China

Abstract

Following Liberation in 1949, the CCP consolidated its control over all of China, with the exceptions of Taiwan and the tiny European concessions of Hong Kong and Macau. It subsequently established a political and economic structure that included all the trappings of a conventional single-party Leninst state. These included the party’s formal claim to a monopoly on political power, its dominance over the administrative state, organization in accordance to the principle of democratic centralism, control of society through mass line organizations, and defining adherence to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought (Burns 1999, pp. 580–581). Economic policies operated according to state planning and were oriented toward modernizing the country through heavy industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, all in the interest of constructing a socialist society on Chinese soil.