In a semi-colonial country such as China, the relationship between the principal contradiction and the non-principal contradictions presents a complicated picture. Before a semi-colony suffered from imperialist oppression, its principal contradiction was the contradiction between the feudal or semi-feudal system and the broad masses of the people. All other contradictions are determined by this principal contradiction. However, when such a society suffers under imperialist oppression, the internal principal contradiction temporarily changes into a non-principal contradiction, and the contradiction between imperialism and the entire, or almost entire, semi-colonial society becomes the principal one, determining the development of all other contradictions. The status of the principal or non-principal contradiction changes at this time according to the extent of imperialist oppression and the extent of the people’s revolution of the semi-colony.
For instance, when imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all its various classes[4-531] can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country [p. 260] (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of the people) are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position. So it was in China in the Opium War,[4-532] the Yi He Tuan War, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, and so it is now in the present Sino-Japanese War. Externally, the American War of Independence, the war between England and South Africa, the war between Spain and the Philippines, and so on, have all been like this.
But in another situation, the contradictions change position. When imperialism carries on its oppression not by war, but by milder means -political, economic, and cultural – the ruling classes in semi-colonial countries capitulate to imperialism, and the two form an alliance; opposition changes to unity between the two for the joint oppression of the masses of the people. At such a time, the masses often resort to civil war against the alliance of imperialism and the feudal classes, while imperialism often gives secret assistance to the internal ruling strata to oppress the internal revolutionary war, and so avoids direct action.[4-533]Thus the internal contradictions become particularly sharp. For instance, in China, the Taiping War, the revolutionary war of 1911, the great Revolution of 1925‒27, the war of the Soviets after 1927;[4-534] externally, there were the February and October revolutions in Russia (Russia too had had many semi-colonial characteristics), the revolutionary characteristics of the numerous civil wars in Central and South America, and so on. Wars among the various ruling groups in the semi-colonies also manifest the intensification of internal contradictions; there have been many of these in China, and Central and South America, which fall into this category.[4-535]