ABSTRACT
In his ‘On the People's Democratic Dictatorship’ (1949), Mao Zedong wrote:
From the time of China's defeat in the Opium War of 1840, Chinese progressives went through untold hardships in their quest for truth from the Western countries. Hong Xiuquan, Kang Youwei, Yan Fu, and Sun Zhongshan were representative of those who had looked to the West for truth before the Communist Party of China was born. Chinese who then sought progress would read any book containing the new knowledge from the West.
