The following two sets of notes from my files bear on the role of the Communist International in China in the 1920s. The references to them in my book, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, have been so frequently cited that I must assume that their full text will be found of some value by interested scholars. This is especially true of the first one, a memorandum based on an interview I had on 19 August 1935 with H. Sneevliet, the Dutch left-wing socialist who, under the name of Maring, went to China in 1921 as a representative of the Comintern. The second is a set of notes written at my request in Paris in 1935 by Albert Treint, who represented the French Communist Party on the Chinese sub-committee of the Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in Moscow in May 1927.

When, at a moment of high tide in the Cultural Revolution, the first Revolutionary Committee was established in the Manchurian province of Heilungkiang on 31 January 1967, a new type of leadership organ appeared on the Chinese scene, indicating drastic changes in the regional power structure. At the beginning, these Revolutionary Committees were supposed to act as “temporary supreme organs of power” (Lin-shih tsui-kao ch'üan-li chi-kou), in which capacity they combined the local and regional leadership of party, administration, economy and mass organizations. During the four weeks preceding the formation of the Heilungkiang Committee, violent activity by newly formed Maoist organizations in a number of Chinese provinces and cities had been answered by wide-spread popular resistance, which was in many cases instigated by the local and regional Party leadership. Facing this resistance, Mao Tse-tung, in a personal mandate to his First Deputy and presumptive successor, Lin Piao, on 17 or 18 January 1967 ordered the military to intervene in the power-struggle between Maoists and anti-Maoists. The immediate attitudinal response of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), however, was not wholly convincing. Nevertheless, this call for the military to support the faltering Maoist counterattack against “revisionist” oppositional forces marks the beginning of a definite rise in military influence on the political process in Communist China.

In the course of the Cultural Revolution, both Chinese official and Red Guard sources have revealed that the so-called Chung-yang kung-tso hui-i (Central Work Conference)—an institution hitherto not well known to outside observers—had met frequently during 1960–66 and that these meetings were connected with decisions on important policy issues. While its existence and jurisdiction have never been formally stipulated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Constitution of 1956 or 1945, the Central Work Conference appears to have become an important locus of decision in the Party during the 1960s. There are indications that it functioned alongside of the Party's regular decision-making bodies, the Central Committee (CC) and the Politburo, and that it replaced, and possibly pre-empted, the functions of other institutional devices which Mao Tse-tung has utilized during the second half of the 1950s. This article examines briefly the participants in, and functions of, the Central Work Conference and other types of Party meetings, attempting to shed some light on the loci of decision in the CCP. Appended to the article is a list of known Party meetings from 1949–66, compiled from official and Red Guard publications, which may be of some use to students of Chinese Communist affairs.

The Chinese Communist Party and the “Overseas Chinese Problem”

The “Overseas Chinese problem” in South-East Asia is most commonly understood to be a problem which confronts the governments and indigenous peoples of the region, or other governments which have an interest in South-East Asia, or sometimes the Overseas Chinese themselves. It is seldom perceived as a “problem” for the Chinese Government, except in so far as China is thought to have encountered certain obstacles to political and economic exploitation of a relationship which appears deceptively simple, and which seems to offer very considerable advantages to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet the evolution of China's Overseas Chinese policy since 1949 reveals a growing awareness on the part of the CCP that there were many intractable problems associated with its overseas population, both in the pursuit of foreign policies in South-East Asia and in the very nature of the Overseas Chinese relationship with China.