ABSTRACT
In China, during the years immediately following the Communist seizure of power, historical inquiry tended to focus on the recent past that had led to the founding of the PRC. More specifically, the task was to link the victory of the “new democracy” led by the CCP to the world socialist revolution. Asserting clearly that China’s new historical era was coterminous with the world’s present situation, Mao declared to the Political Consultative Conference meeting in September 1949 that the Communist success was not an aberrant form of revolution but the inevitable result of China “falling behind” economically in modern times as a result of a century and a half of “oppression by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments”. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a result of Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and intensified clashes along the Sino-Soviet border, China ended the near total diplomatic isolation characteristic of the Cultural Revolution.
