A brief history of Chinese socialist thought in the past century

Around the 1911 Revolution, socialist thought was introduced into China from the West and Japan. Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries regarded socialism as a suitable model upon which to construct the new republic. The Russian Revolution inspired the Chinese revolutionaries and urged them to adopt socialism to reform China, though different parties understood socialism in different ways and, accordingly, chose different plans to realize socialism in China. Sun Yat-sen's The International Development of China and Mao Zedong's On New Democracy and On Coalition Government were the representative fruits of the successful exploration of Chinese socialism fitting the Chinese reality. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party was deeply influenced by the Soviet Union and Stalin's theory of the transitional period, so it gave up the theory of New Democracy and adopted radical policies in order to transform Chinese society directly into a socialist society. This policy, regardless of the Chinese reality, proved wrong in practice. After the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist leaders returned to the original meaning of socialism defined by Marx and Engels and decided to develop the economy as their first priority so as to guarantee people's free and comprehensive development.