This article attempts to set forth, in as nearly comprehensive and organized a manner as possible, a range of problems referring to the political development of Communist China whose investigation would not only advance our understanding of contemporary Chinese politics but would also produce results of value for the general study of politics. Our focus is particularly, but not exclusively, on events since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Our procedure is to move from the general to the specific: that is, to inquire, first, what are the most general classes of political phenomena with which the Chinese political system has affinities; second, what are the most general developmental trends which can be observed in the Chinese revolution; and third, what are the particular aspects of the dynamics of the Chinese political system which offer rewarding opportunities for research.

At the international Communist conclave that assembled in Mos-Cow in November 1960, the Soviet delegation introduced a new formula, designed to serve as an ideological blueprint for Communist policy in the less-developed areas of the world. The formula consisted of two parts: a statement of immediate objectives and a tactical plan to achieve them. Of these, the objectives were set forth in the form of a theoretical governmental model, described as a transitional state structure appropriate for less-developed societies. It was christened the “national democratic state,” and the tactical plan chosen as the proper means for its establishment was correspondingly designated the “national democratic front.”

Although tactical nuclear weapons have been extensively integrated into NATO, there appears to be no clear doctrine for using them to control a battlefield or hold a defense perimeter. Even the possibility of a limited tactical nuclear war has been questioned. Disenchantment with tactical nuclear defense has stimulated an increased interest in the controlled use of strategic weapons and a demand for stronger conventional forces. But these alternatives also present problems.

The water is safe to drink in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt, thanks to a water filter station established by Czechoslovak engineers. A shoe factory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is being built by Czech technicians. Across the frontier, in Somalia, Czechs are building a technical institute to teach some young Somalis the techniques necessary to staff modern factories. Across the continent in Conakry, Guinea, airport inscriptions are in Czech as well as in French and English to accommodate the many Czechs arriving on the direct Prague-to-Conakry airline. In the smaller villages of Ghana special trucks are delivering Czech beer to the local inhabitants. In Mali journalists are being trained by Czechs in the establishment of their own press agency. And in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, there are numerous Africans among the more than 2,000 students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America enrolled at Czech state expense in institutions of higher learning. To say that Africa has assumed a role of real importance for the Czechs is an understatement.

The Second World War is often regarded as a virtually total conflict, with few mutual restraints to bind the belligerents to less than maximum use of their destructive capabilities. While it is generally remembered that poison gas and bacteriological weapons were not used, these limits are usually cited as great exceptions to the rule. Relatively little notice has been taken of the restraints in Europe on the use of conventional high-explosive and incendiary bombs in aerial bombardment, restraints which remained in effect for an unexpectedly long time after the start of the war.

In recent years tremendous concern has been expressed about the problems of what had first been identified as “backward,” then euphemistically “underdeveloped” or “undeveloped,” and now more positively “developing” or “emerging” areas. A wealth of factual and theoretical studies has been produced, attempting to view the problems of underdevelopment broadly and to construct a conceptual framework by which we might comprehend the apparently complex phenomena occurring in those regions. In spite of this growing scholarly interest, and without attempting to minimize the contribution of those who are laboring in this as yet untapped field, it is this writer's contention that too few studies have been undertaken which examine and analyze the views of those individuals most influential in shaping the future of the emerging states—the national political leaders.

Politics cannot tolerate indulgence, it must be logical and consistent.” This was a lesson in Soviet foreign policy which N. S. Khrushchev administered in July 1957, or just after the organizational finale to his bitter struggle with V. M. Molotov, whom the victorious leader accused of favoring “the policy of ‘tightening all the screws’” in relations with the West. However, in the past two and a half years, erraticism has often marked the Kremlin's foreign political behavior. Does this vacillation originate entirely in “objective” pressures on the party First Secretary and premier, or in his own allegedly impulsive nature, or may it sometimes be due in part to a recurrence of factional clashes in the Soviet hierarchy?

I don't know how many economists, teaching business fluctuations or the corn-hog cycle, have devoted an hour to the household thermostat; I know several. Cybernetics, I am told, drew attention to similarities between vacuum tubes and animal nerve cells, and made predictions about the human nervous system that were verified by surgery. An article on feedback related artillery fire-control and automatic oil-pipeline systems to the ecological complementarity of the lynx and the rabbit. Economists compare the closeness of election campaigns to the market forces that make two brands of cider taste much alike. Analysts of rumor, best sellers, and epidemic diseases have been led independently to the equation for the logistic curve; and the collapse of Batista has been compared to the collapse of a stock market. Individuals with conflicting internal values have been likened to a two-person committee with a complicated voting system; and recently the paradigm of the “prisoners' dilemma” has been used to characterize preemptive attack, cheating on a test ban, and Rousseau's illustration (five men cooperating in a stag hunt when one spies a hare) of the value of enforceable contract.

Professor Lucian W. Pye succeeds brilliantly in Politics, Personality, and Nation Building in explaining why at least one country, Burma, has encountered some of the difficulties it has in creating an effective, modern state system. Proclaiming at the start of his study the need for a doctrine of democratic development, Pye deals primarily with the related search for individual and collective identity by a people unprepared in many of their sentiments and attitudes for the tasks that now weigh so heavily upon their shoulders. The most revealing section of his book, that dealing with the attitudes of various members of Burma's political elite on such matters as power and action and the nature of Burmese politics, is based mainly on 79 interviews (34 with administrative officials, 27 with politicians, and 18 with “observers and critics of the political scene such as journalists, educators and businessmen”). Disguised sketches of some of the persons interviewed follow Pye's analysis of the views of these Burmese.

On March 27,1938, just two days before signing the Munich agreement, by which Czechoslovakia was dismembered, Neville Chamberlain referred to the Czech-German dispute in the Sudetenland as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” The insularity and outright ignorance displayed in this remark, while surprising in a national leader, were not untypical of the views prevailing before World War II among the English-speaking public regarding not only the Sudeten problem, but much else in Eastern Europe. The accounts of journalists, travelers, and writers in search of sensation did little to counteract, and frequently merely reflected, the shallow and often disdainful opinions held by many Westerners regarding the quarrelsome nationalities of Eastern Europe.