FOR more than twenty years, Chou Yang was chief guardian of Mao's literary policy. Next to Mao, he determined who was to write and what was to be written. In a series of relentless campaigns, he ruthlessly purged the ranks of China's most creative writers. Then suddenly in the summer of 1966, Chou Yang himself became the public target of the “great proletarian cultural revolution.”

The current cultural rectification campaign in Communist China, which is to “sweep away all monsters” and “touch people to their very souls,” surpasses all previous campaigns in intensity, but more importantly it has revealed a serious political breach within the Chinese Communist Party itself.

The political demise of Politburo member P'eng Chen in 1966 is one of the most significant political events in the Chinese Communist movement since Mao Tse-tung gained control of the Party in the late thirties and early forties.

The 64-year-old native of Shansi is a tall, robust man who worked in north China in the labour movement during the twenties and early thirties. He has been a Party member since 1926. P'eng allegedly spent some time in jail in the early thirties, but by the mid-thirties he was a top Party operative in the Peking area where he played a major role in contacting and recruiting students into the CCP. In these endeavours he seems to have been working directly under Liu Shao-ch'i.

The chief purpose of this discussion is to suggest areas of inquiry which might illuminate the way in which China may have influenced Soviet disarmament policy in recent years. One must be careful not to exaggerate Chinese influence on Soviet disarmament policy. There are obviously many other factors: domestic political considerations, relations with the East European countries, relations with less developed countries, relations with the West, including the Soviet assessment of the strategic “correlation of forces,” and sometimes perhaps even disarmament considerations per se. In recent years there may have been a tendency to look too much to the Chinese in seeking explanations for Soviet behaviour in the disarmament field, partly because the drama of the evolving Sino-Soviet split was so fascinating that all else seemed to pale in significance and partly because “China” sometimes seemed a convenient explanation for otherwise baffling Soviet moves. I propose, rather arbitrarily, to analyse Soviet disarmament policy in four categories: (1) tactics on formal disarmament conferences; (2) the formal proposals put forward by the U.S.S.R.; (3) the general thrust of Soviet disarmament propaganda; and (4) decisions, or what appear to be decisions, by the U.S.S.R. to negotiate seriously for the purpose of actually achieving an agreement.

Hsiung Hsiang-hui, Peking's Chargé d'Affaires in London, is one of the extremely few American-educated Chinese Communists. Now in his mid-forties, Hsiung comes from a large and well-to-do gentry family (his father was once a district judge) in which, as the second son, he bridled under the petty tyrannies of his elder brother. By the mid-1930s he was a student in one of China's finest universities, Tsinghua, where he first came into contact with left-wing elements. After the war broke out in 1937, he studied briefly in Changsha but then joined the First Army of Hu Tsung-nan, a top KMT general. After a year's schooling in the Central Cadets School in Sian, Hsiung became aide-de-camp to General Hu, a post he held from about 1940 to 1943. Hu began to suspect him of being a communist and, to get him out of the way, assigned him back to the Cadets School. Towards the end of the war Hsiung attended a training course established by Hu in preparation for taking over areas held by the Japanese. After this, Hsiung took and failed a government scholarship examination. But then Hu provided the necessary funds for Hsiung to study in the U.S.

In 1958, the Chinese Communist leadership agreed on a revised set of basic principles governing the relationship between the Party and the Army, These principles, which involved a move away from the professionalisation of the Army, became summarised in the slogans “politics in command” and “the Party commands the gun. The changes reflected a decision to continue to rely on a revolutionary strategy based on people's war despite the decision to devote substantial resources to nuclear weapons. After a bitter dispute between the Party and the Army, Mao decided to reject Khrushchev's proposals for a unified nuclear command and to rely on an expanded military force to deter an American attack. Moreover, the Party emphasised the need to put military units to work in the economy. It thus turned the Army away from increased professionalism and technical training towards organising the militia and participating in economic construction work. Like other salient features of the Maoist view revealed at that time the 1958 guide lines for Party-Army relations assumed that a satisfactory balance could be achieved between professional modernisation and the role of the expert, on the one hand, and political mobilisation or “revolutionisation” (ideological “redness”), on the other. It was the Army's resistance to these moves that led to the purge of major military leaders, including P'eng Teh-huai in 1959.

Any discussion of the PLA leadership over the past fifteen years is inevitably hampered by lack of information. No “Army List” is published in China, and while major appointments are usually announced, dismissals are almost always left to be inferred. The names of military office-holders have to be correlated from isolated attributions in the Chinese press, with the proviso that the protracted non-appearance of an individual's came does not necessarily indicate his absence from active duty or his demotion.

No reader of the polemics in the Sino-Soviet dispute can fail to have noticed the importance of issues of nuclear war and disarmament. Among the bitterest exchanges were the statements issued by the spokesmen of the two governments following the signing of the test ban treaty in 1963. The Chinese have launched a broad attack on the Soviet position on disarmament issues most notably in the Fifth Comment on the Soviet Open Letter published on November 8, 1963.