Guided by Chairman Mao’s Marxist-Leninist line, our Party has steadily grown in strength. It has developed from small groups of a few dozen communist… - Hua Guofeng

In the new historical period of Socialist Revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat in China, Chairman Mao summed up both the positive and the negative experience of the international Communist movement, and made a penetrating analysis of the class relations in socialist society by applying the Marxist-Leninist theory of the unity of opposites, and pointed out that the principal contradiction in a socialist society is the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. For the first time in the history of the development of Marxism, Chairman Mao explicitly pointed out that there are still classes and class struggle after the socialist transformation of the ownership of the means of production has in the main been completed, put forward the thesis that in socialist society there are two types of contradictions--those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people themselves, and advanced the great theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marxism-Leninism holds that the completion of the democratic revolution opens the door to the socialist revolution. Applying this principle to the concrete conditions of China, Chairman Mao led our Party successfully making this change-over of the revolution.

At the time of the victory of the democratic revolution China was extremely and backward in economy, with the proletariat accounting for only a tiny portion of the population and the peasants for more than 80 per cent. Was it possible for a big country in such circumstances to switch over immediately to the socialist revolution upon the victory of the democratic revolution? More than a few people, at home and abroad, inside our Party and outside, expressed their doubts or simply thought it impossible.