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<jats:p>Western social scientists have tended to evade a central issue of the Chinese Revolution. As a consequence, our scholarship has generally misconceived and denigrated the Chinese Communist concepts and practices of mass participation. The issue evaded is twentieth-century China's need for a continuing vanguard to direct the revolutionary change that China's conditions demand. One result of that evasion has been the near-unanimous decrying of China's restrictions on democratic control, restrictions that, of course, are implicit in the very concept of a vanguard.</jats:p>