ABSTRACT
The strangest phenomenon in contemporary history has been the triumph of the Communist revolution in China: a leap from the fifteenth into the twentieth century. Marxism in its Leninist and Maoist version has, in only a few decades, become the ideology of a society whose thinking had been ruled for millennia by the teachings of Confucius. China, for a century the helpless, humiliated victim of the rapacity of European and Japanese imperialism, is on a prodigious course to become the greatest world power in history. The Chinese empire, which had been torn to shreds by the struggles between rival war lords and forty years of civil war, was united by the Communists. Marxism had shaped the ideology of the Chinese Revolution, as it had for the Russian Revolution. Moscow instructed the Chinese Communist party to join the Kuomintang as the vehicle for the historically necessary bourgeois revolution.
