THE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 — the study guide
The complete revision document of the atlas: every chapter’s narrative, causes, turning point, consequences, discussion question with a full answer, and one verified interesting fact. Print it, annotate it, argue with it.
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CHAPTER 1 · 1949–1950 · 1949
Consolidating Victory
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.
Politically, the Party, which intended to rule alone, governed at first through a coalition that it designed to be temporary. The Common Program of September 1949 served as a stand-in constitution, much like the interim charters new regimes adopt before writing a permanent one. It protected private property and gave posts to the “democratic parties”, small non-Communist parties allowed to survive as junior partners, and three of the six vice-chairmen came from outside the Party. Mao had already set the limit: the people would enjoy democracy, while landlords, “bureaucrat capitalists” tied to the old regime and Nationalist “reactionaries” would face dictatorship, and the Party alone would decide who counted as the people. The coalition also carried real reform. The Marriage Law of May 1950 banned arranged marriages, concubinage and child betrothal and let women sue for divorce, and divorce cases soon ran into the hundreds of thousands a year. In the Central-South region alone, more than 10,000 women were reported killed or driven to suicide in marriage disputes in 1951. Liberation and coercion arrived in the same years, and often in the same village.
In the countryside, land reform, the handing of landlords’ fields to the peasants who farmed them, laid the regime’s foundations by making peasants take part in it. A work team of cadres, full-time Party officials sent from outside, would live with the poorest families and classify every household as landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant, poor peasant or hired labourer, labels written into the records and passed on to children. Then came the struggle meeting, a public denunciation that worked like a trial without lawyers, in which accusers were coached and the crowd acted as jury, and the landlord’s land, tools, houses and grain were shared out. The marker at Long Bow, a Shanxi village where the American William Hinton watched it in 1948, and the memorial in Hunan stand for its two faces: real relief for families who had never owned land, and the deaths of perhaps one to two million people judged to be enemies. Afterwards nobody in a village could stay neutral, and that shared involvement is what made the new state so hard to resist.
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 Nationalist field armies in the great battles of 1948–49. Military victory gave the new state something no Chinese government had possessed since 1911, a single army obeying a single command across almost the whole country. The discipline that had won the war, with a political commissar in every unit, became the template for governing, and generals ran the six great regions into which China was divided until 1954.
A country exhausted by war and inflation. After eight years of war with Japan and three more of civil war, many Chinese cared above all about order, whatever ideology came with it. Prices under the last Nationalist governments had risen so fast that the gold yuan, introduced in August 1948, was worthless within a year. The new government, guided on economics by Chen Yun, brought inflation under control by early 1950 by gathering grain and cloth into state hands and balancing the budget. Stable prices won the regime acceptance in cities that had never supported it.
Land hunger and the landlord’s power. Close to 480 million Chinese lived in the countryside, and in much of the south a minority of landlords owned a large share of the best land, which they rented out for half the harvest or more. Landlords were often also the local moneylenders, tax collectors and militia leaders, so land meant power as well as income. The Communists had learned in their base areas since the 1920s that promising land won recruits, and turning that promise into national law gave poor peasants in every province a reason to back the Party.
The Cold War chose sides early. The United States went on recognising the Nationalist government, and Mao judged that a revolution facing American hostility needed a great-power protector, which led to the Moscow treaty of February 1950. When the Korean War began that June, President Truman sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait and froze the civil war in place. From its first year the new state faced an enemy across the sea, a fact that justified vigilance, secrecy and campaigns against hidden enemies at home.
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 October 1949 the Communists governed base areas that they might lose; afterwards they controlled ministries, courts, schools and the national budget, and the Common Program gave their power the form of law. The choice of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, from which emperors had issued their edicts, told the country that a new kind of dynasty had begun. Everything that follows in this atlas, from land reform to the Cultural Revolution, was done in the name of the state proclaimed that afternoon.
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 October 1950 China sent its army across the Yalu, the river border with Korea. War with the United States gave the new government a reason to hunt enemies at home and the public mood in which to do it, so the campaigns of 1950–53 were far harsher than the coalition of 1949 had promised. The war also made loyalty measurable, since every citizen could be asked to denounce, donate or enlist.
Class labels that lasted a generation. The labels fixed during land reform were recorded in household files and inherited by children. A family marked “landlord” in 1951 faced suspicion in school, work and marriage for decades, and in the Cultural Revolution such families were the first victims of village killings. The new state had created a hereditary underclass in the name of abolishing class, and the files that recorded it outlived Mao himself.
The land given was soon taken back. Peasants held their new fields as private owners for only a few years. From 1953 the state bought grain at prices it set, and by the end of 1956 almost every household had been folded into collectives, so the land that had won peasant support passed to the co-operative and, in 1958, to the commune. Ownership had been the reward for supporting the revolution, and it turned out to be a loan.
Two Chinas. The failure at Kinmen and the arrival of the American fleet left the Nationalist Republic of China alive on Taiwan, holding China’s seat at the United Nations. The question of which government spoke for China shaped Beijing’s diplomacy until 1971, when it won the seat, and the strait remains divided today. A failed landing on a small island in 1949 still shapes the politics of East Asia.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Did land reform secure the countryside for the Party chiefly through the land it gave or through the violence it organised?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Mao’s most quoted sentence of 1949, “The Chinese people have stood up”, belongs to a different day. He spoke it on 21 September, in his opening speech to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and popular memory later moved it to the Tiananmen rostrum. The flag raised on 1 October was chosen from nearly 3,000 entries sent in by the public. Its designer, Zeng Liansong, an economics graduate working in Shanghai, had placed a hammer and sickle inside the large star; the committee removed them, leaving the five yellow stars on red that fly today.
CHAPTER 2 · 1950–1953 · 1953
Korea and the Campaigns
China entered the Korean War because Mao judged that the risks of staying out were greater than the risks of fighting. The arrows show how close the danger came: after the landing at Incheon in September 1950, United Nations forces crossed the 38th parallel, the line dividing the two Koreas, and pushed north towards the Yalu, the river border with Manchuria, China’s industrial north-east. Zhou Enlai, the premier and foreign minister, warned through the Indian ambassador that China would act, and Washington dismissed the warning as bluff. The general Lin Biao declined to command, so Mao gave the task to Peng Dehuai, a veteran of the civil war. The Chinese People’s Volunteers, as the army was called in Korea, crossed at Andong by night on 19 October, and by late November they had trapped American columns at the Chosin Reservoir and along the Chongchon River. In January 1951 they retook Seoul, which marked the high point of an intervention that had surprised the world’s strongest army.
The war then became a test of endurance that China could survive and could not win. Chinese armies, short of artillery, trucks and air cover, attacked in waves and lost heavily to American firepower; Mao’s own son Mao Anying was killed in an air raid on Peng’s headquarters in November 1950. From mid-1951 the front settled near the 38th parallel, and two more years of talks stalled above all on prisoners, because about 14,000 of the 21,000 Chinese captives refused to go home and chose Taiwan instead. The armistice signed at Panmunjom, a village on the front line, on 27 July 1953 left Korea divided along the line shown on the map. Beijing’s official count of its dead rose from 183,108 in 2010 to 197,653 in 2020, while other estimates run to about 400,000. Because China had fought the United States to a standstill, the new state drew enormous prestige from a war it had not won.
At home the war turned suspicion into policy through the campaign, the method by which the Communist Party, now the sole ruler of China, mobilised the nation against a named enemy, much like a wartime emergency drive in which ordinary rules are suspended. A Party order of 10 October 1950, the “Double Tenth” directive, launched a hunt for “counter-revolutionaries”, a label covering former Nationalist officials, leaders of secret societies such as Shanghai’s Green Gang, bandits and anyone accused of sabotage, and Mao suggested that executions should run at about one per thousand people. Cities held public trials in stadiums, broadcast on radio, and a 1954 report counted 712,000 executed, 1.29 million imprisoned and 1.2 million placed under police watch. The Three-Anti campaign then purged officials for corruption, and the Five-Anti campaign, named for five “poisons” such as bribery and tax evasion, fined and humiliated businessmen until private firms depended on the state; in Shanghai hundreds of owners took their own lives. Each campaign used the same tools of quotas, mass meetings and forced confession, and the Party learned that a method which worked in wartime could be used in peacetime too.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Kim Il-sung’s war and Stalin’s consent. The Korean War began with North Korea’s invasion of the South on 25 June 1950, which Stalin approved in April and Mao accepted when Kim Il-sung visited Beijing in May. Mao expected a quick northern victory and planned to invade Taiwan the same year. Instead, the war brought the American Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait and an American army to the Korean peninsula, which turned a civil war between Koreans into a direct threat on China’s doorstep.
MacArthur crossed the parallel. The UN landing at Incheon on 15 September 1950 broke the North Korean army, and the decision to pursue it across the 38th parallel in early October put American troops on the road to the Yalu. Zhou Enlai’s warning through the Indian ambassador, K. M. Panikkar, was dismissed in Washington as bluff. General MacArthur assured President Truman that China would not intervene, or would be crushed if it did, and that miscalculation decided the course of the next three years.
Mao wanted the confrontation. Archival research shows that Mao had his own reasons to fight, beyond defending the border. He believed revolutionary China had to stand up to American power to win respect abroad and loyalty at home, he owed North Korea a debt for Korean soldiers who had fought in the Chinese civil war, and he feared that a hostile Korea would threaten the industrial north-east. When much of the Politburo hesitated in early October, Mao overruled them, and his personal authority carried the decision.
A state that felt surrounded by enemies. The new government still faced armed opposition in 1950: Nationalist units and bandit gangs in the south-west, secret societies in the countryside, and agents sent from Taiwan. The Party claimed it had to suppress about a million “bandits” in its first years. Once China was at war with the United States, every one of these could be presented as part of a foreign plot, which made it easy to treat suspicion as evidence and to turn a security operation into a national campaign.
THE TURN
The Yalu, 19 October 1950. The crossing of the Yalu was the hinge because it turned the new state’s first year from consolidation into permanent emergency. Before October 1950 the Party was still courting businessmen, intellectuals and foreign governments; after it, China was at war with the United States, cut off from Western trade by an embargo, and bound to the Soviet Union for weapons and loans. The Double Tenth directive against counter-revolutionaries came nine days before the crossing, and the two decisions belong together, since a state fighting abroad could demand total loyalty at home. From then on, the campaign was the state’s normal instrument of government.
WHAT IT CHANGED
A general with the prestige to object. Korea made Peng Dehuai the most respected soldier in China, the man who had held off the Americans with a peasant army. That reputation gave him the standing to send Mao a frank letter about the Great Leap Forward in 1959, and it is part of why Mao treated the letter as so dangerous. The war produced the critic whom the Leap would destroy.
The campaign becomes the method of rule. The tools tested in 1950–53, namely quotas, mass meetings, forced confessions and later “corrections” of excess, were used again against intellectuals in 1957, peasants in 1958 and the Party itself in 1966. Officials learned that overfulfilling a campaign target was safe and that caution could be labelled sympathy with the enemy. Each new campaign therefore ran hotter than the centre had planned, and each ended by blaming the officials who had obeyed.
Locked into the Soviet camp. The war left China under an American-led trade embargo from 1951 and dependent on Soviet weapons, which it had to pay for, and on Soviet loans and advisers. The First Five-Year Plan, launched in 1953, was therefore built on the Soviet model with Soviet equipment, so the decision to fight in Korea also shaped how China would industrialise. The war turned a political preference for the Soviet model, declared in 1949, into a dependence China could not escape.
Taiwan behind an American shield. The fleet that Truman sent into the strait in June 1950 never left, and in 1954 Washington signed a defence treaty with the Nationalists. Korea therefore cost Mao the chance to finish the civil war, and the question of Taiwan stayed at the centre of Chinese foreign policy until the Nixon visit of 1972 and beyond. Beijing shelled the offshore islands in 1954 and 1958 to test that American commitment.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Did the Korean War strengthen or weaken Mao’s new state?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The war was paid for partly by a national donation drive in which factories, villages and schools raised money to “buy” aircraft and guns for the front. Its most famous donor was Chang Xiangyu, a star of Henan opera, who toured China for six months in 1951 performing a play about the woman warrior Hua Mulan and gave the proceeds for a MiG-15 fighter. The aircraft, with her troupe’s name painted on its nose, now stands in the China Aviation Museum north of Beijing. Donation drives of this kind, repeated in later campaigns, made patriotism something citizens performed in public and could be measured by what they gave.
CHAPTER 3 · 1950–1959 · 1956
Tibet and the Frontiers
The new state inherited a contradiction from the Qing, the Manchu empire that had ruled Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs and others beside the Han Chinese until 1912: it claimed an empire’s borders while calling itself the homeland of one nation. The Republic of China that replaced the Qing had lost control of Outer Mongolia, Tibet and much of Xinjiang, and the Communists meant to restore those borders. Xinjiang showed the easy way, because its Nationalist garrison, cut off after Chiang’s government fled, had nothing left to fight for and surrendered in September 1949. In 1954 demobilised soldiers became the Production and Construction Corps, a farming army that ran its own towns, much like the military settler colonies of earlier empires. It settled Han Chinese, over nine in ten of all Chinese, in a region where they had been about 6 percent of the people and where the Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, were the largest group. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region followed in 1955, and since each region’s Communist Party secretary outranked its government, much as a company’s owner outranks its local managers, autonomy put Uyghur faces in office and left power in Han hands.
Tibet was the hard case, because Lhasa had governed itself for nearly four decades and could be recovered only by force and a bargain. The 13th Dalai Lama, Tibet’s religious leader and head of state, a little like a pope who also reigned as king, had expelled the Qing garrison in 1913, and Tibet then ran its own army, currency and foreign relations, though no great power recognised its independence. Without a modern army or an ally, it could not resist in 1950. The arrows show the People’s Liberation Army, the Communist Party’s own army, closing on Chamdo in October 1950, where about 8,000 Tibetan troops were trapped and their governor surrendered. Under the Seventeen-Point Agreement of May 1951, Tibet agreed to “return to the big family of the motherland” and admitted the army, which entered Lhasa that October, while Beijing promised not to alter the political system or the Dalai Lama’s powers. Roads finished in 1954 made that army permanent, which turned a promise into a garrison.
The bargain broke from the east, because Kham and Amdo, the Tibetan lands outside the tan region, were governed as ordinary parts of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan. From 1955 their “democratic reforms” brought land redistribution, the disarming of households, attacks on monastery property and collectivisation, the merging of family farms and herds into units worked in common, much like a compulsory co-operative. Kham rose in early 1956; the army bombed Lithang’s besieged monastery, and revolt and repression spread through Amdo in 1958. Refugees poured into Lhasa, and the Chushi Gangdruk resistance formed in 1958 with covert American training. When rumours spread in March 1959 that the Dalai Lama would be detained, crowds surrounded his summer palace; he fled on the night of 17 March, and the army shelled the city three days later. The state had treated Tibetans differently on either side of a provincial line, and that inconsistency is what destroyed its own bargain.
WHY IT HAPPENED
The Qing borders as a national claim. Both the Nationalists and the Communists treated the borders of the Qing empire at its height as the rightful borders of China, so Tibet’s self-government after 1913 looked to them like a theft committed during China’s weakness. The new state wanted to show that the century of humiliation was over, and restoring the frontier was the most visible proof. The claim also had a strategic edge, because Tibet bordered India and its plateau commanded the approaches to south-west China.
A Tibet that could not defend itself. Lhasa had a small army of about 8,000 to 10,000 men, few modern weapons and no allies willing to fight for it. Britain, its old patron, had left India in 1947, and the new Indian government under Nehru wanted good relations with Beijing. The Tibetan elite had also resisted the military reforms of the 1920s, fearing that a strong army would weaken the monasteries, so in 1950 there was nothing to stop the PLA at Chamdo.
Campaigns built for Han villages. The campaigns that the Party applied across China, from land reform to collectivisation, assumed a society of landlords and tenants that could be reorganised by work teams. In Kham and Amdo they collided with pastoral nomads, powerful monasteries and a people who carried arms. When officials tried to confiscate guns and monastery land in 1955–56, they provoked a revolt that the same methods could not contain. Officials trained to find landlords in Han villages treated lamas and chieftains as class enemies, which turned a reform into an attack on a whole way of life.
Settler colonies and new roads. Beijing secured its frontiers by changing their population and geography. In Xinjiang the Production and Construction Corps, created in 1954 from demobilised soldiers, settled hundreds of thousands of Han migrants over the following decades. In Tibet the highways from Qinghai and Sichuan, opened in December 1954, and a road across Aksai Chin, finished in 1957, allowed troops and supplies to arrive by truck. Each road made the next intervention easier.
THE TURN
Lithang, February–March 1956. The siege and bombing of Lithang’s monastery marks the hinge because it showed that the 1951 bargain could not survive the Party’s campaigns next door. Until 1956 Beijing could present its Tibet policy as patient and voluntary; after Lithang, refugees from Kham carried news of bombed monasteries and armed resistance into Lhasa, and the most determined fighters organised themselves into an army. Mao’s postponement of reform inside Tibet came too late, because the revolt had already crossed the provincial line. The road from Lithang ran straight to the Lhasa rising of March 1959 and the Dalai Lama’s exile.
WHAT IT CHANGED
Tibet transformed after 1959. The rising gave Beijing the reason to end the bargain of 1951. With the old government dissolved, it carried out land reform in Tibet in 1959–61, closed most monasteries, and created the Tibet Autonomous Region in 1965. In 1962 the Panchen Lama, the senior lama who had stayed, sent Zhou Enlai a long petition describing hunger and the destruction of religion in Tibetan areas, and he spent most of the next fifteen years in prison or under detention. The Tibet of the 1951 bargain had ceased to exist within six years.
War with India. The Dalai Lama’s asylum in India, and India’s discovery in 1958 that China had built a road across Aksai Chin, a plateau India claimed, turned the friendship of the early 1950s into a border dispute. Both sides pushed patrols forward, and in October 1962 the PLA attacked, routing Indian forces in the north-east and in Ladakh before withdrawing. The friendship slogan of the 1950s, “Indians and Chinese are brothers”, did not survive the decade.
A government in exile. The Dalai Lama settled at Dharamsala in northern India, where he set up a government-in-exile and later a parliament, schools and monasteries for some 80,000 refugees. Tibet thus acquired an international voice it had lacked in 1950, and the question of Tibet has followed every Chinese government abroad since 1959. Exile turned a regional rising into a lasting international cause.
Xinjiang’s changing population. The Corps and later migration raised the Han share of Xinjiang’s people from about 6 percent in 1953 to roughly two-fifths by the late 1970s. In 1962, in the hungry aftermath of the famine, tens of thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs fled across the border into the Soviet Union, a sign of how fragile the frontier settlement still was. Beijing sealed the border, and Xinjiang became one of the front lines of the Sino-Soviet split.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Was the People’s Republic of the 1950s a nation-state or an empire on its frontiers?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The Dalai Lama who fled in 1959 had been enthroned as a small child, after a search party of monks found him in 1937 in a farming village in Amdo, one of the eastern Tibetan regions that later rose in revolt. He was born in 1935 in Taktser, in today’s Qinghai province, and in 1950, at the age of fifteen, he took full power nearly three years before the customary age of eighteen because of the Chinese invasion. He has lived in India for more than six decades, far longer than he ruled in Lhasa. In 1954–55 he spent months in Beijing, met Mao several times and was made a vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress, which shows how hard both sides tried to make the bargain work.
CHAPTER 4 · 1953–1957 · 1956
The Soviet Model
The Soviet Union was the only model China’s leaders trusted, and after the Korean War it was the only one available. Its model was central planning, in which ministries set every factory’s output much as a head office sets targets for each branch of a company, and China copied it in the First Five-Year Plan of 1953–57. An American-led embargo, a ban on trade with China, had closed off Western technology, while Moscow offered designs, machines and about 10,000 specialists over the decade. The north-east received the showpieces because it had the Japanese-built industrial base and lay nearest the Soviet railway, which the arrows follow to Harbin and Anshan. Anshan’s steelworks was rebuilt, and in Changchun the First Automobile Works produced China’s first truck in 1956. The Plan also placed new plants inland, at Wuhan, Baotou, Lanzhou and Xi’an, away from the vulnerable coast. Because the model fitted the alliance, China adopted it with little debate.
Politically, the Plan years turned the revolutionary army into a bureaucratic state run by the Communist Party, which ruled alone and placed its members in charge of every office, much like a company whose owner appoints every manager. The six great regions run by generals were abolished in 1954, and the leader of the north-east, Gao Gang, was purged after he tried to displace Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai; he killed himself that year. In September 1954 the first National People’s Congress, a parliament that met rarely and approved what the Party had decided, adopted a constitution that listed freedoms of speech and religion while placing the country under the Party’s leadership. In the cities, workers were organised into work units, employers that also supplied housing, health care, pensions and political supervision, much like a company town, so a job became a lifetime dependence called the “iron rice bowl”. Private firms became “joint state-private” companies in January 1956 with almost no resistance. The new institutions brought urban workers security and gave the Party control of nearly every adult’s livelihood.
In the countryside, collectivisation, the merging of family farms into units owned and worked in common, decided who would own China’s harvest. Since 1953 the state had been the only legal buyer of grain, but planners found 110 million separate households hard to tax and harder to plan, so co-operatives, farms owned and worked by their members much like a farmers’ co-operative today, looked like the solution. Mao’s speech of 31 July 1955 mocked cautious colleagues as “a woman with bound feet” and set off a rush in which officials competed to report the highest share of households enrolled. Reluctant peasants slaughtered animals before they could be pooled, and some later tried to leave, but by the end of 1956 almost all had joined. Unlike Stalin’s collectivisation of 1929–33, which caused famine in the Soviet Union, China’s caused none, partly because land reform had already destroyed the rich peasants who might have resisted. The speed of the success persuaded Mao that will and organisation could overcome any economic limit, a lesson that led straight to his crash industrial drive of 1958, the Great Leap Forward.
WHY IT HAPPENED
The war closed every other door. The Korean War left China under an American trade embargo and dependent on Soviet weapons, loans and advice. With Western technology out of reach, the Soviet Union was the only source of the blueprints, machine tools and engineers that industrialisation required, and Moscow agreed to help build 156 major projects. The alliance therefore decided the shape of China’s economy as well as its foreign policy, because a factory built to a Soviet design also needed Soviet parts, training and planning methods.
A Marxist faith in heavy industry. The Party believed that a socialist country needed steel, coal, electricity and machines before anything else, both to create a working class and to defend itself. The Soviet example seemed to prove that a backward country could industrialise in a generation through central planning, so heavy industry received the great majority of industrial investment, and consumer goods and agriculture were left to wait. The choice meant that ordinary living standards would rise slowly, which the leaders accepted as the price of national strength.
Grain was the bottleneck. Industrialisation meant more city workers to feed and more food to export in payment for Soviet machines. When private grain markets failed to deliver enough in 1953, the state imposed its monopoly on buying and selling grain, which let it set low prices and quotas. Collectives then made the monopoly easier to enforce, because the state could deal with a few hundred thousand co-operatives instead of over a hundred million households.
Mao’s impatience with gradualism. Mao grew frustrated with planners and rural officials who wanted to move slowly after 1953, when he replaced New Democracy with a “general line” for the transition to socialism. His July 1955 speech attacked caution as a political error, and officials, who had learned in the campaigns that overfulfilment was safe, competed to enrol villages. The pace of change was set by the leader’s will and by the incentives of the system he had built.
THE TURN
The “high tide”, July 1955. Mao’s speech of 31 July 1955 is the hinge of the Plan years because it took the pace of change away from the planners and gave it to the campaign. Before it, collectivisation was meant to take fifteen years; within eighteen months almost every household was enrolled. The speed showed that the Party could reorganise half a billion people by command, and Mao read the success as proof that political will could overcome economic limits. He used Wang Guofan’s “paupers’ co-operative” as his image of the nation: poor, determined and eager to leap ahead. That belief carried directly into the Great Leap Forward.
WHAT IT CHANGED
The Leap forward from the Plan. The Plan succeeded in industry and left agriculture lagging, and Mao concluded that the Soviet model was too slow and too bureaucratic for China. His answer, from 1958, was to mobilise labour instead of capital and to combine farming and industry in giant communes. The co-operatives of 1956 became the building blocks of the communes two years later, and the officials who had raced to collectivise raced again.
The state could now take the harvest. The grain monopoly and the collectives gave the state the power to decide how much food each village kept. In normal years this fed the cities and paid for imports. In 1959–60, when officials took grain on the basis of inflated harvest reports, the same machinery stripped villages bare and turned a policy failure into famine. The tools built to feed industry became the tools that starved the producers.
Two classes of citizen. The work-unit system and the 1958 household registration rules divided China into city people, with rations, pensions and health care, and rural people, who had to feed themselves from collective fields and could not move to the cities. The divide between urban and rural China created in these years outlasted Mao by decades, and it decided who lived and who died when food ran short in 1960.
Soviet ties that became a burden. China’s factories, schools and planning offices were built on Soviet designs and staffed with Soviet advisers. When the alliance broke down in 1960 and the experts left, unfinished plants and missing blueprints showed how deep the dependence had been, and the split forced China to improvise its own path. Self-reliance, later praised as a virtue, began as a necessity, and the Lanzhou uranium plant finished by Chinese engineers in 1964 became its proudest example.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Was the First Five-Year Plan a success, and for whom?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The alliance with Moscow reached into every classroom. In the early 1950s Russian replaced English as the main foreign language in Chinese schools and universities, and Soviet textbooks were translated by the thousand, from engineering manuals to novels. Beijing’s Friendship Hotel, a vast complex built in 1954 in a palace style with green-tiled roofs, was put up to house Soviet experts and their families near the new university district. When Khrushchev recalled the experts in 1960 its rooms emptied within weeks. It still operates as a hotel today, and its name is one of the few public reminders of the alliance.
CHAPTER 5 · 1956–1957 · 1957
A Hundred Flowers
The Hundred Flowers grew out of a crisis in world communism and Mao’s confidence that China was different. Khrushchev’s secret speech of February 1956 had shown that a Communist leader could be judged and condemned by his own party, and the risings in Poland and Hungary that autumn showed what could happen when grievances were suppressed for too long. Mao’s speech of 27 February 1957, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People”, drew a line between disagreements among the people, which should be settled by discussion, and conflicts with enemies, which called for force. In April the Communist Party, which ruled alone at every level of government, launched a rectification campaign, a drive to correct its own faults much like an organisation inviting complaints about its managers. It asked outsiders to criticise its “bureaucratism, sectarianism and subjectivism”. Mao seems to have expected mild complaints from grateful intellectuals, and his confidence that the Party had won their loyalty was the premise of the whole experiment.
The criticism that came in May and early June 1957 went to the foundations, because people with seven years of grievances took the invitation literally. Chu Anping, editor of the Guangming Daily, a newspaper for intellectuals, accused the Party of treating the country as its private property, the “Party’s empire”. Leaders of the democratic parties, the small non-Communist parties kept as junior partners since 1949, proposed real power-sharing and a commission to review the injustices of earlier campaigns. At Peking University students covered a wall with posters, and the student Lin Xiling told crowds that the faults lay in the system itself. In Shanghai, which carries the second marker, workers joined a wave of strikes over pay and conditions, and the city’s newspaper Wenhui Bao printed the critics at length. As early as 15 May, Mao had told senior officials in an internal article that “things are beginning to change”, and he waited while the critics revealed themselves. The invitation had become a register of names.
The counter-attack was swift and organised, and Deng Xiaoping, the Party’s general secretary, who ran its daily business, managed it. The People’s Daily editorial of 8 June asked “What is this for?”, and on 1 July an editorial written by Mao condemned the Wenhui Bao and described the whole episode as an “open plot” to lure enemies into the light. About 550,000 people were labelled “rightists”, enemies of socialism, a label that worked like a criminal record imposed without a trial. Among them were the sociologist Fei Xiaotong, the novelist Ding Ling and Chu Anping himself. A new punishment, “re-education through labour”, created in August 1957, sent people to camps without trial. At Hanyang, schoolchildren’s protests were treated as a “little Hungary” and three adults were executed, and at Jiabiangou in Gansu most of some 3,000 rightists died of hunger by 1961. China’s educated class learned the lesson that silence was the price of survival.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Khrushchev’s secret speech. On 25 February 1956 Khrushchev told the Soviet party congress that Stalin had been a criminal and a self-glorifying tyrant. The speech shook every Communist party, because it showed that a leader’s record could be condemned by his successors. Mao was uneasy about the attack on a personality cult that resembled his own, and he concluded that China needed its own way to air grievances before they built up. He also wanted to show that the Chinese party, unlike the Soviet one, could face criticism without collapsing.
Hungary and Poland as warnings. Two risings in Eastern Europe convinced Mao that repression alone bred explosions. In October 1956 workers in Poland forced a change of leadership, and in Hungary a rising against the Communist government was crushed by Soviet tanks, with some 2,500 Hungarians killed. Letting people criticise officials, he argued, would allow the Party to correct its faults and prevent a Chinese Hungary. The lesson he drew was the opposite of the one Moscow drew, because Soviet leaders concluded that any opening invited revolt.
Mao’s confidence after collectivisation. By the end of 1956 collectivisation was complete, private business had been absorbed, and the First Five-Year Plan was succeeding. Mao believed the Party had won the loyalty of the educated class and could afford to hear its complaints. That confidence, and his wish to use outside criticism to shake up a bureaucratic Party he distrusted, made the invitation seem safe. He misjudged how much the campaigns of the early 1950s had cost him in the trust of the people he was now inviting to speak.
Real grievances after seven years. There was a great deal to criticise by 1957. Intellectuals had been through thought reform and the purges of 1951–55, the democratic parties had titles without power, workers had lost benefits when firms were nationalised, and students resented assignments and admissions quotas. Once permission was given, these grievances poured out faster and more sharply than anyone in the leadership had expected. The speed of the outpouring was itself evidence of how much had been suppressed since 1949.
THE TURN
8 June and 1 July 1957. The People’s Daily editorials of 8 June and 1 July 1957 are the hinge because they turned an invitation into a hunt and defined criticism of the Party as enmity to the state. Before them, the Party had presented itself as willing to be corrected; after them, the critics’ own words became the evidence against them, and the phrase “open plot” told everyone that frankness had been a test. The editorial attacking Shanghai’s Wenhui Bao, written by Mao, made clear that the leader himself had decided. No later invitation to criticise would be trusted, and the silence that followed shaped every decision of 1958.
WHAT IT CHANGED
No one left to warn. The economists, engineers, statisticians and journalists who might have exposed the impossible targets of 1958 had been labelled, sent away or frightened into silence. When the Great Leap Forward began, the experts who remained in office competed to praise it, and doubts were kept private. The famine that followed was made possible in part by a silence that the Anti-Rightist Campaign had created a year earlier.
Re-education through labour. The punishment created in August 1957 allowed police to send people to camps for years without trial. It was used against rightists, petty offenders and later political suspects, and it lasted until 2013, one of the longest-lived institutions of the Mao era. Even in its final years it held well over a hundred thousand people, and it gave the police a way to punish without courts that every later campaign used.
From rightists to “right opportunists”. The language of 1957 was turned against the Party itself two years later. At Lushan in 1959 Mao called the defence minister’s criticism of the Leap “right opportunism”, and a campaign against it purged officials across the country, so the Anti-Rightist method moved from intellectuals to the Party’s own ranks. Officials who had watched the critics of 1957 punished now learned that even senior comrades could be labelled for honest doubts.
A generation of intellectuals broken. Rightists spent up to twenty years in camps, villages or menial jobs, and their children carried the label too. When the Cultural Revolution came, many of the 1957 victims were attacked again, and the rehabilitations of 1978–80 came too late for those who had died. Those who survived became a generation of cautious professionals who remembered that candour had been punished.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Was the Hundred Flowers campaign a genuine opening that failed, or a deliberate trap?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The best-known social scientist labelled a rightist, Fei Xiaotong, had trained in London under the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, and his study of a Yangtze delta village, Peasant Life in China (1939), is still read as a classic of fieldwork. After 1957 he was barred from research for more than twenty years and spent part of the Cultural Revolution doing manual labour. Rehabilitated in 1980, he returned to the study of small towns and rural industry, and from 1988 to 1998 he served as a vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress, the state he had once been accused of trying to overthrow.
CHAPTER 6 · 1958–1960 · 1958
The Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward, Mao’s drive of 1958–60 to industrialise China at breakneck speed through mass labour, grew from his impatience with the Soviet model and his confidence after collectivisation. The Soviet model was central planning, in which ministries set every factory’s output much as a head office sets targets for each branch of a company. Collectivisation had merged family farms in 1955–56 into co-operatives owned and worked by their members, much like a farmers’ co-operative made compulsory. In January 1958 Mao attacked the premier Zhou Enlai’s caution of 1956, which he called “opposition to rash advance”, so fiercely that Zhou offered to resign. In the winter of 1957–58 tens of millions of peasants were mobilised to dig irrigation works, and their success seemed to prove that labour could replace capital. Mao called China’s people “poor and blank”, and he saw that poverty as an advantage, because people with nothing to lose would leap.
The commune was the Leap’s central institution, because only units that large could pool the labour of tens of thousands for dams and furnaces. A commune ran farming, industry, schools and militia for a whole district, much like a county run as one company town. The first, formed in Suiping county, Henan, in April 1958, was named Sputnik after the Soviet satellite. In August Mao toured model counties in three provinces, the route the red arrow follows, praising communes and asking at Xushui what peasants would do with so much grain. At the Beidaihe meeting that month the Politburo, the inner cabinet of the Communist Party that ran every level of government, endorsed communes and a steel target of 10.7 million tonnes, double 1957’s output. By December nearly every rural household belonged to a commune. Communal mess halls served free meals, and women, freed from cooking, were sent to the fields and furnaces. Private plots, family pigs and village markets disappeared, and so did the household’s control over its own food.
The incentives of the campaign, a national drive with targets and punishments, produced lies at every level, and the lies decided who would eat. Officials who reported modest harvests were accused of rightism, the charge that had branded some 550,000 critics in 1957, so counties competed to launch “sputniks”, claims of yields many times any ever achieved. The 1958 harvest was first announced as 375 million tonnes; the true figure was about 200 million. The state’s procurement, its compulsory purchase of grain at a fixed price, in effect a tax in grain, was set on the claims and in 1959 took close to two-fifths of a shrinking real harvest. The backyard furnaces, meanwhile, consumed pots, tools and doors and produced mostly useless iron. At the Lushan conference of July 1959, a Party meeting at a mountain resort, the defence minister Peng Dehuai’s letter to Mao named the problem “petty-bourgeois fanaticism”. Mao turned the debate into a test of loyalty, Peng was dismissed, and a campaign against “right opportunists”, Party members accused of losing their revolutionary nerve, punished officials across the country. The Leap was renewed at the very moment it should have been stopped.
WHY IT HAPPENED
The easy victory of collectivisation. Collectivisation had been completed in eighteen months without the famine that followed Stalin’s, and the irrigation campaign of the winter of 1957–58 mobilised tens of millions of peasants. These successes convinced Mao that organisation and enthusiasm could achieve in months what planners expected to take years. The co-operatives also provided the units that could be merged into communes, and the officials who had raced to enrol villages in 1955 were ready to race again.
Overtaking Britain. Rivalry inside the Communist world gave the Leap its deadline. At the Moscow conference of Communist parties in November 1957, Khrushchev claimed that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in fifteen years, and Mao answered that China would overtake Britain in steel in the same time. Rivalry within the Communist world turned this into a race, and in 1958 the target date was brought forward again and again. Steel output became the symbol by which success was measured.
A Party that had silenced its critics. The Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 had removed or frightened the economists, engineers and journalists who might have challenged impossible targets. Within the Party, Mao’s attack on Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun for “opposing rash advance” in January 1958 showed that even the most senior leaders could be humiliated for caution, so nobody at any level had an incentive to say that a target was impossible. Silence at the top was copied at every level below, where the penalties for doubt were harsher still.
Mao’s faith in human will. Mao’s revolutionary experience in Yan’an had taught him that a determined, well-organised people could defeat stronger enemies. He applied the same belief to the economy, holding that “politics in command” and mass mobilisation could replace capital, machinery and expertise. Ideas such as close planting and deep ploughing, borrowed from discredited Soviet agronomy, were imposed everywhere as proof that revolutionary methods beat conventional science. Agronomists who objected had often been labelled rightists the year before, so the scientific check on the policy was already gone.
THE TURN
Lushan, July–August 1959. Lushan is the hinge because it was the last moment at which the Leap could have been halted without catastrophe, and Mao chose to defend his authority instead. Peng Dehuai’s letter was moderate, and many leaders privately agreed with it. By treating it as an attack on himself, Mao turned the question of whether the targets were possible into the question of whether officials were loyal. The campaign against right opportunism that followed made every official at every level revive the inflated targets and the requisitions. The famine of 1959–61 was decided at a mountain resort in the summer of 1959.
WHAT IT CHANGED
The Great Famine. With grain quotas set on false harvests, private food abolished and the mess halls running out, the countryside began to starve in the winter of 1958–59, and after Lushan the requisitions were pressed harder. Between 1959 and 1961 somewhere between 15 and 45 million people died, the largest famine in recorded history. The provinces whose leaders had been most zealous in 1958 suffered most.
Lin Biao takes the army. Peng Dehuai’s fall made Lin Biao defence minister, and Lin built his position by promoting the study of Mao’s thought throughout the army, culminating in the Little Red Book of quotations in 1964. The cult that the Cultural Revolution unleashed was first organised in the barracks after Lushan, and by 1969 Lin stood as Mao’s named successor. Two years later Mao turned against him, suspecting that the army’s new power threatened his own.
Mao on the second line. Mao’s retreat to what he called the “second line”, leaving daily government to colleagues, handed them the management of the crisis. In April 1959 he had given up the post of head of state to Liu Shaoqi, saying he wished to concentrate on theory. When the famine forced a retreat, Liu, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun ran it, which gave them authority Mao came to resent and set up the struggle of 1966. The famine’s managers became the Cultural Revolution’s targets.
Khrushchev’s scorn. Khrushchev mocked the communes in public in 1959, and Mao suspected that Peng Dehuai had discussed his criticisms with Soviet leaders during a visit to Eastern Europe that spring. The Leap thus deepened the quarrel with Moscow, and in 1960 the Soviet experts were withdrawn. Each side read the other’s policies as a betrayal of the revolution, and the alliance never recovered.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
How far was Mao personally responsible for the Great Leap Forward and its failure?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
One of the Leap’s campaigns was a war on the “Four Pests”: rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows, which were accused of eating grain. For three days in April 1958 Beijing’s residents banged pots, beat drums and waved flags from roofs and trees so that sparrows could not land until they fell from exhaustion. The birds also ate insects, and locust and pest damage worsened. After scientists such as the ornithologist Zheng Zuoxin warned the leadership, sparrows were quietly removed from the list in 1960 and replaced by bedbugs. The episode became a standard example, in China and abroad, of what happens when a campaign overrides expert advice.
CHAPTER 7 · 1959–1961 · 1960
The Great Famine
Hunger followed a chain of decisions made during the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s 1958 drive to transform China through mass labour, and each link is visible in the records of the Communist Party, which ran every level of government. The harvest of 1959 fell to about 170 million tonnes, and that of 1960 to about 144 million, against 195 million in 1957, because labour had been taken for furnaces and dams. Yet the state’s procurement, its compulsory purchase of grain at a fixed price, in effect a tax in grain, was the decade’s highest in 1959, close to two-fifths of the real crop, since quotas rested on the Leap’s false figures. When officials in Guangdong reported in early 1959 that peasants were hiding grain, drives to seize “concealed” grain spread. Cadres, the local Party officials who acted as a village’s employer, police and tax office, searched houses and beat those who resisted. The communal mess halls, which had replaced family kitchens in 1958, ran short in the winter of 1959–60, and families who had surrendered their pots and stores had nothing left. The deaths that peaked in late 1959 and 1960 followed from a decision to keep collecting grain after the evidence of hunger was in.
The map’s colours show how much depended on place. Anhui under Zeng Xisheng, Henan under Wu Zhipu, Sichuan under Li Jingquan, and Gansu, Guizhou and Qinghai recorded death rates three to six times the normal level, while provinces with more cautious leaders or more grain fared far better. In Xinyang prefecture in Henan, where officials blocked roads and punished “hiders”, around one million people died in a population of some eight million. Sichuan, the most populous province, went on shipping grain to the cities and for export, along the route the red arrow traces down the Yangtze. The cities were protected by ration cards and by household registration, a permit that tied each person to one place, a little like a passport valid in only one town. China also exported 4.2 million tonnes of grain in 1959, mainly to the Soviet Union, and refugees fled towards the north-east. Where a person lived, and who ruled there, decided who survived.
The retreat came late, and only after the evidence could no longer be ignored. In 1960 a Party investigation exposed the deaths in Xinyang, and in November the “Twelve Articles” restored private plots and small markets and shrank the units that controlled farming. In 1961 the mess halls were closed, and China imported about 5.8 million tonnes of grain from Canada and Australia. Mao never admitted the scale of what had happened. In public the Party blamed drought, floods and Soviet pressure, and the official phrase remained “three years of natural disasters”, although the weather, poor in some regions, cannot explain a famine on this scale. The population, by official figures, fell by about ten million in 1960 alone, and historians’ estimates of the famine’s dead run from about 15 million to 45 million. The famine left a silence in Chinese public life that historians and survivors have spent decades trying to break.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Procurement based on false harvests. Grain quotas for 1959 were set on the claims of 1958, when the official harvest was announced as 375 million tonnes against a real figure of about 200 million. Officials who had invented the harvests could not admit it, so they met the quotas by taking seed grain and the food that villages needed to survive. The state therefore took its largest share of the decade in 1959, from villages in the very year they had least.
Households with nothing of their own. The communes had abolished private plots and family livestock, closed rural markets and collected pots and stoves for the furnaces, so food came only from the mess hall. When the halls ran out of grain, families had no reserves, no land of their own to dig and nothing to sell. A system designed to free people from household cares left them with no defence against hunger. Families who had once hidden a little grain for hard years had surrendered their reserves to the collective.
The Lushan purge silenced the alarm. The purge at Lushan made reporting hunger dangerous. After Peng Dehuai was dismissed in August 1959, the campaign against right opportunists punished officials who questioned targets, and millions of cadres were criticised or demoted. Reporting deaths became dangerous, because hunger implied that the Leap had failed. Provincial leaders raised procurement again in the autumn of 1959, exactly when a retreat was most needed, and the worst deaths followed in the next winter and spring.
Cities and exports came first. Household registration and ration cards guaranteed urban residents a minimum supply, so shortages were pushed onto the countryside. China also kept exporting grain, 4.2 million tonnes in 1959, mainly to the Soviet Union, to pay for machinery and repay debts, and it refused foreign food aid. Drought and floods in some regions in 1959–60 made matters worse, but the decisions about who would bear the shortage were political, and they were made in the capital by people who would not go hungry.
THE TURN
Xinyang, winter 1959–60. Xinyang is the hinge because it was where the leadership could no longer pretend not to know. Henan’s leaders had led the Leap, and in Xinyang prefecture they pressed the campaign against concealment through the winter of 1959–60, searching homes, beating peasants and blocking escape, while about one million people died. When an investigation sent by the centre reported in 1960, the Party had written proof from its own officials. Mao endorsed the purge of the local leaders and, in November 1960, the retreat of the Twelve Articles. The famine did not end at once, but the policy that caused it began to be reversed only after Xinyang.
WHAT IT CHANGED
The great retreat. The Party saved the countryside by undoing the Leap. From late 1960 it restored private plots, rural markets and smaller farming units, closed the mess halls and imported grain. Led by Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, the recovery of 1961–65 brought food production back to its 1957 level by about 1965. The managers of the recovery, whose reforms saved lives, would become Mao’s targets in 1966.
A wound in Mao’s authority. Mao withdrew further from day-to-day government and made a limited self-criticism in 1962, while privately blaming lower officials. Leaders who had seen the evidence now doubted his judgement, and Mao came to suspect that they would one day repudiate him as Khrushchev had repudiated Stalin. That fear shaped his decision to attack the Party in 1966. The Cultural Revolution was, among other things, Mao’s answer to the famine’s verdict on him.
Missing births and a lasting scar. Births collapsed during the famine, and demographers estimate around 30 million births lost or postponed in addition to the deaths. The cohort shows as a deep notch in China’s population pyramid even today, and studies of people conceived in 1959–61 have found lasting effects on health and height. The famine marked the bodies of children too young to remember it.
Memory without a monument. Remembering the famine remains a political act in China, because the Party has never published a death toll. Its 1981 Resolution acknowledged “serious losses” and blamed errors, natural calamities and Soviet perfidy together. No national memorial exists, archives have been closed again since the 2010s, and works such as Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone are banned in China. Families have often kept the memory privately, and much of what historians know comes from people who chose to record it at their own risk.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
To what extent was the Great Famine the result of deliberate choices by China’s leaders?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The most detailed history of the famine was written by a member of the Party who had lost his own father to it. Yang Jisheng, a journalist for the state news agency Xinhua for more than three decades, was a student in 1959 when he went home to his village in Hubei and found his father dying of hunger; he says that at the time he believed the official explanation. He spent more than a decade gathering provincial records and interviews, and published Tombstone in Hong Kong in 2008. He explained the title as a tombstone for his father, for the millions who died, and for the system that caused their deaths.
CHAPTER 8 · 1961–1965 · 1964
Retreat and Recovery
The retreat from the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s failed drive of 1958 that ended in famine, worked because leaders finally saw the countryside for themselves. In the spring of 1961 Liu Shaoqi, head of state and second only to Mao in the Communist Party that ran every level of government, spent 44 days in rural Hunan and found empty granaries and peasants who blamed the disaster on officials and their orders. The mess halls closed, farming units shrank to the production team of a few dozen households, and peasants could again raise pigs, tend private plots and sell at markets. In Anhui its leader Zeng Xisheng allowed “responsibility fields”, in which a household contracted to farm a plot and kept what it produced above a quota, much like a tenant who pays a fixed rent and keeps the rest. Deng Xiaoping, the Party’s general secretary, defended such methods in July 1962 with a Sichuan proverb: it does not matter whether a cat is yellow or black, as long as it catches mice. Food production recovered quickly because peasants again had a reason to work hard.
Mao accepted the retreat in public and resented it in private. At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference of January–February 1962, the largest working meeting of officials in the Party’s history, he made a self-criticism, saying that as chairman he bore responsibility for the centre’s errors. Liu’s verdict of “three parts natural disaster, seven parts man-made” hung over the meeting. By the summer Mao was attacking household farming as a road back to capitalism. In September he told the Central Committee, the Party’s ruling council of about two hundred, roughly its national executive, to “never forget class struggle”, his doctrine that hidden enemies survived inside society and even inside the Party. The Socialist Education Movement of 1963–66 sent work teams of outside officials to purify village leaderships, and in January 1965 Mao named its real target: “those in authority within the Party taking the capitalist road”. Meanwhile the defence minister, Lin Biao, built a cult of personality, the organised worship of a living leader familiar from Stalin’s Soviet Union, through the Little Red Book of Mao’s quotations and the model soldier Lei Feng. The cult was built where Mao’s power was most secure.
The map’s new features are defensive, and they show how China’s leaders read the world after 1962. The Soviet Union and Mongolia are blue, India has been blue since the border war of 1962, and in August 1964 the United States began bombing North Vietnam. Mao feared an attack on the coastal and north-eastern industry built in the 1950s, so he ordered a Third Front of factories, mines and railways in the interior, “close to the mountains, dispersed and hidden”, much as Britain once moved factories away from bombing in wartime. The bronze outline marks it, and the arrows show steel moving from Anshan to Panzhihua, Shanghai plants to Guizhou and Sichuan, and car-making from Changchun to Shiyan. At Lop Nur in October 1964 China exploded its first atomic bomb. The country was recovering from famine by preparing for war.
WHY IT HAPPENED
The famine could no longer be denied. The evidence of mass death from places such as Xinyang had reached Beijing by 1960–61 through the Party’s own investigators, and grain had to be imported from Canada and Australia. In May 1962 some 60,000 hungry people crossed from Guangdong into Hong Kong in a few weeks, along the short arrow on the map, and most were caught and sent back. The leadership had to restore food production quickly or face a collapse of the countryside, and that urgency gave the pragmatists room to change policy faster than ideology would normally have allowed.
Pragmatists in charge of the economy. Mao had given up the post of head of state to Liu Shaoqi in 1959 and withdrew further from daily government after the famine, so the recovery was run by Liu, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai. They judged policies by results, used material incentives and relied on experts, and their authority grew with every good harvest. The success of their approach was itself a political threat, because it implied that Mao’s methods had failed.
Mao’s fear of revisionism. Mao watched Khrushchev denounce Stalin, promise Soviet citizens “goulash communism” and seek better relations with the United States, and he concluded that capitalism could return inside a Communist party through its own leaders. The Chinese polemics against Moscow in 1963–64 made this argument in public. Mao began to see Liu Shaoqi’s policies at home as the same disease, and the Socialist Education Movement was his first attempt to cure it.
Enemies on several borders. China faced enemies on several sides at once between 1962 and 1964. It fought India, quarrelled openly with the Soviet Union, watched Mongolia side with Moscow, and saw the United States bomb North Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964. Mao feared a war in which American or Soviet bombers would destroy the industry of the coast and the north-east, and that fear drove the Third Front and the rush to build an atomic bomb.
THE TURN
The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, January 1962. The conference was the hinge because the frankness that made the recovery possible also convinced Mao that his colleagues might one day repudiate him. Liu Shaoqi told more than 7,000 officials that the disaster was mostly man-made, and many speakers criticised the Leap openly for the first time since Lushan. Mao accepted responsibility in general terms, then spent the next four years building the means to fight back. Within months he was attacking household farming, and by 1965 he had defined his target as Party leaders on the “capitalist road”. The Cultural Revolution’s first victims were chosen in the aftermath of this meeting.
WHAT IT CHANGED
Mao turns on the Party. The Socialist Education Movement and the Twenty-three Articles of January 1965 pointed Mao’s suspicion at “power-holders” inside the Party. In 1966 he bypassed the Party machine entirely and called on students to attack it, and Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, the architects of the recovery, became the Cultural Revolution’s chief targets. Liu was expelled from the Party in 1968 and died in custody the following year.
A cult ready to be used. The Little Red Book was in every soldier’s pocket by 1966, and Lei Feng’s diary in every school. When Red Guards rose that summer, they drew their slogans, their certainty and their sense that loyalty to Mao overrode loyalty to the Party from the cult that Lin Biao had built in the army. The man who built the cult became its most prominent beneficiary, and then its most prominent casualty.
Industry hidden in the mountains. The Third Front shifted a large share of China’s new industry into the interior between 1965 and 1971. It left behind steel at Panzhihua, vehicle works at Shiyan, defence plants around Chongqing and new railways such as the Chengdu–Kunming line, and it bound thousands of families to remote towns for a generation. Its costs and its legacies are still argued over.
A baby boom after the famine. Once food returned, births surged: the birth rate reached about 43 per thousand in 1963, the highest in the history of the People’s Republic, and the population passed 700 million by the mid-1960s. That boom created the huge generation of young people who filled the schools in 1966, and it later pushed the state towards the birth-planning campaigns of the 1970s and the one-child policy of 1980.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Why did the recovery of 1961–65 lead to the Cultural Revolution instead of to lasting reform?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Mao complained in June 1965 that the Ministry of Health worked only for the urban fifteen percent of the population and should be renamed the “Ministry of Urban Gentlemen’s Health”. The answer to his complaint was the barefoot doctor, a peasant given a few months of training who worked in the fields between patients; the name came from rice farmers who worked barefoot in flooded paddies. By the late 1970s more than a million served China’s villages, and the World Health Organization held up the scheme as a model of primary care at its 1978 conference in Alma-Ata.
CHAPTER 9 · 1966–1968 · 1967
The Cultural Revolution
Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, his movement to purge officials he called “revisionists” and to remake Chinese culture, by going around the Communist Party, the single ruling party, which he chaired. In November 1965 a Shanghai critic attacked a play by Beijing’s deputy mayor that Mao read as a veiled defence of his critics, and by May 1966 the capital’s leaders had been purged. A Central Cultural Revolution Group now directed the campaign: a small committee that answered to Mao, bypassed the Party’s normal leadership and included his wife Jiang Qing. On 25 May a lecturer’s poster at Peking University attacked its leaders, and Mao had it broadcast nationally. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping sent work teams to contain the students, and Mao condemned them. His own poster of 5 August, “Bombard the Headquarters”, told the country that the enemy sat in the Party’s leadership. At the first great rally on 18 August he wore the armband of the Red Guards, student fighting groups much like a youth militia sworn to him. The highest authority in the land had licensed rebellion against every other authority.
Violence fell first on teachers, and then on anyone whose home or faith marked them as part of the old society. On 5 August the deputy principal of a girls’ school in Beijing, Bian Zhongyun, was beaten to death by her pupils. The police were told not to interfere. Red Guards searched homes for the “Four Olds”, meaning old ideas, culture, customs and habits; they burned books and wrecked temples, including the graves at Confucius’s birthplace in Qufu. Millions travelled free by train in the “great link-up”, carrying the movement along routes like the red arrows. Most of the first Red Guards were children of officials and army officers who attacked people with “bad” class labels inherited from land reform. Rebels, often from families with poor labels or grudges against their bosses, soon formed rival organisations and turned on the officials themselves. Each group claimed to be the most loyal to Mao, so loyalty became the weapon in every quarrel.
The power seizures of 1967 turned rebellion into civil war in miniature. After rebel workers led by Wang Hongwen took over Shanghai in the January Storm, with Mao’s blessing, rebels everywhere tried to seize Party committees, and the army was ordered to “support the left”. Commanders backed rival factions, which armed themselves from military stores. At Wuhan in July 1967 troops loyal to the regional commander seized two envoys from Beijing while Mao was secretly in the city. Mao now relied on the army to impose order. Revolutionary committees were formed province by province: new governments shared by army officers, rebels and surviving officials, much like emergency rule after a coup. In July 1968 Mao disbanded the Red Guards. The new committees then launched the “cleansing of the class ranks”, a purge of hidden enemies by investigation and forced confession, and most of the movement’s dead were killed in it by militias and officials, as at Dao county in Hunan and across Guangxi. The rebels’ revolution ended in the state’s repression.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Mao’s fear of a Chinese Khrushchev. After the famine Mao believed that Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were running the country without him and leading it towards capitalism, much as he thought Khrushchev had done in the Soviet Union. The Socialist Education Movement had not removed them, because they controlled the Party machine that ran it. Mao concluded that only a movement from outside the Party, mobilising the young and backed by the army, could purge “those in authority taking the capitalist road”.
A generation raised on the cult. Students in 1966 had grown up with Lei Feng, the Little Red Book and lessons that taught loyalty to Mao above family and teachers. They also faced shrinking chances of university places and city jobs, and in June 1966 the university entrance examinations were suspended altogether. When Mao told them that rebellion was justified, they had both the faith and the frustration to take him at his word. Teachers, who stood for the examinations and the order that had judged them, became the first targets.
Grievances waiting for a target. Seventeen years of campaigns had left many people with grievances: families stigmatised by class labels, workers on insecure temporary contracts, victims of earlier purges and students resentful of privileged classmates. The Cultural Revolution gave them, briefly, the right to attack those in authority. Rebel factions drew on these grievances, which is one reason the movement spread so fast and proved so hard to control. Each faction’s enemies were often personal and local, so the national campaign broke into thousands of separate feuds.
An army ordered to take sides. Mao ordered the army in January 1967 to “support the left” in the power seizures, but nobody could agree who the left was. Regional commanders backed the factions that suited them, and rival groups armed themselves from military depots. A campaign that began with posters and meetings therefore became a series of armed conflicts in which machine guns and even artillery were used in some cities. Once soldiers took sides, the only force that could end the fighting was a decision by Mao about which side the army should back.
THE TURN
Wuhan, 20 July 1967. The Wuhan Incident was the hinge because it showed Mao that his revolution could split the army, the one institution he could not afford to lose. Troops and the mass organisation “Million Heroes” seized two envoys from Beijing while Mao himself was in the city; he had to be flown out to Shanghai. Mao removed the regional commander, but he also drew back. Within weeks the most radical members of the Cultural Revolution Group were arrested, the army became the arbiter of every province, and the drive to form revolutionary committees accelerated. From this point the Cultural Revolution turned from rebellion to the restoration of order by force.
WHAT IT CHANGED
The army becomes the government. Military officers dominated the revolutionary committees, and by 1969 nearly half the Central Committee wore uniform. The army ran factories, schools and ministries, and its leader, Lin Biao, was named Mao’s successor. The cost of ending the chaos was a militarised state, in which political work teams of soldiers and workers took over universities and the army’s methods became the model for civilian life.
The young sent away. Once the Red Guards had done their work, Mao dispersed them. From December 1968 millions of urban school leavers were sent “up to the mountains and down to the villages” to learn from the peasants, removing the movement’s shock troops from the cities and easing urban unemployment at the same time. About seventeen million young people were sent down by 1980, and for most of them the rebellion ended in a village.
Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping destroyed. Liu Shaoqi was expelled from the Party in October 1968 as a “renegade, traitor and scab” and died in custody in Kaifeng in November 1969, denied proper medical care. Deng Xiaoping was sent to work in a tractor plant in Jiangxi, and his son was crippled after a fall while held by Red Guards. Deng’s survival would shape China after Mao.
Schools closed, heritage destroyed. Secondary schools and universities stopped normal teaching in 1966, and the university entrance examination did not return until 1977. Temples, libraries, graves and private collections were destroyed in the attack on the Four Olds. China lost a decade of trained graduates and a large part of its material past. The reformers of the 1980s had to rebuild universities, research institutes and professions almost from the beginning.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Was the Cultural Revolution a revolution from below or a purge directed from above?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Mao announced his return to politics in July 1966 with a swim. On 16 July, aged 72, he floated down the Yangtze at Wuhan, and the state news agency reported that he had covered nearly 15 kilometres in 65 minutes, a speed faster than any world record of the time; the current did most of the work. Photographs of the swimming chairman filled the newspapers, and the anniversary of the swim was celebrated with mass swims for years afterwards. The message was political, since two days later Mao was back in Beijing to condemn the work teams.
CHAPTER 10 · 1968–1971 · 1971
Down to the Countryside
Sending urban youth to the countryside served several purposes at once, which explains its scale. Mao’s directive of 22 December 1968 turned an old, small policy into a mass movement. Schools had been closed since 1966, so three years of graduates had nowhere to go in the cities. Moving them out ended the Red Guards, the student militants who had fought in Mao’s name since 1966, as a political force and relieved the cities of mouths to feed. Mao also believed that the young had to be toughened by labour and taught the peasants’ values, as his own generation had been in the Communists’ wartime base at Yan’an. Some volunteers went with real enthusiasm. Most went because refusing meant losing their household registration, the internal residence permit that tied each person to one place much like a passport valid in one town, and with it their ration book. Among those sent to a cave village in northern Shaanxi in January 1969 was fifteen-year-old Xi Jinping, a reminder that the generation sent down in these years went on to rule China.
The experience divided a generation by place and luck. Those sent to production teams, the village work groups of a few dozen households into which the communes were divided, lived among peasants who often resented extra mouths. They earned work points, credits for labour paid out in shares of the harvest, which were too small to live on. For food, housing and the chance to leave they depended on cadres, the local officials of the ruling Communist Party, who acted as employer, landlord and police at once. On the army-run farms from Heilongjiang to Yunnan, young people cleared forest and marsh under military discipline. Abuse was common, including the sexual abuse of young women by local officials, which the state acknowledged in the 1970s. Education stopped for most, and marriage and family life were delayed. In 1978–79 sent-down youth on the rubber farms of Xishuangbanna struck and petitioned Beijing, and others blocked railways in Shanghai, so the policy was abandoned and most returned to the cities by 1980. The historian Michel Bonnin calls them a “lost generation”, and their testimony shaped how China remembered the Mao years.
At the top, the army’s new power produced a struggle over succession. The Ninth Congress of April 1969, the Party’s national conference, named Lin Biao Mao’s “close comrade-in-arms and successor”, and nearly half the new Central Committee, the Party’s ruling council of some two hundred members and roughly its national executive, came from the military. The war scare with the Soviet Union that year raised the army’s importance still further. At Lushan in August 1970 Lin’s supporters pressed to restore the post of head of state, which Mao read as a bid for power. In 1971 Lin’s son, Lin Liguo, drew up a plan for a coup, codenamed Project 571, and when it collapsed the family fled north from Shanhaiguan. Their plane crashed near Öndörkhaan on 13 September, killing all nine aboard. For many Chinese, the official story of a treacherous successor made the infallible chairman look fallible for the first time.
WHY IT HAPPENED
The Red Guards had served their purpose. Mao sent the Red Guards away because they had become a problem. By 1968 the student factions were fighting each other with guns, universities such as Tsinghua had become battlegrounds, and the army was tired of policing them. In July 1968 Mao told Red Guard leaders that they had failed him, and workers’ propaganda teams took over the campuses. Sending the students to the countryside removed them from politics without admitting that the movement had gone wrong. The same young people who had been told they were the revolution’s vanguard were now told they needed re-education.
No jobs in the cities. Factories had been disrupted by two years of fighting, schools and universities had closed in 1966, and the large generation born in the baby boom of the 1950s was leaving school with nowhere to go. City governments could not feed or employ them. Sending them to villages and frontier farms shifted the burden onto the countryside, which had no say in the decision. Household registration made the move enforceable, because a young person who refused could not legally live or eat in the city.
Mao’s faith in the peasant revolution. Mao believed that city people, and especially the educated, risked becoming a privileged class cut off from the masses. His own revolution had been won in the villages, and he wanted the young to be toughened by labour and taught by peasants. The language of “re-education” turned a practical measure into a moral duty, which made opposing it look like opposing the revolution itself. Parents who hoped to keep their children at home had to argue against the Chairman’s own words.
An army that had become indispensable. The army had restored order through the revolutionary committees, and the border war with the Soviet Union in 1969 made it more important still. Its leader, Lin Biao, became Mao’s designated successor and its officers filled the Central Committee. That concentration of power alarmed Mao, who had used the army to defeat the Party and now feared the army itself. Lin Biao’s position depended on Mao’s favour, and the same favour could be withdrawn.
THE TURN
Öndörkhaan, 13 September 1971. The crash at Öndörkhaan is the hinge because it destroyed the cult’s claim that Mao was always right. Lin Biao had been the cult’s chief architect and Mao’s chosen heir, written into the Party constitution; now he was announced as a traitor who had plotted murder. Many people later said that this was the moment they stopped believing. The affair also ended the army’s political dominance, as Lin’s generals were arrested within days, and it pushed Mao to rely on Zhou Enlai, to bring back purged officials such as Deng Xiaoping, and to pursue the opening to the United States.
WHAT IT CHANGED
Washington becomes the answer. With Lin gone and the Soviet threat on the northern border, Mao and Zhou Enlai accelerated the secret approach to the United States. Within months Nixon’s visit was confirmed, and in October 1971 the People’s Republic took China’s seat at the United Nations. The crisis at home and the opening abroad moved together, and Zhou Enlai, who managed both, became the most powerful figure after Mao.
The soldiers sent back to barracks. Lin’s leading generals were arrested within days of the crash, civilian Party committees regained authority in the provinces, and in December 1973 Mao rotated the commanders of eight military regions so that none could build a personal power base. The period of military government was over, although soldiers remained powerful. Mao had used the army to break the Party, and then used the Party to rein in the army.
Deng Xiaoping returns. Needing experienced administrators, Mao allowed many purged officials back to work. Deng Xiaoping returned as a vice-premier in 1973 and soon ran the government for the ailing Zhou Enlai, which made him the radicals’ main target and set up the struggle over the succession that would decide China after Mao. Rehabilitated officials became a quiet constituency for ending the campaigns.
A generation that remembered. The sent-down youth returned to the cities from 1978 with lost years and a sceptical view of slogans. Their memoirs, stories and films, beginning with the “scar literature” of the late 1970s, shaped how China remembered the Mao years, and some of them, including Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, later led the country. Their years in the villages taught them how poor rural China was and how little slogans could change it.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
How far did the movement to send urban youth “up to the mountains and down to the villages” achieve Mao’s aims?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
A primary-school teacher in Fujian, Li Qinglin, wrote to Mao in December 1972 that his son, sent down to a village, could not earn enough food to live on and that other young people were being exploited and abused. Mao answered in April 1973 in his own hand, in words that translate roughly as: “Comrade Li Qinglin, I am sending you 300 yuan to make up for your shortage.” He added that such problems existed throughout the country and needed an overall solution. The letter was circulated to officials, and a national conference that summer raised allowances and ordered the punishment of officials who abused sent-down youth.
CHAPTER 11 · 1960–1972 · 1972
From Soviet Ally to Nixon
The split between China and the Soviet Union grew from ideology and pride and was sealed by conflicts of national interest. Mao had resented Stalin’s treatment of him, yet he defended Stalin’s legacy against Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956, partly because an attack on one leader’s personality cult, the official worship of a living leader, much like the reverence owed a divine king, could become an attack on his own. In 1958 Khrushchev proposed a joint naval fleet and a radio station on Chinese soil, which Mao denounced as a return to foreign privileges, and Mao shelled Kinmen, a Nationalist-held island, without consulting Moscow. In June 1959 the Soviets withdrew their promise to supply a sample atomic bomb. In 1960 Beijing attacked Soviet “revisionism”, its word for abandoning revolution while keeping its name, a charge much like heresy in a church. Khrushchev answered by recalling every Soviet expert within weeks, leaving plants such as the uranium works at Lanzhou unfinished. Two parties that claimed the same faith now fought over who would lead it.
China’s borders turned hostile one after another, and the map shows the ring closing. In October 1962 the People’s Liberation Army, the army of China’s ruling Communist Party, attacked India on two fronts: across the McMahon Line, the Himalayan border drawn by Britain in 1914 that China never accepted, and in Ladakh. It routed Indian forces, then declared a ceasefire and withdrew from the north-east while keeping Aksai Chin, the plateau crossed by China’s road from Xinjiang to Tibet. Open polemics in 1963–64 called the Soviet leaders traitors, Mao spoke publicly of territories the tsars had taken, and Soviet troops entered Mongolia under a treaty of 1966. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, justified by the claim that Moscow could intervene in any socialist state, frightened Beijing, because the same claim could cover China. In March 1969 Chinese troops ambushed a Soviet patrol on Zhenbao Island, and Soviet tanks and rockets struck back. After a Chinese patrol was destroyed at Tielieketi in Xinjiang in August, the army was put on war alert, and China now faced a nuclear superpower on its longest border with no powerful ally.
Fear of the Soviet Union made the United States useful, and both governments moved carefully. Richard Nixon had written in 1967 that China could not be left outside the family of nations forever, and he wanted Chinese help in leaving Vietnam on acceptable terms. In 1969 four marshals advised Mao to play the American card against Moscow. Signals followed: an American journalist beside Mao on the Tiananmen rostrum in October 1970, an American table-tennis team invited in April 1971, and the secret flight in July of Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser. In October 1971 the United Nations gave China’s seat, held until then by the Nationalist government on Taiwan, to the People’s Republic. Nixon’s visit in February 1972 ended with the Shanghai Communiqué, a joint statement in which Washington acknowledged the Chinese position that there is one China. The revolutionary who had denounced American imperialism for two decades now sought it as a counterweight.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Mao and Khrushchev read 1956 differently. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and his policy of peaceful coexistence with the West struck Mao as a retreat from revolution. Mao’s own speech in Moscow in 1957, in which he said that even a nuclear war that killed half of humanity would leave socialism victorious, alarmed the Soviet leaders. Each side began to suspect the other’s judgement, and every later disagreement was read through that suspicion. Because both claimed to speak for the same doctrine, a difference of policy became a question of who was the true heir of Lenin.
National interests collided. Moscow wanted naval facilities in China and a voice in its defence; Beijing wanted the atomic bomb and full independence. In 1958 Mao rejected a joint fleet and shelled Kinmen without warning Moscow; in 1959 the Soviets withdrew the promise of a sample bomb and stayed neutral in China’s border dispute with India. The alliance had stopped serving either side’s interests well before it formally ended. Each concession one side asked for looked to the other like an attempt at control.
The Leap divided the comrades. Khrushchev mocked the communes as a mistake the Soviet Union had tried and abandoned decades earlier, and Mao believed that Soviet leaders had encouraged Peng Dehuai’s criticism at Lushan. The withdrawal of the experts in July 1960, at the height of the famine, convinced many Chinese that Moscow had abandoned them when they were weakest, and Beijing later blamed the famine partly on Soviet “perfidy”. Blaming Moscow also helped the leadership avoid blaming itself.
The Brezhnev Doctrine frightened Beijing. Soviet tanks crushed the reform movement in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and Moscow claimed the right to intervene in any socialist country that strayed. Beijing, which Moscow regarded as having strayed far, took the doctrine as a threat to China itself. With Soviet divisions massing on the border and in Mongolia, the Cultural Revolution’s anti-Soviet rhetoric turned into real military fear. China had a small nuclear force and a vast but poorly equipped army, so the threat could not be met by China alone.
THE TURN
Zhenbao Island, March 1969. The fighting on Zhenbao Island is the hinge because it turned an ideological quarrel into a military threat that Mao could not ignore. Beijing planned the ambush of 2 March as a warning; the heavy Soviet response of 15 March, the clash at Tielieketi in August and the Soviet questions about a nuclear strike showed that Moscow might answer with overwhelming force. Mao now judged the Soviet Union the more dangerous enemy, and the logic of balance led towards Washington. Within two years Kissinger was in Beijing. The road to the Nixon visit began on a frozen river island on the Ussuri.
WHAT IT CHANGED
Nixon in Beijing. Nixon’s week in China in February 1972 ended two decades of American refusal to deal with the People’s Republic. The Shanghai Communiqué stated each side’s views openly and found a formula on Taiwan, and the two countries opened liaison offices in 1973. Full diplomatic relations followed in January 1979, under Deng Xiaoping. American trade, technology and students then became central to the reforms that followed Mao.
China takes its seat at the UN. On 25 October 1971 the General Assembly voted 76 to 35 to give China’s seat, including a permanent place on the Security Council, to the People’s Republic, and the representatives of the Republic of China left. The vote showed how many governments had been waiting for an American signal. For Beijing it was the formal end of two decades of isolation, and for Taipei the beginning of a long loss of recognition.
The ring opens. Japan established relations with Beijing in September 1972 and broke them with Taiwan; West Germany, Australia and many others followed within months, and the Philippines and Thailand in 1975. On the map, the blue ring of 1964 breaks open on the east, while the Soviet border remains a front line. China had escaped encirclement without ending its quarrel with Moscow.
A Cold War triangle. With Washington, Moscow and Beijing each able to play the other two against each other, the Cold War became a triangle. The Soviet Union hurried into arms agreements with the United States in May 1972, and Vietnam, angered by China’s dealings with its enemy, drifted towards Moscow, a rift that led to war between China and Vietnam in 1979. The triangle gave China more room to manoeuvre than either alliance or isolation had done.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Why did Mao, the champion of world revolution, welcome Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Henry Kissinger’s secret journey to Beijing in July 1971 was codenamed Polo, after Marco Polo. Pakistan’s president, Yahya Khan, arranged it: during an official visit to Pakistan, Kissinger pretended to be ill with a stomach complaint so that he could disappear for two days, supposedly resting at a hill station. Before dawn on 9 July he boarded a Pakistani airliner at Chaklala airport, near Islamabad, and flew over the Himalaya to Beijing, accompanied by Chinese navigators. When Nixon announced the trip on 15 July, almost no one in the American government had known about it.
EPILOGUE · 1976 · 1976
Mao’s Death and Legacy
The answer to this atlas’s question is that Mao’s party-state reached every village through the Party’s local organisation, the campaigns and an army loyal to the leader. The same machinery unified China and raised life expectancy, and it also produced the famine and the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s assault on his own party from 1966, because nothing inside it could stop a mistake made at the top. A party-state is one in which a single party controls the government at every level, much like a company whose owner appoints every manager, and the campaigns were bursts of mass mobilisation that made citizens accuse and police one another. The chart below counts their cost: one to two million dead in land reform, roughly 700,000 to two million in the campaign against counter-revolutionaries, 15 to 45 million in the famine, and roughly 750,000 to two million in the Cultural Revolution. Altogether somewhere between about 17 million and 50 million people died, and every figure is a range because the regime never fully counted its victims.
The struggle to succeed Mao was decided by force, because his authority had held the factions together and nothing else could. After the fall of Lin Biao, the chosen heir who died fleeing China in 1971, Mao balanced two camps. One was the radicals around his wife Jiang Qing, whom he warned in 1975 not to act as a “gang of four”; the other was the veteran administrators led by Zhou Enlai and the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. When Zhou died in January 1976, crowds in Tiananmen Square turned Qingming, the festival for honouring the dead, into a protest against the radicals, the largest spontaneous demonstration of the Mao era, and on 5 April militia cleared the square. The Politburo, the Party’s inner cabinet of about twenty, blamed Deng and dismissed him again, and Mao chose the little-known Hua Guofeng as his successor. Mao died on 9 September, aged 82. Hua had Mao’s endorsement and no power base of his own, so he allied with Marshal Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing, commander of the leadership’s guard unit, and on 6 October they arrested the Gang of Four. Mao’s revolution ended in a palace coup by the security forces, a final lesson in where power in his system lay.
Mao’s successors kept his party-state and abandoned his campaigns, and their choices still shape China. Deng Xiaoping, restored in 1977, outmanoeuvred Hua and launched reforms in December 1978. Peasants at Xiaogang in Anhui had already begun dividing collective land among households, and by 1984 the communes, the giant collective farms of 1958 that ran whole districts like company towns, were gone. The sent-down youth, the urban young sent to villages after 1968 in a kind of labour conscription, came home along the arrows that reverse their journeys. The Party’s Resolution of 1981 condemned the Cultural Revolution, praised Mao’s leadership before 1957, treated the famine as an error among others, and kept his portrait on the gate and his body in its mausoleum. The state Mao built survived him by abandoning much of what he had believed.
WHY IT HAPPENED
A succession Mao never settled. Mao had destroyed two chosen successors, Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, and in his last years he balanced radicals against veterans without letting either win. He chose Hua Guofeng in 1976 because Hua belonged to neither camp. When Mao died, no institution had the authority to decide between the factions, so the succession was decided by whoever controlled the guards and the army. A regime that had no rule for passing power on had to settle the question by force.
Zhou Enlai’s death and popular anger. Zhou Enlai had become a symbol of moderation and competence, and the radicals’ attempts to limit public mourning for him in January 1976 angered millions. At the Qingming festival in April, wreaths and poems in Tiananmen Square attacked Jiang Qing and praised Zhou and Deng. The protest showed that many people blamed the radicals for a decade of chaos and wanted it to end. Mourning a dead leader was one of the few forms of political expression the system could not easily forbid.
Veterans who had survived the purges. Many of the officials purged in 1966–68 had returned to work after Lin Biao’s fall, among them Deng Xiaoping, while army elders such as Marshal Ye Jianying, sidelined since 1967, regained influence. They distrusted the radicals, controlled much of the army, and were ready to act once Mao was gone. In 1975 Deng had already shown, in the railways, the steel industry and the army, what restoring order would look like. Their return made a different future possible.
Exhaustion after a decade of campaigns. A decade of campaigns had worn out the society that was supposed to sustain them. By 1976 output was falling, the universities barely functioned, and the sent-down youth wanted to go home, while the campaigns of the 1970s, such as “Criticise Lin Biao, Criticise Confucius”, mobilised little enthusiasm. A society tired of struggle meetings, the public denunciations that every campaign used, gave the post-Mao leaders broad support when they ended them. Even inside the Party, many officials had been both perpetrators and victims of the campaigns, and they wanted security more than revolution.
THE TURN
6 October 1976. The arrest of the Gang of Four is the hinge because it ended the Maoist project without a mass movement and without a shot. Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing used the leadership’s guard unit to detain the radicals at a Politburo meeting, and the radicals’ base in Shanghai stood down within days. The coup opened the way for Deng Xiaoping’s return and the reforms of 1978. It also showed that power in Mao’s system had always rested on the army and the security forces, whatever the language of mass revolution claimed.
WHAT IT CHANGED
The communes dismantled. Mao’s successors undid his central rural institution within six years. From 1978, beginning with secret contracts such as Xiaogang’s, households took responsibility for farming plots again, and by 1984 the communes had been abolished. Grain output rose sharply once households could keep what they grew above the quota, and rural incomes rose faster in the early 1980s than in any period of the Mao years. The Party had rediscovered the household farming that Mao rejected in 1962, and the reforms began in the province where the famine had been worst.
Verdicts reversed. The new leaders cleared many of Mao’s victims, selectively. The “rightists” labelled in 1957 were rehabilitated from 1978, Liu Shaoqi was posthumously cleared in 1980, and the Gang of Four were tried on television in 1980–81, with Jiang Qing sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment. The famine’s victims received no such public acknowledgement, and its archives remain restricted. The post-Mao state chose which of the era’s victims it could afford to remember.
A generation comes home. The return of the sent-down youth, the urban young sent to villages after 1968, created a labour problem that helped open the door to private business. Most of those still in the countryside, close to nine million at the end of 1977, came back between 1978 and 1980, and the cities could not employ them all, so the state allowed small private shops and stalls, the first private enterprise since the 1950s. Others passed the restored university examination of 1977 and joined the professions, so the returning generation supplied both the first private traders and the first graduates of the reform era.
Mao still on the gate. The state still honours Mao in its most visible places. His portrait hangs above Tiananmen, his face is on every regular banknote issued since 1999, and his body lies in a mausoleum on the square, while Shaoshan, his birthplace, receives millions of visitors a year. His legacy is official, contested and selective, which is why the history mapped here is still argued over inside and outside China.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Should Mao’s rule be judged chiefly by what it built or by what it cost?
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.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The portrait of Mao above the Gate of Heavenly Peace is about six metres high and weighs around one and a half tonnes, and it is replaced with a freshly painted copy every year before National Day on 1 October. Since 1977 the copies have been painted by the artist Ge Xiaoguang. In 1980, when the reformers were reconsidering Mao’s record, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked Deng Xiaoping whether the portrait would stay. Deng answered that it would be kept there forever, because Mao had been a founder of the Party and the state, and his mistakes did not cancel that.