Is China a communist country?
No.Three decades ago, Beijing used to employ “left” rhetoric calling for “the overthrow of world imperialism”. At the same time, various opportunists and middle class radical tendencies denounced the Trotskyist movement for failing to see the “great achievements” of the Chinese Revolution. They hailed Mao Zedong’s slogan that “power grows out of the barrel of the gun” as opening a new road to socialism, based on peasant guerrilla armies, without any involvement of the working class. Today, Mao’s China is one of the main pillars supporting world capitalism. How do we assess this evolution? First of all, the Maoist regime established in 1949 had nothing to do with genuine socialism. While it retained the title of Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the social and political content of the movement fundamentally changed after the defeat of the Chinese working class in the 1925-27 revolution. Following the 1927 disaster, for which Stalin’s nationalist perspective of the “two-stage theory” was di
