(i) Since 1945, China has experienced
probably the greatest revolution in history, transforming itself from a peasant majority society dominated by native elites (and by the British, French, Americans who controlled much of the country's trade) into a socialist state called the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.)
(ii) Mao believed that Chinese nationalists were unwilling to bring about social and economic changes that would emancipate the Chinese masses, and that they were too corrupt to resist the foreigners.
(iii) The Chinese communists, therefore, not only forced the Japanese, French and British out. most of the national territory by 1949, but also drove their opponents, the Goumindang, Chinese nationalists, to the island of Formosa- present-day Taiwan-across a narrow strait from mainland China.
(iv) Hong Kong was a British Crown colony until 1997. Their ultimate goal remained to reunify Taiwan with the Chinese mainland, which became a separate state.
(v) Since the 1980s, however, the C.C.P. leadership has promoted free enterprise in manufacturing and commercial activitities. By 1993, less than ten percent of P.R.C. industrial production was under central planning.
(vi) The P.R.C. since the 1980s has welcomed hundreds of billions of (U.S.A.) dollars in foreign investment from countries that are China's ideological opponents. Some economists estimate that the P.R.C. will have the world's largest economy by 2020, as China did before 1800, but economic liberalisation and relaxing of some government controls have also reversed the trend of 1949-1980, when the goal of the C.C.P. was to make Chinese more equal in every possible way.
(vii) While the P.R.C. condemned Western aggression and the development of nuclear weapons, it became one of the nuclear-weapon states by the early 1960s.
(viii) Chinese leaders justified their military buildup by pointing to the fact that American leaders had considered dropping nuclear bombs on the P.R.C. during the Korean War (1950-1953).
(ix) The P.R.C.-U.S.S.R. relations worsened during the 1950s as Mao believed Marxism- Leninism needed to be adjusted to Chinese conditions and he and some other leaders feared Soviet domination.
(x) During the 1960s and '70s, the Soviets gave military assistance to the Vietnamese communists in their struggle against the U.S.A., but the P.R.C. refused to support the Vietnamese communist movement. In this same period the P.R.C. was assisting pro-communist people's struggles in Africa. Chinese development assistance was extended to many Third World countries.
