China: From Permanent Revolution to Counter-Revolution

In this important contribution towards a Marxist understanding of one the 20th century's most important revolutionary processes John Peter Roberts examines the following questions: What was the class composition and class nature of the Chinese Communist Party when it took power in 1949? Despite its explicitly class-collaborationist strategy, what forces pushed Mao's regime to take the objectively socialist measures that led to the establishment of a deformed workers’ state in China? The Chinese Revolution was a practical test of both Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution and Mao’s Theory of Uninterrupted Revolution by Stages. Which theory matched reality? The degeneration of the Chinese People’s Republic has again confirmed that without a political revolution and workers' democracy, a Stalinist regime will inevitably return to capitalism, but how exactly did that process unfold? And how women in China were impacted by the revolution—as well as by the subsequent counterrevoluti