Activity

[...] Once the PRC was established, the first generation of CCP leaders and cadres were always mindful of rural society, though this did not mean they were socially protective of it. The countryside was systematically exploited for industrial development, and little serious thought was given to the…

At the same time, dialectical materialism and the Leninist theory of the revolutionary party appeared to provide the best theoretical tool-kit for revolutionary strategy and modern social mobilization.

Historical materialism offered a way of making socio-economic sense of the country’s long past, and projecting it forward with purposefulness beyond any previous Chinese imagination.

Taking Weber’s definition of the state as ‘the exercise of a monopoly of legitimate violence over a given territory’