As the title indicates, this article deals with the image of the Party in Chinese Communist ideology. Obviously the conception of the Party and its role put forward in theoretical writings cannot be isolated from the reality of the Party, if only because ideology is shaped by practice and serves as a rationalization of practice. But the emphasis here will be on the analysis of statements about the Party, and their evolution over the past three decades.

The building of harmonious relationships between the capital and the regions is always a critical task confronting a new regime in any country. In traditional China, the founder of each new dynasty, by virtue of his military conquests, was able to establish fairly firm control over his former enemies in the various regions. But to rise to power in a country of such enormous size, the dynastic founders were forced to form alliances with various local leaders who had assisted them in their conquest. After they achieved victory the conquerors no longer had to subdue enemies but they had to find a way of working smoothly with the regional leaders who had assisted them in their rise to power.

One of the most extraordinary and puzzling events of the twentieth century is surely the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. This most profound crisis in the history of the Peking regime provides us with the best available opportunity to study the Chinese political system. For it is during a crisis that the nature, the strength, and the vulnerabilities of a political system fully reveal themselves. Further-more, we can attempt not only to note the unique features of this extraordinary event, and of Chinese politics itself, but also to see whether the seemingly unique Chinese experience does not reveal some universal dilemma of the human condition and fundamental problems of the socio-political order in a magnified and easily recognizable form. It is my belief that the Chinese political system prior to the Cultural Revolution is one of the purest forms found in human experience of a type of association in which there is a clear-cut separation between the elite and the masses. If one follows Ralf Dahrendorf in asserting that in every social organization there is a differential distribution of power and authority, a division involving domination and subjection, the Chinese political system can be taken as one of the polar examples of all social organizations, showing clearly their possibilities and limitations, their problems and dilemmas. From this perspective, the Maoist vision as it has revealed itself in its extreme form during the early phases of the Cultural Revolution can be considered a critique of this type of political organization.

At the time the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) issued its now-famous Circular Notice of 16 May 1966, which roundly criticized Peking's Mayor P'eng Chen and thereby ushered in a dramatic new stage of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a large-scale and intensive Socialist Education Movement was still being implemented systematically in the Chinese countryside.

It is a commonplace that the writing of foreign observers often reveals as much about the assumptions of their own society as it does about those of the society they observe. Certainly, five centuries of Western commentary on the administration of justice in China support this proposition.

Communist China has not published official population statistics for any date since 1 January, 1958, when it claimed a total population of 646,530,000 persons. For nearly a decade after that, the rounded figure of 650 million was given almost without exception. On 11 March, 1966, however, a figure of 700 million was cited for the first time by Lin Piao in his letter to the Industry and Communications Front, and in August it appeared again in the communiqué of the Eleventh Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee. More recently, the figure 750 million was used in a speech at a workers' congress in Lanchow on 10 February 1968.