The Third Chinese Revolution is now thirteen years old. During that time, and especially since our conclusions were codified in the resolution adopted by the SWP national convention in September 1955 and ratified by the 1957 SWP national convention, all our official activities and writings related to that colossal event have been directed in accord with the following guidelines.  
 
Significance of the revolution
The Chinese Revolution converted China from a capitalist-colonialist country to a workers state by overthrowing Kuomintang rule, ending imperialist domination, unifying the nation under a central government, wiping out provincialism and warlordism, nationalizing the land, banks and major means of industrial production, monopolizing foreign trade, planning the economy, and reorganizing agrarian relations through a series of steps culminating in the "People's Communes."

This radical transformation of China's social and political organization has brought about remarkable progress in many fields in the face of immense obstacles. The new regime has taken measures to improve food, clothing and shelter, stabilized the currency, cleaned up prostitution and beggary, promoted literacy, education and science, expanded public health and medical services, introduced social benefits for the aged and disabled, broken down the patriarchal family, giving greater freedom and equality to the women and youth, built up and beautified many cities. These changes and many others associated with them testify to the gains made through the revolution which has released enormous popular enthusiasm and energies.

The Chinese Revolution is not only the major turning point in modern Chinese history; it is the greatest blow against capitalism since the Russian Revolution of 1917. It is a continuation and extension of that first socialist victory. The progressive consequences of the overturn have not been confined within China's boundaries. The successes of the Chinese Revolution have affected the whole of world politics, especially in the colonial areas, and will have even more profound impact in the next decades. The isolation of the Soviet Union has been broken. The balance of forces between the capitalist and the anticapitalist camp has been altered to the advantage of the latter.

New China has become the central powerhouse of the colonial revolution, especially throughout Asia. It is popularizing socialist ideas and methods among the underdeveloped nations and providing them with an example to follow in overcoming their backwardness and modernizing themselves. In the Korean War China proved a major deterrent to the further penetration of U.S. imperialism into the Far East. The People's Republic of China is emerging as a military and diplomatic power of the first rank, while it is only at the threshold of its assertion in international affairs.  
 
Class nature of communist China
These mighty accomplishments, their international radiations, and the prospects of progress opened up for the 700 millions of China and the rest of humanity have determined our fundamental attitude toward the Third Chinese Revolution and our definition of the social structure and state which have issued from it. We are firm partisans of that workers and peasants revolution, defenders of its social forms and conquests against all internal and external enemies and supporters of its advances. Our party has demonstrated its solidarity with revolutionary China in the struggles against Chiang Kai-shek, then in the [1950–53] Korean War, and most recently in the India-China border clash.

We have sociologically characterized China as a workers state resulting from and based upon the fundamental social achievements of the revolution--expropriation of the landlords and capitalists, nationalization of the means of production, state control of foreign trade and planning of the economy.

At the same time we have noted that the political system of the People's Republic is not in harmony with its socioeconomic foundations. It has been subjected to grave bureaucratic deformations. These were brought into the revolution by the Stalinist background, training and methods of the Chinese Communist Party [CCP], which organized and directed the civil war, set up the new regime, and has monopolized all political activity from its birth.

The CCP did not follow up the victory of the workers and peasants and its own assumption of power by establishing, developing and strengthening organs of popular control. The bureaucratic tendencies present from the first have been subsequently reinforced by China's poverty and cultural backwardness. The predominance of the peasantry over the workers, the insistent demands of extensive and accelerated capital investment in economic development, the sustained scarcities of consumer goods, including food and other elementary necessities, coupled with the authoritarian, ultra-centralized character of the regime has fostered the growth of inequalities. There are no democratic curbs upon the arbitrariness and appetites of the ruling stratum in the government, party, army and economic enterprises. Although their privileges may appear slight compared with the exorbitant parasitism in the wealthier workers states, they can loom large amidst the extremely low level of subsistence.

The absence of workers and peasants councils, freedom of organization and political expression, the suppression of revolutionary Marxist opinion and groups, the total fusion of the party with the state apparatus, the exclusive possession of all the instrumentalities of power by the CP have given a special stamp to the new Chinese regime. It is a workers and peasants state by virtue of its property relations and major social tendencies. But it is a deformed workers state because of the lack of any means of popular control over its policies and administration. In political terms, it is not, as its leaders claim, a "people's democracy," but a bureaucratic autocracy elevated above the worker-peasant masses in whose name it rules.
 
 
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