Rise of China
Overview
Statewide Dual Credit Modern World History: Unit 15, Lesson 4
A discussion of the rise of Communist China under Mao Zedong, including the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the impact of Mao's policies on the Chinese people.
By the late 1940s, world attention shifted from Europe to Asia. Since the 1930s, Chiang Kai-Shek’s (1887-1975) Kuomintang government had been locked in a civil war with Mao Zedong’s (1893-1976) Chinese Communist forces. Under American diplomatic pressure, Chiang and Mao created a coalition government in 1946. The coalition quickly frayed and by 1949, Mao’s forces forced the Kuomintang to retreat to the island of Taiwan (also known as Formosa). On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China from the top of the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Mao Zedong and his followers sought to remake China in their image. From 1952-1962, Mao initiated the “Great Leap Forward” by ordering Chinese peasants to create primitive blast furnaces and steel mills in an effort to, within a generation, catapult China into the upper echelon of industrial nations. However, by neglecting agricultural production, Mao condemned 15-55 million people to starvation.
Aware that China contained over 95 minorities and many individuals still loyal to the old Kuomintang, the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used strongarm tactics to keep the population in line. Communist control of schools ensured that children were fed a steady diet of socialist ideology from a young age and urged to spy on their parents. Mandarin became the official language of the government. Mao even demanded that China’s traditional writing system be simplified to purge it of class bias. Even powerful government officials were often forced to attend party indoctrination sessions, confess their “crimes” and submit to public denunciations. The Chinese secret police were everywhere, arresting, torturing and sentencing thousands of suspected Chinese intellectuals, poets, politicians and even military officials to long sentences in “re-education camps.”
Spotlight On | THE LITTLE RED BOOK
Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, formally known as Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, represented one of the most influential political tracts of the 20th century. Compiled in 1964, the book contained 267 sayings attributed to Chairman Mao. Forming a crucial part of Mao’s cult of personality during the Cultural Revolution, The "Little Red Book" was modeled on popular collections of quotes from Chinese scholars like Confucius and Mencius that Chinese schoolchildren had used for centuries. In the 1960s, the Chinese Ministry of Education aimed to give a copy to every Chinese citizen. Red Guards would also routinely ask whether ordinary Chinese had a copy with them or whether they could quote passages from the book from memory. Two of the most often recited quotes from the "Little Red Book" were, “Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
From 1966-1976, Mao launched the “Cultural Revolution.” Although officially designed to combat corruption and keep the Chinese people in a permanent state of communist revolution, in reality, the Cultural Revolution involved creating a cult of personality around Mao. At Mao’s urging, groups of young people known as “Red Guards,” indoctrinated by the ceaseless reading of a collection of their leader’s teachings incorporated in “Little Red Books,” scoured the Chinese countryside. They humiliated, beat and killed individuals considered “capitalist roaders,” destroying churches, temples and other symbols of China’s past, all with little or no opposition from Chinese officials. Although figures vary, it was estimated that over two million people died during the Cultural Revolution, a movement that did not officially end until Mao died in 1976.