The achievements of the Chinese Communist regime over the past 20 years are impressive, whether seen in terms of the Communists' own ideology or of universal human desires for security and material sufficiency. Under the Party's leadership, the Chinese people have unified their nation, constructed a considerable industrial base, transformed their country's internal distribution network, explored thoroughly for the first time China's natural resources, overcome the threat of famine, begun to master the field of nuclear energy, and accomplished many other changes which reflect favourably on China in comparison with other nations that have set for themselves equal or lesser goals in a similar period of time. This is not to deny shifts and setbacks in the general strategies for socialist construction. The capital-intensive industrialization of the first five-year plan moved to the labour-intensive industrialization of the Great Leap and culminated in the balanced strategy which emerged after 1962 of building the agricultural prerequisites for industrialization. The failure of the Great Leap may have cost China as much as a decade in terms of a potential time schedule for development, but it is important to stress the achievements of the economic plan which followed the Leap.

Some aspects of the Chinese People's Republic have been explained as reversions to traditional Chinese patterns. There are resemblances between the Chinese Communist ideal for society and the traditional Confucian ideal. Both assume that, in a properly ordered society, there should be universal acceptance of a true doctrine and universal agreement on what is right. Paul Linebarger, describing the Confucian ideal, wrote, “Government, once cheng ming has been set in motion, is not a policy making body. There is no question of policy, no room for disagreement, no alternative; what is right is apparent. … government needs only to administer for … the maintenance of the ideology. Once right views are established, no individual is entitled to think otherwise. … control of the individual will devolves upon persons making up his immediate social environment. …” One can compare this with the frequent Chinese Communist statements about the universal validity of Marxism-Leninism and the thought of Mao Tse-tung and the continually appearing assumption that a process of discussion must end with unanimous agreement on what is right. Also, control of the individual by persons in his immediate social environment is a characteristic feature of the Chinese Communist system.

At the time the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) issued its now-famous Circular Notice of 16 May 1966, which roundly criticized Peking's Mayor P'eng Chen and thereby ushered in a dramatic new stage of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a large-scale and intensive Socialist Education Movement was still being implemented systematically in the Chinese countryside.

The building of harmonious relationships between the capital and the regions is always a critical task confronting a new regime in any country. In traditional China, the founder of each new dynasty, by virtue of his military conquests, was able to establish fairly firm control over his former enemies in the various regions. But to rise to power in a country of such enormous size, the dynastic founders were forced to form alliances with various local leaders who had assisted them in their conquest. After they achieved victory the conquerors no longer had to subdue enemies but they had to find a way of working smoothly with the regional leaders who had assisted them in their rise to power.

One of the most extraordinary and puzzling events of the twentieth century is surely the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. This most profound crisis in the history of the Peking regime provides us with the best available opportunity to study the Chinese political system. For it is during a crisis that the nature, the strength, and the vulnerabilities of a political system fully reveal themselves. Further-more, we can attempt not only to note the unique features of this extraordinary event, and of Chinese politics itself, but also to see whether the seemingly unique Chinese experience does not reveal some universal dilemma of the human condition and fundamental problems of the socio-political order in a magnified and easily recognizable form. It is my belief that the Chinese political system prior to the Cultural Revolution is one of the purest forms found in human experience of a type of association in which there is a clear-cut separation between the elite and the masses. If one follows Ralf Dahrendorf in asserting that in every social organization there is a differential distribution of power and authority, a division involving domination and subjection, the Chinese political system can be taken as one of the polar examples of all social organizations, showing clearly their possibilities and limitations, their problems and dilemmas. From this perspective, the Maoist vision as it has revealed itself in its extreme form during the early phases of the Cultural Revolution can be considered a critique of this type of political organization.

Communist China has not published official population statistics for any date since 1 January, 1958, when it claimed a total population of 646,530,000 persons. For nearly a decade after that, the rounded figure of 650 million was given almost without exception. On 11 March, 1966, however, a figure of 700 million was cited for the first time by Lin Piao in his letter to the Industry and Communications Front, and in August it appeared again in the communiqué of the Eleventh Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee. More recently, the figure 750 million was used in a speech at a workers' congress in Lanchow on 10 February 1968.

It is a commonplace that the writing of foreign observers often reveals as much about the assumptions of their own society as it does about those of the society they observe. Certainly, five centuries of Western commentary on the administration of justice in China support this proposition.