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Starting on March 4, 1958 and continuing to the present, the People’s Republic of China has published a weekly English-language news magazine originally called “Peking Review”, and beginning with issue #1 in 1979 renamed “Beijing Review” after the Pinyin transliteration system was adopted for foreign-language publications. This archive is a collection of many of the more important articles on politics, philosophy, and political economy that appeared in that magazine, mostly from the Mao era. While some of these articles sound somewhat stylized and doctrinaire today, there is still much of value in them for those who read them carefully.
In addition we now have 64 entire issues available in PDF format. Many of these were prepared by the IRTR Cultural Revolution Archive at IRTR.ORG, which seems to no longer exist.
All the articles are complete and unaltered. However, in a few cases non-essential photographs accompanying the articles have been omitted; their reproduction quality is often not high in any case. The articles are unsigned unless otherwise noted. At around the beginning of 1967, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Chinese editors adopted the practice of putting quotations from Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels and Stalin in bold type, and this practice continued into the late 1970s. Where this was done in the original we have followed the same convention here.
There are now over 310 articles in this archive (not counting the hundreds more in the PDF entire issues), but we will be gradually adding many more, especially from the Cultural Revolution period (often dated from 1966-1976). We will also be adding a contents page for each issue, with links to articles which have been posted. If you know of specific articles you would like to see included in this archive soon, or have other suggestions, or if you find scanning errors that should be corrected, please let us know at: webmaster@massline.org
A small red star (
) next to an issue indicates that all the articles from that issue have been posted and are individually listed in the indexes. (At present the articles in the whole issues in PDF format are not individually listed.)
Articles and issues in PDF format added after Jan. 1, 2012 are in a searchable PDF format.
There are a number of issues of Peking Review which we do not have access to. If you are willing to donate, loan, or sell any of the following issues to us, please let us know!
- 1958-1964: We need them all!
- 1965: Numbers 1 through 8, and 42-46.
- 1966: Number 3.
- 1967: Numbers 7-42.
- 1968: Numbers 9 and 15-24.
- 1969: Numbers 24, 36, and 39.
- 1970: Numbers 3, 4, 6, 9-11, 13-16.
- 1971-1980: We have a complete set!
- 1981: Number 35.
- 1982: Numbers 4, 18, 21, 23, and 34.
- 1983 and later: We don’t have any!
Many additional articles from Peking Review during the Mao era, most of which are not yet posted here, are being transcribed and posted on the WENGEWANG.ORG site, in both English and Chinese. They seem to be especially focusing on the early years of the Cultural Revolution and on some of the more important articles from each year. The index page for the articles now available there is at: http://www.wengewang.org/read.php?tid=17284&page=1&toread=1. With their permission we are gradually copying over the English versions of the articles to this site, and adjusting them to our format. Our appreciation to WENGEWANG.ORG for all the work they are doing!
The Marxist Internet Archive is, with our permission, copying over the articles we post here to their site. See: http://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/index.htm. (They have slightly changed the appearance of the articles to match their standard, and are usually not including the pictures which accompany the articles.) Almost all of the articles below are now also posted there. In addition they have posted some articles which are not yet available here, including:
- “Premier Pham Van Dong Supports Chinese Government Proposal” (Letter to Chou En-lai), from 1963, issue #34.
- Chou En-lai: “Speech at the Grand Banquet Celebrating [the] Second Anniversary of Sihanouk’s Coming to China”, from 1972, issue #12.
- Chin Hua: “Human Cognizance and Utilization of Energy Resources is Never-Ending — Refutation of ‘Exhaustion of Energy Resources’”, from 1976, issue #4.
Some articles and entire issues of the Spanish edition of this weekly news magazine, which is called Pekin Informa, are now available in the Spanish section of the Marxist Internet Archive at: http://www.marx.org/espanol/tematica/china/pekininforma/index.htm.
#41 — October 11, 1963:
“I Learn Dialectics and Grow Bigger Crops”, by Yao Shih-Chang.
“Relying on ‘On Practice’ and ‘On Contradiction’ to Make a
Chinese-Type Frequency Clock”, by Fang Fu-ken. [Searchable PDF format.]
“Take Firm Hold of the Revolution and Stimulate Production”,
“Renmin Ribao” editorial, Sept. 7, 1966.
“The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution”, by Wang Li, Chia Yi-Hsueh and Li Hsin, 6 pages.
“China Achieves World’s First Total Synthesis of Crystalline
Insulin”
“Use Mao Tse-Tung’s Thought to Open the Gate to ‘The Enigma of
Life’”, “Renmin Ribao” editorial, Dec. 24, 1966. [This article is the second in the PDF file.]
“Socialist China in Progress”. Includes these
short news items:
SUBJECT INDEX of Peking Review Articles.