We are still too close to a yet unfolding story to draw more than tentative conclusions about (big-C) Communism's demise. But even without the benefit of a long historical perspective, it is plain that 1989, the year Communism ended in Eastern Europe and imploded dramatically in the Soviet Union itself, and 1991, when Communism officially ended even in the land of its origin, were watershed years for socialist theory and practice. They marked the end of the historical project begun in 1917 and prepared, in part, in the three or four decades preceding the Bolshevik Revolution – during Marxism's classical phase, the Age of the Second International. As of this writing, China remains officially Communist, accounting for nearly a quarter of the world's population, and there are other survivors too at the peripheries of the old Communist system – in North Korea, Vietnam, and, of course, Cuba. But the exceptional status of these regimes is unlikely to last. Already in the Chinese case, it is mainly the political system that remains Communist (and even Stalinist). Vast sections of China have been opened up to infusions of capital and technology from Japan, East Asia, and the West – a fact that helps explain the persistence of the regime in power. Even if China remains officially Communist for some time, it is rapidly becoming transformed from an economic system built on the Soviet model into a source of cheap labor for foreign capital, a workshop for industries developed and organized elsewhere.