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The new Communist government, a one-party state under the rule of the CCP, brought an end to the long period of Western imperialist involvement in China. Regions within the countrys historic boundaries that had fallen away since the overthrow of the Manchus were reclaimed, including Tibet and Xinjiang in western China.
China established alliances with the countries of the emerging Socialist bloc. In 1950 China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) signed a treaty of friendship and alliance, and in supplementary agreements the Soviets gave up their privileges in Northeast China. During the Korean War (1950-1953), Chinese troops aided the Communist regime of North Korea against South Korean and United Nations forces. China also aided the Communist insurgents fighting the French in Vietnam, and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai played an important role in negotiating the 1954 Geneva Accords that ended the hostilities known as the First Indochina War.
Transformation of the economy and society. During the first few years of Communist leadership, the new government reorganized nearly all aspects of Chinese life. To revive the economy, which had been disrupted by decades of warfare, the CCP adopted measures to curb inflation, restore communications, and reestablish the domestic order necessary for economic development. The government also orchestrated campaigns and struggle sessions to mobilize mass revolutionary enthusiasm and remove from power those likely to obstruct the new government. In the 1951 campaign against individuals who had been affiliated with Kuomintang (KMT) organizations or had served in its army, tens of thousands were executed and many more sent to labor reform camps.
The CCP made fundamental changes to society. New marriage laws that prohibited men from taking more than one wife and interference with remarriage by widows assured women of a more equal position in society. Women also received equal rights with respect to divorce, employment, and ownership of property. The CCP made every effort to control the spread of ideas. Through the press and through schools, the government directed youth to look to the party and the state rather than to their families for leadership and security. The CCP assumed strict control over religion, forcing foreign missionaries to leave the country and installing Chinese clerics willing to cooperate with the Communists in positions of authority over Christian churches. Intellectuals were made to undergo specialized programs of thought reform directed toward eradicating anti-Communist ideas.
Government takeover of businesses undermined the power of the urban-based capitalists who had gained influence under the KMT. To make use of their expertise, however, the government often enlisted previous business owners to manage companies. The governments first five-year plan, initiated in 1953 and carried out with Soviet assistance, emphasized the expansion of heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods.
Through the progressive socialization of Chinese agriculture (making ownership of land collective, not individual or family), the landowning elite was eliminated, the source of its income and influence abolished. As the CCP took control of new areas, it taught the peasants in those areas that social and economic inequalities were not natural but rather a perversion caused by the institution of private property. Wealthy landowners were not people of high moral standards but were exploiters.
To create a new communal order where all would work together unselfishly for common goals, the Communists first redistributed property. Their usual method was to send a small team of cadres (party administrators) and students to a village to cultivate relations with the poor, organize a peasant association, identify potential leaders, compile lists of grievances, and organize struggle sessions. Eventually the inhabitants would be classified into five categories: landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and hired hands. The government then would confiscate the holdings of landowners, and sometimes land owned by rich and middle peasants, and redistribute it more evenly. The wealthy also endured struggle sessions, which sometimes led to executions of landlords. This stage of land reform resulted in the creation of a castelike system in the countryside. The lowest caste was composed of the descendants of those labeled landlords, while the descendants of former poor and lower-middle peasants became a new privileged class.
Agricultural collectivization followed land reform in several stages. First, farmers were encouraged to join mutual-aid teams of usually less than 10 families. Next, they were instructed to set up cooperatives, consisting of 40 or 50 families. From 1954 to 1956 the Communists created higher-level collectives (also called production teams) that united cooperatives. At this point, economic inequality within villages had been virtually eliminated. The state took over the grain market, and peasants were no longer allowed to market their crops.
The reorganization of the countryside created a new elite of rural party cadres. Illiterate peasants who kept the peace among villagers and exceeded state production targets had opportunities to rise in the party hierarchy. This created social mobility far beyond anything that had existed in imperial China, which had only provided advancement opportunities to educated peasants. Another byproduct of the reorganization of the countryside was the extension of social services, because collectives throughout the country coordinated basic health care and primary education for their members.
The Hundred Flowers and the Great Leap Forward. In 1956 Mao Zedong launched a campaign to expose the party to the criticism of Chinese intellectuals under the slogan Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom. Mao was afraid that the revolutionary fervor of CCP members was waning, that they were losing touch with the people and becoming authoritarian bureaucrats. Although most intellectuals were cautious at first, Mao repeatedly urged people to speak up, and once the criticism had started, it became a torrent. In 1957 Mao and other party leaders abruptly changed course and launched the so-called Antirightist campaign on the critics for harboring rightist ideology. About half a million educated people lost their jobs and often their freedom, usually because something they had said during the Hundred Flowers period had been construed as anti-Communist.
Next Mao launched a radical development plan known as the Great Leap Forward. Mao announced the plan in November 1957 at a meeting of the leaders of the international Communist movement in Moscow, claiming that China would surpass Britain in industrial output within 15 years. Through the concerted hard work of hundreds of millions of people laboring together, he claimed, China would transform itself from a poor nation into a mighty one. In 1958, in a wave of utopian enthusiasm, the CCP combined agricultural collectives into gigantic communes, expecting huge increases in productivity. Throughout the country, communes, factories, and schools set up backyard furnaces in order to double steel production. As workers were mobilized to work long hours on these and other large-scale projects, they spent little time at home or in normal farm work.
Peng Dehuai, Chinas minister of defense and a military hero, offered measured criticisms of the Great Leap policies at a 1959 party meeting. Mao was furious and forced the party to choose between Peng and himself. The CCP ultimately removed Peng from his positions of authority. Within a couple of years, the Great Leap had proved an economic disaster. Industrial production dropped by as much as 50 percent between 1959 and 1962. Grain was taken from the countryside on the basis of wildly exaggerated production reports, contributing, along with environmental calamities, to a massive famine from 1960 to 1962 in which more than 20 million people died.
Growing Isolation.
The economic hardship created by the Great Leap was made worse in 1960 by the Soviets withdrawal of economic assistance and technical advice. As the USSR moved toward peaceful coexistence with the West, its alliance with China deteriorated. In 1962 China openly condemned the USSR for withdrawing its missiles from Communist Cuba under pressure from the United States. Consequently, the USSR reneged on its agreements to aid Chinas economic development. The Chinese began to compete openly with the USSR for leadership of the Communist bloc and for influence among the members of the Nonaligned Movement, a loose association of countries not specifically allied with either of the power blocs led by either the United States or the USSR. In 1963 Zhou Enlai toured Asia and Africa to gain support for the Chinese model of socialism.
Meanwhile, other actions taken by China kept many nonaligned nations wary. In 1959 the United Nations condemned Chinas actions in Tibet when China suppressed a rebellion there. The Dalai Lama (Tibets ruler at that time) and thousands of Tibetans fled south to Nepal and India. Also in 1959, Chinese troops penetrated and occupied 31,000 sq km (12,000 sq mi) of territory claimed by India. Negotiations between the two countries proved inconclusive, and fighting erupted again in 1962 when Chinese troops advanced across the claimed Indian borders. In Southeast Asia, China lent moral support and technical and material assistance to Communist-led insurgency movements in Laos and Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1959-1975). In Indonesia, Chinese embassy officials aided Communist insurgents until the Chinese embassy was expelled in 1965.
The Cultural Revolution. In mid-1966 Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, known simply as the Cultural Revolution. The announced goals of the revolution were to eradicate the remains of so-called bourgeois ideas and customs and to recapture the revolutionary zeal of early Chinese Communism. Mao also wanted to increase his power over the government by discrediting or removing party leaders who had challenged his authority or disagreed with his policies. Earlier in the year, Maos wife, Jiang Qing, and a few other Mao supporters had begun calling for attacks on cultural works that criticized Maos policies. Soon radical students at Beijing University, urged by Mao to denounce elitist elements of society, were agitating against university and government officials who they believed were not sufficiently revolutionary. Liu Shaoqi, a veteran revolutionary who had been designated as Maos successor, tried to control the students, but Mao intervened. He launched an intense public criticism of Liu and sanctioned the organization of Beijing students into militant groups known as Red Guards. Soon students all over China were responding to the call to make revolution, happy to help Mao, whom many worshiped as a godlike hero.
In June 1966 nearly all Chinese schools and universities were closed as students devoted themselves full-time to Red Guard activities. Joined by groups of workers, peasants, and demobilized soldiers, Red Guards took to the streets in pro-Maoist, sometimes violent, demonstrations. They made intellectuals, bureaucrats, party officials, and urban workers their chief targets. The central party structure was destroyed as many high officials, including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, were removed from their positions. During 1967 and 1968 bloody fighting among various Red Guard factions claimed thousands of lives. In some areas, rebellion deteriorated into a state of lawlessness. Finally, the army was called in to restore order, and in July 1968 the Red Guards were sent back to school or to work in the countryside. In many areas, the army quickly became the dominant force.
During the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, Mao and his supporters continually promoted class struggle against so-called revisionists and counterrevolutionaries. To this end, educated people were singled out for persecution. College professors, middle-school teachers, newspaper journalists, musicians, party cadres, factory managers, and others who could be categorized as educated suffered a wide variety of brutal treatment. Men and women were tortured, imprisoned, starved, denied medical treatment, and forced to leave their children unsupervised when they were sent to labor camps in the countryside. Tens of thousands were killed or committed suicide.
CCP delegates to the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969 reelected Mao party chairman with a great deal of fanfare. They named Defense Minister Lin Biao, Maos personal choice, to be Maos eventual successor. For several years, Lin was regularly referred to as Maos closest comrade in arms and best student. Yet, according to the official CCP account, in 1971 Lin turned against Mao, plotted unsuccessfully to assassinate him, and then died in an airplane crash while attempting to flee to the USSR. Lin was officially condemned as a traitor.
Much of the political and social turmoil that characterized the first half of the Cultural Revolution subsided in the second half. In 1976 the government arrested a group of four revolutionaries, known as the Gang of Four, and charged them with the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. This event came to mark the official end of the campaign.
Shifting foreign relations. In the early years of the Cultural Revolution, Chinas already strained foreign relations worsened. Propaganda and agitation in support of the Red Guards by overseas Chinese strained relations with many foreign governments. A successful Chinese hydrogen bomb test in 1967 did nothing to allay apprehension. Tension with the USSR worsened when China accused Soviet leaders of imperialism after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Clashes between Soviet and Chinese border guards along the Amur and Ussuri rivers in 1969 created a tense situation. China was largely isolated from the outside world, maintaining good relations only with Albania.
In the early 1970s, however, Chinas foreign relations began to improve dramatically. In 1971 the Peoples Republic of China was given the China seat in the United Nations, replacing the nationalist government on Taiwan, which had continued to hold the seat after losing the civil war with the Communists in 1945. In 1972 U.S. president Richard Nixon made an official visit to China during which he agreed to the need for Chinese-American contacts and the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Taiwan. In the wake of these developments, many other nations transferred their diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the mainland Communist government. In 1972 China restored diplomatic relations with Japan.
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