Chinese History | The People's Republic of China

"On October 1, 1949 a grand ceremony was witnessed by 300,000 people in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, and Mao Zedong, chairman of the Central People's Government, solemnly proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China." ~ Wikimedia.

From 1949 to 1976, Mao Zedong was the leader of the New China. This was a period during which many of the ideals and visions that he had of building a modern, socialist China went a long way towards being achieved. It was also a period of conflict within the leadership of China over how a modern industrialised society could be built. These disputes eventually brought the party close to self-destruction and, by the time Mao died in 1976, China was poised on the brink of a further radical transformation. 1

Mao Zedong's vision of a new China was a dominant rhetoric throughout this period. What Mao said, his writings, his speeches, these were the public goals the ideals that the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China officially pursued. But, almost from the beginning of the People's Republic, there were different groups within the leadership who interpreted the goals of building socialism and building a modern industrial society in different ways. We saw different roads, different paths that could be followed in pursuit of these objectives.

These debates were generally kept within the leadership of the Party. The Party sought to keep as long as possible a unified public face, but we know now that, in retrospect, many of these divisions became quite acrimonious and, on occasion, they broke out into more public forms of conflict. Mao was generally able to prevail, at least in terms of keeping the party line and the stated positions of the party, according with his views. But, from time to time, he was forced to compromise, sometimes to give up some control over various aspects of the government. He never really was able to have absolute power over all aspects of development, all aspects of the program of the party and the government, which he probably would have wished and which would probably have allowed him to pursue his particular vision more successfully.

In the 1950's the principle area of contention between the different groupings within the party had to do with agricultural policy. China at this time was overwhelmingly an agricultural nation, the agricultural sector within the economy was by far the largest and nearly 85% of the Chinese people lived on the land and were still involved in farming, so how to deal with the agricultural sector was a critical question.

Land reform was carried out across the country and was very effective in redistributing land, getting land into the hands of farming families so that all the peasants, all across China had some land. Everybody wound up with something. They hand individual titles to this land, they could cultivate it themselves and the great estates, the great landlords were largely done away with, either given smaller plots of land to farm themselves or in many instances driven off the land or sometimes killed. A completely new setup in the countryside seemed to be taking shape.

But the goal of land reform and the goal of the Communist movement was not simply to redistribute land to small scale peasant farmers and have them go on with a system of small scale private property, but was instead to build up a collective system... a system of collective or cooperative farming which would provide various kinds of economic reforms to take place, allow economies of scale to develop and would increase the productivity of the land. So, in the early and mid 1950's, incremental steps were taken towards agricultural collectivisation.

Essentially this was from a widespread body of individual farmers to small scale cooperative units to larger scale cooperatives and eventually to even larger scale collective units. This was a year by year process of development. Up until about 1956-7 each stage in this process seemed to be very effective. There was no public resistance or resentment to this, largely because the kinds of reforms that were being carried out -- the introduction of small scale mechanisation, the introduction of better knowledge about techniques of cultivation, the use of fertilisers, cooperation between working groups, the ability to share certain instruments of production whether it was livestock or farm tools of one kind or another -- all these factors combined to result in increasing yields.

If we look at the statistics on food | grain production in China during this period, year to year they go up. Grain production increases faster than the rate of population growth, which itself is taking place significantly during these years, and that means that the available food supply per capita was also increasing. So the reforms that were carried out in the early and mid 1950's were very effective and successful and, therefore, were well received. 2

By about 1957, Mao was convinced that it's possible, building on these initial successes, to accelerate the timeline, to shorten the amount of time needed to achieve complete collectivisation, and he begins to announce that moving to the highest level, moving to what came to be called the People's Communes, which were very large collective entities, now is the time. He said that Communes were a good thing and a movement effectively sweeps across the country to leap up to these highest level Collectives, and to then launch what came to be known as a "Great Leap Forward". This is in some ways a logical culmination of Mao's vision of unleashing the productive capacity of the Chinese peasantry, of moving into economies of scale, great large scale cooperative labour projects to build water reservoirs, irrigation systems etc.

The Great Leap achieves many positive objectives, but it runs into some even more powerful negative forces. The core problem of the Great Leap Forward is linked, in many ways, to Mao's idea of how to motivate people, how to get the vast masses of China to work together and achieve, almost by an act of will, a process of economic development. Enthusiasm is basic in this process and enthusiasm for success is such that people begin to falsify their reports of success. Not in a gross way, but if you add a few %ge points at the bottom level of reporting, and the person at the next level does the same, and so on... by the time you get up to the national level, the level where the State Planning Bureau is formulating its information and making its plans for the future, you have gross distortions.

In 1957-59, initially the Great Leap Forward itself is a great success. The problem is, it doesn't increase in reality as much as it increases on paper. It does gain, but it doesn't gain as much. Based on false figures on misunderstood realities in the countryside, the planners decide so much has been achieved they can lift various kinds of rationing restrictions and allow people to basically consume what they want. This results in a lot of grain, livestock and other food resources not making their way into the supply system for the cities where, at the same time, they are trying to build up industry and raise the standard of living of the urban population. Instead, there is an initial glut in the countryside.

As a result of that and excessively high targets for the next year, there begins to be a crisis in agricultural production. There is not enough food. Food which they thought would be there in reserve has been consumed. As we move into 1959, the situation begins to be much worse. Bad weather sets in, a variety of other circumstances begin to contribute to problems in the countryside, and food shortages become characteristic. There is a lot of debate and dispute in academia about the extent of the hunger and starvation that follows. We see figures of up to 20 million people dying from the food crisis during the Great Leap Forward. It's hard to know what the precise figure should be, but no matter how you look at it, this is a period of hardship, widespread malnutrition and certainly of significant deaths resulting from the shortfalls of the Great Leap Forward.

The crisis that this engenders results in the first real serious split between elements within the Party leadership. There had been campaigns carried out in the course of the 1950's directed against people who were called 'rightists' or 'anti-party' elements. These were largely directed against intellectuals who had criticised the party for being overly bureaucratic. This begins to point up what will prove to be a very serious problem for the Party long term.

It goes from, prior to 1949, a fighting, revolutionary organisation to a government bureaucracy, an administrative elite managing the affairs of the country and with the capacity to draw to itself a lot of the material rewards and benefits that are being made available by economic growth and development. The bureaucratic alienation of the Party from the ordinary people for which it is supposedly there to serve starts to be more and more of a problem. The false reporting during the Great Leap Forward is one example of this. The bureaucrats wanted to make themselves look good by having the best sounding reports and they weren't really cognisant of how this could have such an adverse impact on the actual lives of the people that they were managing.

Needless to say, the food shortfalls that are occurring by the Spring of 1959 lead some of the leadership to be very critical of the policies of the Great Leap Forward. In August, 1959, a Party conference takes place and at that conference, in Lushan, the Defence Minister (Peng De Huai) circulates a letter to Party leadership very critical of Mao Zedong and critical of Mao's model of mass mobilisation and modernisation of the agricultural sector and building up the enthusiasm of the peasantry. Mao learns of this letter and launches a counter-attack against Peng De Huai and eventually confronts the Party leadership with a choice. If they support Peng De Huai, he will resign, go back to the countryside and lead a new peasant revolution. Nobody really wanted that to happen and Peng De Huai is forced to resign as Defence Minister and he goes into a period of enforced retirement for a few years but eventually he is brought back to a more active role.

Mao was vindicated and, although his leadership is sustained he is nonetheless forced to step back and resign from the position of President of the People's Republic of China. He retreats to a secondary level of State Affairs. He remains Chairman of the Party and wields tremendous power from that position. But it does represent a kind of political compromise that inhibits Mao's ability to manage the operations of the State machinery on a day to day basis. 3

From 1959 to 1962, that state machinery comes to be more and more controlled by a group within the Party leadership sometimes referred to as "the pragmatists", led by Deng Xiao Ping and the man who replaces Mao as President, Liu Shao Qi. These leaders emphasised the achievement of economic objectives which were thought to be based on a more realistic appraisal of things, and not on the primacy of politics. Mao's view was that politics should be in command, the pragmatists took the view that economic factors and calculations should be given the more significant role.

They moved away from Mao's emphasis on the highest levels of collectivisation. The people's communes were largely disassembled and broken back down into much smaller scale, although still collective, farming entities, and there was a general relaxation in the Party's oversight over life in both the countryside and the cities. 4

In 1965, Mao's frustration reaches a peak and he finds that, at that point, he has trouble in getting some articles he had written published in the newspaper of the Communist Party. This for him is almost unthinkable. He leaves the capital, Beijing, and goes down to Shanghai where there is a group of supporters who share his views and thinking, and he prepares to launch what comes to be called "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution". This gets fully under way in the Spring of 1966 and, in the next two or three years, this engulfs China in a tremendous public drama and trauma.

What Mao does in the Cultural Revolution essentially is to call upon the broad masses to criticise the Party. He says that it is right to "attack the headquarters" and "struggle against the reactionaries". By reactionaries, he means people in the Party who are reactionary. He talks about opposing those in the Party who are "taking the capitalist road", whose policies in his view will result not in the building of socialism but in China returning to the capitalist way. By calling on the masses to attack the Party, Mao unleashes some very powerful forces.

We see late in 1966 and into the first half of 1967 some very radical activity. The workers in great cities, most particularly the city of Shanghai, the most industrialised city in China, the greatest port in China where millions of factory workers lived and worked, but other big industrial cities as well. Large scale mass organisations of workers are formed, street demonstrations demanding various kinds of reforms take place, in some ways, what Mao unleashes, the kinds of popular movements that spring up, particularly in places like Shanghai, are almost anticipatory of things like the Solidarity movement in Poland, a decade or so later.

In Shanghai in the winter of 1966-67 this actually reaches the point were these popular workers organisations set aside the leadership of the Communist party. The Communist Party Committee of Shanghai, the Municipal Party organisation is dissolved and something called the "Shanghai Commune" is put in place in February 1967. It doesn't last very long, and in many ways this is the turning point in the Cultural Revolution. It goes on for a while after this but these events became quite important because what Mao decides is that you do really need to have a Communist Party. He orders the radical groups in Shanghai to restore the Party and to dissolve their popular government, their so called Shanghai Commune. Once he does this the real question becomes not a matter of the broad masses trying to reform the Party, but "Who's going to control the Party from within?" The Cultural Revolution from that point on largely becomes a conflict over Party control.

This process culminates in April 1969, at the 9th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. At that poinht, it's pretty clear that Mao and his followers have achieved sufficient control within the Party and, although the official Cultural Revolution, in name, that continues all the way on to Mao's death in 1976, practically speaking, the active political phase of the Cultural Revolution comes to an end in the Spring of 1969. 5

The final seven years of Mao's life were characterised by a functional stalemate within the Party leadership. Mao's group, particularly a quartet of radical leaders called the "Gang of Four" with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, as their principle leader, came to control much of the Party's propaganda, education and cultural institutions. But other supposed allies and successors to Mao such as Lin Biyao winds up being denounced as a traitor, and dies in a plane crash while trying to flee China after supposedly having plotted to assassinate Mao. The Maoist side of the conflict within the Party is in a state of disarray.

The pragmatists, on the other hand, find themselves staging a comeback. Liu Xiaoqi, the leader of this group originally, dies in 1969 but Deng Xiao Ping, his 2nd in Command, having been purged several times makes a return to power, particularly after 1972, and is placed in charge of science and technology policy for China.

Through the early 1970's it appears that Mao was balancing off the radicals such as the "Gang of Four" against the Pragmatists like Deng Xiaoping. Having decided to retain the central role of the Chinese Communist Party, he is now stuck with the situation of not being able to resolve the conflicts from within the Party. This makes the last phase of Mao's leadership a rather tragic and pathetic period.

1976 proves to be a critical year. It is the year in which Mao himself dies, but this only the end of a series of very dramatic events. In January, Zhou Enlai, who is probably the most popular leader amongst the communists up to this point, he had been Prime Minister since the establishment of the People's Republic back in 1949, dies. His death is widely mourned and, in April 1976, people in Beijing go to Tiananmen Square, put flowers and other kinds of memorials at the Monument to the People's Heroes. This is interpreted by the "Gang of Four" as a criticism of them. Zhou Enlai had always remained very close to Mao, but never really supported the radical activities of the "Gang of Four" and they saw him as having been, in fact, their adversary or enemy. When popular support for Zhou was expressed, they interpreted it as an attack on them and there was quite a confrontation at Tiananmen in April 1976, riots break out, some Police cars are overturned and burnt and troops had to be sent in to quieten the situation down. It doesn't get out of control to anywhere near the degree it does in 1989, but it does represent the most serious public expression of opposition to the existing leadership that has been seen in China in quite a while.

In July 1976, a major earthquake centred in Tangshan, North-East of Beijing, kills nearly 300,000 people and causes widespread damage in Northern China, including in Beijing itself. An earthquake like this in the traditional cosmological view of China, and still in popular consciousness, is an omen or portent of serious negative impending events. Shortly after the Tangshan earthquake Zhu De, who had been the founder of the red army, dies also. Finally, on September 9th, Mao Zedong himself dies. So 1976 is a year in which three of the founding leaders of the Communist movement pass from the scene, in which a serious demonstration against the existing leadership takes place in the heart of Beijing, and when an earthquake frightens not only the people but the leadership as well.

Almost immediately, after Mao's death, the Pragmatic wing within the Party starts to move against his more radical followers. By early October, the "Gang of Four" are arrested and the machinery begins to go to work for the final return of Deng Xiaoping to the leadership and to preside over a fairly complete reorganisation of the Chinese Communist Party and of China's course of development in the modern world. 6