THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST WHOSE MAIN INTEREST LIES IN ASIA OR Africa has to avoid impaling himself upon the twin horns of an analytical dilemma. If he seeks to place his subject within the general framework of political theory he finds that it is difficult to avoid accepting Asian politics as a sub-species of Western politics. But if he insists upon the uniqueness of his own subject then he can expect to achieve an explanation of a ‘rose is a rose is a rose’ variety. Almond and Coleman in The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, 1960) set us off in pursuit of ‘political development’ and ‘modernization’. Many of us rejected a view of politics as a continuum in which the Asian world was presented as entering the mainstream of political development insofar as its members were assimilating to the model of ‘competitive politics’ – which, on closer examination, turned out to be the Anglo-American model – though Almond and Coleman did not go quite so far as to insist that the goal, the promised land of political development, was a two-party system.

TWENTY YEARS OF BREAKDOWNS IN PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENTS; the replacement of competitive political systems by military-bureaucratic regimes throughout Asia and Africa; civil war in Vietnam; the disintegration of Nigeria and the perpetration of genocide in that country, have inspired pessimism among most observers about the future of democratic politics in the new states. It has been suggested that political scientists now turn their attentions to the question of ‘political decay’ as well as to the question of ‘political development’ and that political leaders in the new states concentrate upon building the instruments of political control before engaging in serious economic development and social mobilization, and before permitting political competition and political participation: for, it is argued, rapid increases in economic development, social mobilization, and political participation work against the building and maintenance of strong and stable political institutions in a developing society.

INTER-PARTY RIVALRY BASED LARGELY ON SOCIO-ECONOMIC LINES took institutional shape in Ceylon, for the first time, with the approach of general elections in August–September 1947, under the newly inaugurated Soulbury Constitution. The issues at the general election of 1947 were simple and straightforward. It was accepted that the United National Party (UNP) would form the government with its leader, D. S. Senanayake, as the man who would lead the country to independence. The party had the backing of almost the entire press. It enjoyed ample financial resources and commanded the support of the ‘big families’, the landed interests, the mudalalis (shop-owners), and government officials, particularly the village headmean. The choice posed to the electors was between a policy of progressive social reforms and stable government advocated by the UNP as against the revolutionary changes that the three left wing parties envisaged – the Trotskyist Lank Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and its splinter, the Bolshevik Leninist Party which later changed its name to the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party (BSP), and the Moscoworiented Communist Party (CP). These left-wing groups were ideologically in conflict with each other.

NEITHER A SINGLE NOR A DOMINANT POLITICAL PARIY EMERGED FROM the Indonesian nationalist struggle. Rather, before the declaration of independence in August 1945, during the physical revolution against the Dutch which terminated in December 1949, and in the subsequent years the nationalist movement has been fragmented into a diversity of political groupings. Even today, after many small parties have disappeared, there remain eight legally active parties; a ninth, the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia), is striving to put together an underground apparatus from the ruins of 1965. As each party is the centre of a network of mass organizations, the peasants, youth, women, students and workers are also organizationally fragmented.

The multiplicity of political parties is rooted in the division of Indonesian society into several distinct self-conscious, socio-cultural groupings, the alirans (lit: ‘streams’), whose distribution has changed little since 1945. They are cross-ethnic in nature and mostly encompass a broad range of socio-economic classes. The broad outlines of the aliran pattern become apparent through an examination of two fundamental cleavages that cut across society: one religious, the other between holders of traditionalist and modernist world views.

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.

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.