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Peking's Leaders: A Study in Isolation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Donald W. Klein
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Extract

The prospects are growing that the United States will be dealing directly with ranking Chinese Communist leaders on a continuing basis. Such an encounter has occurred at the Geneva conference on Laos. Almost every article concerning disarmament and arms control mentions Peking, implying, of course, future face-to-face United States–Chinese Communist meetings. And, if Communist China were to enter the United Nations in 1961 or perhaps 1962 there would, of course, be vastly increased contacts.

Type
Foreign Relations
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 7 , September 1961 , pp. 35 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1961

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References

1 “Peking's Evolving Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” The China Quarterly, No. 4, 10–12, 1960, pp. 28–39.Google Scholar

2 In an excellent article entitled “The Logic of Communist China's Policy,” The Yale Review, Vol. L, No. 1, Autumn 1960, pp. 1–17.Google Scholar

3 “Advanced” nations, as used here, include obviously industrialised countries, such as the United States, England, and Japan, but not necessarily all so-called Western nations (e.g., Chile). This same term appears in the accompanying tables.

4 We don't have to look to the Communists alone for victims of propaganda. How many care to recall the mockery and scorn of the early 1950s heaped upon the many Soviet scientific “firsts” in everything from the airplane to the baby carriage? Americans have now happily abandoned the notion that captured German scientists were behind each Soviet scientific advance. The fact remains, however, that the initial shock to the public caused by the first Sputnik resulted in large part from self-delusion.

5 As suggested earlier, other studies have given us some notion of the backgrounds of the Chinese leaders. From North, Robert C.'s Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Elites (Stanford University Press, 1952)Google Scholar, we learn that the general level of education is rather low and that the leaders tend to hail from provinces away from Western contact. Kuo-chün, Chao in “Leadership in the Chinese Communist Party,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 321, 01 1959, pp. 40–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, informs us that most were not trained outside of China and that among those who were, the majority went to the Soviet Union.

6 An “individual trip” means one man travelling to a single area or at least related areas. Thus, if Chou En-lai and Ch'en I visited Cairo, this would count as two trips. If Chou visited Budapest and Prague, this would also count as one; but if he visited London and Moscow, this would be calculated as two trips.

7 “Post-1949” is used as the dividing line for Communist control of China; a few of these travels slightly pre-dated 1949, but as they came long after youthful student days, they are included in the “post-1949” figures. This same term appears in the accompanying tables.

8 Liu Ning-yi, Liao Ch'eng-chih, Liu Ch'ang-sheng, and Chou En-lai, in that order. The first and third men are top trade union officials; Liao, a former “youth” leader, now serves on the “peace front.” Most of the trips of these three were to international Communist-front meetings held mainly within the Afro-Asian or Communist blocs. (Brief background sketches of these four, plus Foreign Minister Ch'en Yi, are found at the end of this article.)

9 Specifically, the “other areas” used here, as well as in the accompanying tables, consist of the following countries: Iraq, the United Arab Republic, the Sudan, Guinea, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Upper Volta, Togo, Chile, and Cuba.

10 A flexible criterion was used to arrive at the figure of 67 military men. For the most part it includes those on the National Defence Council, those holding ranking military posts within the PLA, plus Mao, Liu, Chou, and Teng Hsiao-p'ing on the grounds of their paramountcy within the régime.

11 U.S. News and World Report, 10 24, 1960, p. 75.Google Scholar