China - Crossroads Socialism

Chen Erjin's work — originally entitled On Proletarian-Democratic Revolution — is the first major unofficial critique of 'existing socialism' to have reached the West from China. Written during the last two years of Mao's life, in the midst of the political crisis surrounding the final, disastrous stages of the Cultural Revolution decade, this pioneering study of the new class structure and development tendencies of China's post-revolutionary order maps out a radical anti-bureaucratic alternative to the present system of single-party dictatorship. First published unofficially in 1979 as part of the worker and student-based 'Democracy Movement', or 'Peking Spring' (an authentically grassroots response to the official liberalization carried out by Mao's successors), it quickly established itself as one of the movement's key political texts. By the time of the movement's final suppression in early 1981, it had helped to inspire the development in China of a new and fascinating school of l