The 1949 Chinese Revolution was a monumental event in world history. It ended a century of imperialist subjugation and unified the most populous country in the world, which had been divided for decades. The revolution dealt a major blow to imperialism, overturned the domination of the landlord class and money lenders over the countryside and eliminated much that was socially and culturally backward and oppressive.

The Chinese Communist Party regime headed by Mao Tse-Tung implemented bourgeois nationalist measures, including the expropriation of the landlord class, but it was intensely hostile to the working class. It brutally suppressed the Chinese Trotskyists, who had remained active within the urban proletarian centers in the aftermath of the defeat of the 1927 revolution. After considerable equivocation, the regime took control of much of Chinese industry. The CCP established a bureaucratic police state along the Stalinist model, combining nationalization of industry and socialist rhetoric with an internal regime that ruthlessly suppressed opposition, particularly from the left.

Over the past 30 years, the Chinese Communist Party has presided over the transformation of Chuna into a massive cheap labour platform for world capitalism. Astonishing levels of economic growth over the past three decades have been accompanied by equally staggering levels of social inequality. To understand how and why this happened, it is necessary to examine the historic roots of contemporary China in the 1949 Revolution.