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political philosophy China could once again claim to be the centre of the world. In these circumstances the break with the Soviet Union was inevitable. It was merely a matter of when and how.
5.
Liberation had core after half a century of war, civil and international, instability and humiliation. And for slush ten years the consequent goodwill carried the system forward, ith land reform, the nationalisation of industry and the establishment
There were of a socialist system on a country-wide basis. difficulties and there were many instances of cruelty, but nothing on the scale of what happened after 1917 in the Soviet Union.
6.
It was in the mid-50s that the mistakes began. First, in 1955, Mao insisted on forced collectivisation of the land sc recently distributed to the peasants. Then in 1957/8 he launched the Great Leap Forward. Although, on his own admission, Mao was no economist, he was not unmindful of the material needs of the people. But his thinking was dominated by a form of revolutionary romanticism which made him think that he could use the strength of numbers of a quarter of the world's population to drive ahead to a Communist utopia. He also had to a dangerous degree the old
Chinese attitude that China could be sufficient unto herself. Whet he failed to see was that the country had already completed the easy and acceptable parts of the economic revolution and that it would be a hard grind from then on. It was the bureaucrat, Liu Shao-chi, who saw the need to take it steadily and to consolidate the early gains; and the popular General, Peng Teh-huai, who dared to tell Mao to his face what a disaster his policies had been. Mao's revolution lost its way. still there.
But Mao was
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