China 2050

"It is wise to remember that the Chinese Communist leaders have had a story quite different from their Russian counterparts. Before they came to power, many of the Russian leaders spent their lives in underground work, jail or exile. Through the sudden collapse of the Czarist regime, they were able to seize control of their country in two or threeyears, and soon went into the isolation which goes with great power. It was easy for them to think in theories and treat the Russian people as statistics on a piece of paper.

But Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues prepared for national power gradually, over more than twenty years. From 1927 on, they lived in parts of China they controlled. And right until the day they entered Peking in 1949, they were in villages or small towns where they could not be isolated from the people around them. Since they had to extend their power village by village, county by county, and had to do so much of it by persuasion, they had to study these people and fir their theories to them, rather than vice versa.

I think it is just possible that Chinese Communism may be something new and unique, based on the same ideas which produced Western communism, but growing in such different circumstances, among a ver un-western people, that its final form is unpredictable. The Chinese revolution has taken a century to work up to the collapse of feudalism, so I suspect that if it meets no outside interference, its larger stages will spread over at least one more century; it cannot be considered complete until China is fully modernized. By that time the Chinese government may be Communist, non-Communist or of a type not known yet."

Graham Peck, Two kinds of Time. (written in 1950)