Mao’s China questions and answers

Both explanations have strong evidence, and the best answers show how they worked together. The land mattered: about 300 million peasants received fields, tools and grain, and many families remembered fanshen, “turning over”, as the first time they had owned anything, which is why Hinton’s villagers defended the new order. The violence did a different kind of work. Struggle meetings made peasants accuse, vote and sometimes kill, and people who had taken part had every reason to fear the return of the old elite, so their loyalty rested on complicity as well as gratitude. Dikötter weighs the terror heavily, while DeMare and earlier writers give more room to the material gains, and a death toll estimated at one to two million is too uncertain to settle the debate by itself. The next decade adds evidence, because the same peasants lost their land to collectives within five years and resisted mostly in quiet ways, by slaughtering livestock or leaving co-operatives, without open revolt in the Han heartland. That suggests the lasting bond was fear and dependence as much as ownership. The wider lesson is that revolutionary states often secure loyalty by making their supporters share responsibility for what was done.

READ CHAPTER 1 — Mao’s consolidation and land reform →

The costs were heavy and should not be minimised: between about 200,000 and 400,000 Chinese soldiers died, much of the budget went on the war, China owed the Soviet Union for its weapons, and the American fleet put Taiwan out of reach. Yet inside China the war strengthened the regime in ways that peace could not have done. It allowed the Party to present the campaigns against counter-revolutionaries, corrupt officials and businessmen as patriotic defence, it raised donations and recruits from every province, and it gave the new state a prestige no Chinese government had held since the Opium Wars, because a peasant army had fought the United States to a draw. Chen Jian argues that this domestic mobilisation was one of Mao’s aims from the start, while others stress that the decision was a gamble whose costs fell on soldiers and families. The answer therefore depends on the measure: as a state, China emerged harder, more unified and more feared; as a society, it emerged poorer, more isolated and more afraid. The general lesson is that external war often strengthens a new authoritarian regime by turning dissent into treason.

READ CHAPTER 2 — Korean War and Mao’s mass campaigns →

The answer depends on which test is applied. By the test of law and self-description, the PRC was a multi-national state: its 1954 constitution recognised minority nationalities, it created autonomous regions run partly by local officials, and it promoted minority languages in schools and publishing. By the test of power, it behaved much like an empire. Decisions in Lhasa and Urumqi were made by Han Party secretaries and the army, settlers changed the population of Xinjiang, and when Tibetans resisted the campaigns in 1956–59, the state answered with aircraft and artillery. Goldstein shows that Beijing’s policy in Tibet proper was cautious until 1959, while Shakya and other historians stress that the caution existed only where Chinese control was weakest. The Soviet comparison helps, because both states claimed to have ended empire while keeping its borders and its methods. The transferable point is that labels such as “nation” and “empire” describe relationships of power, and a state can be one in its constitution and the other in its practice.

READ CHAPTER 3 — Tibet and Xinjiang under Mao →

By its own measures the Plan succeeded: steel output quadrupled, coal production doubled, and industrial output grew by around 18 percent a year, a pace few poor countries have matched. Urban workers gained steady jobs, housing and welfare through their work units, and China built industries it had never had. The costs were carried elsewhere. Peasants sold grain at prices set by the state, lost their land to co-operatives within a few years of receiving it, and were tied to their villages by household registration, so the countryside paid for the cities. Agricultural output grew only a little faster than population, which left no margin for error. Historians such as Naughton credit the Plan with real achievements while stressing these imbalances, and Meisner argues that it also created the bureaucratic elite Mao later turned against. A fair verdict is that the Plan was a success for the state and for city workers, and a sacrifice imposed on the peasant majority. It also shows how growth figures can conceal who pays for development.

READ CHAPTER 4 — China’s First Five-Year Plan →

The evidence points to a gamble that Mao later disguised as a trap. Supporting a genuine opening are his speech of February 1957, which argued for settling disagreements by discussion, the international crisis of 1956 that made reform seem urgent, and the fact that the rectification campaign began with real criticism of officials. Supporting the trap thesis are Mao’s own later claims of an “open plot” and his internal article of 15 May, which shows him watching the critics and preparing a response before the counter-attack. MacFarquhar reads that article as a change of course, while Chang and Halliday read it as the plan unfolding; Teiwes stresses that other leaders were divided too. The documents cannot reveal Mao’s private intentions in March 1957, so any answer carries uncertainty. What can be said is that the outcome made the question almost irrelevant for those punished, and that a regime which can turn an invitation into evidence teaches its citizens never to answer the next invitation honestly.

READ CHAPTER 5 — Hundred Flowers Campaign →

The case for Mao’s personal responsibility is strong. He devised the Leap’s central ideas, attacked colleagues who urged caution in January 1958, promoted the communes and the steel target, and at Lushan he chose to purge Peng Dehuai and revive the campaign when a correction was under way. Teiwes and Sun conclude that no other leader could have started or stopped it. Yet the Leap also depended on thousands of others. Provincial leaders such as Wu Zhipu in Henan and Li Jingquan in Sichuan competed to exceed targets, county officials invented harvests, and colleagues in Beijing who doubted the figures stayed silent. Some historians, including Andrew Walder, therefore stress the system: a party-state that rewarded zeal and punished honesty would have produced inflated claims under any leader in a campaign. The most convincing judgement is that Mao bore primary responsibility for the decisions, while the political system he built explains why those decisions could not be challenged. Responsibility in authoritarian systems is rarely the leader’s alone, and rarely anyone else’s first.

READ CHAPTER 6 — Great Leap Forward →

The famine was certainly the result of choices: to set quotas on inflated harvests, to abolish private food, to purge Peng Dehuai and revive the Leap after Lushan, to protect the cities and keep exporting grain, and to refuse foreign aid. Each was taken by people with power, and the provincial variation shown on the map strongly suggests that choices by local leaders mattered far more than the weather. Whether these choices amount to deliberate killing is where historians divide. Dikötter argues that Mao knew of mass deaths and continued, which makes the famine a mass killing; Wemheuer, Ó Gráda and others see leaders who accepted rural deaths as the price of their priorities without seeking them, a famine of ideology and wilful blindness. The evidence of Mao’s private knowledge in 1959–60 is incomplete and disputed, so certainty is impossible. The strongest answer separates the two questions: the deaths were caused by deliberate policies, while the intention to kill is not proven. The general lesson concerns systems that punish bad news, since such systems can kill on a vast scale without any leader needing to want it.

READ CHAPTER 7 — Great Chinese Famine →

The recovery worked, and that was the problem. Private plots, markets, smaller accounting units and household contracting restored food production by 1965, but each measure looked to Mao like a step back towards capitalism, and each success strengthened Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who had managed it. Mao still held the Party chairmanship, the loyalty of the army through Lin Biao, and the power to define what counted as socialist. Historians weigh his motives differently. MacFarquhar and others stress power and fear: Mao believed his colleagues would denounce him after his death as Khrushchev had denounced Stalin. Meisner and Walder give more weight to conviction, since Mao genuinely believed that bureaucrats and incentives were creating a new privileged class. The two readings fit together, because Mao saw his own authority and the revolution as one thing. The recovery therefore became the evidence for the prosecution in 1966. The lesson for students of authoritarian rule is that a leader who keeps control of the army and the ideology can reverse a successful reform led by others.

READ CHAPTER 8 — Recovery after the Great Leap →

It was launched from above and became, for a time, a rebellion from below, before ending in repression from above again. Mao chose the targets, licensed the Red Guards, called for power seizures and decided when to end the movement, so the initiative was his throughout. Yet millions joined for their own reasons: students angry at privilege, workers with insecure contracts, families stigmatised by class labels, and officials settling scores, and the research of Perry and Li Xun and of Yiching Wu shows rebels pursuing real grievances. Walder’s work adds a crucial point about the violence, since most deaths were caused by the authorities, militias and army-backed committees in 1968–71, while the rebels’ battles killed fewer. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals emphasise the leader; social historians emphasise the society that responded. A balanced judgement is that Mao opened the door and decided when to close it, while what happened in between depended on millions of local choices. The case shows how authoritarian leaders can mobilise popular anger and how quickly the state reclaims it.

READ CHAPTER 9 — Cultural Revolution →

Judged by its political aim, the movement succeeded quickly: the Red Guards were dispersed, the factional fighting in the cities ended, and urban unemployment fell, because millions of young people were moved out of the cities within two years. Judged by Mao’s ideological aim, it largely failed. The young were supposed to learn revolutionary values from peasants and to narrow the gap between town and country, yet many peasants resented them, and most of the youth longed to return home. Bonnin’s research shows that the urban-rural divide was reinforced, since the young people’s greatest wish was to recover the urban residence permits that the state had taken away. Some former sent-down youth remember the experience as formative, a source of resilience and of knowledge about rural poverty, and memory varies with where people were sent and what happened to them. The movement ended in strikes and protests in 1978–79. Its history shows that coercive social engineering can meet short-term political goals while producing the opposite of the society it promised.

READ CHAPTER 10 — Down to the Countryside Movement →

Security explains most of the decision. By 1969 the Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia under a doctrine that threatened China, massed dozens of divisions on the border, fought at Zhenbao and Tielieketi, and sounded out Washington about a nuclear strike; an opening to the United States was the obvious counterweight. Mao’s four marshals advised exactly that. Opportunity mattered too, because Nixon needed help leaving Vietnam and wanted leverage over Moscow, so both sides gained from the meeting. Domestic politics played a part as well: after Lin Biao’s death in 1971 Mao relied more on Zhou Enlai, who favoured the opening, and the visit restored the prestige the Cultural Revolution had damaged. Ideology did not disappear, since Mao described the opening as exploiting contradictions among enemies, as he had during the Second World War. Lüthi and Radchenko both stress how Mao fitted realpolitik into revolutionary language. The lesson for authoritarian regimes is that survival usually outranks ideology when the two collide, and ideology is then reinterpreted to fit.

READ CHAPTER 11 — Sino-Soviet split and Nixon in China →

The case for judging by achievement rests on real evidence: a unified country after a century of division, heavy industry and nuclear weapons, life expectancy that rose by roughly twenty-five years, widespread literacy, and a state strong enough to support the growth that followed after 1978. The case for judging by cost is overwhelming in scale, since the campaigns and the famine killed somewhere between about 17 million and 50 million people, most of them in a famine caused by policy, and persecuted tens of millions more. Historians such as Dikötter and Chang and Halliday put the cost first; Meisner and Short weigh the achievements more heavily; Walder’s analysis of the party-state, and Drèze and Sen’s comparison with India, both point to the same system as the source of the gains and the deaths. That last point changes the question, because the achievements and the deaths were two products of one system, which means that neither can be offered as the price of the other. Many later achievements, from rural health to industry, were also attained elsewhere without famine. The most defensible judgement is that the regime’s capacity was real and its lack of accountability made that capacity lethal, and the general lesson for students of authoritarian rule is that power without correction magnifies both success and error.

READ CHAPTER 12 — Death and legacy of Mao Zedong →