ABSTRACT
Under the rubric of the New Democracy, thought reform was carried out through a series of mass movements organized by the party to politicize people and get them individually involved in various projects and campaigns. The Korean War began in June 1950 when North Korean troops invaded South Korea. The war with the United States created severe economic and political tensions within China. Socialism could be built on an industrial substructure that would establish the social and economic conditions for the powerful proletariat, whose mission it would be to push the historical dialectic toward communism. The First Five-Year Plan marked the official transition from the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution to the beginning of the socialist phase, a higher stage of development that required a solid industrial base. A nettlesome problem that dominated the Eighth Party Congress concerned the implementation of a Second Five-Year Plan. This issue was taken up by the second session of the congress in May 1958.
