On Lin Zenpings Studies of How National Bourgeoisie Came into Existence in Modern China

Lin zenping expounds in four ways the fundamental features of the primitive accumulation of capital in modern China, that is, “on the one hand, the accumulation of poverty is quite unbearable for the proletariat, and on the other hand, the accumulation of capital is quite insufficient for the bourgeois.”And this is a “point of penetration” in his studies of the bourgeois in modern China. He then explains the economic and historical reasons for some landlords, bureaucrats, merchants and compradors to be the basic source of modern bourgeois through his comparative studies of the feudal cities, industry and commerce in China and the West. He also demonstrates that the national bourgeois in China began to grow into an independent social class at an early stage of capitalism in China, that is, in the years between 1895 and the first World War. All his arguments are based not only on historical facts but also on theories of historical materialism and his viewpoints have played and will continue to play a leading role in the studies of the modern Chinese history.