ese Communist Party (CCP), its primary foreign policy preoccupation has been imperialism. Consistently with Marxist-Leninist ideology, its fight against imperialism was intertwined with a democratic revolution to be achieved only through class struggle.
According to Mao, who became undisputed leader of the CCP during the war of liberation against the Japanese between 1936 and 1945 and the ensuing civil war against the Kuomintang led government, imperialist rule could be overthrown in China only by helping the peasants in their struggle against the feudal landlord class. Conversely, without the successful overthrowing of imperialism, the rule of the feudal landlord class could not be ended, because imperialism was its main support (Tse-tung, 1967, p. 318).
By 1940, not differently from Chiang Kai-shek, Mao had no doubt in considering himself as the faithful and rightful successor of Sun Yat-sen. He saw Sun's nationalist doctrine as correct and well-suited to his time. It only lacked one thing to make it equally applicable to the problem offered by the Japanese imperialist invasion: a concern with mobilizing the masses (Bianco, 1967, 151).
At this time, the CCP's alliance with the Kuomintang in the united front against the Japanese meant that the issues of class struggle and democratic revolution were temporarily relegated to a second place vis-a-vis the issue of national liberation. Nevertheless, by creating a peasant democracy in the areas under its control, Mao and his party succeeded in winning the overwhelming support of the masses, a kind of support which Chiang Kai-shek's party never obtained. It was at this juncture in the political struggle for power that the Kuomintang lost the civil war against the Communists (Bianco, 1967, 159).
Between 1945 and 1949, the official year of the Chinese Communist Revolution, while Chiang Kai-shek's government was relying more and more on American help against the Communists, ...