The New Dark Age

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Seventy-five years ago, on 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is important to note that the Communist Party of China (CPC) did not name the new state the Socialist Republic, but instead called it the People’s Republic. That is because Mao and the CPC did not foresee China being immediately ushered into socialism; rather, the country was embarking on the road to socialism, a process that would likely take decades, if not a century. That was very clear to the people who began to shape the new state and society. The People’s Republic would have to be built out of the embers of a very long war, one that began when the Japanese invaded northern China in 1931 and that lasted for the next 14 years and took the lives of over 35 million people. ‘From now on our nation will belong to the community of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world’, Mao said at the first plenary session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on 21 September 1949. The new China, he continued, will ‘work courageously and industriously to foster its own civilisation and well-being and at the same time to promote world peace and freedom. Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up’.

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