![]() As it enters its seventh decade, the People’s Republic is an engine of the world economy, the largest exporter at once to the eu, Japan and the United States the largest holder of foreign-exchange reserves on earth for a quarter of a century posting the fastest growth rates in per capita income, for the largest population, ever recorded. The outcome of the Chinese Revolution offers an arresting contrast. That, at any rate, would be a common judgement today. Its most lasting achievement, huge enough, was negative: the defeat of Nazism, which no other European regime could have encompassed. While future reversals are not to be excluded, for the moment what has survived of the October rising, in any positive sense, looks small. What has remained is a Russia lesser in size than the Enlightenment once knew, with under half the population of the ussr, restored to a capitalism now more dependent on the export of raw materials than in the last days of Tsarism. ![]() The Soviet state, born of the First World War, victor in the Second, defeated in the cold replica of a Third, dissolved after seven decades with scarcely a shot, as swiftly as it had once arisen. I f the twentieth century was dominated, more than by any other single event, by the trajectory of the Russian Revolution, the twenty-first will be shaped by the outcome of the Chinese Revolution. ![]()
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