Sixty years is a long life-span for a revolutionary regime to survive and remain vigorous. The celebration in 2009 of the 60th anniversary of the Chinese communist conquest of power and the creation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was in stark contrast to the fate of its erstwhile Soviet “elder brother.” Despite suffering terrible human tragedies and political upheavals – notably, the great famine of 1959–61 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 – the PRC had emerged as a powerful and dynamic country. The purpose of this volume is to chronicle how that came about. The purpose of this introduction is to proffer a hypothesis, based on that chronicle, to explain the Chinese success.