ABSTRACT
Mao Zedong's revolutionary goals clearly included the re-creation of the Chinese nation-state. The founders and the leading members of the party being overwhelmingly drawn from the “respectable classes” rather than the peasants and illiterate workers of retrograde China, reactive nationalism found expression in the revolutionary posturing of the party. Mao, almost completely incapable of dealing with theoretical concepts with any sophistication, buried his evident nationalism in cognitively meaningless Marxist expressions. Since nationalism provided the inspiration for rapid economic growth and industrialization, capitalists who were “patriotic” served the nation well by assuring China its ultimate sovereignty and independence. By the mid-1980s, what passed as “Marxism” was Deng Xiaoping’s unqualified commitment to the “development of the productive forces” rather than “class struggle” or “proletarian internationalism.” By the early 1990s, publications in the People’s Republic were perfectly clear on the role nationalism was to play in the future of revolutionary China.
