On 3 August 1966 a brief dispatch was included in the English service of the New China News Agency. That day, it said, the Chinese Buddhist Association had given a banquet in honour of a group of visiting Japanese Buddhists, members of the Shingon sect, led by Juncho Onozuka. The day before they had joined in performing a religious ceremony at the principal Peking monastery; and the day after, 4 August, they were received by Kuo Mo-jo.

China's bitter population dilemma is clearly summarized in just one short statement from the People's Daily: “We insist on family planning, but generally speaking we think it is a good thing to have a large population.” For the past two decades China's population policy has been shrouded in secrecy, has been expressed only through Communist polemic and has suffered from apparent indecision and consequent vacillations. Official thinking on this subject is almost never expressed in direct statements and proclamations. It must be gleaned from casual remarks by Chinese leaders, from newspaper and magazine articles and official radio broadcasts, which usually discuss implementation but omit reference to the initial decision, and from visitors to China who describe the visible signs that suggest a particular policy is currently in effect.

Summing up the Campaign against the Enemy's 5th “Encirclement”* Resolutions of the Centre of the CCP Adopted by the Conference of the Politburo, Tsunyi, 8 January 1935 Having listened to Comrade X X's survey of the 5th “Encirclement” and Comrade X X X's supplementary report, the enlarged conference of the Politburo regards Comrade XX's survey as fundamentally incorrect.

As other analysts have suggested in different ways, the Cultural Revolution involves differences of emphasis among Chinese leaders over basic directional choices for the society at large: whether Maoist-style politics (or ideology) can continue to “take command” or must yield at least equal place to the practical problems and limitations involved in fixing priorities and setting goals; whether radical Maoism befits a China in transition or must be modified if China is to realize its historically based claim to great power status; or whether China must inevitably “change colour” or can remain ideologically “pure red” even in the throes of modernization.

The Cultural Revolution in the field of Overseas Chinese affairs has induced a state of paralysis in the bureaucracy, has accelerated the tendency to extinction of domestic Overseas Chinese status, and reduced policy towards the Chinese abroad to long periods of silence, silence punctuated until late 1968 by protests against incidents involving the Chinese in South-east Asia. The Cultural Revolution also has provided an insight into the Overseas Chinese policies of the People's Republic of China since 1949. Part I of this paper deals with the latter of these two aspects, while Part II is concerned with the impact of the Cultural Revolution on Overseas Chinese policies and institutions.

In 1961 Robert C. Tucker argued, contrary to the then prevailing assumption of the uniform nature of totalitarian systems, that such systems could be classified into several different types for purposes of analysis. Subsequently, H. Gordon Skilling applied interest group theory to his study of Communist politics and, by doing so, also called into question the case for regarding totalitarian governments as a single category of states possessing unique attributes. Skilling asserted that Communist states cannot be considered “conflictless,” as is sometimes assumed, but can be more adequately understood in terms of the competing social forces commonly found in non-Communist societies. Because of the special, but varying, limits imposed by a central leadership elite on the public expression of conflict in the several Communist-run countries, he added, Communist political parties could play special and quite diverse roles. His thesis contrasts with that of Carl J. Friedrich, which stresses the uniformity of the party's role under totalitarianism. According to Professor Friedrich, in his discussions of “the unique character of totalitarian society,” the presence of a single mass party is a common feature of all totalitarian politics, and is “typically either superior to, or completely commingled with the bureaucratic organization.” While Friedrich in his later work, written jointly with Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, acknowledges that “within the broad pattern of similarities, there are many significant variations” in totalitarian dictatorships, the authors' emphasis is on the novelty and uniqueness of these dictatorships. They state:

It is impossible to estimate exactly what weight should be given to each of the various factors which have contributed to the conflict between the Communist regimes of Russia and of China, but there can be no doubt that Russia's refusal to assist China to become a nuclear power was one of the most important. According to the Chinese account of the matter, the Soviet Union promised to provide China with “a sample of an atomic bomb and technical data concerning its manufacture,” apparently as part of an agreement on “new technology for national defence” concluded in October 1957, but went back on this promise and unilaterally annulled the agreement in June 1959. The Chinese People's Republic, nevertheless, went ahead on its own and exploded its first atomic bomb on 16 October 1964; this was followed by China's first hydrogen bomb on 17 June 1967.