Targets of the New-Democratic Revolution

In his article “The Chinese Revolution and the Communist Party of China” in December 1939, Mao Zedong pointed out: "Only when we grasp the nature of Chinese society will we be able clearly to understand the targets of the Chinese revolution.”

Since the nature of that-day Chinese society was semi-colonial and semi-feudal, the targets of Chinese revolution were "imperialism and feudalism, the bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries and the landlord class of our country. For it is these two that are the chief oppressors, the chief obstacles to the progress of Chinese society at the present stage. The two collude with each other in oppressing the Chinese people, and imperialism is the foremost and most ferocious enemy of the Chinese people, because national oppression by imperialism is the more onerous.” And during the Anti-Japanese War, “the principal enemies of the revolution were Japanese imperialism together with all the Chinese traitors and reactionaries.”

When we say that the principal enemies of the Chinese revolution were imperialism and feudalism, it also means that capitalism was not and could not be the immediate enemy in general. In semi-colonial and semi-feudal China, where the economy and culture were very backward, national capitalism was still involving a relatively progressive relations of production. However, China's New-Democratic Revolution was opposed to the bureaucrat-capitalism.

In April 1948, Mao Zedong explicitly regarded bureaucrat-capitalism as one of the targets of Chinese revolution in his “Speech at a Conference of Cadres in the Shanxi-Suiyuan Liberated Area”. Opposing bureaucrat-capitalism was not because it was capitalist, but because it was closely combined with imperialism, the landlord class and the old-fashioned rich peasants, and had a comprador and feudal nature. Therefore, opposing bureaucrat-capitalism was the proper meaning of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal democratic revolution.

In short, the targets of the Chinese revolution were imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism.