During the early years of the Chinese People's Republic, Manchuria was usually referred to as the Three Eastern Provinces, which included Liaoning (also known in early years as Fengtien), Kirin and Heilungkiang. At times, a fourth province, Jehol, was also considered part of the region. In fact, since the occupation by the Japanese in 1931, Manchuria has been generally defined to cover the area of these four provinces, rather than that of the three. This was true not only under the Manchoukuo regime, but also under the administration of the Nationalist Government from 1945 to 1948, when the entire region of Manchuria was subdivided into nine provinces, and also under the Communist administration after 1948.

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.