Introduction

China at Mao Tse-tung's birth in 1893 was already a country in change. The penetration of China by foreign capital and trade had important results which were later to be turned to the advantage of the revolution Mao was to lead. The foreign firms used their privileges merely to dump their goods on the Chinese market. The communists, including Mao, identified various contradictions which they held were characteristic of Chinese semi-feudal, semi-colonial society. After the communists took power in 1949, the revolution turned to what the Chinese Communist Party called socialist construction. Mao's thinking is rooted deep in the Chinese soil. Mao maintained, the underlying and determining contradiction was at all times the one within China itself, between semi-feudalism and capitalism on the one hand and the masses of the people on the other. For a people to live with it for centuries are to mark every new generation with a history of bitterness that paralyses the soul.