One of the most arresting aspects of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has been the confrontation between Mao Tse-tung (or the Maoist group) and the Chinese Communist Party. There is, to be sure, an area of vagueness and uncertainty concerning this whole matter. Have the Maoists attacked the party as such? What indeed is the party as such? The party may be conceived of as the sum total of its actual members—of its human composition. It may be conceived of in terms of its organisational structure—its “constitution,” rules and established mechanisms. To any genuine Marxist-Leninist, it is, of course, more than its cells and anatomy. It is a metaphysical organism which is more than the sum of its parts. The “soul” of this collective entity incarnates all those intellectual and moral capacities which Marx had attributed to the industrial proletariat.

The role played by the Soviet Union in the early days of the Chinese communist movement has always been shrouded in mystery. Recently some of this mystery has been dispelled as the Soviet Union has begun to publish a number of books and articles about the experiences of Soviet advisers in China.

The revolutionary Japanese artists have several times revised parts of the historical play Prairie Fire which they have been staging during their tour of China. It depicts the Japanese peasants' uprising in 1848, and they have made changes in it, in accordance with Mao Tse-tung's thought, to bring out even more clearly the armed struggle waged by the peasants. They have added a magnificent new scene at the end of the play. Amidst the singing of “The East is Red” and “The Internationale”, a great image of Chairman Mao appears on the backdrop, and the Japanese people, holding red-covered Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung and also spears and rifles, all turn to Chairman Mao.

The Cultural Revolution is a struggle for power, but at the same time it is the most extraordinary coup d'état in history in the sense that the dictator is trying to destroy with the help of outside forces the existing Party, which is his own creation and the very foundation of his power, in order to produce a totally new power structure.

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.

Initialy, the Chinese Communist Government held high hopes for a speedy solution to “the nationalities question.” Recent events, however, show that this question is still much in evidence and has been causing considerable anxiety in Peking. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guard exposures of “black bandits in power who are following a capitalist path” have revealed the existence of minorities problems which cast doubt on the régime's previous claims of progress. The Cultural Revolution has also revealed a split between those in the top leadership who favour concessions to the customs and traditions of the minorities and those who favour immediate and total assimilation. Since the former are generally experienced administrators while the latter are ideological zealots, this split may also be seen as yet another manifestation of the continuing “Red” versus “Expert” controversy.

The activities of the Communist Government of China in Tibet have been the object of international attention for some years. This attention has centred mainly around the occupation of parts of Tibet in 1950, which precipitated a discussion in the General Committee of the United Nations' General Assembly, and the continuing suppression of the civil unrest in Tibet which came to world attention in 1959 when the Dalai Lama fled from his capital and sought political asylum in India.