ON THIS DAY ·
Founding of the People’s Republic of China
Mao proclaims the People’s Republic of China from the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The south-west is still in Nationalist hands, and the new state has more soldiers than Party members to govern with.
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The moment in context
The new state began as an army that had to become a government, and the map of October 1949 shows how much of the country was still unconquered. The People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, was the ruling Communist Party’s army, much like a party militia grown to national size, and it was about five million strong. The arrows show Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping’s forces driving into Guizhou and Sichuan, where Chongqing fell on 30 November and Chengdu on 27 December, and Lin Biao’s forces sweeping into Guangxi and across the strait to Hainan in April 1950. The Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan with about two million people, and after an assault on Kinmen island failed in October 1949, the chance of finishing the war across the strait slipped away. Until 1954 China was run as six great regions under military-administrative committees, boards of generals and Party officials, so the first rulers of the People’s Republic were its soldiers.
From Mao’s consolidation and land reform, chapter 1 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 (1949).
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — An army that had already won. The Party came to power through the People’s Liberation Army, which had grown to about five million soldiers by 1949 and had destroyed the…
- The turn — Tiananmen, 1 October 1949. The proclamation was the hinge because it turned an insurgent party into a state with the authority to decide who belonged to “the people”. Before…
- What it changed — War arrives before the state is built. The new state had to fight a great power before it had finished building itself. Eight months after the proclamation the Korean War began, and in…
Then ask the room: Did land reform secure the countryside for the Party chiefly through the land it gave or through the violence it organised? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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