CONCLUSION

It is evident that the proletariat in China, both urban and rural, played a distinctly secondary role in the post-1927, Communist-led phase of the Chinese revolution. But much more significantly, Communist efforts under various versions of the proletarian (or class) line to place labor in the vanguard position proved not only impractical, but essentially counterproductive as well. This line, with its labor class-struggle tactics, its urban orientation, and its promotion of a favored political and economic status for labor, seriously hindered the fashioning of an effective strategy on both the urban and rural fronts and was at odds with the