“Kremlinological” approaches to the study of contemporary Chinese politics are sometimes criticized for seeming to embody the “rather crude view of politics being concerned with factional strife and power politics.” Certainly, for most politicians most of the time, it would be wrong as well as cynical to regard “power” as being the ultimate goal. On the other hand, few would deny that politics does, in part, involve factional strife and power politics, and some political scientists believe that political behaviour may be best explained through a focus on the play of power. Thus, Joseph Schlesinger explains certain aspects of American politics by what he calls “ambition theory”: “A politician's behavior is a response to his office goals.” Anthony Downs works out a good deductive explanation of the behaviour of political parties in a democracy by starting with the hypothesis that politicians act in a rational manner, espousing ideologies and policies which enable them to maintain or expand their power. The point of these hypotheses is not that politicians are an unusually venal race of men; the hypotheses do not purport to be accurate descriptions of political motivations. Rather, the assertion is that whatever the ultimate motives of political actors, an approach which hypothesizes that they will behave as though power were their goal does yield helpful and concise explanations of their behaviour. This article about the political career of one Chinese politician, T'ao Chu, from 1956 through 1966, will attempt to see how far hypotheses concentrating on “pure power” provide a useful explanation of events in comparison with those which give more weight to stated political opinions.

The machine-building industry covers a very wide field: rolling stock for railroads, blast furnaces for new iron and steel complexes, trucks and tractors for agriculture, bicycles, radios, clocks and thermos bottles for personal use, not to mention thousands of other commodities. An interest in any of these things or in more aggregate measures such as the volume of construction or the growth of industry, presupposes an interest in the machine-building industry. As it was put in the first Five-Year Plan, “The machine-building industry is the key to the technological transformation of [the] national economy.”

Maoist ideology and policy imposed on the realities of China's economic backwardness and the scarcities resulting therefrom have produced a peculiar and sharply contrasting pattern of development during the past two decades. The differences in economic performance were so marked – characterized by rapid expansion in the 1950s and stagnation in the 1960s – that it almost seems as though one were dealing with economies in two entirely different settings, perhaps even in two different countries.