You Don't Need To Read Marx...

...thank God, to see that the Chinese revolution of 1949 was not communist. One clue would be the strong lead exercised by the peasant class, not by the urban proletariat.

In reality, the 'revolution' of 1949 was a counter-revolution against the 1911 revolution led by Sun Yat-Sen. The 1911 revolution, quite possibly led by ex-pat Chinese businessmen, opened China to a disastrous 40 years of plunder by foreign powers. The counter-revolution led by Mao sought to close China to the pirates and restore the integrity- political and cultural- of the Chinese nation. This counter-revolution was finally defeated when Nixon restored American relations with China in the early seventies.

While the Chinese merchants have at all times been strongly international in trade relations, the Chinese empire, by the 13th century, had decided against outward expansion. The Chinese economy looked inwards, to the Grand Canal, which carried surplus rice in a good year to Beijing, and in a bad year distributed to the provinces from the reserves in Beijing.

The revolution won, but it was the revolution of 1911 that won- the revolution of modernization and the adaptation of the Chinese state to the mechanisms of international trade. Certainly since 1970 the rulers of China have been no more 'communist' than you or I- as convenient as it may have been to them, and the scaremongers of American society, to preserve the fiction.