Fundamentals of the Chinese Communist Party

Abstract

This title was first published in 1976. From 1966 to 1969 the large-scale political turmoil and intense conflicts of the Cultural Revolution in China shattered notions of institutional permanence and unshakable legitimacy that many analysts had come to associate with the Communist Party of China, which had ruled the People's Republic for over fifteen years. Just as the high-level bureaucrats of the Party were shaken from their complacency, it seemed for a time, from the outside, as though it could no longer be taken for granted that the Communist Party would continue to provide the institutional core for political leadership in China. Fundamentals of the Party (Tang ti chi-ch'u chih-shih), which we are translating and publishing here as Fundamentals of the Chinese Communist Party, was published by the Shanghai People's Press in 1974 and constitutes an important source of the type needed to study the revival of the Party.