In Chinese Studies, three themes have acquired new emphasis since the Cultural Revolution: first, the view that China is not a simple monolithic state but one with diversified interest groups and potential internal conflict. Second, the influence of the military throughout society and the extent to which its particular interests and internal conflicts shape the nature of government and society. Third, the fact that bureaucratism, though attacked in the Cultural Revolution, is likely to continue shaping Chinese society and to be a perennial threat to revolutionary ideals. This article touches on each of these themes – first, by an analysis of personal loyalty groups during the Cultural Revolution and the Lin Piao affair and, second, by an account of the changing nature of Chinese bureaucracies and of how these changes impinge on factional politics.

The origins and course of the fighting over the Ussuri island of Chenpao in March 1969 are as sharply disputed as the island itself. That fighting had broken out on 2 March was announced in a broadcast from Moscow that day and a Soviet Note to Peking of the same date charged that the Chinese had deliberately organized an armed provocation by sending troops across the state boundary line. Soviet frontier guards had been dispatched to warn them off Soviet territory: “The Chinese servicemen let the Soviet frontier guards approach them to a distance of a few metres and then suddenly, without any warning, opened point-blank fire at them.” Simultaneously, other Chinese troops, lying in ambush on the island itself, opened fire at the Soviet frontier guards on the ice. The Chinese, in this version, used machine-guns, mortars and artillery as well as automatic rifles, and about 200 troops. In later Soviet accounts that number was enlarged to 300. The Russians said they lost 31 killed and 14 wounded in the action but that they “expelled the violators from Soviet territory.”

“ Criticism and self-criticism,” or inner-Party struggle as it is sometimes called, has always been a major mechanism of inner-Party decision making and discipline among Chinese political elites, but during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution it emerged as a form of mass mobilization and education as well. I shall argue here that this came about as a result of political decisions made in the context of a series of non-reversible structural changes in the Chinese system of communications

The eighth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) met on 15 September 1956 in an atmosphere of some triumph. In the 11 years that had elapsed since the seventh Congress, the Communists had defeated the Kuomintang, taken over the country and set up a strong administration that had given the country the peace and unity so desperately lacking over the previous century. They had restored and developed the economy, substantially collectivized agriculture – without the drastic consequences suffered by the Soviet Union – and they had nationalized or semi-nationalized private industry and commerce. The People's Liberation Army had fought impressively in Korea, engendering a healthy respect abroad for the new Chinese regime. More recently, especially since the 1955 Bandung Conference, Chinese diplomacy had won new friends in Asia. China had stood up, Mao had said in 1949, and by 1956 it was clear to all that it had.