Maoism and the Chinese Revolution

Abstract

The socialist movement in China-as a mass movement, at least-was from its very beginning dependent upon the Russian Revolution. It began under the influence of the thunderclap of October 1917, and this starting point in China which was a culmination in Russia caused the two movements to follow different courses. Chinese Communism was Leninist from the outset, but what might have seemed to be a short cut-China's revolutionaries being spared twenty years of struggle to shake off "reformism"-proved eventually a source of troubles. What gave Leninism its strength and precision was, in fact, its having matured in the course of struggles, both ideological and practical, in which it confronted and even clashed with other socialist trends, and had plenty of time to test out both the absolute adversary (Tsardom) and the bourgeois "allies", who first vacillated and then defaulted.