ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to give a four d'horizon of the commonest views of Chinese politics as they have appeared in the scholarly literature. The chapter introduces some of the most important concepts, models and theories that have been used to explain Chinese political reality. Totalitarianism was a child of the Cold War. The hostile climate towards the Soviet Union in the post Second World War period gave credibility to the image of communism as an evil, repressive ideology maintaining an authoritarian regime equal to the nazi and fascist states in the 1930s. The Korean War in the early 1950s, where the Chinese Liberation Army fought with great success against the UN forces led by the United States, helped create a negative picture of the People's Republic which was maintained by the totalitarian model used to analyze Chinese politics. Bettelheim saw the alternative to 'state capitalism' in the continuous control through mass participation of the state bureaucracy.
