After having suffered from the self-inflicted wounds of internal convulsions and diplomatic isolation during the Cultural Revolution, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has returned to the world diplomatic scene with a new, vigorous, and imaginative foreign policy. To appreciate its dimensions fully, one must recall that China's foreign policy was left largely unprotected from the disruptive spillovers of the domestic quarrels during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards not only sacked the British chancery in Peking, but also seized their own Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1967. By November 1967, forty-four out of forty-five ambassadors were called home for “rectification,” leaving the durable Huang Hua in Cairo as the PRC's sole representative abroad. China's trade also suffered; by the end of September 1967, Peking had been involved in disputes of varying intensity with some thirty-two nations. However, the transition from revolutionary turmoil to pragmatic reconstruction came through a series of decisions made by Mao Tse-tung and his close advisors beginning in late July 1968 and culminating at the First Plenum of the Ninth Party Congress held in April 1969, ushering in a new era in Chinese foreign policy. toward the United Nations may be characterized as one of “love me or leave me, but don't leave me alone,” evolving through the stages of naive optimism, frustration, disenchantment, anger, and lingering envy and hope, the PRC's support of the principles of the United Nations Charter had remained largely unaffected from 1945 to 1964. However, the Indonesian withdrawal on January 7, 1965, triggered off a process of negative polemics against the United Nations. Indeed, Peking's bill of complaints against the United Nations was broad and sweeping: that blind faith in the United Nations had to be stopped because the organization was by no means sacred and inviolable; that by committing sins of commission and omission, the United Nations had become an adjunct of the U.S. State Department; that the United Nations had become a channel for United States economic and cultural penetration into Asian, African, and Latin American countries; and that the United Nations in the final analysis was a paper tiger.

Until recently, most of the literature on political development has centered primarily on nation building. Relatively little expenditure of time and energy has been directed toward some of the most gnawing political problems that confront leaders in industrializing societies: how to remain at the apex of power; what steps must be taken to create and then preserve public authority; and by what means leaders mobilize support and secure compliance with policy decisions when their brittle governmental structure is simultaneously confronted with crises of integration, mobilization, and distribution. The imperative need is to raise questions concerning (i) how authority is built and maintained, and (2) the means by which political leaders implement policy when they are confronted with a skeptical and volatile population. Those are the ends toward which this article is directed.

In his pioneering essay, “The Element of Decision in the Pattern of of War,” Theodore Abel argues, on the basis of twenty-five sample studies, “The rational, calculating decision for war is reached far in advance of the actual outbreak of hostilities,” and “in no case is the decision precipitated by emotional tensions, sentimentality, crowd behavior, or other irrational motivation. In every case, the decision is based upon a careful weighing of chances and of anticipating consequences.” This thesis—that a state selects an action of war from a number of alternatives in a conscious decision to maximize its goals after a careful weighing of available means and of possible consequences—may be applied as a conceptual scheme which we could term the rational calculation model.

Henry Ashby Turner's recent suggestions concerning the analysis of fascism in terms of its relationship to the processes we have come to understand as “modernization” are too important and interesting to pass without critical comment. So much of what Turner says is persuasive that we run the risk of uncritically accepting what might be the chaff of his discussion along with its welcome substance.

There are at least two types of reservations with respect to Turner's account. One type turns on the general thesis he entertains; the second deals with the specifics of his argument.

Negotiation is one of the basic political or decision-making processes, but if processes in general have been sorely neglected in political analysis, negotiation has been neglected more than most. Legislation as an institutional function has a respectable literature; as a process wherein goal values are constant and decisions are made by aggregating a sufficient number of parties to constitute a numerically superior side, it has become the subject of coalition theory. Adjudication has also given rise to a large quantity of institutional literature, although a theory explaining the process wherein a single party combines events and values to produce a decision is less well established. Similarly, diplomacy—and more recently, collective bargaining—has been thoroughly described, and economists and mathematicians using game and utility theories have developed some complex models of bargaining. But negotiation as a political process, specifically explained in terms of power, is an underdeveloped area of theory.

Each of the books listed above is concerned in some way with problems of tradition and modernity. The extent to which tradition is still an influential force in Japan; the compatibility and/or incompatibility of tradition and modernity; the present functions of tradition in Japanese society, polity, and economy; and the future prospects for tradition in modern Japan—all these are matters of concern to the authors, and together they may inform present intellectual discussions of traditionalism, modernization, and modernity.

“[Policy] is like a play in many acts which unfolds inevitably once the curtain is raised. To declare then that the performance will not take place is an absurdity. The play will go on, either by means of the actors... or by means of the spectators who mount the stage.... Intelligent people never consider this the essence of the problem, however. For them it lies in the decision whether the curtain is to be raised at all, whether the spectators are to be assembled, and in the intrinsic quality of the play….” With these words of Metternich, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger begins the chapter on the definition of the political equilibrium in his book on problems of peace in Europe between 1812–1822.