Part 8 - LA36 KB articles 1988 98 and cuttings 005 008

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8 "There is no evidence to suggest that nationalisation of foreign enterprises was actually being planned prior to the CCP takeover in 1948-9. Subsequent CCP documentation suggests that the Party contemplated that an independent China would welcome foreign investment. In the course of the civil war, the CCP once again emphasised that the policy for foreign residents and their interests would not be one of expulsion or expropriation, no matter whether or not they were of an imperialist nature." The Soviet Union was prevented from following the kind of economic policies once envisaged by Lenin by the civil war and the war of intervention, the policy of blockade and embargo by the US and other imperialist powers, the rise of fascism, the forced march to heavy industrialisation necessitated by the fascist threat, the grim trial of the Great Patriotic War, and the Cold War, which through its combination of a destructive arms race, and ideological pressure from within and without, did so much to bring down the once mighty and glorious Soviet Union. In the case of China, the crisis in the Taiwan Straits and, particularly, the Korean War, led the United States and most other western powers to slap a total trade embargo on the newly-born People's Republic, dashing the early hopes of the Chinese revolutionaries for their new society. However, in terms of domestic policy, alongside the extensive assistance from the Soviet Union and the East European people's democracies, the policy of building a new China through the support of all her people was basically followed for the first decade. But, following mistakes and excessive zeal in the anti-rightist campaign of 1957, there followed the misconceived policies of the Great Leap Forward and the formation of the people's communes, ushering in a lengthy period of ultra-leftist mistakes, whose fundamental correction was not initiated until the end of 1978, when the party central committee asserted the primacy of Comrade Deng Xiaoping's line of 'seeking truth from facts'. Of course, in this period, China faced not only the unrelenting hostility of US imperialism, but also the hegemonistic designs and arrogant big power bullying of the modern revisionists. And despite this, China did preserve its socialist system, developed its national economy, to a greater degree than is presently admitted, and rendered very considerable assistance to the oppressed peoples of the world in their anti-imperialist struggles. Whatever the mistakes, it is also the case that China's successes today

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