ABSTRACT
Sun Yefang joined the Chinese Communist Party at the age of sixteen and worked actively for the Party for sixty years until his death in 1983. Sun Yefang responded to the experiences by developing a flexible, cosmopolitan approach to Marxist theory that enabled him to make some genuinely original contributions to the problem of applying Marxism to the economic problems of socialist countries. Sun's Yefang intellectual background is Marxism, and more particularly Soviet Marxism; in this respect, Sun Yefang is more like younger intellectuals who joined the Party in the war years. Sun Yefang made important contributions to the elaboration of the theory of the united front in China, which itself was based on the writings of Lenin, Bukharin, and Mao. The core argument rested on the assertion that China was not a capitalist country, but rather a semifeudal, semicolonial economy. De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union shook the socialist bloc to its foundations.
