People’s China

English Language Twice-Monthly Magazine from the
Early Years of the People’s Republic of China


             

      This magazine, published twice each month, was launched in English in January 1950. It also soon had editions in Russian, Japanese, Chinese, French and Indonesian. We are not entirely sure when the English language edition was terminated, but it continued at least through 1957. We believe its function was then replaced by the weekly news magazine Peking Review (which began publishing in March 1958) and the monthly feature magazine China Reconstructs (begun in January 1952). In later years only the Japanese edition of People’s China continued to be published.

      It should be remembered, of course, that this magazine appeared in the early years of the People’s Republic of China, and before the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (which is usually considered to have begun in early 1966). As such, it contains some articles by individuals such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping who later proved to be capitalist-roaders and revisionists. Nevertheless there is much of interest here about the first years of the PRC.

      After 60 years it is very difficult to obtain copies of People’s China, especially considering that the U.S. government did everything it could at the time to block materials coming out of China. Moreover, a few of the issues we have were scanned from copies in poor condition, with stains and damage from being stored in basements for decades. We apologize for this, and will scan and post copies in better condition if we can obtain them.

      Good news! A Parisian friend of this website has recently provided us with a large number of issues for the years 1950-1954. We now have a pretty good collection for that period, which we have scanned and posted. This generosity has inspired other friends of this site to also locate and provide some additional copies for various years. However, so far, we still only have a small number of issues for the 1955-1957 years, and there are also a number of gaps for the earlier years.

      Some of the issues have the file extension “.djvu”. These files require the WinDjView program to read them. This reader can be obtained for free at: http://www.windjview.sourceforge.net   Some PDF-reading programs which run under Windows, such as the free program SumatraPDF, can also read .djvu files. (Linux users have the capability to read .djvu files integrated into their PDF readers of the major desktops: Okular in KDE, Evince in GNOME.)

      If you have additional copies (or copies in better condition) which you are willing to give, loan or sell to us (at the very low prices we can afford to pay!), we will then scan and post them here. Please contact us at:   webmaster@massline.org



People’s China Issues Listed by Date of Publication



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