For Marxists the Chinese Revolution is second only to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as one of the greatest events in human history. In 1949 the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) took power and within a short span of time snuffed out capitalism and landlordism.

However, Mao talked the language of bourgeois democracy, and on assuming power had the PLA stamp on any signs of independent activity by the workers. But the bourgeoisie had fled en masse with Chiang Kai-shek, and to maintain his perspective, Mao was forced to form a united front with rag tag remnants of the bourgeoisie. Notwithstanding Mao’s declared goals, the Third Chinese Revolution progressed rapidly from the New Democracy – a regime which had the defined goal of a capitalist economy with an extensive nationalised sector, protected the national bourgeoisie, and postponed the transition to socialism to many decades in the future – to the threshold of a workers’ state. In this transition the leading members of the CCP, immersed in their Stalinist, petty bourgeois ideology stood in opposition to the press of events.

It will be argued that the establishment of a workers’ state in China is striking confirmation of the general tendency for revolutions in backward countries to transcend the bourgeois-democratic phase and turn into socialist revolutions. The situation after World War II may have had specific characteristics, such as imperialism being temporarily impotent and the leadership of the mass uprising being in the hands of Stalinists, which gave the Chinese Revolution particular features, but the trend was, inevitably, towards the establishment of a (deformed) workers’ state, or as some describe it “proletarian Bonapartism.”[1]

At the time, those analysing Chinese events had to paint in broad strokes; details available today were unobtainable then. This chapter attempts to fill in those details. It describes and analyses the processes and forces which acted over the transitional period between announcing the PRC and achieving a workers’ state. The nature of the state is at the heart of Marxism and transitional regimes test our ability to apply Marxist theory to contradictory and dynamic phenomena which are important for the analysis of future events and the development of the revolutionary movement.

  1. Grant, T. The Unbroken Thread, Fortress Books, p282-288 and 345.

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