In China, October 1953 was a defining moment; the CCP introduced the 1st FYP for economic construction and industrialisation and proclaimed the beginning of the transition to socialism. The CCP finally rejected the concept of the New Democracy in favour of a policy of what was euphemistically termed state and private co-operation – the final seizure of bourgeois property and the creation of the Chinese (deformed) workers’ state.
If we were to distil the revolutionary experience of China it could be expressed in the following passage from the Transitional Program:
Colonial and semi-colonial countries are backward countries by their very essence. But backward countries are part of a world dominated by imperialism. Their development, therefore, has a combined character: the most primitive economic forms are combined with the last word in capitalist technique and culture. In like manner are defined the political strivings of the proletariat of backward countries: the struggle for the most elementary achievements of national independence and bourgeois democracy is combined with the socialist struggle against world imperialism. Democratic slogans, transitional demands and the problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs in this struggle, but stem directly from one another.[39]
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Trotsky, Transitional Programme, Op. cit.