After the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 László Ladányi and other Jesuits were forced to flee China, and he settled in Hong Kong.
[citation needed] Ladányi, who was variously called a "fanatical anti-Communist" by critics and as "the most exact and consistently correct observer" of mainland Chinese politics by admirers,[2] possessed what Simon Leys called an "uncanny ability" to draw meaning out of often cryptic official Chinese documents.
[3] Jürgen Domes described him as having attained "unprecedented prestige as a China scholar, [...] the doyen of the international community of observers of contemporary Chinese politics".
[2] Ladányi served as the sole editor of China News Analysis from its founding until 1982, when he left the journal to pursue a career as an author.
The Sinologist Simon Leys (pseudonym for the art historian and man of letters, Pierre Ryckmans) gleaned much information from Ladányi's China News Analysis, which he called "super.
"[4] Leys made frequent use of this material in his 1971 book Les Habits neufs du président Mao.
He called it "useful and challenging", and found that its use of official Chinese sources gives the analysis a "certain credibility", but tends to present an "overly unified picture" with little indication of policy debates and problems of implementation.
[5] In the final edition of China News Analysis for which Ladányi served as editor, he compiled a "ten commandments" describing his philosophy on the study and assessment of contemporary Chinese politics:[citation needed] 1.