In November 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. The brutal suppression of the Hungarian Uprising was a pivotal moment in communist history, reinforcing Moscow’s iron grip over Eastern Europe for decades to come.
But just a few months prior, the seeds of an arguably even more profound and epoch-making revolution were quietly planted in Beijing at the CCP’s 8
th
party congress. Its resolution heralded Communist China’s first great reset: the party’s new central task would be to unleash the country’s underdeveloped factors of production, rather than obsess over relations of production. In layman’s terms, economic growth would trump class…