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The State Council and the Cultural Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Donald W. Klein
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Extract

This article attempts to explore the status of the leading personnel in the State Council since the advent of the Cultural Revolution. The State Council, of course, contains some of Peking's most famous personalities—such as Chou En-lai and Lin Piao—but my purpose here is to ignore for the most part the famed leaders and, rather, to dwell on a quantitative assessment of the entire body of 366 persons who were (in 1966) ministers and vice-ministers and chairmen of China's 49 ministries and commissions. One might also describe this as a study of the focal point of “experts” in China, even though it is clear that the State Council does not have a monopoly on China's “expert” talents.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 35 , September 1968 , pp. 78 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1968

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References

1 The date for the launching of the Cultural Revolution is a matter of dispute. For the purposes of this paper I have used the late spring of 1966 when large numbers of leaders fell from power, disappeared from the public scene, etc.

2 For the sake of simplicity the term “ministry” is used below to refer to both the State Council ministries and commissions. Similarly, the terms “minister” and “vice-minister” are employed to include also the commission chairmen and vice-chairmen.

3 It would have been useful to include the Academy of Sciences in this study, but a preliminary check revealed that there was too little biographic data about Academy personnel to draw meaningful conclusions.

4 The Chinese cabinet was known as the Government Administration Council from 1949 to 1954, and since then as the State Council. I have used the latter term throughout the article for the sake of simplicity.

5 Because the 2nd and 7th Ministries of Machine Building had no vice-ministers as of 1966, they have been excluded from Table VI.

6 No appointments have been made since the State Council held its last “formal” meeting on 9 March 1966.

7 Three charges d'affaires a.i. were in the U.S.S.R., Yugoslavia and India; it is clear, however, that the absence of an ambassador is the result of Peking's diplomatic “warfare” with these three nations over the past several years. For the purposes of this article I have regarded these three men as “ambassadors.” Similarly, I have regarded the two men who head the “Offices of the Chargg d'Affaires” (in England and the Netherlands) as ambassadorial equivalents.

8 Mongolia is the only Communist nation that has not held a meeting with the Chinese since the inauguration of the Cultural Revolution.

9 Apter, David E., The Politics of Modernization (Chicago, 1965), p. 167Google Scholar.

10 Ibid. p. 175.

11 Ionescu, Ghita, The Politics of the European Communist States (New York. 1967), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

12 Schurmann, Franz, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley, 1966), p. 56Google Scholar.