HANOI INTERVIEW 85 about this a little, and so gradually lead into your questions. Vietnam is rather a special case. We can divide the world into three categories of countries according to their productive forces. These forces include industrial power, tools, and human productivity. The first kind of country has the most developed industry, for example the USA, Canada, Japan and western Europe. Question. What about the Soviet Union? Answer. Well, 1 am speaking only of the capitalist countries at present. At most, only about twenty capitalist countries fall into this first category. The second kind has relatively developed industry, but its agriculture is backward and not mechanized, and there have been no land reforms. India and Brazil would be examples. Spain, yes, though Spain has reached a rather high level. Mexico and Argentina are other examples. The problem is that they do not have much heavy industry, and they have dependent economies. In the third category there are the really backward, predominantly agricultural societies. In the nineteenth century, Marx and the Marxists said socialism could develop only in the first category of states, not in the second or third. Yet in fact socialist movements did win revolutions in Russia and eastern Europe, which then belonged to category two. In the states of the first category, the proletariat is strong and big, but not yet strong nough to overthrow the capitalist class. From 1917 until now, socialist movements have been victorious in, at best, some states of category two, but not of category one. The USSR was rather backward at the time of the revolution, but it was very large, and that was why it was able to stand firm and later to serve as a base for other countries in their revolutions. Therefore, it is a backbone for the socialist camp, and has helped in the setting up of the socialist system elsewhere. Socialism was thus able to spread from the second category of states to some of the third. The USSR also had the ability to build up a modern, large-scale industry. Now it is on the same level with the capitalist states which developed in the previous century and so creates a new balance between capitalist and socialist systems: both have modern industry. At the same time, the capitalist system grows smaller in scope and is in deeper crisis. So socialism can develop in different kinds of countries; socialist movements have been victorious in backward countries like Angola, Cuba and Vietnam before the highly developed capitalist states. In eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia was highly developed but Roumania, Bulgaria and Albania were very backward. However, these countries were able to ally themselves against fascism and move to socialism. In Asia, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, also Mongolia and North Korea, were very backward but underwent socialist revolutions. Q. What about China?