm at the Vietnam-Cambodia war and the Soviet involvement there has heightened its own sensitivity to territorial problems.
Breaking with Mao Tse-tung's concept of the peasant guerrilla army, Red China's new military masters have disclosed that the armed forces will be using modern weapons and skills as well as techniques borrowed from foreign armies. This new direction was spelled out in a decision on management of military academies taken by the Communist party military commission.
APRIL 26 - Chinese Communist radio reports conceded that the purge against followers of the "gang of four" headed by Chiang Ching has provoked serious social disturbances. They demanded that the ruthless maneuvers used in earlier liquidation campaigns such as the so-called "land reform," "suppression of counterrevolutionaries," "three anti's and five anti's," and the "four clean-ups" be used to deal with opponents within the regime.
A terrorist group calling itself the "Mafia" has appeared in Peiping, Shanghai and Canton, according to intelligence reports. The group, which is composed of students of the Foreign Language Institute in Peiping, made its first appearance late last year. Its terrorist activities include acts against foreigners such as assassination, bombing foreign embassies and sending threatening letters to foreign diplomatic missions.
A dozen former Red Guard leaders, including Kuai Ta-fu of Tsinghua University and Wieh Yuan tzu of Peking University, were arrested recently. A third person arrested was Tan Hou-lan, former radical leader of Peiping's Teacher Training College. The arrests were made after a criticism campaign.
Red China is stepping up its aid to Somalia in an effort to counter Soviet influence in the "horn of Africa," according to the Christian Science Monitor.
A Soviet delegation arrived in Peiping to resume talks with the Red Chinese on the long-smouldering dispute over borders, Tass newsagency reported. Tass said the Soviet delegation was headed by L.F. Ilyichev, Soviet deputy foreign minister.
APRIL 27 - Security personnel in Shansi have discovered 14 anti-Communist resistance groups operating in the province, according to an intelligence report.
Indonesian Information Minister Gen. Ali Murtopo told Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda that a Japan-Red China "peace and amity treaty" would pose a threat to the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Red China announced an emergency mobilization to fight drought affecting the Huai and Yellow River basins in the north.
Two Red Chinese newspapers called for an end to discrimination against cadres and students with a bad "class origin" or who committed political mistakes in the past.
APRIL 29 - Miss Nancy Tang, former interpreter of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, has "volunteered" to spend a term at a May 7 school for Communist cadres for re-education, an independent Hongkong newspaper reported.
APRIL 30 - A whole company of 160 soldiers in Chaoan, Kwangtung, was wiped out in an ambush by armed guerrillas while they were on their way to take up garrison duty in another place, according to an intelligence report.
MAY 1 - Many overseas Chinese visiting the Chinese mainland have found themselves in a desperate situation when they were refused exit for reasons never made known to them, according to returning travelers. Some of them, believed to be former refugees who had settled down in Hongkong for years after fleeing Communist rule, were reported to have been sent to labor camps in remote areas.
Peiping is suffering from an acute shortage of restaurants, causing chaotic conditions at meal times, People's Daily said. The paper said Peiping's 656 restaurants serve more than a million meals daily.
Red China's population has reached 900 million, a Yugoslav report from Peiping said.
U.S. Representative Bob Michel introduced legislation to require the State Department to send annual reports to the Congress on the human rights situation in Red China and other Communist countries.
MAY 2 - The London Financial Times reported in a dispatch from Hanoi that serious fighting took place between Red Chinese and Vietnamese troops on the border.
Murders, especially those for political purposes, have increased sharply on the Chinese mainland, an intelligence report said. The main reason is that Communist cadres have formed incompatible factions.
Red China's abandonment of the huge outdoor Peiping celebrations of its second biggest festival - May Day - raises an intriguing question. Did it call them off because it feared violence by radical dissidents? Instead of the massive outpouring of more than a million citizens to the city's parks which marked May Day in previous years, the leadership of Hua Kuo-feng held a performance in the indoor municipal stadium for 18,900 handpicked guests.
The chief of Britain's defense staff told his Red Chinese hosts the Soviet Union is a common enemy of Britain and Red China. The statement drew a Soviet demand for an explanation and calls in Britain for his resignation.
MAY 4 - Canton has for years remained a city of disgust, filled with terror, garbage and vulgarism. This is the message conveyed in two eyewitness reports in Hongkong.
U.S. Representative John M. Ashbrook of Ohio voiced strong objection to the sale of American oil drilling equipment to Red China. In a statement to the House of Representatives, Ashbrook said "the sale of our most sophisticated technology to Communist nations is impossible to justify."
Free Chinese military authorities urged the United States to take note of Peiping's talk about taking Taiwan "by force under the proper circumstances."
U.S. Representative Eldon Rudd criticized President Carter for sending his national security affairs adviser to Peiping on the same day as Premier Chiang Ching-kuo was inaugurated President of the Republic of China.
Labor union leaders of the Republic of Korea, Japan, Hongkong and the Republic of China called on the United States to stop its move to "normalize" relations with the Chinese Communists. They said such a move would increase the danger of Communist aggression.
The Chinese Communist Youth League will hold its 10th national congress in October after 12 years of inactivity, People's Daily said.
Hua Kuo-feng left Peiping by train for a visit to North Korea. It was the first trip abroad by a "chairman of the central committee" of the Chinese Communist party since Mao Tse-tung visited Moscow in 1957.
MAY 5 - The Washington Press Club, saying the media and not the government should decide the news value of an event, protested the barring of reporters from presidential aide Zbigniew Brzezinski's trip to mainland China.
About 15,000 Chinese who lived in Vietnam have gone to mainland China so far and a new influx is expected, the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug reported from Peiping. More than 2 million Chinese are believed to live in Vietnam, but many have accepted Vietnamese citizenship.
The United States "must withdraw from South Korea all its aggressive troops, arms and equipment," Hua Kuo-feng said in North Korea during his first trip abroad.
MAY 7 - President Jimmy Carter probably will not change the slow pace of advancing U.S. relations with Red China because "there seems to be no constituency in this country pushing him to move faster." This is the assessment of Bernard Gwertzman, diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times.
Hua Kuo-feng's regime is confronted with serious difficulties and these will increase in the future. This was the conclusion of a three-day meeting of some 70 Chinese and Japanese delegates at their Sixth Joint Conference on China Mainland Affairs in Tokyo.
Teng Hsiao-ping and his supporters are racing against time in a struggle against a group of "politburo" members who benefited from the "cultural revolution," including Hua Kuo-feng, said Kenneth Lieberthal, associate professor of political science at Swarthmore College.
Red China's recent campaign to expose official corruption, high living, extra-legal deals and the persecution of innocent people has brought into public view the weaknesses of the regime, according to a report in the New York Times.
MAY 8 - Anti-Communist organizations on the Chinese mainland have issued a series of publications to celebrate the election of Premier Chiang Ching-kuo and Governor Shieh Tung-min as the sixth President and Vice President of the Republic of China.
The U.S. government, citing national security concerns, has blocked an Ann Arbor firm from selling US$2.8 million dollars worth of equipment which would aid Red China in detecting potential earthquakes and oil fields. The equipment also might help Red China intercept U.S. military signals.
Corruption is as deeply rooted in Red China as in the Soviet Union, the New York Times reported in a comparative study.
May 9 – Former California Governor Ronald Reagan warned that U.S. recognition of Red China would start a chain of events that could prove disastrous not only for Taiwan but also for the United States itself.
A commune official in Red China who overlooked the promiscuity of a friend and relative has been dismissed from office for beating up a peasant who complained to authorities, according to Wuhan radio in Hupeh province.
Yeh Chien-ying and Teng Hsiao-ping are being pitted against each other in a dispute over Mao Tse-tung's legacy, the Washington Post reported. In a special analysis, Jay Mathews wrote from Hongkong the two adversaries are engaged in "a war of code words" in speeches "whose consistency leaves no doubt that a serious, if so far muted, dispute over Mao exists."
Relations between Albania and Red China are deteriorating. Tirana again attacked the Chinese Communists for their "three worlds theory" and other "splitting activities."
The Chinese Communist regime confirmed that agriculture on the mainland is falling far behind. There is a clamor for the introduction of foreign techniques to deal with the crisis.
MAY 10 - Herb Caen, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has found life in Peiping dull, colorless, disappointing and even the cooking of "Peking duck" unsatisfactory. He toured the Chinese mainland with a group of American journalists.
Trade between the Chinese Communists and West Germany dropped 25 percent last year and Peiping ran into deficit problems, the Washington Post reported.
Red China and Japan quarreled over planned Japanese and South Korean joint development of the continental shelf, a move that Peiping called an "infringement"."
MAY 11 - A new violent power struggle is likely to erupt at the top level of the Chinese Communist hierarchy and the friction between Hua Kuo-feng and Teng Hsiao-ping will eventually lead to civil war, intelligence reports from the Chinese mainland indicated.
The "people liberation army" is balking at orders from the new Peiping leadership, according to Victor Zorza. In a syndicated column, Zorza said Peiping is once again dropping dark hints about a military conspiracy that is supposedly working to wrest power from the present leadership.
John Cannon, public affairs adviser of the State Department's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said it would be a great mistake to sell weapons to Peiping.
Peiping charged that Soviet troops, gunboats and a helicopter penetrated two miles into mainland China's northeastern Heilungkiang province and an armed conflict was averted only because of Chinese Communist "restraint." Red China charged that 18 Soviet boats, about 30 Russian troops and a helicopter crossed the Wusuli River in an "organized military provocation." The Soviet troops landed on the Red Chinese side of the river - scene of border clashes in 1969 - and penetrated four kilometers (2.4 miles), into mainland territory.
MAY 12 - A plot to blow up the "great hall of the people" in Peiping while the "national people's congress" was in session was discovered just before the meeting, intelligence reports said.
MAY 13 - Red China was not satisfied with the Soviet explanation of the recent crossing of Soviet soldiers into mainland territory along the Siberian border, the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug reported from Peiping.
The New York Times reported that the area in Manchuria where the Soviet armed forces made an incursion recently remains tense. David K. Shipler, the newspaper's correspondent in Moscow, said recent Soviet travelers to border regions have reported that some civilians are moving out. In one district blackouts are said to be held three times a week with power cut off to simulate air raid alerts.
MAY 14 - Declaring that war with the Soviet Union is inevitable, Red China has ordered military leaders to intensify training of its armed forces, the "New China News Agency" said.
MAY 15 - Who's afraid of "ghosts?" Some Red Chinese military cadres are, according to Peiping's military newspaper. The Liberation Army Daily recently published a series of ghost fables in an attempt to persuade people not to be afraid of ghosts. An editor's note said some military cadres are still afraid of ghosts.
Mongolia has rejected a Red Chinese demand to withdraw Soviet troops from its territory, which borders several Chinese mainland provinces, including Heilungkiang, where Russian soldiers crossed over last week in a border incident.
Kelly Black, a 17-year-old American high school student from Connecticut, wrote: "In (Red) China, it is not considered impolite to stare, a fact I learned only after some unnerving moments. I will never forget the faces in the crowd we passed through after leaving the Canton train station. We had just been greeted by our guides, models of warmth and efficiency. I was shocked by the contrast. The faces in the crowd were intense."
Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu arrived in Peiping.