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the subject by historians of modern China. The paucity at least until recently of adequate sources provides the most obvious explanation for this indifference. But perhaps even more important is the fall of foreign relations from historical grace-from the position of prominence and respect it once enjoyed. As historians embraced a "China-centered" approach, they became increasingly absorbed in intellectual, social, economic, and local history. They looked back with a critical eye on the earlier historical literature with its strong emphasis on : China's external relations, and they saw scant reason for interest in more recent treatments of CCP foreign policy produced in the main by political scientists.[1

As a result, an emergent CCP foreignpolicy history, like other aspects of China's foreign relations, stands somewhat apart from

CCP FOREIGN RELATIONS: A GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE

by Michael H. Hunt

This article offers a general overview of the literature on the origins and evolution of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP)'s external relations. This opportunity to share with interested readers my understanding of that literature also permits me to acknowledge the scholarly contributions of others who made my synthesis in The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy possible.

Background and General Treatments

Anyone in search of major themes in Chinese foreign relations or a ready overview should start with Jonathan Spence's elegant The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990), and The Cambridge History of China, general editors Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge University Press, 1978-). The Cambridge History provides good coverage not only of the period treated in this study—the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--but also earlier times. Both Spence and The Cambridge History volumes offer help on the relevant literature.

Of all the broad-gauge surveys of CCP external relations, John Gittings's The World and China, 1922-1972 (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) stands out for the vigor of its argument and for the breadth of its concep

today's governing historical concerns. Why today's governing historical concerns. Why should specialists in early twentieth-century anarchism, urban women, or rural society care about the party's dealings with the outside world? Even specialists in party history drawn from a new generation of American historians are inclined to set foreign relations beyond their purview or banish it at best to the margins of their concerns.

But arguably to set foreign relations somewhere on edge of Chinese history is to impoverish both. Politics and the state do matter, a point that social and cultural historians in a variety of fields have come to accept.12 And foreign policy, the regulation of relations with the outside world, may be one of the most powerful and consequential aspects of the state's activity. Understanding the decisions, institutions, and culture associated with that activity can be of signal

tion. Gittings first broached the major themes later developed in the book in "The Origins of China's Foreign Policy," in Containment and Revolution, ed. David Horowitz (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 182-217. Hélène Carrère d'Encausse and Stuart Schram, Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings (London: Penguin Press, 1969), also offers a long-term view of the CCP within the context of the international communist movement. A sampling of the new work and a discussion of its interpretive implications and field repercussions can be found in Michael H. Hunt and Niu Jun, eds., Toward a History of Chinese Communist Foreign Relations, 1920s-1960s: Personalities and Interpretive Approaches (Washington: Asia Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1995).

Historical materials appearing in China over the last decade have dramatically broadened our window on CCP foreign relations and left somewhat dated most of the earlier Western-language literature. The most important of those materials for the period treated here is Zhongyang dang'anguan, comp., Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian comp., Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian xuanji [A selection of CCP Central Committee documents] covering 1921-1949. This collection is supposedly drawn from an even fuller body of materials extending beyond 1949, Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian huibian [A compilation of CCP Central Committee documents], compiled by Zhongyang dang'anguan and available on a very limited basis only in China. The xuanji first appeared in an "inner-party” (dangnei)

importance in filling out such diverse topics as the role of ideas, life in the city, or changes in the countryside. Party historians in particular run the risk of losing track of the global dimensions of the revolutionary and state-building enterprise and thereby forfeiting a chance to move toward a fully rounded understanding of the CCP. At the same time, CCP foreign relations needs the methodological leavening and interpretive breadth afforded by the history of China as it is now practiced. Foreign relations also needs the well honed language tools that historians of China could bring to mining the documentary ore now so abundantly in view.

While there is no reason to mourn the passing of the age of foreign-relations hegemony in the study of the Chinese past, the effect has been to leave the stewardship of China's foreign relations to political scienedition (14 vols.; Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao, 1982-87). It has reportedly been supplemented by a two-volume addition. An open edition is now available (18 vols.; Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao, 1989-92). A translation of key items from this collection will appear in The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis, ed. Tony Saich with Benjamin Yang (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, forthcoming).

There are several other general collections containing materials helpful to exploring the party's approach to international issues and its closely related domestic concerns: Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun zhengzhi xueyuan dangshi jiaoyanshi, comp., Zhonggong dangshi cankao ziliao [Reference materials on CCP history] (11 vols.; n.p. [Beijing?], n.d. [preface in vol. 1 dated 1979]; continued for the post-1949 period as Zhonggong dangshi jiaoxue cankao ziliao); Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan xinwen yanjiusuo, comp., Zhongguo gongchandang xinwen gongzuo wenjian huibian [A collection of documents on CCP journalism] (3) vols.; Beijing: Xinhua, 1980; "internal circulation" [neibu]), which covers 1921-1956; and Fudan daxue lishixi Zhongguo jindaishi jiaoyanzu, comp., Zhongguo jindai duiwai guanxi shiliao xuanji (1840-1949) [A selection of historical materials on modern China's foreign relations (1840-1949)] (4 vols.; Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1977).

Most of the major figures in the CCP continued on page 136

tists with their own understandably distinct agenda and style. The consequence of their dominance is a literature tending in two directions, each bearing features that are worrisome because of the effect they may have in slowing and skewing the use of new materials on the CCP.13

One tendency, marked but by no means dominant, is a preoccupation with theoretical abstractions. What may most strike historians is how this theory-building enterprise tends to thrive under conditions that are euphemistically described by those who attempt it as "data poor" (if imagination rich). We can all call to mind efforts to construct and test high-flying theoretical formulations that get off the ground only after the perilous potholes along the evidentiary runway are carefully smoothed over. Once airborne, those formulations stay aloft only so long as no dangerous mountains of data intrude in the flight path. The virtuosity of the performance can be impressive, but it usually comes at the price of obscuring the fascinating complexity of political life with sometimes mind-numbing abstractions, 14

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The second, perhaps more pronounced tendency among political scientists is to approach Chinese policy with a stronger commitment to description and a more developed historical sensibility. Political scientists working along these lines bring to their work an awareness of the way that skimpy documentation hobbles their interpretive effort. This group also follows an old-fashioned faith in the importance of individual leaders' values, style, and personality especially Mao's. But the paucity of good documentation long locked CCP decisionmaking in a black box and forced these China-watchers to find modes of analysis that would help them make sense of limited evidence and communicate their findings promptly and clearly to the broad policy community. Determined to make some sense of what was going on inside the black box, these analysts developed a variety of tools to penetrate its mysteries. However, the problematic nature of some of those tools is becoming apparent as the new CCP sources open up that box for the first time and permit comparison of past interpretations with the newer, more richly documented understanding.

The reading of public pronouncements, long a mainstay of China-watchers, is ren

dered particularly tricky by all the ways those pronouncements can deceive. Usually couched in explicit and correct ideological terms, they may not reflect the more direct, less jargon-ridden inner-party discussions and directives. They are, moreover, sometimes intended to manipulate foreigners, and thus are couched in terms that the party thinks will be effective on its target audience, not in terms that are revealing of inner-party calculations. Finally, they may be directed at an audience altogether different from the one the contemporary foreign reader may have 16 assumed was the target.

American observers' misreading of the CCP's propaganda line from mid-1945 to mid-1946 offers a good example of these interpretive difficulties. Inner-party documents now capture Mao Zedong as a backstage operator, carefully orchestrating an attempt to manipulate Washington into an engagement in Chinese politics beneficial to the CCP. He was not intent, as most students of the period have naturally concluded on the basis of the public record, on dismissing American contacts or rejecting American involvement, 17

An even more complicated example of the perils of reading public signals is Zhou Enlai's interview on 3 October 1950 with the Indian ambassador. Often cited retrospectively as one of a string of crystal-clear warnings issued by Beijing following the outbreak of the Korean War, Zhou's own language in the formal Chinese record is in fact strikingly muffled and vague and does not accurately convey the depth of Mao's commitment to intervention at that moment. Zhou was apparently aware that he might be misconstrued and worked with his translator to get his point across. But U.S. Chinawatchers in Hong Kong had difficulty extracting a clear message from that October interview, and the puzzle still remains for historians today looking back. While we may puzzle over whether Zhou's lack of clarity was inadvertent or by design, the point remains that this critical public pronouncement is still hard to interpret. 18

An emphasis on factions, the relatively stable groups united by some sort of overarching interest or ideology, 19 is another of the questionable short-cuts employed by China-watchers struggling to make sense of Beijing politics. The reduction of complicated political choices to stark factional alternatives reflected the analysts' need for

clarity and the absence of restraints that rich documentation might impose. At first based largely on circumstantial evidence, the factional interpretation enjoyed a major boost during the Cultural Revolution when material on elite conflict became public. As a result, a variety of factional cleavages have gained prominence in the writing of Chinawatchers, and soon found their way back into the work on party history produced by political scientists. Perhaps the best known of the factional interpretations has arrayed "Maoists" against Moscow-oriented "internationalists."20

The new materials have raised two sets of doubts about the factional model. On the one hand, they offer little to support even a circumstantial argument for the existence of factions, and on the other they have set in question the Cultural Revolution evidence used to beat down former party leaders. Some of this evidence is of doubtful authenticity, and much seems torn from context to score political points.

It would prove ironic indeed if the factional model turns out to offer a no more subtle treatment of Chinese politics than does the former dependence of the CCP's own analysts on struggles within monopoly capitalism to explain U.S. politics. Undeniably, informal networks and shifting coalitions have played a part in PRC politics, but a compelling, carefully documented case has not yet been made that those networks have supported stable and identifiable as opposed to complex and cross-cutting political attachments. Scholars pressing factional claims bear the responsibility for being explicit about their definition of the term, marshalling reliable evidence, and setting whatever factional activity may exist within the broad political context so as to clarify the relative importance of such activity.

A final shortcut rendered doubtful by the new CCP history is the China-watchers' reliance on China's own international affairs "experts" as a prime source of information.21 These experts, often accessible and able to speak the language (both literally and figuratively) of Western analysts, have become over the past decade understandably attractive contacts, constituting along with their foreign counterparts a transnational community of policy specialists and commentators on current international affairs.

But the new history underlines the lim

ited insights of these experts by revealing the degree to which decisionmaking on critical issues has been closely held, the monopoly of a handful of leaders. Moreover, the new history reveals that major decisions have often been tightly guarded, not something to share with a foreigner-except where it suits the purposes of the party center to make available partial and sometimes tendentious information.

The shift toward a more historical rendering of the CCP past should have a notable impact on political science research. Those of a more descriptive bent should welcome and benefit from the accumulation of fresh evidence that makes possible greater analytic rigor and sharper interpretive insight. The more theoretically inclined may be the more threatened, but some will accommodate to the new data, using it as ballast that will keep them closer to the safety of the ground. Indeed, it is possible that taking a longer view and looking at the implications of better documented cases may induce them

CCP LEADERS' SELECTED WORKS AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION1

By Chen Jian

The study of 20th-century Chinese history, especially the history of the Chinese Communist revolution, has experienced a boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s largely for two reasons. First, the introduction of the "reform and opening to the outside world" policy in the People's Republic of China in the late 1970s and early 1980s resulted in a more flexible political and academic environment, which enabled Chinese scholars, historians in particular, to conduct their studies in more creative and critical ways. Second, the release of many previous unavailable documentary sources about the activities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) makes it possible for scholars, both in China and in the West, to base their studies on a more comprehensive documentary foundation. This paper reviews the works of CCP leaders that have been compiled and published (both internally and openly) since the early 1980s, examining their influence on the historical writing of the Chinese Communist revolution.

to dispense with all but the most modest, commonsensical "theory" and perhaps even to enter the fray over what the evidence actually means. The theoretically enthralled may thereby rediscover in Chinese policy some of the classic and "soft" issues of international politics-the importance of personality, the contingent nature of politics, the complexity of thought behind action, and the persistence and power of political culture.

While this new CCP history should give political scientists pause, they also have important contributions to make to a more historically oriented field. Their concern with understanding the state and explaining its exercise of power has generated a repertoire of theories that may prove helpful to anyone trying to make sense of considerable new data and still uncertain of the most fruitful way to frame the issues. Moreover, the political scientists' preoccupation with contemporary questions stands as a salutary reminder to the more historically oriented of

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For the purpose of mobilizing the party's rank and file as well as the masses, the CCP has long carried out a practice of compiling and publishing the works of Party leaders. The most important example in this regard is the publication of the four-volume Mao Zedong xuanji (Selected Works of Mao Zedong) in the 1950s and 1960s. Altogether, over 100,000,000 sets of xuanji had been printed and sold by 1966-1967, making them, together with the famous "little red book" (Quotations of Chairman Mao), the "Red Bible" during the years of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution." (As a byproduct, Chairman Mao became the richest person in China from royalty income, although, according to the memoirs of his nurses and bodyguards, he disliked money and was unwilling to touch it himself.) The publication of works of the CCP leaders was not designed to provide scholars with reliable source materials to study the party's past; rather, it was aimed to guide the revolutionary mass movement into the orbit set up by the party.

Thus, the criteria for selecting the works of Party leaders followed the Party's needs. Indeed, only those documents which served to promote the Party's current policy, or to enhance the Party's and its leaders' image of being "eternally correct," were made public.

the complex relationship of past to present— of how the present may subtly influence the agenda for historical research and how historical findings may illuminate current problems.

Defining a Historical Agenda

CCP foreign policy is, as the above discussion suggests, a field distinctly in flux. Specialists have put a good deal of time and energy into coping with the recent flood of valuable documentary and other materials. The flood may be cresting, and those who have escaped drowning and reached the safety of high ground are now in a position to reflect on their future tasks.

The most obvious is to link a better documented version of CCP external relations chronologically and thematically to Chinese foreign relations in general. Qing sources, printed and archival, have long been available, and have been recently reinforced by the opening of collections located in the

Consequently, the selection process often resulted in a substantive revision of the texts of historical documents. For example, it is well known among China scholars that the texts of many pieces in Mao Zedong xuanji were substantially altered from the original versions.

Yet scholars of the Chinese revolution, including historians, have widely used such publications as Mao Zedong xuanji as their primary sources. Indeed, at a time that Western scholars had to travel to Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo to collect materials on the Chinese Communist revolution, how could they exclude Mao Zedong xuanji from their data base? The openly published selected works by CCP leaders, together with official CCP statements, contemporaneous newspaper and journal literature, and, in some cases, Guomindang (Nationalist Party) and Western intelligence reports, formed the documentary basis of Western studies on the Chinese Communist revolution before the early 1980s. Sometimes China scholars had no choice but to rely on obviously flawed documentary sources. As a result, in those years, the ability to make good "educated guesses" was a necessary quality for every Western scholar writing about China.

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In a brief sketch, it is hard to describe continued on page 144

PRC. Materials from the Republican era get steadily better as fresh publications appear and archives open on Taiwan and within the PRC. The new CCP material helps round out an already rich documentary base and makes all the more urgent an integrated treatment of China's external relations. Drawing on this range of sources, historians can begin to offer in-depth treatment of all the kinds of topics associated with a well developed foreign-relations literaturefrom important personalities to the relation of policy to the "public." It should also convey a more complex sense of policy with features-economic opportunism, political flexibility, cultural ambivalence, strategic opportunism, and policy confusion-long associated with the better studied policies of other countries. To bring these themes into better focus specialists will want to place the CCP's historical experience in a comparative framework and look for insight on the CCP that might emerge from juxtaposition with other foreign-relations histories.22

This broad agenda, good as far as it goes, neglects a fundamental and necessarily unsettling interpretive collision about to play out within the CCP foreign-relations field. Its resolution bears directly on the kind of agenda the field will follow. As historians turn to CCP foreign relations, they will bring with them an anthropological concern with culture and a post-modern sensitivity to language, both currently strong preoccupations within their discipline.23 Those interpretive proclivities are distinctly at odds with at least three fundamental features of the established literature and discourse defined by political science. Finding ways to make fresh, thoughtful use of the new historical evidence is here as perhaps in general inextricably tied to a critical examination of older, well worn, and often narrow channels of interpretation.

One point of conflict arises from the long-established tendency to cast policy in terms of antinomies that in effect impose an interpretive strait-jacket. The literature is peppered with reference to policies that are supposed to fit in one of several either/or categories. Policies were either "idealistic" or "realistic." They were either "ideologically driven" or responsive to “situational factors." They were shaped either by the "international system" or by "domestic determinants." These alternatives confront scholars with an interpretive dilemma that

they often resolve by impaling themselves on one or the other of its horns.

Of all the dualisms, none is more pervasive and troubling than the idea of the "international system" and its conceptual twin, "domestic determinants." A moment of critical reflection reminds us that the make-up of cal reflection reminds us that the make-up of the international system is not self-evident, and those who champion its power to shape national policy differ widely on what the system is and how it works. Claims for the primacy of "domestic determinants" suffer from an equally serious problem: "domestic" is understood so narrowly and "determinants" is taken so literally that the phrase is almost drained of its significance.

The impulse to distinguish domestic and international influences may not be particularly useful in understanding the foreign policy of any country, and in the case of China draws a distinction that party leaders from Chen Duxiu to Deng Xiaoping would have found baffling, even wrong-headed. The growing availability of documentation makes it possible to argue what common sense already suggests that discussions of Chinese policy need to transcend this and the other stark categories that narrow and impoverish our discourse.

Some scholars (including political scientists) have already begun to escape these stark alternatives.24 They have shown not stark alternatives.24 They have shown not just that Mao and his colleagues operated within an international arena of Cold War rivalry and in a China of revolutionary aspirations and conflict but also that those worlds overlapped and interacted. Conclusions drawn from the behavior of the American imperialists, upheavals observed in Eastern Europe, and Nikita Khrushchev's theses on peaceful coexistence played off against internal discussions and debates about the best road for China's socialist development, treatment of peasants and intellectuals, the nature of party leadership, and China's appropriate place in a world revolutionary movement. Together the foreign and the domestic strands were interwoven into a single web, and neither strand can be removed without doing fundamental harm to our understanding of fundamental harm to our understanding of the whole.

A second point of likely conflict is an interpretive vocabulary whose unexamined assumptions exercise a quiet but nonetheless dangerous linguistic tyranny. Any reader of international relations would recognize the widely used lexicon, including prominently

such terms as "national interest," "strategic interests," "geostrategic imperatives,” and "geopolitical realities." Thus we get accounts that confidently proclaim China's foreign relations is "propelled by national interests" (not its evil twin, "ideology"). Other accounts seek to differentiate "pragmatic" policies (usually linked with Zhou Enlai's or Deng Xiaoping's name) from "radical" or "provocative" policies (here Mao or the "Gang of Four" is likely to appear), and hold up as an ideal a "balanceof-power" approach that secures "strategic interests," "national security," and "foreignpolicy interests" in a changing “international system."

While this language most commonly appears in American writing on contemporary China, Chinese scholars writing about their country's foreign policy have been showing signs of appropriating this vocabulary. Influenced by American international relations literature as well by their own search for a usable foreign-policy past, they have emphasized the neatly formulated and smoothly executed nature of Chinese policy and held up Zhou Enlai as a model of "realism" and "expertise," while wrestling over whether to make Mao's contributions to

foreign-policy "realistic" or "ideological."25

Behind this vocabulary lurks a strongly judgmental impulse antipathetic to less universal, more culture-specific insights. Understanding policy, whatever its complexities, takes a back seat to handing down a clear-cut verdict based on what a "rational" or "realistic" actor would have done in a particular set of circumstances.

The Korean War literature starkly illustrates this point about the powerful impulse to evaluate the rationality or realism of policy. Chinese scholars have joined Americans in reporting approvingly on Beijing's reassuringly clear, unitary, and above all carefully calculated response to U.S. intervention on the peninsula. In the American literature on deterrence China's handling of the Korean War has even been enshrined as a positive model in striking contrast to the bumblings of U.S. policymakers at the time.26 Subjected now to a closer look thanks to the new evidence, this positive characterization seems wide of the mark. Mao and his associates, it now turns out, were themselves engulfed in the kind of messy and confused decisionmaking that also afflicted American leaders. Viewed in this new light,

Beijing's reaction to the Korean crisis becomes interesting not so much for the evaluative question of who did the better job but rather for the interpretive question of how do we understand the limits of cultural understanding and human control in a story strongly marked by chaos and contingency. These observations are not meant to deny rationality on the part of Chinese policymakers or for that matter on the part of Americans but to highlight the difficulty of evaluating policy rationality, especially with the help of simple, dichotomous notions of policy as either realistic or idealistic, driven by either careful calculations of national interest or by ungov

ernable ideological impulses.27

Though the critique of the rational actor model is widely made and apparently widely accepted, 28 much of the CCP literature still seems unusually preoccupied with distinguishing sound from misguided policy. This siren call to make judgments about international behavior finds a response in all of us, but answering the call carries dangers. The most apparent is the tendency for simple judgments and a polemical style to appeal most strongly when limited evidence affords the weakest supporting grounds for them. For example, it was easy to offer up an idealized Mao when his own party decided what we should know, and it was natural to move toward a negative appraisal when new revelations thrust at us serious, previously unsuspected personal flaws. As the evidence becomes fuller and more reliable for Mao as for the CCP in general, older judgments must confront previously unimagined moral and political dimensions, and what previously seemed self-evident evaluations dissolve into complexity.

But beyond the simple problem of judgments handed down on scant or skewed evidence there is a broader and more complex problem. The claim to understand and judge "national interest," "national security," and so forth rests on a fundamentally metaphysical faith that value preferences serve to settle otherwise eminently debatable issues. That claim becomes often unthinkingly universalistic when scholars discover in countries and cultures other than their own roughly comparable notions of national interest and national security-at least among policymakers deemed sufficiently skilled in the realist calculus of power. The inadvertent results of this rational actor framework are judgments that are funda

mentally culture-bound or at least that employ a definition of culture so narrow as to close off potentially interesting lines of investigation. Historians more interested in understanding the past than judging it will find limited appeal in hauling CCP leaders into court and formulating a verdict on the basis of their realism.

The third interpretive impulse likely to create conflict is a notion of ideology that is ahistorical and anemic. This unfortunate approach to the role of ideas in policymaking is in part a reflection of the rigid dualisms and fixation with rationality discussed above. It is also a reflection of a broader tendency during the Cold War to denigrate ideology as a peculiar deformation of the socialist bloc, a tendency that carried over into the China field as international relations specialists, schooled in comparative communism, applied a Soviet model to Chinese politics. In their accounts a pervasive, powerful Marxist-Leninist ideology came to offer an important key to understanding Chinese policy.

The resulting notions of CCP ideology are, it would now appear, ahistorical. The use of the Soviet Union as a starting point for understanding Chinese thinking may be unwise and is certainly premature because the Soviet model is itself drawn in narrow political terms and lacks firm historical grounding.29 Moreover, the Chinese party, which itself only recently began to come into sharper historical focus, is unlikely to offer an easy fit with any Soviet template.30 Indeed, we may look back on this Sino-Soviet ideological model and realize that the conclusions drawn from one set of highly circumstantial studies became the foundation for another set of equally circumstantial studies.

The prevalent thin, abstract conception of ideology should not divert our attention from more subtle and perhaps powerful informal ideologies that may be of considerably greater analytic value.31 Examining the intellectual predispositions and fundamental assumptions that constitute informal ideology may render us more sensitive to the cultural and social influences over policy. Such an approach may thus help us better understand how calculations of “interest" are rooted in social structure and filtered through a screen of culturally conditioned assumptions and how individual responses to "objective" circumstances in the international environment are profoundly condi

tioned by personal background, beliefs, and surroundings.

Analysts using imposed, culture-bound categories find themselves in much the same impossible situation an outsider would face in trying to understand the Australian aborigines who spoke Dyirbal. To ignore their language is to close the door to understanding their world with its unfamiliar classification: bayi (human males, animals); balan (human females, water, fire, fighting); balam (nonflesh food); and bala (a residual category).32 This breakdown may not make much sense to an outsider, but if getting into the head of the "other" is important, then uncovering the particular categories used to constitute their world is essential. By contrast, the conceptual baggage the observer brings from home must be counted a serious impediment. Employing outside frames of reference may obscure more China-centered and China-sensitive perspectives and thereby divert us from our ultimate destination-the understanding of China's beliefs and behavior in international affairs.33

One promising way to get beyond simple and mutually exclusive notions of CCP ideology-for example, either making it “Marxism-Leninism" or "nationalism"-is to think of it as a fabric that we can better understand by following the strand of keywords. A close look at those keywords and the relationship among them might prove helpful in defining policy discourse over time and unlocking contending visions of China's place in the world. 34

"Patriotism" (aiguo zhuyi) is one of those neglected keywords examined earlier in these pages. Another is "small and weak nationalities" (ruoxiao minzu). It too would repay close examination, revealing complexities not easily spotted in a straightforward reading of formal party statements. Like patriotism, this term had its roots in the late Qing, and persisted in CCP discourse from the party founding through the Maoist era and even beyond, injecting into it tensions as well as unintended ironies. China at times offered flamboyant rhetorical support for its revolutionary neighbors, but it has also collided with India and Vietnam, both important members of that community to which China claimed to belong. How has the concept of "small and weak nationalities" evolved, and what has China's regional ambitions and limited resources done to reconstitute the meaning of that term?

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