Perceiving changes in the Socialist Bloc: Taiwan’s Cold War intelligence journal Feiqing yanjiu

This article introduces Feiqing yanjiu [Studies of Bandit Communists], a little-used journal produced by Taiwan’s intelligence agency during the Cold War, as a valuable source for how the capitalist world interpreted policy shifts within the socialist bloc. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Taiwan’s mainland China analysts drew on publicly available Chinese Communist Party (CCP) materials to develop distinctive frameworks for interpreting early reform signals. These assessments were often more ideologically attuned and sceptical than those of their Western counterparts, anticipating many of the critiques now prevalent in contemporary scholarship. As access to sources in the People’s Republic of China becomes increasingly restricted, these overlooked materials provide not only rich empirical material but also a timely opportunity to rethink the methodologies used to study reform, ideology and intra-party dynamics under the CCP.