Dream of a Red Factory

In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse and the suppression of the Beijing democracy movement, scholars are asking how communist hardliners in China have managed to retain power. In this timely and strikingly original study, Deborah Kaple examines the first three years of communist power and argues that the orthodox analysis of communism as a monolithic structure fails to account for the resilience and adaptability of the Chinese system into the nineties. Instead, she offers a fresh examination of the roots of Chinese communism - based on an unprecedented reading of primary sources in both Russian and Chinese - that stresses the peculiarities of the Chinese communist experience, which, to a significant extent is a result of their legacy of `High Stalinism'.