The analytical approaches so far devoted to the contemporary People's Liberation Army (PLA) have been of three general types. First, biographical studies which explain events in terms of the individual military leaders and their inter-relationships. Second, some students of the PLA have devised analytical models of informal power structures. The behaviour of the PLA in the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” has been interpreted by some as determined by personal loyalties, latent regionalism, and cliques formed around common service in military units prior to 1949. Others have viewed the PLA as split between “professional” commanders and the political cadres in the armed forces – sometimes dubbed a “Red versus expert” analysis. These categories of studies have one thing in common; they treat PLA institutions as being manipulated by informal and extra-legal forces. The third type of study emphasizes organizational and institutional frameworks. This paper falls into the third category. It asks the question: to what extent were the military institutions the subject or object of developments in the Cultural Revolution? It concludes that the organizational structures of the PLA and the missions assigned them heavily influenced the political behaviour of military leaders in the provinces.

China shares with the developing countries of the third world the broad objective of economic growth, starting from a condition the Chinese themselves describe as “poor and blank” relative to the material resources of the developed countries. Yet “self-reliance” has been the keynote of Chinese policies for ten years, and the Chinese now urge the rest of the third world countries to adopt the same principle for their own development. In broad terms, “development” refers to the improvement of a society's material welfare, resulting from economic growth and from appropriate measures of income distribution. In Chinese and, increasingly, in general usage, such economic growth is identified with the use of production processes and the production of goods new to the developing economy. “Self-reliance” does not necessarily preclude transfer of foreign technologies into the developing country, but specifies technological change which occurs in response to demands arising within the developing economy itself, rather than imposed on it from outside. In any country, demand for technological change and distribution of the fruits of technological advance are dependent on its political and social structure, as well as on economic factors, and on the country's international economic and political bargaining power. China, whose leaders have a particular perception of the implications of these relationships for their development objectives, is an especially significant “case study” of the use of science and technology for national development.

The argument presented here is that Hong Kong was sometimes, but not always, an exception to the overall pattern of Chinese foreign policy in the second half of the 1950s. This discrepancy existed because to China, Hong Kong was so many things – a British colony and as such an extension of the West, an Asian neighbour, and a territory to be someday reunited with the mainland. By reacting to Hong Kong in different ways the Chinese were using more discrimination than simply applying their grand strategy to each specific case.

Ying Wei-chen, the narrator of the following account, is the chairman of the Revolutionary committee of the Huang Tu Kang People's Commune in the southern suburbs of Peking, and secretary of its Party committee. In 1952 he organized the first agricultural co-operative in the Peking area, and he was a deputy to the 9th Party Congress in April 1969. He is an agile stocky man of 48, and widely respected.

What makes Manchuria a most promising industrial field … is the fact that coal and labour are obtainable at an extraordinarily low cost. … Although Manchuria possesses a population of forty millions, not a single piece of clothing worn by the inhabitants is manufactured in the province. All textiles required by the people are imported either from south China or from Japan. The starting of a spinning and weaving industry in Manchuria will be fraught with great possibilities. [Shirani Takeshi, Kwantung Civil Governor (1909).]

10 1969 was not only the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese People's Republic (C.P.R.); it also marked the culmination of China's fifth year as a nuclear power. During this five-year period there were 10 detonations, three of which were thermonuclear and one of which was tested underground. At least one of the warheads was fired from a guided missile. According to one estimate, current defence expenditures amount to 10 per cent. of China's gross national product, and one-fifth of this outlay is devoted to nuclear research and development alone. A large portion of China's advanced scientific and technical manpower has also been assigned to this field. Although an adequate delivery system for this limited nuclear capability, as of November 1971, is not known to be operational, China's progress in the research and development of advanced weapons has clearly been substantial. The launching of Chinese satellites in 1970 and 1971 and the likelihood of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test in the near future are further evidence of major technological achievement. Peking's entry, then, into the “nuclear club” has been a major concern of China's leaders; it has also had significant consequences for American defence planners. The explicit rationale for the Nixon Administration's expansion of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system in early 1970, for example, was to guard against the possibility of a Chinese attack in the 1980s and thus to assure the reliability of American defence commitments in East Asia and the Pacific.

When the history of Sino-American relations since 1949 is written in years to come, it will very likely lump together much of the two decades from the Korean War to the Kissinger-Chou meeting as a period of drearily sustained deadlock. Korean hostilities will be blended rather easily into Indochina hostilities, John Foster Dulles into Dean Rusk. The words and deeds of American East Asian intervention, of the containment and isolation of China, will seem an unbroken continuity. And at the end, under most improbable auspices but for commonsense balance-of-power reasons, will come the Zen-like Nixon stroke that cut the Gordian knot and opened a new era.