As explained in the first part of this series1, Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC), had recognised a decade before the 1949 victory of the Chinese revolution that China stood at a crossroads. The capitalist class was too small to overcome China’s semi-feudal and semi-colonial condition, to revolutionise the vast country and lift its population of over 500 million people out of poverty. Only socialism could break these chains.
Having led China’s revolutionary masses and driven the pro-capitalist Kuomintang (KMT) into Taiwan in 1949, the CPC was faced with a society where 90% of the population were peasants or semi-proletarian agricultural workers. China’s productive forces could scarcely develop independently of the imperialist powers without the assistance of the socialist bloc, led by the Soviet Union. Mao predicted: ‘As things are today, it is perfectly clear that unless there is the policy of alliance with Russia, the land of socialism, there will inevitably be a policy of alliance with imperialism, with the imperialist powers.’2 The following decades were to prove this tragically prophetic as the PRC and the USSR were driven apart, and China subsequently embarked on a path of cooperation with imperialism.
Socialism isolated
Communists in Britain must regard the outcome of this process as a huge defeat for the working class in China and globally, yet they must study it in the context of the general failure of international socialism. The working-class movements in the imperialist countries were led by social democrats such as Britain’s Labour Party. These forces, representing a privileged labour aristocracy that feeds on the crumbs of imperialism, isolated and betrayed the Russian revolution of 1917. Labour spearheaded the creation of the NATO anti-communist alliance in 1949 and, in 1954, supported the founding of NATO’s equivalent the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation. Squalid opportunists on the British left such as the International Socialists (later the SWP) vehemently denigrated the socialist states as ‘bureaucratic state capitalist’, acting as a bridgehead to spread chauvinism into all corners of the movement.
The failure of British socialists and communists to defend the gains of the Soviet people, fight imperialism and build solidarity with revolutionary movements across the world disqualifies them from any cheap criticism of the CPC for the course it has taken.3
Sino-Soviet split
The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance was signed in 1950, establishing security cooperation between the USSR and China and providing $300m worth of Soviet loans at 1% interest for China’s post-war reconstruction, along with Soviet specialists. However, the CPC proved highly sensitive to Soviet requests for deeper economic integration, regarding them as an intrusion in Chinese national matters. Unlike the Russian people, the Chinese had been on the receiving end of colonialism, including Tsarist Russia’s annexation of outer Manchuria in 1858.
During the Cold War (1947-1991), the USSR needed to rebuild after the devastation of the Nazi invasion. However, it was instead forced to dedicate up to 20% of its GDP to military spending as NATO encircled it with missile bases, provoking an arms race. Nikita Khrushchev (Soviet leader from 1953-1964) calculated that Soviet military power would enable a ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the imperialists. Meanwhile Mao called for open battle against the imperialist states. Contradictory assessments of the strength of imperialism, and the tactics and strategies needed to respond to it, were central to the Sino-Soviet split which became clear at the November 1960 Moscow conference of international communist parties.
The PRC then broke with the USSR and by the 1960s, Soviet aid to China ended and the split developed into outright hostility. Mao attacked Khrushchev as revisionist, particularly for his repudiation of the previous Soviet leader Josef Stalin following the latter’s death in 1953, and for pursuing policies which Mao argued amounted to capitalist restoration and even ‘fascism’ and a ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’. Mao and the CPC used Lenin’s language to condemn the Soviet Union as ‘social imperialist’ (socialist in words, imperialist in deeds) on spurious grounds, and an even greater threat to the international working class than US, European or Japanese imperialism.
From internationalism to chauvinism
‘We are taking advantage of their conflict to strike the Soviet revisionists while simultaneously undermining the American imperialists. The American imperialists also want to take advantage of our conflict with the Soviet revisionists to cope with the Soviets. They are unable to use us. Rather, we can use them.’ – Geng Biao, PRC foreign minister, 1975
The CPC’s opposition to Soviet ‘social imperialism’ transformed its belligerence toward the western imperialist states into its very opposite, cooperation with US imperialism to pit one ‘imperialist superpower’ against another:
• Following the US invasion of Vietnam in 1964, the Soviet Union armed the North Vietnamese communist liberation fighters, but China held back and sent no volunteers or weapons as it had to Korea in the 1950s. In 1974 China seized the Paracel Islands from Vietnam even as the northern forces fought to reunify the country.
• After the victory of the Vietnamese against US imperialism in 1975, the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia, which had killed 1.5-2 million Cambodians, invaded Vietnam in 1977. The Khmer Rouge were defeated by a joint Vietnamese and Cambodian force in 1979. The PRC had treated the Khmer Rouge as a strategic ally, and shamefully then invaded Vietnam. The Chinese forces were rebuffed.
• During and after Angola’s victorious struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism (1960-1975), the MPLA liberation movement was backed by the Soviet Union and Cuban volunteers. China supported the reactionary US-backed UNITA forces against the MPLA. In 1976 the Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney rebuked US black Maoists who supported UNITA: ‘What explanation does such a person give to the Angolans who have been engaged since 1960 in armed struggle against the Portuguese, against NATO, who, at the end of that struggle found they were faced with the [Apartheid] South Africans and with an escalation of US support to the so-called liberation movement [UNITA] which had been harassing the genuine freedom fighters for many years?’4
• At the 1955 Bandung Conference, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai had pledged support to the Palestinian national liberation struggle. China offered military training to PLO militants in the 1960s. However, as its relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated, the PRC covertly and later openly cooperated with Zionism. China imported military technology from Israel in the 1980s and established formal diplomatic ties with the Zionist state in 1992.
• During the Soviet intervention in defence of the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (1979–89), the PRC provided covert support to the fiercely reactionary mujahideen, including arms and training in cooperation with the CIA, MI6 and Pakistani intelligence service ISI.
The changing relationship of the PRC to the west is reflected in the status of the Chinese island of Taiwan. Initially, the imperialist powers insisted that ‘China’ meant the KMT regime in Taiwan, which (then known as Formosa) held the permanent Chinese seat on the UN Security Council complete with veto powers. But as rapprochement with Beijing became strategically advantageous to the US, it relented – to the demands not only of the Chinese people but also of the socialist bloc and postcolonial countries – and the UN recognised ‘One China’ under the PRC in 1971, relegating Taiwan to ambiguous, unofficial status. At the same time, however, imperialist military and economic support for Taiwan continued.
The PRC’s rapprochement with the United States, embodied in US President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing, marked a new era of open cooperation with imperialism both in China’s domestic sphere and in international affairs.
Cultural Revolution
As the Sino-Soviet split came to a head, an immense class struggle was breaking out in the PRC. The CPC had begun to describe China’s system as a dictatorship of the proletariat from the early 1950s, reducing its emphasis on the theory of a joint dictatorship of several classes. Nonetheless, bourgeois and petit-bourgeois class forces continued to exist in the country and within the CPC, accepting communist leadership (for the time being) as the price of independent economic development and national unity. In the CPC this bourgeois tendency was led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. With the PRC cut off from the USSR, the struggle to build the country’s productive forces became even more intense and pro-capitalist voices grew louder.
In the fields of culture and education, where traditional Chinese class divisions were sharpest, the children of the dispossessed bourgeoisie and landowners, including in the CPC and the state, had powerful advantages in terms of literacy and prestige. They gradually attempted to reassert their ideas and pass on privileges to their children. Mao launched the ‘Socialist Education Movement’ in 1963, sending young party cadres and students out into rural areas to revitalise their connection with the people and fight against bureaucracy and revisionism in the CPC.
The 1966-76 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a final attempt by Mao and his supporters to mobilise pro-socialist forces and reassert the dictatorship of the proletariat. Officially it began with the appointment of a ‘group of five’ in charge of the Cultural Revolution to report on the role of art and culture in socialist society; the Central Committee of the CPC found the report to be sympathetic to bourgeois trends, repudiating it in a circular to all party bodies in May 1966, exposing the deep fissures which extended to the top echelons of the party. Mass struggle broke out with the launch of a political attack on the bourgeois leadership of Beijing University by philosophy lecturer Nie Yuanzi, swiftly endorsed by Mao. His supporters in the student movement, the Red Guards, spurred their classmates to fight the party establishment; classes were cancelled and demonstrators marched in the streets of Beijing. The volatile Red Guards engaged in fanatical struggles against intellectuals, staff and party cadre they deemed to be class enemies.
Mao and his ally Lin Biao attended mass rallies of Red Guards, using their party apparatus to support the growing rebellion. Mao branded Liu and Deng ‘capitalist roaders in party positions’ ie those in the CPC who wanted to set China on a capitalist road. The capitalist roaders scattered before this bombardment. Following a party conference in October 1966, Deng was forced to undertake re-education and factory labour. Liu was placed under house arrest in 1967 and died in prison two years later.
From victory to defeat
But China’s underdevelopment worked against Mao’s tendency: by the 1960s, proletarians remained only around 15% of CPC membership, hence the Cultural Revolution was heavily dependent on students and urban youth, radical intellectuals and, to begin with, the People’s Liberation Army (70-90% of whose personnel were peasants).
As the rebellion spread to wider sections of the working class, the ferocity and political confusion of the campaign taxed the popularity of the CPC severely. Several million people lost their lives in factional violence verging on civil war. Many more party members were censured as counterrevolutionaries (including the parents of the PRC’s current President Xi Jinping). Shockingly, Mao’s confirmed successor Lin and his followers were implicated in a military coup plot against Mao in 1971. Lin died in a plane crash attempting to flee to the USSR. Mao was ultimately isolated, and his rivals capitalised on the turmoil.
Mao died in 1976 and his leading allies in the CPC (the so-called ‘Gang of Four’) were arrested. Deng’s record as a revolutionary was tarnished by the ten-year disruption, but he finally assumed the leadership of the CPC in 1977, and from 1978 his ‘reform and opening up’ policy integrated China into the capitalist world economy. In 1981, the CPC published a resolution declaring that the Cultural Revolution had been based on an ‘entirely erroneous appraisal of the prevailing class relations and political situation in the Party and state’, relegating it to the status of an ultra-left error.
Continued in part III
- ‘China and imperialism Part I: China breaks the chains’, FRFI 308 October/November 2025.
- Mao ‘On new democracy’, 1940.
- See Trevor Rayne, ‘China: from internationalism to chauvinism — the Sino-Soviet dispute’, FRFI 189
- Walter Rodney, ‘The Angolan Question’, speech at Howard University, 1976.
