¹ The official communiqui summing up the Congress described it as a “congress of unity and a congress of victory.”

² The Party Constitution adopted in 1956 provided that the CC should meet at least twice a year, but no such provision is contained in the new version.

³ By “northerners,” which is our own term, we refer mainly to the men who established the important Communist base in Shensi prior to the Long March. Shensi served as the haven for Mao and his Long Marchers when they arrived there in 1935–36. Most of the northerners were native to Shensi or one of the nearby provinces. For a description of the Shensi base, see Selden, Mark's articles on the subject in The China Quarterly, Nos. 28–29 (10–12 1966, January–March 1967).Google Scholar

⁴ See Klein, Donald W., “The ‘Next Generation’ of Chinese Communist Leaden,” The China Quarterly, No. 12 (10–12 1962), pp. 57–74.Google Scholar

⁵ Klein, Donald W., “A Question of Leadership,” Current Scene (Hong Kong), Vol. V, No. 7 (30 04 1967).Google Scholar

⁶ Of the 44 full members elected in 1945, nine were dead and six had in effect already been purged (although one of the six may have been ill rather than purged).

⁷ These figures work out to 20 who survived and nine who were purged during the Cultural Revolution.

⁸ We draw the distinction between the men in the central-south bases and the Long Marchers to highlight those in the former group who remained behind in the south when the Long March troops left Kiangsi in 1934. Notables in this group include Ch'en I and Teng Tzu-hui.

⁹ The five are Wang En-mao, Teng Hua, Fang I, Tang Liang and T'an Ch'i-lung. (It was clearly no coincidence that these five were the only ones elected to the Ninth CC who were not on the Ninth Congress presidium.) The election of these men, plus a few more elected to full membership, may have resulted from compromises, implicit or explicit, worked out during the troubled years of the Cultural Revolution. In particular, it appears that the election of Wang En-mao, the dominant personality in Sinkiang for many years, resulted from a compromise. He had been promoted to full membership in 1958, but was pointedly demoted to alternate status on the Ninth CC.

¹⁰ There is abundant documentation to show that the overwhelming majority of the 120 men were purged. But there are some exceptions. For example, Li T'ao, Wang Weichou (now dead), Lo Kuei-po and Hsieh Chueh-tsai were favourably mentioned in the press subsequent to the Ninth Congress.

¹¹ For a view of “generations” as defined by CC membership, see Klein, , “The ‘Next Generation’…,” The China Quarterly, No. 12Google Scholar, and for another which concentrates on the PLA, see Whitson, William, “The Field Army in Chinese Communist Military Poutics,” The China Quarterly, No. 37 (01–03 1969), pp. 1–30Google Scholar. In 1960 Edgar Snow was told by a “man very high” in the Party that after Chiang Kai-shek's 1927 coup against the CCP there were only 10,000 Communists left, and “today there are about 800 of us—survivors of all the years” since 1927. “By and large,” the official continued, “the country is being run and for some years will be run by those 800.” See Snow, Edgar, The Other Side of the River (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1963), p. 331.Google Scholar

¹² in this regard, the final communiqué of the Ninth Congress seems to stress the newness of CC membership by pointed references to “new proletarian fighters who have come forth in the … Cultural Revolution,” “outstanding Party members working at production posts in factories and rural areas,” and PLA “combat heroes.”

¹³ We used an admittedly loose definition for “first identification with the Communist movement.” The figures are probably conservative in that the earliest information about a man often suggests he was already a Party member for several years. This assumption may serve to balance out the further supposition that many of the “unknowns” in our information joined the Communists at a much later date. In any case, Table II is meant to be suggestive, and nothing more.

¹⁴ See Klein, , “The ‘Next Generation’…,” The China Quarterly, No. 12Google Scholar, and Kuo-chün, Chao, “Leadership in the Chinese Communist Party,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, 01 1959, pp. 40–50.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Hofheinz, Roy Jr., “The Ecology of Chinese Communist Success: Rural Influence Patterns, 1923–45,” in Barnett, A. Doak (ed.), Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), p. 20.Google Scholar

¹⁶ From 1949 to the Cultural Revolution, work locale and native province bore only a marginal relationship for most important Communist leaders. But in the case of the worker-peasant group, there seems to be a very strong correlation; this has already been demonstrated in some biographical sketches published in China since the Ninth Congress about the workers and peasants now on the CC.

¹⁷ For statistics on the foreign travels of Eighth CC members, see Klein, Donald W., “Peking's Leaders: A Study in Isolation,” The China Quarterly, No. 7 (07–09 1961), pp. 35–43Google Scholar. Unlike some categories examined in this paper, information on foreign travel is generally very good.

¹⁸ “As compared with any of the previous congresses of our Party, there have never been such great numbers of delegates of Parly members from among industrial workers in factories, mines and other enterprises and from among the poor and lower-middle peasants in people's communes, …” Peking Review, No. 14 (4 04 1969), p. 8Google Scholar. Midway through the congress a plenary session was held which adopted Lin Piao's political report On that occasion Ch'en Yung-kuei, a peasant, and Wei Feng-ying, a worker, were among the very few to give speeches aside from such old stalwarts as Mao, Chou En-lai, Ch'en Po-ta and K'ang Sheng.

¹⁹ In a 1958 speech, Mao Tse-tung observed that “comrades working in local areas will eventually come to the center. Those working in the center will eventually die or be overthrown. Khrushchev came from a local area. The local class struggle is sharper, more similar to a natural struggle, and closer to the masses. These are the favorable-conditions possessed by the local comrades as compared with comrades at the center. The state of Ch'in was first a kingdom and then an empire.” “Selections from Chairman Mao,” Translations on Communist China, No. 90, Joint Publications Research Service (Washington), No. 49826 (12 02 1970), p. 46.Google Scholar

²⁰ For details on systems in China, see Barnett, A. Doak, Cadres, Bureaucracy, and Political Power in Communist China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), esp. pp. 5–9 and 456–457.Google Scholar

²¹ As used here, ministers and vice-ministers are equated with State Council commission chairmen and vice-chairmen, e.g., the chairman of the State Planning Commission.

²² The figures for “representation” in these ministries are almost certainly inflated. Lin Piao, for example, is calculated in these totals by virtue of his position as Defence Minister.

²³ By top posts we mean commander, political commissar, deputy commanders, and deputy political commissars, as well as the generally described “responsible persons.”