Elite strife is the Achilles’ heel of the Chinese political system, the event most apt to inspire elite-mass cleavages and other crises threatening the stability of the regime-nay, its very existence. All the major crises to have shaken the regime seem to have been instigated by or coincided with bouts of relatively severe elite conflict. Yet at the same time such strife offers one of the few opportunities for political innovations taking a fundamental departure from an elite consensus which otherwise tends to rigidify. Thus we find that many of the classics of the Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, from Mao's “On Contradiction” to Liu Shaoqi's “On Inner-Party Struggle,” display ambivalence, on the one hand lauding the self-validating, revitalizing functions of “struggle,” while at the same time warning that it must be handled “correctly.”

One of the central concerns in a study of the political economy of reforms in China is to determine the factors that affect the pace and the direction of reforms and to see if the objectives of the reformers can be obtained within a realistic time period. In the current literature on the political economy of reforms, much attention has been focused upon the orientation, decisions and interests of the Chinese top and regional leadership and central economic bureaucracies. For example, Harry Harding, in his recent book, has written extensively about the debates that took place between the moderate and radical reformers within the Chinese leadership on the two contrasting approaches to speeding up economic growth. On local governments and economic bureaucracies, much attention is paid to the conflicts of interest between the centre and the locality, and between different bureaucracies. Christine Wong has argued that with the substantial gain in allocation power, local governments are able to behave in ways detrimental to central objectives. Dorothy Solinger and Susan Shirk have described different ministerial responses to inflation control measures and reform initiatives.

During an interview in September 1986, some three years prior to seeking political asylum with his wife at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, Fang Lizhi was asked how he felt about the progress of political reform in China. Fang responded, “I must start with cosmology in answering this question.”

Fang's linkage of politics with cosmology – a branch of astrophysics concerned with the origins of the universe – must seem peculiar to those who know him only as a human rights advocate and critic of the Chinese Communist Party. Yet this was no idiosyncrasy on Fang's part. Fang's life and published work from the early 1970s to the present leave no doubt that his emergence as the symbolic leader of China's democracy movement is deeply rooted in his experiences and outlook as a scientist.

Fang's personal universe began to expand in 1972, when he and his colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) published a paper in Physica entitled “A Solution of the cosmological equations in scalar-tensor theory, with mass and blackbody radiation.” This innocuous-sounding article met with a furious response from leading theoretical circles of the Party. Fang et al. had broken a long-standing taboo by introducing the Big Bang theory to the Chinese physics world. Insofar as the Big Bang contradicted Engels's declaration that the universe must be infinite in space and time, Fang's paper was tantamount to heresy.

During the 1980s, bracketed by the Third Plenum in 1978 and the suppression of the democracy movement in 1989, China edged, step by step, away from the orthodoxies of the Cultural Revolution, and each reversal excited a certain amount of commentary both within and without China. As time passed, and the list of reintroduced institutions and practices grew ever longer, habituation reduced the surprise of succeeding announcements. But the reintroduction of advertising, a cental totem of advanced capitalist culture, occupied a particularly significant place on the list because its reappearance in China forced the Chinese to reconsider distinctions that had formerly been drawn between capitalist and socialist societies. For most of its history, the People's Republic had castigated advertising as the apotheosis of the capitalist religion of consumption. This was especially so in the late 1960s during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Afterwards few commercial billboards or newspaper advertisements interrupted the skein of relentlessly political messages that crossed public space. When advertising was officially reintroduced in 1979, and its sanctioned scope expanded beyond industrial goods, the state faced a daunting ideological task: rebuilding a case for advertising in a socialist system that had long defined itself as one that did not need commercial exhortation. In essence, it had to sell the legitimacy of selling.

The People's Republic of China has come under strong international criticism recently over its use of the death penalty. Capital punishment had a long history in China as a permanent fixture of the criminal justice system well before the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. Today the death penalty is an integral part of the legal system and is meted out for a wide range of offences.

Although scholars have examined the struggle between Mao Zedong and the Internationalists associated with Wang Ming and Bo Gu for control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in some detail, they have ignored the final battle between the two groups. That confrontation did not take place in the Central Committee or at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945. Rather, new source materials from the People's Republic and a close reading of the newspaper itself show that it took place in the Party's primary propaganda organ, the Liberation Daily (Jiefang ribao).