This chapter seeks to document and interpret the development of Mao Tse-tung's thought during the first three decades of his active political life. Manifestly, Mao Tse-tung's was able to work effectively in such a formal context because he attached primary importance to national unification and China's struggle to throw off the domination of the imperialists, and accepted that, for the moment, the Kuomintang and its army were the best instrument for achieving this. Mao had already in 1939-40 characterized the regime to be established after the war as a 'joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes', and had made it fairly clear that this dictatorship was to be under the effective control of the proletariat, or of its ' vanguard', the Chinese Communist Party. Mao sought to promote, in the period from 1939 onwards, a 'new democratic' revolution in China which would be a kind of functional equivalent of the capitalist stage in the development of European society.