THE DIVERSE POLICIES OF BURMESE A ND THAI GOVERNMENTS obscure the similarities between these two countries. To contrast their political styles highlights these similar features and also reveals a general political change that applies also to much of Asia. That trend is towards the politization of military leaders and their creation of political parties to sustain their power base. Civilian experts and civil organizations increasingly serve these military governments and thereby tend to bolster their legitimacy.

It is two decades since the European powers commenced their withdrawal from Southeast Asia. Considerable political experimentation followed as leaders of these states adjusted their freshly won sovereignty to fit their weakened condition. Democracy burst on the region like a river in spate. Without exception every central government employed elections to legitimize itself. Then (but for the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore) military juntas moved to seize power from impotent legislatures. Liberals saw military totalitarianism sweeping Asia, conservatives viewed the nationalization practices as statism that crushed private initiative.

CONTRARY TO EXPECTATIONS, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SALAZAR FROM the political scene has not, in the short-run at least, led to a serious succession crisis in Portugal. A few weeks of hard but covert bargaining within the ruling circles culminated in the appointment by the President, Admiral Tomás of Dr Marcello Caetano as Prime Minister. Admiral Tomás was himself appointed by Salazar and chosen partly for his docility and innocuousness to replace the rebellious Craveiro Lopes in 1958; he has no power base of his own. Although in a fluid situation such as this his role has allowed him a greater latitude of choice than in normal circumstances, his decision probably reflected the balance of forces within the ruling circles. Caetano's background is typical of a whole generation of ‘counter-revolutionary’ monarchists, whose political formation matured within the matrix of the Portuguese Maurrassist movement, the integralismo Insitano. Somehow his monarchist allegiance, if not his authoritarian-corporatist convictions, waned as his career within the Estado Novo waxed. He was one of the young (in their twenties and thirties) integralista experts whose services were vital in Salazar's transformation of a mindless military dictatorship into a ‘respectable’ authoritarian regime.

THE VIETNAMESE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT IS DEEPLY AFFECTED BY ITS own history, brief as this has been (it was only founded in 1930). At the same time it has been marked by the triple historical experience of the nation from which it was born : the rich traditions of its secular history, the changes of the colonial period and the trials it has gone through and continues to go through since independence. It is authentically Vietnamese.

BOTH HALVES OF MY TITLE MAY REQUIRE EXPLANATION. WHY, IN AN issue devoted to political forces, an article on one man, and why the use of the vague term ‘equilibrium’? Because China today confronts us with the singular oddity of a country in which the existing political system has been attacked and partially dismantled on orders from the supreme leader, but nevertheless subsists to some extent; and in which the new system which he is striving to create has still not been firmly established or taken definite shape. It is, therefore, impossible to trace with precision the contours of the political forces, and indicate how they are related to one another, but while there may or may not exist in China a political system in the sense of an integrated whole, functioning according to definite rules, there clearly does exist a certain equilibrium – dynamic and unstable, but a kind of equilibrium none the less – between the various illdefined contenders for a share in political power, and the ‘force’ which stands at the centre of this political jungle is unquestionably Mao.