Introduction

The search for a proletariat on which to found a revolutionary class-based movement during 1921–1949 led eventually to the Communist Party of China (CCP) seeing the peasantry as the inseparable allies of the proletariat. Class is at the heart of this enquiry because the CCP’s commitment to transformation has been explicitly expressed in terms of class and class conflict. In Europe, Communism had developed with the emergence of an industrial working class in the nineteenth century. Its starting point was class conflict and the potential political power of the proletariat. An examination of the evolving relationship between the CCP, on the one hand, and the theory and practice of class in China, on the other, is then important for understanding the dynamics of social change. Class is a central concept in the social sciences least because of its role in the writings of Marx and Weber.