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 counterrevolution.

By John Peter Roberts.

520 Pages.