First Published: Unity, Vol. 2, No. 20, October 5-18, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
On the 30th anniversary of the founding of People’s China, we send our warm greetings to the Chinese people and salute their efforts to build socialism, a society free of exploitation and oppression.
On October 1, 1949, at the founding celebration of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong declared, “The Chinese people have stood up!” This proclamation marked the victorious culmination of years of revolutionary struggle by the Chinese people against domestic reaction and foreign imperialism.
Over the next three decades the Chinese people, under the leadership of the Communist Party, underwent one revolutionary test after another.
In the early 1950’s the Chinese people reconstructed the economy, devastated after years of foreign intervention and civil war. At the same time, China bravely supported the Korean people against U.S. aggression. Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers laid down their lives in battle against U.S. imperialism.
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s the Chinese faced the sabotage and bullying of the modern revisionists in the Soviet Union. The revolutionary people of the world will always be indebted to the Communist Party of China for its principled stand and battle against the betrayers of socialism in the U.S.S.R.
In 1966 the Cultural Revolution was initiated to oppose revisionism. Lin Biao and the “gang of four,” though, emerged during this campaign, promoted anarchism and ultra-leftism and threw the country into turmoil. The disastrous effects of Lin Biao and the “gang” on the country are still evident to people visiting China today.
Over the past three years China has strived to rebuild and correct the damage of the “gang,” and has set the great task of transforming itself into a modern, powerful, socialist country by the turn of the century. An important part of this task is the summarization of China’s positive and negative experiences over these 30 years. The history of the Chinese revolution shows that the building of socialism is a difficult undertaking and does not follow a straight and easy path.
At the same time that China engages in construction and modernization, she is also playing an active role in combating the danger of war in the world, especially in opposing the growing threat of Soviet social-imperialism. The Soviet imperialists and their agents around the world hate China for this. The big capitalists in the U.S., too, harbor the hope that socialism will be overturned in China. But China never again will be the “sick man of Asia.”
The Chinese people, despite the opposition and slander of the reactionaries, continue to march ahead under Mao Zedong’s revolutionary banner. The impressive economic, social, cultural and political advances of the Chinese people have confirmed the superiority of the socialist system. The Chinese people’s struggles and accomplishments have been, and continue to be, inspirations to the working and oppressed peoples in the U.S. and the world over who are fighting for liberation and socialism.