The sixth congress of the Communist Party of India (CPI) met at Vijayawada, Andhra, from April 7 to April 16. Since it was the first such congress to be held since the beginning of the frontier disputes between India and China, it was clearly of some importance. The disputes have created bitter divisions within the party, and the ideological rift between the Soviet Union and China has intensified these divisons. For nearly two years the CPI has been unable to function effectively and the rift within it is openly acknowledged by members.

Some important documentation has been published in the Chinese press since the dismissal of Teng Hsiao-p'ing regarding the policies which he pursued during the preceding year. As might be expected this evidence is partial and fragmentary, but it does throw new light on recent events. In particular the material strongly suggests that Teng took to the offensive in 1975 against what he regarded as a widespread tendency of ultra-Leftism especially in the Party, in industry and education, and that the anti-Teng struggle in spring 1976 was therefore not unprQVpked. Whether the policies advocated by Teng amounted to “restoring capitalism,” and whether the contradiction between the two lines was in fact “antagonistic,” is of course another question. This research note is simply designed to bring the story up to date for readers of The China

In January 1977, People's Daily announced that the scholarly journal Historical Research (Li-shih yen-chiu) had since 1973 been one of the “ periodicals of the ‘ gang of four.’ ” Collective contributors such as the Liang Hsiao and Lo Ssu-ting groups were accused of presenting a dogmatic line only corrected after October 1976, when the “ gang of four ” was smashed and the editorial authority of the journal was handed back to the Academy' s Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences.

Previous sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC), with their voluminous official reports on the ups and downs of Government work —particularly economic work—have provided some of the best data for tracking the course of political change in China during the last decade, and for trying to co-ordinate apparent changes of policy with the rise or fall of individual politicians. Although this year's NPC produced little more than a guarded summary of Chou En-lai's Report on Government Work, a Resolution on it and a People's Daily editorial, when these are read with the rest of current propaganda and compared with previous form, an attempt can be made to draw some tentative conclusions about the present political climate in Peking.

In January 1935 the harassed, decimated main forces of the Chinese Communist movement paused in the course of their epic Long March from Kiangsi to rest and regroup at Tsunyi in the hills of northern Kweichow. During their brief occupation of this remote, provincial town the top political and military leaders present held a conference which has come to be regarded as the major turning point in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the time, however, no such significance was attached to the stop-over in Tsunyi and, indeed, the very fact that an important political meeting was convened there was not revealed for some years after.

The notion of a great power triangle composed of the U.S., U.S.S.R. and PRC, and the “card games” played within this geometric configuration, are now particularly prevalent in the field of international politics. It is the purpose of this analysis to study the relevance of the great power triangle concept for Chinese foreign policy. A primary assumption will be that an understanding of Beijing's previous policies in a tripolar system will be a useful guide to the policies and problems of the present. Therefore we will begin with a review of the development of tripolarity and China's past attitudes. We will then concentrate on some crucial aspects of the triangle, the difficulties facing the Chinese leaders, and some possible policy options derived from our focus on the great power triad.

Dawa Norbu's contribution to these pages (“The 1959 Tibetan Rebellion: An Interpretation,” The China Quarterly, No. 77, March 1979, 74–93) bears a significance beyond its purely academic insights and its subsequent expansion of our knowledge of a major event in Sino-Tibetan history. Mr Norbu's presence among the scholarly ranks represents a noteworthy turning-point in the direction the historiography of this field of study is heading and consequently how future scholars will view Sino-Tibetan history. Before commenting directly on his article, I would like to make some observations on the state of the discipline itself.

During the Cultural Revolution, “Party life” (tang ti sheng-huo) was temporarily interrupted when leading members of Communist Party organizations at all levels were called (or “dragged”) out to defend themselves against the criticisms of revolutionary mass factions. As these issues were resolved, new coalitions formed and Party organs were carefully restructured to reflect the new distribution of power. The analysis here is of the 158 secretaries and deputy secretaries elected by the new provincial committees of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) between 4 December 1970 and 24 August 1971. It yields some unexpected findings.

This research report traces the history of route books (genglubu) from their chance discovery in 1974. It assesses the credibility of these practical nautical guide books as historical sources employed by official agencies in mainland China to claim permanent Chinese occupation of islands in the South China Sea. The route books of Hainan fishermen have a rather short history, having been laid down in writing only in the early 20th century. As contemporary practical nautical guides, they complement the established order of pre-modern Chinese texts used in official publications to describe the South China Sea as historical Chinese territory.

The non-take-up of public services has the potential to undermine civil rights and deepen social inequality. Looking at the case of the Youth Community College Programme in China, an innovation in governance to facilitate community integration of the migrant population by providing free education, this study finds that the targeted disadvantaged groups are systematically excluded due to the disproportionate imposition of various administrative burdens on them. We propose that an interaction mechanism – which we term “selective affinity” – between the policy process and individuals’ human capital leads to this unintended outcome. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of the causal mechanisms underlying vulnerable people's non-take-up of public services, while highlighting an example of dysfunctional state–society interaction and a mechanism for the reproduction of social inequality under authoritarianism in China.

In 1968, at the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR hereafter), Mao Zedong mobilized industrial workers to form Workers’ Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams (WPT hereafter) and to “occupy” the superstructure. This move empowered the working class in an unprecedented way. Did Mao's move bring about a new model of worker power under communism that was distinct from Lenin's vanguardist model and Rosa Luxemburg's model based on her perception of workers’ spontaneity and creativity? In contrast to the workers’ spontaneous rebel groups during the first two years of the CR, the WPTs were a quasi-institutionalized form of worker power created by the political elite to serve the CR agenda. It was also the Mao leadership's attempt to realize the leading role of the working class by absorbing workers into the structure of political authority, an attempt which reflected the Party's declared ideological principle. While the WPTs provided workers with opportunities to participate in politics, they were a misplacement of worker power in both social and organizational senses. The article examines the roots of this power misplacement and explores the dilemmas it brought for the Party as well as the working class itself, and why.