Page 4 - RESOLUTION OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA ON THE MAJOR ACHIEVEMENTS AND HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE OF THE PARTY OVER THE PAST CENTURY

national independence and the people’s liberation, and create the
fundamental social conditions necessary for realizing national rejuvenation.

With a history stretching back more than 5,000 years, the Chinese nation
is a great and ancient nation that has fostered a splendid civilization and
made indelible contributions to the progress of human civilization. After the

Opium War of 1840, however, China was gradually reduced to a
semi-colonial, semi-feudal society due to the aggression of Western powers
and the corruption of feudal rulers. The country endured intense humiliation,
the people were subjected to untold misery, and the Chinese civilization was

plunged into darkness. The Chinese nation suffered greater ravages than ever
before

To save the nation from peril, the Chinese people rose to fight back, and
patriots of high ideals sought to pull the nation together, putting up a heroic
and moving struggle. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the
Westernization Movement, the Reform Movement of 1898, and the Yihetuan

Movement rose one after the other, and a variety of plans were devised to
ensure national survival, but all of these ended in failure. The Revolution of
1911 led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen brought down the absolute monarchy that had
reigned over China for thousands of years, but it failed to change the
semi-colonial and semi-feudal nature of Chinese society and to alter the bitter

fate of the Chinese people. China was in urgent need of new ideas to lead the
movement to save the nation and a new organization to rally forces of
revolution.

With the salvoes of Russia’s October Revolution in 1917,
Marxism-Leninism was brought to China. The May 4th Movement of 1919
spurred the spread of Marxism throughout the country. Then in July 1921, as

the Chinese people and the Chinese nation were undergoing a great
awakening and Marxism-Leninism was becoming closely integrated with the
Chinese workers’ movement, the Communist Party of China was born. The
founding of a communist party in China was an epoch-making event, and

from then on the Chinese revolution took on an entirely new look.
The Party was keenly aware that the conflicts between imperialism and

the Chinese nation, and those between feudalism and the people constituted
the principal contradiction in modern Chinese society. To realize national
rejuvenation, it would be essential to initiate an anti-imperialist and
anti-feudal struggle.

In the early days of the Party and during the Great Revolution, the Party
formulated the program of the democratic revolution, launched movements
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