Just as China's economic programme seemed to be settling into a predictable and reasonably successful pattern of growth, politics in the form of the “great proletarian cultural revolution” again reared up to cloud the future. Although most of the details of China's economic performance during 1966 and the first three months of 1967 remain obscured, enough is known to make at least a partial assessment.

Although organised by students and young intellectuals, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has had a love-hate relationship with these groups. Throughout most of a quarter century of rural insurgency, the CCP was hard put to manipulate political activities among individualistic young urban intellectuals. In the mid-twenties, the Communist Youth League (YCL) resisted the Stalinist directives of Party leaders. During the war against Japan, thought reform was deemed essential to insure the loyalty even of those who had undertaken the arduous trek to the Border Regions. Furthermore, the CCP laboured under a doctrinal handicap: although students were invaluable for organising intellectuals, workers and peasants, it was embarrassing for the party of the proletariat to have to rely upon this educated eélite. During the united front periods of the mid-20s and after 1937, students were defined as “petit bourgeois,” which made them acceptable allies. After the CCP's break with Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, a more radical party line blamed these petit bourgeois for such Stalinist follies as the Canton Commune. Throughout the “united front from below” of the early 30s, students were divided into “progressive” proletarian and “reactionary” bourgeois elements, the former to be utilised, the latter to be excluded. The ideological conundrum remains even today.

Political relations between the Kingdom of Thailand and the People's Republic of China are conditioned by important historical, geographical and social facts. While Thailand and China are situated in close proximity to each other on the north and south-west respectively, they do not have a common border; a narrow strip of both Burma and Laos joins to form an intervening corridor. This border region shared by the four countries is an area of rugged mountains and primitive communications. Neither railroad nor all-weather highway connects China with Thailand. The most effective form of land communication between Chiengrai in north Thailand and Che-li in China's southern province is by horseback. The possibility of the movement of heavy traffic over difficult terrain cannot be denied since the experience of the siege of Dien Bien Phu. There are roads of some sort from Yunnan through Burma to Chiengrai, and also (and probably more importantly) from Vietnam through Laos to Nongkhai and Nakhon Phanom.

During his visit to the United States in September 1966, President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines declared in a nation-wide television interview that he knew “for a fact” that the recent resurgence of Huk guerrilla activity in his country was assisted by “agents” from Peking. A year earlier, Philippine armed forces intelligence had reported the discovery of military training centres in Bicol and the Visayas run by Chinese Communists. According to the same report, some 3,000 Chinese “subversives” in the Philippines were working closely with the Huks. Philippine constabulary chief, Brigadier General Flavio Olivares, termed the threat posed by the Chinese Communist infiltrators as more serious than that of the Huks. He noted that lax enforcement of immigration laws facilitated the entry of Chinese Communists and added that in recent years some 1,000 Chinese had gone to China, ostensibly for sentimental reasons, but had come back to the Philippines as agents. Despite the frequently partisan and self-serving complexion of some official Philippine pronouncements on the communist danger, it is impossible today to discount the significance of communist activity in the Philippines or to minimise the related problem of illegal Chinese immigration.

Chinese Communist evaluations of China's foreign conquest dynasties, like those of earlier Chinese historians, have been hostile, at least on the most vulgar level of historical writing. This comes as no surprise, for the conquest dynasties occupied all or part of China by military force and often governed badly. For the Chinese Communist historians these conquerors carry the additional onus of being feudalists, or worse, feudalists who allowed the feudal economy to stagnate. This attitude is particularly marked in the treatment of the more recent foreign dynasties, the Khitan Liao dynasty (916–1124), the Jurchen Chin dynasty (1115–1234), the Tangut Hsi Hsia dynasty (1032–1227), the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty (1644–1911) and the one discussed here, the Mongol Yüan dynasty (1220–1367).

“The anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles of the people in Asia, Africa and Latin America,” says the Proposal Concerning the General Line, “are pounding and undermining the foundations of the rule of imperialism and colonialism. … In a sense therefore the whole cause of the international proletarian revolution hinges on the outcome of the revolutionary struggles of the people of these areas, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the world's population.”