This was the next big prize, a huge Asian landmass seized from capitalism that would become the centrepiece of revolution not only in the region but around the world as an inspiration to peasant struggles as well as to the industrial working class, and operating as a counterweight to the Soviet Union, providing some different templates for what ‘socialism’ might mean but with an ossified leadership that would cruelly betray what it promised.

The full chapter appears in Ian Parker’s Socialisms: Revolutions Betrayed, Mislaid and Unmade, published by Resistance Books and the IIRE (2020).

This was one of the Socialisms series of FIIMG articles