In 1936 a group of Chinese communists were released from jail after a humiliating renunciation of communism. The Chinese Communist Party then secretly employed them to galvanise support in nationalist areas of the country. It later condemned the members of this group as renegades before finally rehabilitating them in 1978. Pamela Lubell uncovers the fascinating history of these communists, known as the Sixty-one, and in doing so produces a revealing account of the tensions within the Chinese Communist Party.

The essays that make up this volume offer the reader a full introduction to, and analysis of, the politics of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to the mid 1990s

Suppression and thaw have marked the course of communism in China. Merle Goldman traces that shifting pattern over the last decades of Mao's regime, linking it to the unique role of the intellectual in government Her engrossing account of the relations between the intellectuals and the governing elites provides a map of understanding to some recent events in the turbulent history of the People's Republic.

According to common misconception the Chinese political system is highly centralized. One result of this widely accepted view is that China specialists have often neglected the study of decision-making as a process. Concentrating upon the neighbouring but contrasting provinces of Sichuan and Guizhou during the decade before the Cultural Revolution, this book examines the interaction between centre and province and, without adopting a 'centralist' or a 'pluralist' viewpoint, argues that a spatial dimension is of necessity part of the Chinese decision-making process. Particular attention is paid to the variability of this interaction over time.

Since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, Chinese Communist leaders have constructed an administrative apparatus that has exercised broader and tighter control over Chinese society than any previous government in the country's history. This is a history of the development of Chinese organizational policy - a topic of constant concern and often strident debate - from 1949 to the death of Mao Tse-tung in 1976. The author argues that Chinese organizational policy has been controversial because of the complexity of administrative problems, the effects of policy changes on the distribution of power and status, and the philosophical dilemma of whether the efficiency of modern bureaucracy outweighs its social and political costs. He also shows how extreme approaches, such as demands during the Cultural Revolution that bureaucracy be destroyed altogether or proposals during the 1950s that the bureaucracy be rationalized, have been repeatedly rejected in favor of a policy more in keeping with much of Chinese tradition: to recruit officials on the basis of their political views, subject them to ideological indoctrination, and rely on mass campaigns to implement Party policy.