Editor's Note

Abstract

The following two important documents, selected from Taiwan sources, were originally published by the Red Guards. Although there is no way to verify the authenticity of the documents, judging from the contents, they appear to be reasonably reliable. As official reports on the personal conduct and wrong policy lines committed by Lo Jui-ch'ing, chief of staff of the PLA from 1959 until his purge in 1965, both documents shed significant light on the tensions between the Maoist and the non-Maoist line of army-building and military strategy. The documents iden- tified and contrasted the specific areas of difference and conflict. Although both reports focused primarily on Lo, most of the criticism is equally applicable to leaders like P'eng Teh-huai and Huang K'o-ch'eng who were purged earlier in 1959. It should be noted that the documents also reveal useful information on many issues of historical interest as well as on the broader processes and patterns of power struggle and policy conflict within Communist China's political system. Comments of the Central Committee on the transmission of the second selection in this section may be found in CCP Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong, Union Research Institute, 1968), pp. 29-32.