"Despite the prominence of the theory of New Democracy in formal Maoist theory for more than a decade, and its seeming promise of a lengthy stage of capitalist (or at least semi-capitalist) development, the bourgeois phase of China's postrevolutionary history was abruptly terminated after a scant four years. No doubt in good measure responsible for the hasty prouncement of the "transition to socialism" was Mao Zedong's longstanding populist-type hostility to all forms of capitalism and his persistent refusal to intellectually accept the Marxist thesis that socialism presupposes capitalism."