p The Chinese leaders are endeavouring
to establish a theoretical basis for their reactionary views and actions, which they cloak with revolutionary verbiage. Contrary to reality, they maintain that it is not the international working class and the world socialist system but the liberation struggle in Asian, African and Latin American countries which is in the centre of the present epoch. This, they contend, is where the main contradiction of the modern world lies. On this point Peking Review wrote: "... the contradiction between the oppressed nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is the principal contradiction in the contemporary world.”  [157•* 

p This is obviously an unscientific theory, which deliberately sets aside the conscious class approach to present-day problems of social development in favour of the Mao group’s racist views with their clear-cut hegemonistic ambitions. It counterposes the national liberation movement to its natural ally, the world working class, and thereby deprives it of its socialist perspective.

p The views of the Maoists are characterised by their discriminatory name for Asian, African and Latin American countries, which they call the "rural areas of the world" in opposition to the so-called rich countries—the "cities of the world”. Peking Review openly writes: "On a world scale, Asia, Africa and Latin America are the village of the world, while Europe and North America are the town of the world.”  [157•** 

p The socialist and imperialist states are thereby placed virtually in the same category, and both are counterposed 158 to the African and Asian countries. This approach contains not a trace of a class assessment of the international situation.

p Peking propaganda speaks of the encirclement of the "cities of the world by the rural areas of the world”. By voicing views of this kind the Peking theoreticians find themselves in the same camp with bourgeois ideologists, who likewise divide the world into “poor” and “rich” countries, regardless of their social system, in order to divert the masses from the class struggle and safeguard imperialist rule.

p From their unscientific and anti-Marxist positions, the Maoists have advanced the thesis of "intermediate zones”. In their opinion the first "intermediate zone" consists of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the second embraces the capitalist states of Western Europe and North America with the exception of the United States of America. .. .

p In the light of the policy pursued by the Chinese leaders headed by Mao Tse-tung, the socialist countries and the international communist and working-class movement face the important task of constantly strengthening and developing the close alliance with the national liberation movement and with all anti-imperialist states.

Recent developments lucidly demonstrate that the reactionary policy of the Mao group is doomed to failure.