Fateful Embrace of Communism } 7
understood them. The vision of a post-capitalist, communist utopia was im-
mensely attractive to many Chinese intellectuals, just as it was to intellectuals
in countries around the world. In the 1950s and 1960s, PRC foreign relations
and domestic politics were deeply shaped by ideological battles within the
world communist movement, and within the CCP, over the “correct” line for
destroying capitalism and entering a new post-capitalist era of first social-
ism and then, once the material and psychological conditions had been built,
communism. Moreover, China’s embrace and subsequent rejection of this
communist vision was a key part of the global drama of enchantment and
disenchantment with the communist vision. Understanding the drama of
PRC foreign relations requires situating it in the context of a global embrace
and then disembrace of communism.
Marxism-Leninism, the combination of philosophy and ideology worked
out by Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilich Lenin, purported to lay out the scientific
laws of social and historical development. These laws demonstrated to believ-
ers the inevitability of the replacement of capitalism by socialism and the
subsequent replacement of socialism by communism. Capitalism, the private
ownership of the means of production and market organization of economic
processes, was doomed to be replaced by a superior social form, socialism, in
which the means of production were owned by the state and the economy was
no longer driven by blind, irrational market forces but by altruistic and wise
state planners. There would be a period of “socialist construction” during
which revolutionary dictatorship was “historically necessary.” That period
would be followed by “communism,” in which economic privation, insecu-
rity, inequality, and greedy selfish individualism, along with the state itself,
would disappear. This was the communist vision: a rationally planned, highly
industrialized, and technologically advanced society founded on science, but
one with collective social solidarity in place of the selfish individualism of
capitalism. The crux of communist philosophy was a revolutionary dictator-
ship which would remake every aspect of society through its exercise of dicta-
torial power, realizing, ultimately (and following Herbert Marcuse), the great
vision of the French Revolution, a society of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,”
ending the long human quest for a fundamentally just society.^13 Large dis-
parities of wealth and power would disappear along with war, imperialism,
privation-driven crime, and repressive government. It was an extremely at-
tractive, even seductive, vision.
To repeat, this utopian vision was not what drew people like Mao, Zhou,
and Deng to Marxism-Leninism. Rather, it was the model of revolution-
ary organization that went along with Marxism-Leninism that was a
large part of what made it attractive to young Chinese patriots. The type
of party organization hammered out by Lenin in the two decades before
the Bolshevik Revolution envisioned a relatively small cohort of com-
pletely dedicated men and women subordinating themselves absolutely to