Bankruptcy of Capitalist Nation-Building Undertakings in China

In order to save the nation from subjugation, in the period from the 1840s to the early 20th century, progressive Chinese figures tried to learn from West and strove to take the capitalist path; Hong Xiuquan, Kang Youwei, Yan Fu and Sun Yat-sen were the representative figures who looked to the West for a path of salvation. This was the situation before the CPC was born.

The Chinese had learned a lot from Western capitalist countries, but the result had not made China achieve its national independence and political freedom, nor had it made China prosperous and strong; on the contrary, China's colonization had gradually become more serious, and the people became more and more impoverished, and its national strength even became weaker. As Mao Zedong pointed out: “There are bourgeois republics in foreign lands, but China cannot have a bourgeois republic because she is a country suffering under imperialist oppression.” “Day by day, conditions in the country got worse, and life was made impossible.” “Doubts and pessimism for the capitalist path arose, increased and deepened.”

It was precisely due to these doubts about the feasibility of the capitalist nation-building undertaking in China, China’s advanced elements sought another way and explored new solutions to save China’s peril; thus, this situation prepared the adequate ideological soil for them to accept Marxist scientific socialism.