Mao’s China quiz: 8 questions

The Party promised a long transition in which private firms and rich peasants would be tolerated while the state was rebuilt. Within three years the Five-Anti campaign had broken the businessmen the Common Program had courted.

Its twin, the Three-Anti campaign, targeted officials. Together they turned the businessmen whom the 1949 coalition had courted into suspects, and left private firms dependent on the state within a year.

Kham lay inside Sichuan, a Chinese province, where the Han campaigns applied in full. The American CIA did train Khampa fighters, but only from 1957, after the revolt had begun.

The monopoly fed the cities and paid for industry by buying cheaply from the countryside. It also made collectives attractive to planners, because a few hundred thousand co-operatives were easier to tax than more than a hundred million households.

The new target sent some 90 million people to backyard furnaces in the harvest season. Much of the iron they made was useless, and crops were left standing in the fields.

Liu repeated a saying he had heard from Hunan peasants. It was the frankest verdict any leader gave, and Mao did not forget it: Liu was purged in the Cultural Revolution and died in custody in 1969.

In practice the army dominated. The committees ended the factional fighting by force and used their new power to purge the defeated factions, which is why order returned at a high price.

The formula let the Party condemn the Cultural Revolution while keeping Mao as its founder; Deng Xiaoping often repeated Mao’s own formula of seven parts achievement, three parts error. Most historians outside China weigh the famine far more heavily.