A. James Gregor is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and H. L. Oppenheimer Professor at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. He was awarded a Knighthood in the Order of Merit by the Italian government. He is the author of thirty volumes, most recently Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History.

This volume constitutes a rigorous attempt to assess the actual influence of traditional Marxist theory - the doctrines of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - on developments in revolutionary China. Employing primary documents, the exposition carries the reader from the first years of the Chinese Communist Party, through the stresses of the war of resistance against Japan and the Civil War - that concluded with the proclamation of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. An account of the Mao epoch, inspired by a fundamentally transformed Marxism, is prelude to the 'Second Chinese Revolution' that saw the 'Thought of Deng Xiaoping' shaping the destiny of the New China. The role of modern China, as a reactive nationalist, single-party, developmental dictatorship, is assessed against what we know of such systems, and how they have influenced our history in the past.