ABSTRACT
One important new source of information, providing new insight into China's leadership politics in particular, derives directly from the events of 1989. This source is the diverse body of memoirs, retrospective analyses, and interpretive judgments of cadre, all party members, who in the 1980s worked in the staffs and bureaucracies at relatively high levels of the central political system and who have emigrated to the West as a result of events in 1989. The most immediately relevant field for comparison with what we know about China's institutional structure and the formal procedures and processes of leadership politics is the literature on the former Soviet system. There has also been the spectacular explosion of official press and broadcast media sources. Though controlled at some level and shaped by regime purposes in its content, the scale of information available from media sources has defied bibliographic control. The open and internal systems serve entirely different functions in the Chinese political process.
