ABSTRACT
Maoism, Titoism and Stalinism are shorthand terms for the three broad notions which have legitimated the policies of the socialist transition in the People's Republic of China. This chapter clarifies these three socialist projects by sketching contours of these notions as they were first drawn between 1948 and 1958. By 1958, in developing a critique of how capitalism was restored in Yugoslavia, Maoism took the form of new policies to guarantee the transition through socialism to communism. The Yugoslavs believed that the terms of the economic agreements which Mao and the Chinese leadership negotiated in Moscow in 1949-1950 'could hardly have delighted Mao'. In China, the 1956-57 searches for democratic, market institutions were supplanted by a struggle to rid the state of people committed to that democratic quest. Mao's subsequent agenda for preventing capitalist restoration in a socialist state was already embodied in the CCP's approval of the Cominform's denunciation of Tito's Yugoslavia.
