Having recently read this article of Lenin’s on the adoption of the NEP and the dangers of “exaggerated revolutionism” you can easily see the rationale adopted later on by the Chinese after Mao. In fact, it’s so obvious to me that they were following the Leninist line on this issue that it surprises me a lot that American policy makers didn’t understand what was going on and assumed the Dengist reforms would somehow pave the way to a liberalisation of China.

What happened? How did the imperialists and their Sovietologists not see this coming? They were slap bang in the middle of an ideological struggle and yet they seem to have missed something so fundamental. What kind of internal screw ups might have occurred that duped the west so thoroughly on this issue?