The recent events in China are surely drama of the highest order, but at times it has seemed that the actors themselves were not entirely sure who was writing the lines. In fact what we seem to be witnessing is a form of commedia dell'arte: improvisation within a certain tacitly understood framework. The cultural revolution appears to have taken new turns and to have broken into new channels precisely because the actors have been faced with new and unforeseen circumstances as it has run its course. No faction in the struggle has been able to impose its will on the Party or the country by fiat; new devices and stratagems have been brought into play in what has looked like desperate attempts to gain the upper hand. It has clearly been a battle of the utmost seriousness, but there appear to have been limitations on the resultant chaos. Economic disorganisation does not seem to have occurred on the scale of the later stages of the Great Leap Forward. Nor, despite the clashes, confusion and bitter infighting, have new centres of power, totally divorced from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself, arisen. The cultural revolution has been pre-eminently a struggle within the Party.

In the latter half of 1927 the Chinese Communist Party suffered the most disastrous defeat of its history. The debacle of that year not only very nearly destroyed the Party's apparatus, it shattered beyond repair an entire conception of revolutionary strategy: the use of peasant mass organisation as a power base for the seizure of hegemony within the revolutionary movement. The repercussions of this traumatic reverse are being felt to this very day.

Styles of interpersonal communication are but one of a broad range of politically relevant behavioural patterns which are now seen to be shaped in part by the culture of a given society; together these patterns are called “political culture.” This analysis is an exploration of the childhood socialisation of attitudes and emotional concerns which have affected inter-personal communications in Chinese society and of some of the ways these culturally-based attitudes have influenced Chinese political behaviour. More specifically, the present discussion is intended to demonstrate something of the “political culture” analytical approach: data concerning Chinese habits of interpersonal and political communications are related to some of the leadership concepts and political institutions developed by the Chinese Communists. Socialisation experiences, however, are used as only one source of data for making inferences. What we have looked for is a general pattern of personal attitudes and social or political institutions as manifest in individual interview records, studies of Chinese history and political life, and in the writings of Chinese who have taken on the tasks of political leadership.

A Double explosion took place in mid-October 1964, producing strong shock waves around the globe. Khrushchev fell from power on October 14, while on October 16 Communist China became the fifth nation to explode an atomic weapon. The first Chinese test (like the second and fourth that followed in 1965–66) had a yield comparable to the Hiroshima bomb in 1945—about 20 kilotons. But, as Radio Prague noted soon after, a “small bomb” can do “great evil.”