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.

As the title indicates, this article deals with the image of the Party in Chinese Communist ideology. Obviously the conception of the Party and its role put forward in theoretical writings cannot be isolated from the reality of the Party, if only because ideology is shaped by practice and serves as a rationalization of practice. But the emphasis here will be on the analysis of statements about the Party, and their evolution over the past three decades.

The outbreak of the Fukien Rebellion on 20 November 1933 brought to a halt the first phase of Chiang Kai-shek's Fifth Encirclement Campaign against the Central Soviet area. Just as the Kuomintang (KMT) economic blockade was becoming effective and Nationalist troops were inflicting important losses on the Red Army, Chiang was forced to curtail operations and divert sizeable units eastward to defend against a possible rebel invasion from Fukien. For the beleaguered Red armies defending the Kiangsi Soviet base, this allowed a much-needed rest and a chance to turn with safety from the Fukien front to regroup for action in more critical sectors. The rebellion broke the KMT encirclement in the east, at least temporarily, and seemingly gave the Communist leadership at Juichin grounds for hope that a friendly rebel regime in Foochow might open up new channels for supply of food and munitions.

From its inception until at least the Cultural Revolution, the Communist regime in China has had a twofold aim for its intellectuals: it has sought to indoctrinate them with the exclusive ideologies of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and it has tried to utilize their skills to develop an industrialized and modernized society. The Chinese Communist Party has attempted to implement these two policies by an insistence on the strict orthodoxy of thinking individuals, on the one hand, and by the encouragement of intellectuals to work creatively at their jobs on the other. This contradictory approach has resulted in a policy toward the intellectuals that has been alternatively severe and relaxed. Though the main trend is usually in one direction or the other, there have always been counter-currents present which can be revived when necessary.

A Communist party is not a mass party. It is rather, by its own definition, a party of elites, the most advanced members of a single class. The Communist Party in China is proportionally the smallest of all ruling Communist parties, never having comprised as much as three per cent. of the population. Such a small leadership group, lacking the direct involvement of the masses in its membership, must rely on other organs to engage the bulk of the population on its behalf. These are the mass organizations. Operating through these mass organizations, the Party maintains leadership and control over the various sectors of society; at the same time, the organizations, staffed by Party members, educate the masses in communism and provide grass roots listening posts which help the Party to maintain its legitimacy.

Since their formal organization in February 1949, the “Field Armies” of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) have fascinated various students of the Chinese Communist political process. Unfortunately their roles, other than those associated with combat, have never been carefully studied or defined. One of the consequences has been that most observers, especially Western observers, have neglected these institutions in their search for the origins and parameters of contemporary formal and informal power, collective and individual. In part, this neglect has reflected a dearth of essential research on Chinese Communist military biography and military history, without which neither the 1949 nor the 1968 military-political significance of the Field Armies could emerge from the superficial picture of them as triumphant masses of combat forces sweeping across the Mainland in 1950.