In China, even before the CP assumed power, in 1949, i.e. before it came to rest on a middle-class bureaucracy, it was comprised of, and rested upon the peasantry, the most obvious manifestation of a petty-bourgeois, middle-class.
“Let us listen further to Manuilsky: “All these [?] conditions lead to the fact that a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship in China will be confronted with the necessity of a consistent confiscation of the enterprises belonging to foreign and Chinese capital.”” (p 233)
But, in that case, the class nature of the state is characterised, no longer, as being bourgeois, but as proletarian. The Democratic Dictatorship assumed that the state would be bourgeois-democratic, clearing away the obstacles to a freer, more rapid development of capitalism, but the demands for the seizure of large-scale capital, already imply skipping over that stage, at least to the stage of social-democracy, and The Dictatorship of The Proletariat, if not to the stage of a planned transition towards socialism. Under social-democracy, large-scale, socialised capital, already predominates, and, as its collective owners are, objectively, the associated producers, that makes them the ruling class. The only question to be resolved, in these conditions, is the extent to which they are conscious of that reality, and it is reflected in the legal and political superstructure.
“The democratic dictatorship can be contrasted only to the proletarian socialist dictatorship. The one differs from the other by the character of the class holding power and by the social content of its historical work. If the democratic dictatorship is to occupy itself not with clearing the road for capitalist development, as stated in the Bolshevik schema “outlined in 1905”, but on the contrary, with a “consistent confiscation of the enterprises belonging to foreign and Chinese capital”, as “outlined” by Manuilsky, then we ask: wherein does this democratic dictatorship differ from the socialist?” (p 233-4)
Clearly, it does not differ. The bridge between the two is precisely the function of permanent revolution. What distinguishes the bourgeois-democratic, national revolution, in the era of imperialism, is, precisely, the existence of, and role of the industrial proletariat, and the fact that, if the interests of that proletariat are to be protected and advanced, which is the role of Marxists, that revolution cannot stop at the stage of the bourgeois-democratic, national revolution, but must continue to the international socialist revolution.
But, the Stalinists, having led the Chinese revolution to ignominious defeat, with their Popular Front policy, of support for the KMT, in line with their slogan of The Democratic Dictatorship of the Peasantry and Proletariat, now looked to cover their backs, by introducing a corrupted version of permanent revolution, in which, having gone through that stage of the betrayal by the KMT/bourgeoisie, the revolution was still on a permanent upward trajectory. Squaring this circle was the task of Manuilsky.
So, the revolutionary democratic dictatorship would be distinguished by the presence of socialist elements.
“The democratic dictatorship was always thought of by the Bolsheviks as a bourgeois-democratic dictatorship, and not as a supra-class one, and was contrasted to the socialist dictatorship only in this – the only possible – sense. Now it appears that in China there will be a “democratic dictatorship with socialist elements”. Between the bourgeois and socialist régimes, the class abyss thus disappears, everything is dissolved into pure democracy, and this pure democracy is supplemented gradually and planfully by “socialist elements”.” (p 234-5)
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