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The label "history" is conventionally used with at least two distinct meanings: history-as-actuality and history-as-record. The events lying beneath the abstraction termed the social and economic history of the Roman empire constitute the former; Rostovtzeff'sSocial and Economic History of the Roman Empireis an example of the latter. Our concern in this paper is with "history" in still a third sense. When an individual, through either intent or accident, comes to occupy a dominant position in the history of a people, a country or an institution, his personal views on history and the historical process assume significance for the historian.The Peloponnesian War, Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, The History of the Russian Revolution, andThe Second World Warare important sources not only as records of past events but also because Thucydides, Julius Caesar, Trotsky and Churchill were themselves involved in the making of history. The recorded views of such event-making individuals are of intrinsic, albeit uneven, value because the men had personal knowledge of the events described—because they were, in short, actors before they were authors.

Writing some four hundred and fifty years ago, the founder of the modern realist school of political analysis struck the mark. "The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains," Machiavelli observed, "is from seeing the men that he has about him." To the student of the terrain of post-1928 Chinese political history, the prominent positions of Chiang Kai-shek's Chekiang clique in the Kuomintang and of Mao Tse-tung's Hunan faction in the Chinese Communist Party are obvious landmarks. Yet the difference in the political styles of Chiang and Mao, as revealed in the men around them, has been less emphasised. Chiang Kai-shek's trusted political and military associates, with some exceptions, have been either members of his own family or natives of his own province of Chekiang in east China. Mao Tse-tung, while revealing similar parochialism in selecting and retaining associates from his native province of Hunan, has nevertheless shown more imagination and less inflexibility than Chiang.

The counterpoint of radical change and durable continuity which has characterised the Communist upheaval in China is nowhere so marked as in the ambivalent attitudes towards youth and age. Traditional China was a backward-looking civilisation, espousing a view of life and of history which esteemed past over present, age over youth, authority over innovation. The twentieth century has seen a definite, often violent, conflict between the generations, with the revolt of 1911, the May Fourth movement, and the Northern Expedition each expressing an aspect of the upsurge of youthful aspiration. The emergence of a Communist government has been marked by a drastic change in the official attitude, a new preoccupation with the future rather than the past, and sustained attention to the organisation of the youth of China, from which group will come the national leaders of the generation ahead.