ABSTRACT
This chapter follows the theme of shifting ideas of transition through to the end of the 1980s. The most important issue before the Chinese Communist Party when it assumed state power was how to plan the gradual transition towards socialism. The core was the policy of New Democracy which Mao Zedong formulated in the early 1940s. The idea of the New Democratic Revolution originated in theoretical and ideological debates in China and the Soviet Union, and played a prominent role in shaping the policies of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1940s and well into the 1950s. The policy for transition which took shape during the early 1940s can best be summed up in the term 'New Democracy'. Dialectical materialism in Mao Zedong's version was formulated in 'On Practice' and 'On Contradiction' in 1937. Mao argued that the main notion of dialectical materialism is that all phenomena are composed of contradictions.
