The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 — the study guide

CHAPTER 1 · 1949–1950 · 1949

Consolidating Victory

A proclamation could announce a government; it could not by itself give that government control of the country. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Communist Party’s army, had grown from something like a party militia to a force of about five million. In October 1949 it still had campaigns to fight. Follow the arrows into the southwest: Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping’s forces entered Guizhou and Sichuan, taking Chongqing on 30 November and Chengdu on 27 December. Lin Biao’s forces swept into Guangxi and crossed to Hainan in April 1950.

The Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan with about two million people. An assault on Kinmen island failed in October 1949, and the chance to finish the war across the strait slipped away. On the mainland, meanwhile, the institution capable of taking territory also supplied its first governors. Until 1954, generals and Party officials on military-administrative committees ran six great regions.

The September 1949 Common Program gave the new government an interim constitution and a broader political base. It protected private property and gave positions to the small non-Communist “democratic parties”, which survived as junior partners; three of the six vice-chairmen were outside the Communist Party. The inclusion had a boundary. Mao promised democracy to the people and dictatorship over landlords, Nationalist “reactionaries” and the “bureaucrat capitalists” tied to the old regime. The Party decided who belonged on either side of that line.

The new government also legislated changes in family life. The Marriage Law of May 1950 banned arranged marriages, concubinage and child betrothal and allowed women to sue for divorce. Hundreds of thousands of divorce cases soon followed each year. A legal right could nevertheless meet violent resistance: in the Central-South region alone, more than 10,000 women were reported killed or driven to suicide in marriage disputes in 1951. The same years brought both liberation and coercion to village life.

Land reform drew villagers into decisions about their neighbors. Cadre work teams came from outside, lived with the poorest families and assigned every household a class: landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant, poor peasant or hired laborer. These labels went into records and passed to children. At struggle meetings, coached accusers denounced landlords before a crowd that acted much like a jury in a trial without lawyers. Land, tools, houses and grain were then divided among villagers.

The Long Bow marker identifies the Shanxi village where the American William Hinton witnessed reform in 1948; the Hunan memorial points to its violence. Families who had owned no land gained relief, while perhaps one to two million people designated enemies died. The two outcomes helped change village politics together. People who had accused neighbors and taken their property had participated in the new order, and a return of the old one could threaten what they had gained and expose what they had done.

WHY IT HAPPENED

An army that had already won. The Communist victory rested on an army of about five million. In the great battles of 1948–49 the PLA destroyed the Nationalist field armies, giving the new state a single force under one command across almost all China—something no Chinese government had possessed since 1911. The army also offered a way to govern: its units had political commissars, and generals ran the six great regions until 1954.

A country exhausted by war and inflation. After eight years of war against Japan and three of civil war, many Chinese wanted order regardless of the ideology that brought it. The Nationalists’ gold yuan, introduced in August 1948, became worthless within a year. Under Chen Yun’s economic guidance, the new government gathered grain and cloth into state hands and balanced the budget. Inflation was controlled by early 1950. Stable prices helped win acceptance in cities where the Communists had lacked support.

Land hunger and the landlord’s power. For much of rural China, land meant both livelihood and authority. Close to 480 million people lived in the countryside; in much of the south a minority of landlords owned a large share of the best land and charged tenants half the harvest or more. Landlords could also lend money, collect taxes and lead militias. Since the 1920s the Communists had learned in their base areas that a promise of land attracted recruits. National reform gave poor peasants across the provinces a reason to support the Party.

The Cold War chose sides early. The United States still recognized the Nationalist government, and Mao saw a need for a great-power protector against American hostility. China’s February 1950 treaty with Moscow answered that need. When the Korean War began in June, President Truman sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, freezing the civil war in place. The new state’s enemy across the sea helped justify vigilance, secrecy and campaigns against supposed hidden enemies at home.

WHAT IT CHANGED

War arrives before the state is built. The government had scarcely begun building its institutions when war came. The Korean War started eight months after the proclamation, and in October 1950 China sent its army across the Yalu, the river border with Korea. Fighting the United States gave the government a reason and a receptive public mood for hunting enemies at home. The campaigns of 1950–53 became far harsher than the coalition of 1949 had promised, and citizens could be asked to show loyalty by denouncing, donating or enlisting.

Class labels that lasted a generation. A classification made during land reform could follow a family for decades. The label “landlord” entered household files and passed to children, affecting prospects at school, work and marriage. During the Cultural Revolution, such families were among the first victims of village killings. A state seeking to abolish class had created a hereditary underclass; the files outlived Mao.

The land given was soon taken back. Land ownership gave peasants a reason to support the revolution, but private ownership lasted only a few years. From 1953 the state purchased grain at prices it set; by the end of 1956 almost every household had entered a collective. The fields passed to cooperatives and, in 1958, to communes. What had helped win support for the Party was no longer held individually.

Two Chinas. The Nationalist Republic of China survived on Taiwan after the failed Kinmen landing and the arrival of the American fleet. It also retained China’s United Nations seat. Beijing’s struggle over which government represented China continued until it won the seat in 1971. The strait remains divided today, and the failed landing of 1949 still bears on East Asian politics.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did land reform secure the countryside for the Party chiefly through the land it gave or through the violence it organised?

The land and the violence did different work, and their effects reinforced each other. About 300 million peasants received fields, tools and grain. Many remembered fanshen, “turning over”, as the first time they had owned anything; Hinton’s villagers had good material reasons to defend the new order. At struggle meetings people also accused, voted and sometimes killed. Those who took part could fear what would happen if the old elite returned, making complicity a source of loyalty alongside gratitude. Dikötter emphasizes terror, while DeMare and earlier writers give greater weight to material gains. The uncertain estimate of one to two million deaths cannot decide that disagreement by itself. Consider what happened next: within five years peasants lost their land to collectives, yet resistance was mostly quiet, taking forms such as slaughtering livestock or leaving cooperatives, without open revolt in the Han heartland. That suggests that fear and dependence mattered as much as ownership to the lasting bond. A revolutionary state can secure loyalty by making its supporters share responsibility for its acts.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The words “The Chinese people have stood up” are often associated with Mao’s Tiananmen proclamation. He actually spoke them on 21 September 1949, opening the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; popular memory later moved them to the rostrum on 1 October. The flag raised that day was selected from nearly 3,000 public entries. Zeng Liansong, an economics graduate working in Shanghai, designed it with a hammer and sickle inside the large star. The committee removed that emblem, leaving the five yellow stars on red that fly today.

CHAPTER 2 · 1950–1953 · 1953

Korea and the Campaigns

The Korean War began with a northern invasion, but by autumn 1950 the forces approaching China were American-led. The UN landing at Incheon in September reversed the course of the fighting. UN troops crossed the 38th parallel and advanced toward the Yalu, the river separating Korea from Manchuria, China’s industrial northeast. Premier and foreign minister Zhou Enlai warned through the Indian ambassador that China would act; Washington dismissed the warning as bluff. Mao judged the danger of remaining outside the war greater than the danger of entering it.

Lin Biao declined the command, and Mao chose the civil-war veteran Peng Dehuai. On the night of 19 October the Chinese People’s Volunteers crossed at Andong. Their intervention surprised the world’s strongest army: by late November they had trapped American columns at the Chosin Reservoir and along the Chongchon River, and in January 1951 they retook Seoul. That was the high point of their advance.

Holding the line became a different task from driving the UN forces back. Chinese armies lacked artillery, trucks and air cover; their attacks in waves met devastating American firepower. Mao Anying, Mao’s own son, was killed in an air raid on Peng’s headquarters in November 1950. By mid-1951 the front had settled near the 38th parallel. Talks continued for two more years, held up above all by prisoners: about 14,000 of the 21,000 Chinese captives refused repatriation and chose Taiwan instead.

The armistice was signed on 27 July 1953 at Panmunjom, a village on the front. The line on the map shows a divided Korea. Beijing’s official count of Chinese dead rose from 183,108 in 2010 to 197,653 in 2020; other estimates reach about 400,000. China had not won, but the ability to hold the United States to a standstill brought the new government enormous prestige.

The fighting abroad gave urgency to a campaign already beginning at home. A campaign mobilized the country against a named enemy, much as a wartime emergency drive might suspend ordinary rules. The “Double Tenth” directive of 10 October 1950 called for a hunt for “counter-revolutionaries”. The label covered former Nationalist officials, bandits, alleged saboteurs and leaders of secret societies such as Shanghai’s Green Gang. Mao suggested executions at about one per thousand people. Public trials filled stadiums and went out over the radio; a 1954 report counted 712,000 executed, 1.29 million imprisoned and 1.2 million placed under police watch.

Other campaigns carried the method into government offices and private firms. The Three-Anti campaign purged officials for corruption; the Five-Anti campaign named five “poisons”, including bribery and tax evasion, and used fines and humiliation against businessmen. Hundreds of Shanghai owners took their own lives, and private firms came to depend on the state. Quotas, mass meetings and forced confessions could now be used in peace as well as war.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Kim Il-sung’s war and Stalin’s consent. Kim Il-sung secured Stalin’s approval in April 1950 and Mao’s acceptance during a visit to Beijing in May. North Korea invaded the South on 25 June. Mao expected the North to win quickly and intended to invade Taiwan that year. Instead the United States sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait and an army to Korea. The Korean civil war had brought American forces close to China.

MacArthur crossed the parallel. The UN landing at Incheon on 15 September 1950 broke the North Korean army. Pursuit across the 38th parallel in early October put American troops on the road to the Yalu. Zhou Enlai sent a warning through the Indian ambassador, K. M. Panikkar, but Washington treated it as bluff. General MacArthur assured President Truman that China would either stay out or be crushed if it intervened. The error helped determine the next three years of war.

Mao wanted the confrontation. Mao had reasons to fight beyond the immediate border threat. Archival research shows his belief that confronting American power would bring revolutionary China respect abroad and loyalty at home. He also remembered the Korean soldiers who had fought in China’s civil war and feared that a hostile Korea would threaten the industrial northeast. Much of the Politburo hesitated in early October, but Mao overruled it; his authority carried the decision.

A state that felt surrounded by enemies. In 1950 the new government faced Nationalist units and bandit gangs in the southwest, rural secret societies and agents sent from Taiwan. It claimed that it had to suppress about a million “bandits” in its first years. War with the United States made it easier to portray these distinct threats as parts of a foreign plot. Suspicion could become evidence, and a security operation could become a national campaign.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A general with the prestige to object. Peng Dehuai emerged from Korea as China’s most respected soldier, credited with holding off the Americans with a peasant army. That standing helped give him the confidence to write Mao a frank letter about the Great Leap Forward in 1959. It also helps explain why Mao regarded his criticism as dangerous. The war had elevated a soldier whom the Leap would destroy.

The campaign becomes the method of rule. The campaigns of 1950–53 supplied a set of tools used again against intellectuals in 1957, peasants in 1958 and the Party itself in 1966: quotas, mass meetings, forced confessions and subsequent “corrections” of excess. Officials learned that exceeding a target could be safe while caution could look like sympathy for the enemy. Campaigns consequently ran hotter than the center had planned, and officials who had obeyed were blamed afterward.

Locked into the Soviet camp. An American-led trade embargo from 1951 restricted China’s choices, while the war made it dependent on Soviet loans, advisers and weapons that had to be paid for. The First Five-Year Plan, launched in 1953, used Soviet equipment and followed the Soviet model. Mao’s political preference for that model, declared in 1949, had become a dependence that shaped industrialization.

Taiwan behind an American shield. Truman’s fleet entered the Taiwan Strait in June 1950 and never left; in 1954 Washington signed a defense treaty with the Nationalists. The Korean War had put Mao’s chance of completing the civil war out of reach. Beijing tested the American commitment by shelling offshore islands in 1954 and 1958. Taiwan remained central to Chinese foreign policy through Nixon’s 1972 visit and beyond.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did the Korean War strengthen or weaken Mao’s new state?

The war strengthened the regime’s authority, but its costs fell heavily on China and its people. About 200,000 to 400,000 Chinese soldiers died, much of the budget went to the war, Soviet weapons had to be paid for, and the American fleet put Taiwan out of reach. Soldiers and families bore the cost of a decision that some historians emphasize was a gamble. At home, however, the Party could present campaigns against counter-revolutionaries, corrupt officials and businessmen as patriotic defense. Donations and recruits came from every province, while a peasant army’s stand against the United States gave the state prestige no Chinese government had enjoyed since the Opium Wars. Chen Jian argues that Mao had sought domestic mobilization from the outset. By the measure of state power, China emerged harder, more unified and more feared; its society emerged poorer, more isolated and more afraid. War can strengthen a new authoritarian regime by making dissent appear to be treason.

AN INTERESTING FACT

A national donation drive asked factories, villages and schools to raise money to “buy” aircraft and guns for the Korean front. Its most famous donor was Chang Xiangyu, a Henan opera star. During six months in 1951 she toured China in a play about the woman warrior Hua Mulan and gave the proceeds for a MiG-15 fighter. Her troupe’s name was painted on its nose; the aircraft now stands in the China Aviation Museum north of Beijing. Such drives recurred in later campaigns, making patriotism a public act measurable by the amount given.

CHAPTER 3 · 1950–1959 · 1956

Tibet and the Frontiers

The Qing empire had governed Han Chinese alongside Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs and other peoples until 1912. Its successor, the Republic of China, lost control of Outer Mongolia, Tibet and much of Xinjiang. The Communists claimed the old imperial borders for the new People’s Republic. That ambition left a question: how would a state presenting itself as a nation govern peoples whose histories were bound to those borders in different ways?

In Xinjiang the transfer of power came without a major battle. Chiang’s government had fled, leaving its Nationalist garrison isolated; it surrendered in September 1949. Beijing then made settlement part of its control. Demobilized soldiers formed the Production and Construction Corps in 1954, a farming army with its own towns, comparable to the military settler colonies of earlier empires. Han Chinese, over nine in ten of China’s population, had been about 6 percent of Xinjiang’s people; Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, were the largest group. The Corps settled Han there. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was created in 1955, but the Party secretary outranked the regional government, much as an owner outranks local managers. Uyghur officials could hold office while decisive power remained in Han hands.

Tibet had a longer experience of governing itself. The 13th Dalai Lama, its religious leader and head of state, rather like a pope who also reigned as king, expelled the Qing garrison in 1913. Lhasa maintained an army, currency and foreign relations for nearly four decades. No great power recognized its independence, however, and in 1950 it had neither a modern army nor an ally able to defend it.

The arrows show the PLA, the Communist Party’s own army, advancing toward Chamdo in October 1950. About 8,000 Tibetan troops were trapped and their governor surrendered. Military defeat brought a negotiation: under the Seventeen-Point Agreement of May 1951 Tibet agreed to “return to the big family of the motherland” and admit the army. Beijing undertook to preserve the political system and the Dalai Lama’s powers. The PLA entered Lhasa that October; roads completed in 1954 made its presence permanent. Tibetan government continued, but a Chinese garrison now stood behind the agreement.

The settlement covered the tan region, while other Tibetan lands were governed as parts of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan. From 1955, “democratic reforms” in Kham and Amdo redistributed land, disarmed households and attacked monastery property. They also introduced collectivization, combining family farms and herds into units worked in common, like a compulsory cooperative. Kham rose in early 1956; the army bombed the besieged monastery at Lithang. By 1958 revolt and repression had spread through Amdo.

The provincial boundary could not keep the effects of those campaigns out of Lhasa. Refugees arrived there, and the Chushi Gangdruk resistance formed in 1958 with covert American training. In March 1959 rumors that the Dalai Lama would be detained drew crowds around his summer palace. He fled on the night of 17 March, and three days later the army shelled the city. Beijing had preserved a bargain in one Tibetan region while pursuing policies elsewhere that drove people and resistance across its boundary.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Qing borders as a national claim. Nationalists and Communists both claimed the Qing empire’s borders at their height as China’s rightful borders. On that view, Tibetan self-government after 1913 was a loss incurred during national weakness. Recovering the frontier would show that the century of humiliation had ended. Tibet also mattered strategically: it bordered India, and its plateau commanded approaches to southwest China.

A Tibet that could not defend itself. Tibet’s own choices and its international position left Lhasa poorly equipped in 1950. Its army numbered about 8,000 to 10,000 men and had few modern weapons. The elite had resisted military reforms in the 1920s, fearing that a strong army would weaken the monasteries. Britain, Tibet’s old patron, had left India in 1947; Nehru’s new Indian government sought good relations with Beijing. With no ally willing to fight, Tibet had no force capable of stopping the PLA at Chamdo.

Campaigns built for Han villages. Party work teams had developed land reform and collectivization around landlords and tenants in Han villages. Kham and Amdo included pastoral nomads, powerful monasteries and people accustomed to carrying arms. When officials treated lamas and chieftains as class enemies and tried to confiscate guns and monastery land in 1955–56, reform appeared as an attack on a way of life. Resistance followed, and the methods used to reorganize villages could not contain it.

Settler colonies and new roads. Settlement and roads gave Beijing different means of holding the frontier. Xinjiang’s Production and Construction Corps, formed from demobilized soldiers in 1954, settled hundreds of thousands of Han migrants over subsequent decades. Highways from Qinghai and Sichuan opened in Tibet in December 1954, and a road across Aksai Chin was completed in 1957. Trucks could now bring troops and supplies, making later interventions easier.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Tibet transformed after 1959. Beijing used the rising to end the 1951 settlement. It dissolved the old government, undertook land reform in Tibet in 1959–61, closed most monasteries and established the Tibet Autonomous Region in 1965. In 1962 the Panchen Lama, the senior lama who remained, sent Zhou Enlai a long petition about hunger and the destruction of religion in Tibetan areas. He spent most of the next fifteen years in prison or detention. Within six years the Tibet preserved by the agreement had disappeared.

War with India. India’s discovery in 1958 of a Chinese road across Aksai Chin, a plateau claimed by India, and its later grant of asylum to the Dalai Lama strained the friendship of the early 1950s. Patrols from both countries pushed forward in the border dispute. The PLA attacked in October 1962, routed Indian forces in the northeast and Ladakh, then withdrew. The earlier slogan “Indians and Chinese are brothers” had not survived the decade.

A government in exile. Exile gave Tibet an international voice it had lacked in 1950. At Dharamsala in northern India, the Dalai Lama established a government-in-exile and later a parliament, schools and monasteries for some 80,000 refugees. The regional rising became a lasting international cause, and the question of Tibet has followed every Chinese government abroad since 1959.

Xinjiang’s changing population. The Corps and subsequent migration changed who lived in Xinjiang. Han people rose from about 6 percent of the population in 1953 to roughly two-fifths by the late 1970s. Yet control remained fragile: in 1962, amid hunger after the famine, tens of thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs fled into the Soviet Union. Beijing sealed the border, and Xinjiang became a front line 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 constitution and the exercise of power suggest different answers. The PRC’s 1954 constitution recognized minority nationalities; autonomous regions included local officials, and minority languages received support in schools and publishing. By its law and self-description it was a multi-national state. But Han Party secretaries and the army made decisions in Lhasa and Urumqi, settlement changed Xinjiang’s population, and aircraft and artillery met Tibetan resistance to campaigns in 1956–59. Those relationships resemble imperial rule. Goldstein emphasizes Beijing’s caution in Tibet proper until 1959; Shakya and other historians stress that caution prevailed where Chinese control was weakest. Like the Soviet Union, the PRC claimed to end empire while retaining its borders and methods. The name a constitution gives a state and the way its center governs its peoples can point in different directions.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Dalai Lama’s life spanned both sides of the 1951 bargain. Born in 1935 at Taktser, a farming village in Amdo in today’s Qinghai province, he was found there by a search party of monks in 1937 and enthroned as a small child. The Chinese invasion led him to take full power in 1950 at fifteen, nearly three years before the customary age of eighteen. In 1954–55 he spent months in Beijing, met Mao several times and became a vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress, evidence of both sides’ effort to make the settlement work. He fled in 1959 and has lived in India for more than six decades, far longer than he ruled in Lhasa.

CHAPTER 4 · 1953–1957 · 1956

The Soviet Model

The Korean War narrowed China’s choices at the very moment its leaders wanted to industrialize. An American-led embargo barred trade with China and closed access to Western technology. The Soviet Union offered designs, machinery and about 10,000 specialists over the decade. China’s leaders trusted the Soviet example; after the war it was also the only model available. They adopted it with little debate.

The First Five-Year Plan of 1953–57 gave ministries responsibility for setting factory output, rather as a head office sets targets for its branches. The northeast had both a Japanese-built industrial base and proximity to the Soviet railway. It received the showpieces: the arrows follow the railway to Harbin and Anshan, where the steelworks was rebuilt. At Changchun the First Automobile Works produced China’s first truck in 1956. Planners also put plants at Wuhan, Baotou, Lanzhou and Xi’an, deep inland and away from the vulnerable coast.

Building the economy went together with building a new state. The revolutionary army gave way to a bureaucracy in which the Communist Party ruled alone and placed its members in charge of every office, like an owner appointing managers. In 1954 the six great regions run by generals were abolished. Gao Gang, the northeastern leader, was purged after trying to displace Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai; he killed himself that year.

The first National People’s Congress adopted a constitution in September 1954. It listed freedoms of speech and religion while placing China under Party leadership; the Congress itself met rarely and approved Party decisions. In the cities, a worker’s employer became a work unit providing housing, health care and pensions as well as political supervision, much like a company town. The resulting lifetime dependence was called the “iron rice bowl”. In January 1956 private firms became “joint state-private” companies with almost no resistance. Urban workers gained security, while the Party gained control over nearly every adult’s livelihood.

The countryside faced a different bargain. The state had been the only legal grain buyer since 1953, but officials found 110 million separate households difficult to tax and still harder to plan. Cooperatives offered a way to organize them: family farms would become units owned and worked in common, rather like farmers’ cooperatives today. Control of the harvest would rest increasingly with institutions the state could direct.

Mao wanted to move faster than his cautious colleagues. In his speech of 31 July 1955 he mocked them as “a woman with bound feet”. Officials competed to report the highest enrollment, while some reluctant peasants slaughtered animals before pooling them and others later tried to leave. By the end of 1956 almost all households had joined. Unlike Stalin’s collectivization of 1929–33, which caused famine in the Soviet Union, China’s caused none; land reform had already destroyed the rich peasants who might have resisted, which partly explains the difference. Mao took the speed of the change as evidence that will and organization could overcome any economic limit. That lesson fed his crash industrial drive of 1958, the Great Leap Forward.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The war closed every other door. The Korean War left China subject to an American trade embargo and dependent on Soviet weapons, loans and advice. Moscow offered the blueprints, machine tools and engineers unavailable from the West, and agreed to help build 156 major projects. This shaped the economy as well as foreign policy. A factory using a Soviet design also needed compatible parts, training and planning methods.

A Marxist faith in heavy industry. Party leaders associated socialism and national defense with steel, coal, electricity, machinery and a modern working class. The Soviet experience appeared to show that central planning could industrialize a backward country within a generation. Heavy industry consequently received the great majority of industrial investment. Consumer goods and agriculture had to wait, and leaders accepted slow gains in ordinary living standards as the price of national strength.

Grain was the bottleneck. New city workers needed food, and food exports could pay for Soviet machines. Private grain markets failed to supply enough in 1953, so the state monopolized buying and selling and imposed low prices and quotas. Cooperatives made that system easier to administer: officials could deal with a few hundred thousand collective units instead of more than a hundred million separate households.

Mao’s impatience with gradualism. In 1953 Mao replaced New Democracy with a “general line” for the transition to socialism. Planners and rural officials favored a slower course, but his impatience grew. His July 1955 speech made caution a political error. Officials accustomed to campaigns in which overfulfillment was safe then competed to enroll villages. Mao chose the direction, and the system’s incentives drove the rush.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The Leap forward from the Plan. The Plan built industry faster than agriculture, and Mao came to regard the Soviet model as too slow and bureaucratic for China. From 1958 he sought to mobilize labor in place of capital, combining agriculture and industry in giant communes. The cooperatives created in 1956 provided their building blocks; the officials who had raced to collectivize now raced again.

The state could now take the harvest. Under the grain monopoly, officials could use the collectives to determine how much food a village retained. In ordinary years the system fed cities and paid for imports. In 1959–60 officials based procurements on inflated harvest reports, and the same machinery stripped villages bare. A system constructed to supply industry turned policy failure into famine among the people who grew the food.

Two classes of citizen. Urban work units supplied rations, pensions and health care. Rural people, by contrast, had to feed themselves from collective fields, and the 1958 household registration rules prevented them from moving to cities. This division survived Mao by decades. When food ran short in 1960, it helped determine who lived and who died.

Soviet ties that became a burden. The alliance had put Soviet designs and advisers into factories, schools and planning offices. Its breakdown in 1960 exposed the cost of that dependence: experts left, plants stood unfinished and blueprints were missing. China had to improvise. Self-reliance later became a praised virtue, but it began as necessity; 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?

Measured against its industrial targets, 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. China acquired industries it had never had, while city workers received steady jobs, housing and welfare through their work units. The gains depended on a different experience in the countryside. Peasants sold grain at state-set prices, surrendered land to cooperatives only a few years after receiving it, and were tied to their villages by household registration. Their contribution financed the cities, while agricultural output grew only a little faster than population and left little margin for error. Naughton credits the achievements but stresses the imbalance; Meisner also identifies a bureaucratic elite that Mao later turned against. The Plan served the state and urban workers while imposing sacrifices on the peasant majority. Growth figures show the achievement, but they cannot by themselves tell us who paid for it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Soviet alliance shaped education as well as factories. In the early 1950s Russian replaced English as the main foreign language in Chinese schools and universities, and thousands of Soviet textbooks were translated, from engineering manuals to novels. Beijing built the Friendship Hotel in 1954 near the new university district to house Soviet experts and their families. Its vast palace-style complex had green-tiled roofs. When Khrushchev recalled the experts in 1960, the rooms emptied within weeks. The hotel still operates today, its name among the few public reminders of the alliance.

CHAPTER 5 · 1956–1957 · 1957

A Hundred Flowers

In 1956 Communist leaders faced a disturbing question: what happened when a party’s mistakes could no longer be discussed openly? Khrushchev’s secret speech in February condemned Stalin, showing that a Communist leader could be judged by his own party. Later that year, risings in Poland and Hungary showed the danger of accumulated grievances. Mao believed China could respond differently, by hearing complaints before they produced an explosion.

His speech of 27 February 1957, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People”, offered a distinction for doing so. Disagreements among the people should be settled through discussion; conflicts with enemies called for force. In April the Party, which ruled alone at every level, began a rectification campaign and invited outsiders to criticize its “bureaucratism, sectarianism and subjectivism”. Mao seems to have expected grateful intellectuals to offer moderate complaints that would help correct officials. That expectation depended on his belief that the Party had won their loyalty.

Seven years of grievances gave the invitation a different result. In May and early June, critics questioned the Party’s right to govern without sharing power. Chu Anping, editor of the intellectuals’ newspaper Guangming Daily, accused it of treating China as its private property, the “Party’s empire”. Leaders of the democratic parties, retained as junior partners since 1949, proposed genuine power-sharing and a commission to review injustices from earlier campaigns.

Students at Peking University covered a wall with posters; Lin Xiling told crowds that the faults lay in the system itself. In Shanghai, marked on the map, workers struck over pay and conditions, and Wenhui Bao printed criticism at length. Mao was already watching the change. On 15 May he told senior officials in an internal article that “things are beginning to change”, and waited while critics revealed themselves. The invitation was becoming a record of people who could be pursued.

Deng Xiaoping, the Party’s general secretary, managed its daily business and organized the counterattack. The People’s Daily asked “What is this for?” on 8 June. On 1 July Mao’s editorial condemned Wenhui Bao and described the episode as an “open plot” to lure enemies into the light. Words offered as criticism could now serve as evidence of hostility.

About 550,000 people were labeled “rightists”, enemies of socialism, with consequences like a criminal record imposed without trial. They included sociologist Fei Xiaotong, novelist Ding Ling and Chu Anping. A punishment created in August 1957, “re-education through labour”, allowed people to be sent to camps without trial. At Hanyang, officials treated schoolchildren’s protests as a “little Hungary” and executed three adults. At Jiabiangou in Gansu, most of some 3,000 rightists died of hunger by 1961. China’s educated people had reason to conclude that silence could be 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. His successors had condemned a Communist leader’s record, shaking parties throughout the movement. Mao was uneasy about an attack on a personality cult resembling his own. He also wanted China to air grievances before they accumulated and to show that its party, unlike the Soviet party, could face criticism without collapsing.

Hungary and Poland as warnings. Polish workers forced a change of leadership in October 1956. In Hungary a rising against Communist government ended when Soviet tanks crushed it, killing some 2,500 Hungarians. Mao saw a warning about pressures that repression alone could leave to build. Allowing criticism of officials, he argued, would help the Party correct faults before China faced its own Hungary. Soviet leaders drew the opposite lesson: an opening could invite revolt.

Mao’s confidence after collectivisation. Mao’s confidence rested on recent achievements. By the end of 1956 collectivization was complete, private business had been absorbed and the First Five-Year Plan was succeeding. He believed educated people were sufficiently loyal to criticize safely, and hoped their complaints would shake up a bureaucracy he distrusted. He had underestimated the trust lost during the campaigns of the early 1950s.

Real grievances after seven years. The invitation reached people who had reasons to complain. Intellectuals had endured thought reform and the purges of 1951–55; democratic parties had titles but no power. Workers had lost benefits as firms were nationalized, while students resented assignments and admissions quotas. Once they had permission to speak, grievances accumulated since 1949 emerged faster and more sharply than the leadership had expected.

WHAT IT CHANGED

No one left to warn. The Great Leap Forward began in 1958 after economists, engineers, statisticians and journalists who might have exposed its impossible targets had been labeled, sent away or intimidated. Those experts still in office competed to praise the drive, and kept doubts private. The Anti-Rightist Campaign’s enforced silence helped make the ensuing famine possible.

Re-education through labour. From August 1957 police could use re-education through labour to send people to camps for years without trial. The power reached rightists, petty offenders and later political suspects, and remained available for later campaigns. It lasted until 2013, making it one of the Mao era’s longest-lived institutions; even in its final years it held well over a hundred thousand people.

From rightists to “right opportunists”. At Lushan in 1959 Mao called the defense minister’s criticism of the Leap “right opportunism”. A subsequent campaign purged officials across China. The method used against intellectuals in 1957 had reached the Party’s own ranks: even a senior comrade could be labeled for expressing honest doubts.

A generation of intellectuals broken. The label could shape a family’s life for decades. Some rightists spent up to twenty years in camps, villages or menial jobs, and their children carried the stigma. Many were attacked again during the Cultural Revolution. Rehabilitation in 1978–80 came too late for those who had died; survivors returned to professional life with the memory of what candor had cost.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Hundred Flowers campaign a genuine opening that failed, or a deliberate trap?

The evidence favors a genuine gamble that Mao later presented as a trap. His February 1957 speech called for discussion of disagreements; the international crisis of 1956 made reform urgent; and rectification began with real criticism of officials. These facts fit an attempt to help the Party correct itself. There is evidence for the other reading. Mao later called the episode an “open plot”, and his internal article of 15 May shows him watching critics and preparing a response before the counterattack. MacFarquhar sees a change of course in that article; Chang and Halliday see the original plan unfolding. Teiwes also stresses divisions among other leaders. The documents cannot disclose Mao’s private intentions in March 1957, so the judgment remains uncertain. For those punished, the practical result was clear: an invitation to speak had supplied evidence against them, and the next invitation would be harder to answer honestly.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Fei Xiaotong, the best-known social scientist labeled a rightist, trained in London under the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. His Peasant Life in China (1939), a study of a Yangtze delta village, remains 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 labor. Rehabilitation in 1980 allowed him to return to studying small towns and rural industry. From 1988 to 1998 he was a vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress, serving the state he had once been accused of trying to overthrow.

CHAPTER 6 · 1958–1960 · 1958

The Great Leap Forward

Mao’s Great Leap Forward sought to industrialize China in 1958–60 by mobilizing its people. He had become impatient with the Soviet model of central planning, in which ministries set factory output much as a head office assigns targets to branches. Collectivization appeared to offer another possibility: during 1955–56 family farms had been merged into cooperatives owned and worked by their members, like farmers’ cooperatives made compulsory.

The leadership’s response to caution helps explain why the new drive accelerated. In January 1958 Mao attacked Premier Zhou Enlai for his 1956 “opposition to rash advance” so fiercely that Zhou offered to resign. Meanwhile tens of millions of peasants dug irrigation works during the winter of 1957–58. Their apparent success encouraged Mao to believe that labor could substitute for capital. He described China’s people as “poor and blank” and saw poverty as an advantage: people with nothing to lose would leap.

The commune gave this ambition an institution. It could gather tens of thousands of people for dams and furnaces while directing farming, industry, schools and militia across a district—rather like a county run as a single company town. The first commune was formed in Suiping county, Henan, in April 1958 and named Sputnik after the Soviet satellite.

Mao visited model counties in three provinces in August, following the route marked by the red arrow. He praised communes and asked at Xushui what peasants would do with so much grain. At Beidaihe that month the Politburo, the inner cabinet of the Party that governed at every level, endorsed the communes and a steel target of 10.7 million tonnes, twice the 1957 output. Nearly every rural household belonged to a commune by December.

The new arrangements changed who controlled food and labor. Communal mess halls provided free meals, freeing women from cooking for work in fields and furnaces. Private plots, family pigs and village markets disappeared. A household no longer had the same means of securing its own food if the collective supply failed.

Officials faced pressure to report abundance. A modest harvest report could bring an accusation of rightism, the charge that had branded some 550,000 critics in 1957. Counties competed to launch “sputniks”, claims of yields many times those previously achieved. The 1958 harvest was announced as 375 million tonnes; the real figure was about 200 million.

Those false figures had practical consequences. The state based procurement—compulsory purchase at a fixed price, effectively a tax in grain—on the reported harvest. In 1959 it took close to two-fifths of a shrinking real harvest. Backyard furnaces meanwhile consumed pots, tools and doors and produced mostly useless iron. The campaign was taking food and useful equipment on the strength of an abundance that existed on paper.

At the Party’s mountain-resort meeting at Lushan in July 1959, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai wrote to Mao and called the problem “petty-bourgeois fanaticism”. Mao turned the disagreement into a test of loyalty. Peng was dismissed, and officials across China were punished as “right opportunists”, Party members accused of losing revolutionary nerve. A chance to stop the drive became a decision to renew it.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The easy victory of collectivisation. Collectivization had taken eighteen months and ended without the famine that followed Stalin’s. During the winter of 1957–58, tens of millions of peasants were then mobilized for irrigation. Mao took these experiences as evidence that organization and enthusiasm could accomplish in months what planners expected to take years. The cooperatives were also ready-made units for merger into communes, and officials who had raced to enroll villages in 1955 were ready to race again.

Overtaking Britain. The deadline came from rivalry within the Communist world. At the November 1957 Moscow conference of Communist parties, Khrushchev claimed that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in fifteen years. Mao responded that China would overtake Britain in steel over the same period. Steel became a measure of success in the resulting race, and the target date was brought forward repeatedly in 1958.

A Party that had silenced its critics. Economists, engineers and journalists who might have challenged impossible targets had been removed or frightened by the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Caution was dangerous inside the Party too. Mao’s January 1958 attack on Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun for “opposing rash advance” showed that even senior leaders could be humiliated. Silence at the top encouraged silence below, where the penalties for doubt were harsher still.

Mao’s faith in human will. Mao’s experience at Yan’an had convinced him that a determined, well-organized people could defeat stronger enemies. Applied to the economy, that conviction became a belief that “politics in command” and mass mobilization could substitute for capital, machinery and expertise. Close planting and deep ploughing, borrowed from discredited Soviet agronomy, were imposed everywhere as proof of revolutionary methods’ superiority to conventional science. Many agronomists who objected had been labeled rightists the previous year, removing a scientific check.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The Great Famine. The countryside began to starve in the winter of 1958–59. Private food supplies had been abolished, communal mess halls were running out and quotas rested on false harvest reports. After Lushan, requisitions were pressed harder. Between 1959 and 1961 an estimated 15 to 45 million people died in the largest famine in recorded history; provinces whose leaders had been most zealous in 1958 suffered most.

Lin Biao takes the army. When Peng fell, Lin Biao became defense minister. He built his position by promoting the study of Mao’s thought in the army, culminating in the Little Red Book of quotations in 1964. The cult unleashed during the Cultural Revolution had first been organized in the barracks after Lushan. By 1969 Lin was Mao’s named successor; two years later Mao turned against him, suspecting the army’s new power threatened his own.

Mao on the second line. Mao called his withdrawal from daily government the “second line”. In April 1959 he gave Liu Shaoqi the post of head of state, saying he wanted to concentrate on theory. When famine forced a retreat, Liu, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun managed it. Their growing authority became a source of Mao’s resentment and helped set up the struggle of 1966, when the managers of the famine became targets of the Cultural Revolution.

Khrushchev’s scorn. The Leap sharpened the quarrel with Moscow. Khrushchev mocked the communes publicly in 1959, and Mao suspected that Peng Dehuai had discussed his criticisms with Soviet leaders during a spring visit to Eastern Europe. Soviet experts were withdrawn in 1960. Each side regarded the other’s policies as a betrayal of revolution, and the alliance never recovered.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How far was Mao personally responsible for the Great Leap Forward and its failure?

Mao bears primary responsibility for the decisions that launched and sustained the Leap. He devised its central ideas, attacked cautious colleagues in January 1958, and promoted the communes and steel target. At Lushan he purged Peng Dehuai and revived the campaign while a correction was under way. Teiwes and Sun conclude that no other leader could have started or stopped it. The policy nevertheless required many participants. Wu Zhipu in Henan and Li Jingquan in Sichuan competed to exceed targets; county officials invented harvests; colleagues in Beijing remained silent about their doubts. Andrew Walder and other historians therefore stress the party-state’s incentives: a system rewarding zeal and punishing honesty would have produced inflated claims under any leader conducting such a campaign. That system helps explain why Mao’s decisions went unchallenged, while his choices remain the primary responsibility.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The “Four Pests” campaign targeted rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows, accused of eating grain. For three days in April 1958 Beijing residents banged pots, beat drums and waved flags from roofs and trees, keeping sparrows from landing until they fell from exhaustion. The birds also ate insects, and locust and pest damage worsened. Scientists including the ornithologist Zheng Zuoxin warned the leadership; in 1960 sparrows were quietly replaced on the list by bedbugs. The episode became a standard example in China and abroad of a campaign overriding expert advice.

CHAPTER 7 · 1959–1961 · 1960

The Great Famine

China’s leaders entered 1959 expecting grain that the countryside could not supply. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, begun in 1958, had sent workers from fields to furnaces and dams. Output fell from 195 million tonnes in 1957 to about 170 million in 1959, and then to about 144 million in 1960. Yet the state’s demands were based on the much larger harvests officials had reported, rather than the crops villagers actually had.

Procurement was compulsory purchase at a fixed price, in effect a tax paid in grain. In 1959 the state took close to two-fifths of the real crop, its highest share of the decade. When Guangdong officials reported early that year that peasants were hiding grain, drives to find “concealed” supplies spread. Cadres—the local Party officials who served as employer, police and tax office—searched homes and beat those who resisted. Grain continued to be collected even when there was evidence that people were hungry.

Households had little protection against this loss. Communal mess halls had replaced family kitchens in 1958, and families had surrendered their pots and stores. When the halls ran short in the winter of 1959–60, the families who depended on them had nothing left to draw on. Deaths peaked in late 1959 and 1960.

National policy was carried out by provincial and local leaders, and the results varied sharply. Anhui under Zeng Xisheng, Henan under Wu Zhipu, Sichuan under Li Jingquan, and Gansu, Guizhou and Qinghai recorded death rates three to six times normal. Provinces with more cautious leaders or more grain fared much better. In Henan’s Xinyang prefecture, officials blocked roads and punished “hiders”; around one million people died among some eight million inhabitants.

Food continued to leave places where people were starving. Sichuan, China’s most populous province, shipped grain to cities and for export along the Yangtze route traced by the red arrow. Ration cards protected city residents, and household registration tied people to one place, rather like a passport valid in only one town. China exported 4.2 million tonnes of grain in 1959, mainly to the Soviet Union, while refugees fled toward the northeast. Both a person’s location and the decisions of the officials there mattered to survival.

The leadership began to reverse course after a Party investigation exposed the deaths in Xinyang in 1960. In November the “Twelve Articles” restored private plots and small markets and reduced the size of farming units. Mess halls closed in 1961, and that year China imported about 5.8 million tonnes of grain from Canada and Australia.

Mao never admitted the scale of the catastrophe. The Party blamed drought, floods and Soviet pressure, and for decades retained the phrase “three years of natural disasters”. Poor weather affected some regions, but it cannot explain a famine of this scale. Official figures show that the population fell by about ten million in 1960 alone; historians estimate 15 million to 45 million famine deaths. Survivors and historians have spent decades trying to break the silence in Chinese public life.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Procurement based on false harvests. The state announced a 1958 harvest of 375 million tonnes, though the real figure was about 200 million. Its 1959 quotas were built on that claim. Officials who had invented the harvest could not admit the discrepancy, and to fulfill the quotas they took seed grain and food villages needed to survive. In a year when villages had least to spare, the state collected its largest share of the decade.

Households with nothing of their own. A household could once keep grain against a hard year. Under the communes, private plots and family livestock disappeared, rural markets closed, and pots and stoves were collected for furnaces. Families surrendered their reserves and relied on mess halls. When the halls ran out, they had no stores, no land of their own to dig and nothing to sell. A system meant to free people from household cares had removed their defense against hunger.

The Lushan purge silenced the alarm. Peng Dehuai’s dismissal in August 1959 changed the cost of raising an alarm. The campaign against right opportunists punished officials who questioned targets, and millions of cadres were criticized or demoted. A report of hunger or deaths implied that the Leap had failed. Instead of retreating, provincial leaders raised procurement in autumn 1959; the worst deaths followed in the winter and spring.

Cities and exports came first. The shortage had to fall somewhere. Ration cards and household registration protected a minimum supply for urban residents, shifting the burden to the countryside. China refused foreign food aid and continued exports: 4.2 million tonnes in 1959, mainly to the Soviet Union to pay for machinery and repay debts. Drought and floods worsened conditions in some regions in 1959–60, but people in the capital who would not go hungry made the political decisions about who bore the shortage.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The great retreat. Recovery required the Party to undo much of the Leap. From late 1960 it restored private plots, rural markets and smaller farming units, closed mess halls and imported grain. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun led the recovery of 1961–65; by about 1965 food production had returned to its 1957 level. The managers whose reforms saved lives would become Mao’s targets in 1966.

A wound in Mao’s authority. The disaster weakened Mao’s standing among leaders who had seen the evidence. He withdrew further from daily government and made a limited self-criticism in 1962, while privately blaming lower officials. He came to fear that colleagues might repudiate him as Khrushchev had repudiated Stalin. That fear helped shape his attack on the Party in 1966: the Cultural Revolution was, among other things, his answer to the famine’s verdict on him.

Missing births and a lasting scar. Deaths were not the only demographic loss. Births collapsed, and demographers estimate that around 30 million were lost or postponed. The cohort remains a deep notch in China’s population pyramid. Studies of people conceived in 1959–61 have also found lasting effects on health and height: the famine marked children too young to remember it.

Memory without a monument. The Party has never published a death toll. Its 1981 Resolution acknowledged “serious losses” but attributed them to errors, natural calamities and Soviet perfidy together. There is no national memorial; archives have been closed again since the 2010s, and works including Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone are banned in China. Families have often preserved memories privately, while historians have relied in part on people who recorded them at their own risk. Remembering remains political.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

To what extent was the Great Famine the result of deliberate choices by China’s leaders?

The policies were deliberate. Leaders set quotas on inflated harvests, abolished private food, purged Peng Dehuai and revived the Leap after Lushan. They protected cities, continued grain exports and refused foreign aid. The provincial variation on the map strongly suggests that local choices mattered far more than weather. A further question is whether leaders intended people to die. Dikötter argues that Mao knew of mass deaths and continued, making the famine a mass killing. Wemheuer, Ó Gráda and others see leaders accepting rural deaths as the price of their priorities without seeking them: a famine of ideology and willful blindness. Evidence of Mao’s private knowledge in 1959–60 is incomplete and disputed. The distinction is essential: deliberate policies caused the deaths, while an intention to kill is not proven. A system that punishes bad news can kill on a vast scale even when no leader wants that result.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In 1959 Yang Jisheng returned as a student to his village in Hubei and found his father dying of hunger. He says he believed the official explanation at the time. Yang, a Party member and Xinhua journalist for more than three decades, later spent over a decade gathering provincial records and interviews. The result was Tombstone, published in Hong Kong in 2008 and the most detailed history of the famine. He described its 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

In spring 1961 Liu Shaoqi spent 44 days in rural Hunan. Liu was head of state and second only to Mao in the Communist Party, which governed at every level. He found empty granaries and peasants who blamed officials and their orders for the disaster. The Great Leap Forward, Mao’s drive launched in 1958, had ended in famine; seeing the countryside helped persuade leaders that its policies had to change.

The new arrangements gave households more control over work and food. Mess halls closed, and farming units shrank to production teams of a few dozen households. Peasants could again raise pigs, cultivate private plots and sell in markets. In Anhui, Zeng Xisheng permitted “responsibility fields”: a household contracted to farm a plot and kept what it produced above a quota, rather like a tenant paying a fixed rent and keeping the rest. In July 1962 Deng Xiaoping defended such methods with a Sichuan proverb: it does not matter whether a cat is yellow or black, as long as it catches mice. With reasons to work hard again, peasants helped food production recover quickly.

The retreat also required the Party to face what had gone wrong. At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in January–February 1962, the largest working meeting of officials in its history, Mao accepted responsibility as chairman for errors at the center. Liu’s judgment was more pointed: “three parts natural disaster, seven parts man-made”. Mao accepted retreat publicly but resented it privately. By summer he was attacking household farming as a road back to capitalism.

To Mao, the danger was not confined to farming. 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”. Hidden enemies, he believed, could survive inside the Party as well as in society. The Socialist Education Movement of 1963–66 sent outside work teams to purify village leaderships. In January 1965 Mao identified the target as “those in authority within the Party taking the capitalist road”.

Mao had a secure source of support outside the Party machinery. Defense Minister Lin Biao built a cult of personality in the army, the organized worship of a living leader familiar from Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Little Red Book of Mao’s quotations and the model soldier Lei Feng helped give that loyalty a language and an example.

The map also shows why leaders feared attack from abroad. The Soviet Union and Mongolia are blue, as is India after the border war of 1962; in August 1964 the United States began bombing North Vietnam. Industry built on the coast and in the northeast during the 1950s seemed vulnerable. Mao ordered factories, mines and railways into an interior Third Front, “close to the mountains, dispersed and hidden”, much as Britain once moved factories away from wartime bombing.

The bronze outline marks the Third Front. Arrows trace steel moving from Anshan to Panzhihua, Shanghai plants to Guizhou and Sichuan, and car-making from Changchun to Shiyan. China exploded its first atomic bomb at Lop Nur in October 1964. Recovery from famine and preparation for war proceeded together.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The famine could no longer be denied. By 1960–61 Party investigators had brought evidence of mass death from Xinyang and elsewhere to Beijing, and China had to import grain from Canada and Australia. The distress was still visible in May 1962, when some 60,000 hungry people crossed from Guangdong into Hong Kong within a few weeks, along the map’s short arrow. Most were caught and sent back. Leaders needed food production to recover quickly or risk rural collapse; that urgency gave pragmatists room to change policy faster than ideology would normally have allowed.

Pragmatists in charge of the economy. Liu Shaoqi had replaced Mao as head of state in 1959, and Mao withdrew further from daily government after the famine. Liu, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai managed recovery with experts, material incentives and a concern for results. Each good harvest strengthened their authority. It also pointed to a failure of Mao’s methods, making economic success politically threatening to him.

Mao’s fear of revisionism. Mao watched Khrushchev denounce Stalin, promise Soviet citizens “goulash communism” and seek better relations with the United States. He concluded that Communist leaders themselves could restore capitalism from within the party. Chinese polemics against Moscow in 1963–64 made that argument public. Mao came to see Liu Shaoqi’s domestic policies as the same disease and launched the Socialist Education Movement as a first attempt to cure it.

Enemies on several borders. Between 1962 and 1964 China fought India, quarreled openly with the Soviet Union and watched Mongolia side with Moscow. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, the United States bombed North Vietnam. Mao feared American or Soviet bombers could destroy industry on the coast and in the northeast. The Third Front and the rush to build an atomic bomb answered that fear.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Mao turns on the Party. Mao’s suspicion came to rest on Party “power-holders” through the Socialist Education Movement and the Twenty-three Articles of January 1965. The following year he bypassed the Party machine and called on students to attack it. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, architects of recovery, became chief targets of the Cultural Revolution. Liu was expelled from the Party in 1968 and died in custody in 1969.

A cult ready to be used. By 1966 the Little Red Book was in every soldier’s pocket and Lei Feng’s diary in every school. When Red Guards rose that summer, they drew slogans, certainty and the belief that loyalty to Mao stood above loyalty to the Party from the cult Lin Biao had built in the army. Lin became its most prominent beneficiary and later its most prominent casualty.

Industry hidden in the mountains. The Third Front placed a large share of China’s new industry inland between 1965 and 1971. Steel at Panzhihua, vehicle works at Shiyan, defense plants around Chongqing and railways including the Chengdu–Kunming line remained afterward. Thousands of families were tied to remote towns for a generation. Its costs and legacies are still debated.

A baby boom after the famine. The return of food brought a surge in births. In 1963 the birth rate reached about 43 per thousand, the highest in the People’s Republic’s history; by the mid-1960s the population had passed 700 million. The boom produced the huge generation of young people who filled schools in 1966. It later pushed the state toward 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 measures that restored food production also changed the balance of authority. Private plots, markets, smaller accounting units and household contracting helped recovery by 1965, strengthening Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Mao saw each as a step toward capitalism. He remained Party chairman, retained the army’s loyalty through Lin Biao and could define what counted as socialist. Historians differ over his motives. MacFarquhar and others emphasize power and fear: Mao thought colleagues would denounce him after his death as Khrushchev had denounced Stalin. Meisner and Walder place greater weight on conviction, arguing that Mao genuinely believed bureaucrats and incentives were creating a privileged class. These explanations can fit together, since Mao saw his own authority and the revolution as one. In 1966 the recovery became evidence against its managers. A leader who retains control of the army and ideology can reverse even a successful reform led by others.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In June 1965 Mao complained that the Ministry of Health served only the urban fifteen percent of the population. He said it should be renamed the “Ministry of Urban Gentlemen’s Health”. The barefoot doctor offered one answer: a peasant received a few months of training and worked in the fields between patients. The name came from rice farmers working barefoot in flooded paddies. By the late 1970s more than a million served China’s villages, and the World Health Organization presented the scheme as a model of primary care at its 1978 conference in Alma-Ata.

CHAPTER 9 · 1966–1968 · 1967

The Cultural Revolution

Mao wanted to remake China and purge officials he called “revisionists”, but the Party he chaired was itself the obstacle. The opening came in November 1965, when a Shanghai critic attacked a play by Beijing’s deputy mayor. Mao read the play as a veiled defense of his critics. By May 1966 Beijing’s leaders had been purged, and a small Central Cultural Revolution Group, including his wife Jiang Qing, directed the campaign. It answered to Mao and bypassed the Party’s normal leadership.

The struggle over students made clear how this new authority would work. On 25 May a Peking University lecturer posted an attack on the university’s leaders, which Mao had broadcast across China. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping sent work teams to contain the students; Mao condemned the teams. His poster of 5 August, “Bombard the Headquarters”, placed the enemy inside the Party leadership. On 18 August, at the first great rally, he wore the armband of the Red Guards. These student fighting groups resembled a youth militia sworn to him. The country’s highest authority was encouraging them to rebel against the authorities below him.

Teachers felt the consequences first. On 5 August pupils beat Bian Zhongyun, deputy principal of a Beijing girls’ school, to death. Police had been told not to interfere. The attack widened to the “Four Olds”—old ideas, culture, customs and habits. Red Guards searched homes, burned books and wrecked temples, including graves at Confucius’s birthplace in Qufu. Millions traveled free by train in the “great link-up”, carrying the movement along routes like the red arrows on the map.

The young people who joined did not all have the same enemies. The first Red Guards were mostly children of officials and army officers, and they attacked people whose “bad” class labels dated from land reform. Rival rebel organizations soon arose, often drawing people from families with poor labels or grievances against their bosses. They attacked the officials themselves. Each side claimed loyalty to Mao, and each could use that claim against the other.

In January 1967 rebel workers led by Wang Hongwen took power in Shanghai in the January Storm, with Mao’s blessing. Rebels elsewhere attempted to seize Party committees. The army received orders to “support the left”, but commanders chose rival factions, which armed themselves from military stores. The contest became a civil war in miniature. In July, at Wuhan, troops loyal to the regional commander seized two envoys from Beijing while Mao was secretly in the city. The institution expected to support the revolution could itself become divided.

Mao turned to the army to impose order. Revolutionary committees brought officers, rebels and surviving officials together in provincial governments, much like emergency rule after a coup; in July 1968 Mao disbanded the Red Guards. The new committees then pursued supposed hidden enemies in the “cleansing of the class ranks”, using investigations and forced confessions. Militias and officials killed most of the movement’s dead in this purge, including at Dao county in Hunan and across Guangxi. The rebellion against the party-state gave way to repression by its new authorities.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Mao’s fear of a Chinese Khrushchev. Mao believed after the famine that Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were governing without him and leading China toward capitalism, as he believed Khrushchev had done in the Soviet Union. The Socialist Education Movement had failed to remove them; the men it threatened controlled the Party machine conducting it. Mao therefore looked outside that machine. Young people, mobilized with army backing, could purge “those in authority taking the capitalist road”.

A generation raised on the cult. The students Mao addressed in 1966 had been taught to place loyalty to him above family and teachers. Lei Feng, the Little Red Book and the cult of Mao had shaped their education. Their prospects were also narrowing: university places and city jobs were becoming harder to obtain, and entrance examinations were suspended in June 1966. When Mao said rebellion was justified, faith in him met frustrations of their own. Teachers represented the examinations and the order that judged students, and became early targets.

Grievances waiting for a target. Campaigns over seventeen years had left many people with reasons to resent those above them: families carried stigmatizing class labels, temporary workers held insecure jobs, purge victims remembered their treatment, and students resented privileged classmates. The Cultural Revolution briefly permitted attacks on authority. These grievances helped rebel factions spread, but they also gave a national campaign thousands of local and personal quarrels that proved hard to control.

An army ordered to take sides. The instruction to the army in January 1967 was to “support the left” during the power seizures. Which faction was the left? Commanders backed groups that suited them, while rivals took weapons from military depots. Posters and meetings gave way to armed conflict; some cities saw machine guns and even artillery used. With soldiers themselves taking sides, ending the fighting required Mao to decide which side the army should back.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The army becomes the government. Restoring order gave the army a commanding place in civilian government. Officers dominated the revolutionary committees; by 1969 nearly half the Central Committee wore uniform. The army ran factories, schools and ministries, and its leader Lin Biao became Mao’s designated successor. Soldiers and workers formed political work teams that took over universities, while army methods became a model for the militarized state.

The young sent away. From December 1968 Mao sent millions of urban school leavers “up to the mountains and down to the villages” to learn from peasants. Dispersing the young removed the Red Guards, the movement’s shock troops, from the cities and eased urban unemployment. By 1980 about seventeen million young people had been sent down. For most, rebellion ended in a village.

Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping destroyed. The campaign ruined both men who had led the recovery. Liu Shaoqi was expelled from the Party in October 1968 as a “renegade, traitor and scab”; denied proper medical care, he died in custody in Kaifeng in November 1969. Deng Xiaoping was sent to work in a tractor plant in Jiangxi. His son was crippled after a fall while held by Red Guards. Deng survived and would shape China after Mao.

Schools closed, heritage destroyed. The attack on the Four Olds destroyed temples, libraries, graves and private collections. Education suffered a long interruption too: secondary schools and universities stopped normal teaching in 1966, and university entrance examinations returned only in 1977. China lost a decade of trained graduates and much of its material past. Reformers in 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?

Mao supplied the initiative from above: he chose targets, licensed the Red Guards, called for power seizures and decided when to end the movement. But the people who responded had purposes of their own. Students resented privilege, temporary workers faced insecurity, families bore class labels and officials settled scores. Perry and Li Xun and Yiching Wu show rebels pursuing real grievances. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals emphasize the leader; social historians explain the society that responded to him. The ending matters as well. Walder finds that authorities, militias and army-backed committees caused most deaths in 1968–71, while rebel battles killed fewer. Mao opened the door to rebellion and decided when to close it, but millions of local choices shaped what happened between. The episode shows how an authoritarian leader can mobilize popular anger and how quickly the state can reclaim it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Mao made a political display of swimming on 16 July 1966. At 72, he floated down the Yangtze at Wuhan; the state news agency reported nearly 15 kilometres in 65 minutes, faster than any world record of the time. The current did most of the work. Newspapers carried photographs of the swimming chairman, and mass swims marked the anniversary for years afterward. Two days after the swim Mao returned to Beijing to condemn the work teams.

CHAPTER 10 · 1968–1971 · 1971

Down to the Countryside

Mao’s directive of 22 December 1968 expanded an existing, small policy into a mass movement. Sending urban youth to the countryside solved several problems at once. Schools had closed in 1966, and three years of graduates had accumulated with nowhere to go in the cities. Their departure relieved the cities of mouths to feed and removed the Red Guards, who had fought in Mao’s name since 1966, as a political force.

Mao also saw a lesson in the move. At the Communists’ wartime base at Yan’an, his own generation had learned through labor and contact with peasants; he wanted the young to acquire similar toughness and values. Some volunteered enthusiastically. Most went under pressure: refusal meant losing household registration, the internal residence permit tying a person to one place, rather like a passport valid in one town. The ration book went with it. In January 1969 fifteen-year-old Xi Jinping was sent to a cave village in northern Shaanxi. Members of this generation would later rule China.

Conditions depended on where the young people were sent. Many joined production teams, groups of a few dozen households within communes, and lived among peasants who often resented extra mouths to feed. Their work earned points paid out in shares of the harvest, yet these were too small to live on. Food, housing and permission to leave depended on cadres, local Communist Party officials who acted as employer, landlord and police at once. On army-run farms from Heilongjiang to Yunnan, young people cleared forest and marsh under military discipline.

Abuse was common. In the 1970s the state acknowledged the sexual abuse of young women by local officials. For most, education stopped; marriage and family life were delayed. The young eventually pressed to leave. In 1978–79 workers on the Xishuangbanna rubber farms struck and petitioned Beijing, while others blocked railways in Shanghai. The policy was abandoned and most returned to cities by 1980. The historian Michel Bonnin calls them a “lost generation”; their testimony shaped China’s memory of the Mao years.

Meanwhile, the force that had restored order was acquiring exceptional power. At the Ninth Congress, the Party’s national conference, in April 1969, Lin Biao was named Mao’s “close comrade-in-arms and successor”. Nearly half the new Central Committee came from the military. This ruling council of some two hundred members was roughly the Party’s national executive, and the war scare with the Soviet Union that year made the army more important still.

Mao grew suspicious of that concentration of power. 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 coup plan codenamed Project 571. When it collapsed, the family fled north from Shanhaiguan. Their plane crashed near Öndörkhaan on 13 September, killing all nine aboard. The official account made Mao’s chosen successor a traitor. For many Chinese, the supposedly infallible chairman now looked fallible.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Red Guards had served their purpose. The students Mao had hailed as the revolution’s vanguard became a problem for him. By 1968 factions fought with guns, universities such as Tsinghua had become battlegrounds, and the army was tired of policing them. In July Mao told Red Guard leaders they had failed him; workers’ propaganda teams took over campuses. Sending students to the countryside removed them from politics without admitting that the movement had gone wrong. They were now told they needed re-education.

No jobs in the cities. The cities faced a large group of school leavers without work. Two years of fighting had disrupted factories, and schools and universities had closed in 1966. The baby-boom generation born in the 1950s was leaving school, but city governments could neither feed nor employ it. Villages and frontier farms received the burden without the countryside having a say. Household registration made the transfer enforceable: refusal meant a young person could not legally live or eat in the city.

Mao’s faith in the peasant revolution. Mao’s own revolution had been won in the villages. He feared that educated city people might become a privileged class separated from the masses, and wanted peasants to teach the young while labor toughened them. The term “re-education” gave a practical measure the force of a moral duty. Parents who wanted their children home had to argue against the Chairman’s words, and opposition could look like opposition to the revolution itself.

An army that had become indispensable. The army had made itself indispensable by restoring order through revolutionary committees. The 1969 border war with the Soviet Union increased its importance. Officers filled the Central Committee, and their leader Lin Biao became Mao’s designated successor. Mao had used the army to defeat the Party, but its accumulated power now alarmed him. Lin’s position depended on Mao’s favor, and that favor could be withdrawn.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Washington becomes the answer. The Soviet threat remained on China’s northern border after Lin’s fall. Mao and Zhou Enlai accelerated their secret approach to the United States, and Nixon’s visit was confirmed within months. In October 1971 the People’s Republic took China’s seat at the United Nations. Zhou managed the crisis at home as well as the opening abroad, becoming the most powerful figure after Mao.

The soldiers sent back to barracks. Lin’s leading generals were arrested within days of the crash, and civilian Party committees regained authority in the provinces. In December 1973 Mao rotated commanders of eight military regions so that none could build a personal power base. Military government ended, though soldiers remained powerful. Mao had used the army to break the Party; now he used the Party to rein in the army.

Deng Xiaoping returns. The return of purged officials supplied Mao with experienced administrators and gave those officials a quiet constituency for ending campaigns. Deng Xiaoping became a vice-premier again in 1973 and soon ran the government for the ailing Zhou Enlai. That position made him the radicals’ main target and prepared the succession struggle that would decide China after Mao.

A generation that remembered. Sent-down youth began returning to the cities from 1978, carrying memories of lost years and skepticism about slogans. Their memoirs, stories and films, beginning with the “scar literature” of the late 1970s, shaped China’s memory of the Mao years. Village life had shown them rural poverty and how little slogans could change it. Some, including Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, later led the country.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How far did the movement to send urban youth “up to the mountains and down to the villages” achieve Mao’s aims?

The movement met its immediate political aims. Within two years millions had left the cities, dispersing the Red Guards, ending urban factional fighting and reducing unemployment. Mao also wanted young people to learn revolutionary values from peasants and narrow the gap between town and country. Here the result was much less favorable. Many peasants resented the newcomers, while most young people wanted to return home. Bonnin’s research shows the divide reinforced: their greatest wish was to recover the urban residence permits the state had taken away. Experience and memory varied with the place and the person. Some former sent-down youth found resilience and knowledge of rural poverty in those years. Strikes and protests ended the movement in 1978–79. Coercive social engineering had achieved short-term political goals while producing the opposite of the society it promised.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Li Qinglin, a primary-school teacher in Fujian, wrote to Mao in December 1972 about his son, who had been sent to a village and could not earn enough food to live on. Li reported exploitation and abuse of other young people too. Mao replied in his own hand in April 1973, in words that translate roughly as: “Comrade Li Qinglin, I am sending you 300 yuan to make up for your shortage.” He recognized that such problems existed throughout China and needed an overall solution. The letter circulated to officials; a national conference that summer raised allowances and ordered punishment for officials who abused sent-down youth.

CHAPTER 11 · 1960–1972 · 1972

From Soviet Ally to Nixon

Mao’s relationship with Stalin helps explain why the Soviet leader’s condemnation in 1956 was so unsettling. Mao had resented Stalin’s treatment of him, yet he defended Stalin’s legacy when Khrushchev attacked it in a secret speech. A personality cult—the official worship of a living leader, rather like the reverence owed a divine king—was also part of Mao’s own authority. If Stalin could be condemned for such a cult, Mao might face the same criticism.

The two governments also had different ideas about what an alliance allowed. Khrushchev proposed a joint naval fleet and a radio station on Chinese soil in 1958. Mao rejected what he saw as a return to foreign privileges, and that year shelled the Nationalist-held island of Kinmen without consulting Moscow. In June 1959 the Soviets withdrew their promise to provide a sample atomic bomb. Beijing accused the Soviet leadership of “revisionism” in 1960: abandoning revolution while keeping its name, a charge resembling heresy in a church. Khrushchev recalled every Soviet expert within weeks. Projects including the uranium works at Lanzhou were left unfinished. The parties still claimed the same faith, but disagreed over who was entitled to lead it.

China’s security problems extended beyond the Soviet alliance. In October 1962 the People’s Liberation Army, the army of China’s ruling Communist Party, attacked India in Ladakh and across the McMahon Line. Britain had drawn that Himalayan line in 1914, and China had never accepted it. Chinese forces routed the Indians, declared a ceasefire and withdrew from the northeast. They kept Aksai Chin, the plateau carrying China’s road between Xinjiang and Tibet.

On the map hostile borders were closing around China. In 1963–64 Chinese polemics called Soviet leaders traitors, while Mao spoke publicly of territories taken by the tsars. Soviet troops entered Mongolia under a 1966 treaty. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 gave Beijing another reason for alarm: Moscow claimed a right to intervene in a socialist state, a claim that might also be applied to China.

In March 1969 Chinese troops ambushed a Soviet patrol on Zhenbao Island; Soviet tanks and rockets struck back. A Chinese patrol was destroyed at Tielieketi in Xinjiang in August, and China placed its army on war alert. It now faced a nuclear superpower along its longest border without a powerful ally. This was the danger that made an approach to Washington worth considering.

Neither side moved without reasons of its own. Richard Nixon had written in 1967 that China could not remain outside the family of nations forever, and he wanted Chinese help in leaving Vietnam on acceptable terms. Four marshals advised Mao in 1969 to play the American card against Moscow. Signals followed: an American journalist stood beside Mao on the Tiananmen rostrum in October 1970; an American table-tennis team received an invitation in April 1971; and Kissinger flew secretly to Beijing in July.

In October 1971 the United Nations gave China’s seat, previously held by the Nationalist government on Taiwan, to the People’s Republic. Nixon visited in February 1972. The resulting Shanghai Communiqué acknowledged the Chinese position that there is one China. After two decades of denouncing American imperialism, Mao had found a use for American power as a counterweight to Moscow.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Mao and Khrushchev read 1956 differently. Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin and peaceful coexistence with the West suggested to Mao that Moscow was retreating from revolution. The suspicion ran both ways. In a 1957 Moscow speech Mao said socialism would triumph even after a nuclear war killed half of humanity, alarming Soviet leaders. Later disagreements were judged against these doubts. Because both claimed Lenin’s doctrine, a dispute over policy became a contest over its rightful heir.

National interests collided. An alliance did not remove the two states’ different interests. Moscow sought naval facilities in China and influence over its defense; Beijing wanted the atomic bomb and independence. Mao rejected the joint fleet and shelled Kinmen without warning Moscow in 1958. In 1959 the Soviets withdrew their promise of a sample bomb and stayed neutral in China’s border dispute with India. Requests for cooperation looked like attempts at control, and the alliance ceased to serve either side well before it formally ended.

The Leap divided the comrades. The Great Leap brought domestic and foreign disagreements together. Khrushchev mocked the communes as a Soviet mistake already tried and abandoned, while Mao believed Soviet leaders had encouraged Peng Dehuai’s criticism at Lushan. Moscow withdrew its experts in July 1960, at the height of famine, leaving many Chinese convinced that an ally had deserted them at their weakest. Beijing later blamed the famine partly on Soviet “perfidy”; that explanation also spared its leaders some blame for their own decisions.

The Brezhnev Doctrine frightened Beijing. In August 1968 Soviet tanks crushed Czechoslovakia’s reform movement. Moscow claimed a right to intervene when a socialist country strayed, and Beijing knew that Soviet leaders considered China to have strayed far. Divisions massed on the border and in Mongolia turned the Cultural Revolution’s anti-Soviet rhetoric into a military fear. China had a small nuclear force and a vast but poorly equipped army, and could not meet that threat alone.

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 set out both sides’ views and found a formula on Taiwan. Liaison offices opened in 1973, followed by full diplomatic relations in January 1979 under Deng Xiaoping. American trade, technology and students became central to the reforms after Mao.

China takes its seat at the UN. The General Assembly voted 76 to 35 on 25 October 1971 to give the People’s Republic China’s UN seat, including its permanent Security Council place. The Republic of China’s representatives left. The vote showed how many governments had awaited an American signal. Beijing saw a formal end to two decades of isolation; Taipei faced 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; the Philippines and Thailand did so in 1975. The map’s blue ring of 1964 opens in the east, even though the Soviet border remains a front line. China had escaped encirclement without settling its dispute with Moscow.

A Cold War triangle. Washington, Moscow and Beijing could now each use relations with one of the others to influence the third. The Soviet Union hurried into arms agreements with the United States in May 1972. Vietnam resented China’s dealings with its enemy and drifted toward Moscow; the rift led to a China–Vietnam war in 1979. The triangle offered China more room to maneuver than either alliance or isolation.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Why did Mao, the champion of world revolution, welcome Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972?

The Soviet threat made the opening compelling. By 1969 Moscow had invaded Czechoslovakia under a doctrine that could be applied to China, massed dozens of divisions on the border, fought at Zhenbao and Tielieketi, and sounded out Washington about a nuclear strike. Mao’s four marshals advised using the United States as a counterweight. Nixon had his own reasons to respond: he wanted leverage over Moscow and help leaving Vietnam. Domestic politics also mattered. After Lin Biao died in 1971, Mao relied more on Zhou Enlai, who favored an opening; the visit restored prestige damaged by the Cultural Revolution. Mao presented the move in revolutionary terms, as exploiting contradictions among enemies, as he had during the Second World War. Lüthi and Radchenko stress this accommodation of realpolitik within revolutionary language. For authoritarian regimes, survival usually takes precedence when it conflicts with ideology, which can then be reinterpreted.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The secret journey had the codename Polo, after Marco Polo. Pakistan’s president Yahya Khan arranged it. During a visit to Pakistan in July 1971, Henry Kissinger feigned a stomach complaint and disappeared for two days, supposedly to rest 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 with Chinese navigators. When Nixon announced the trip on 15 July, almost nobody in the American government had known about it.

EPILOGUE · 1976 · 1976

Mao’s Death and Legacy

Mao’s government could carry its decisions from the center to the villages. The Party had local organizations; campaigns enlisted citizens to accuse and police one another; and the army was loyal to the leader. This was a party-state, a system in which one party controls government at every level, rather as a company owner appoints every manager. It unified China and raised life expectancy. Yet the same reach carried disastrous decisions downward. Nothing inside the system could stop an error at the top, whether in the famine or in Mao’s assault on his own party, the Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966.

The cost chart gives ranges for the dead: one to two million 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. Together the estimates come to about 17 million to 50 million. The regime never fully counted its victims, so each figure remains a range.

Mao’s personal authority also kept competing factions in balance. After his chosen heir Lin Biao died fleeing China in 1971, Mao managed two camps. The radicals gathered around his wife Jiang Qing; in 1975 he warned her against acting as a “gang of four”. Opposite them stood veteran administrators led by Zhou Enlai and the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. Neither camp could settle the succession while Mao held authority over both.

Zhou died in January 1976. At Qingming, the festival for honoring the dead, crowds in Tiananmen Square turned mourning for him into protest against the radicals. It was the largest spontaneous demonstration of the Mao era. Militia cleared the square on 5 April, and the Politburo—the Party’s inner cabinet of about twenty—blamed and dismissed Deng once more. Mao selected the little-known Hua Guofeng as his successor.

When Mao died on 9 September, aged 82, his endorsement gave Hua a claim but no power base. Hua joined Marshal Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing, commander of the leadership’s guard unit. On 6 October they arrested the Gang of Four. The revolution ended in a palace coup by the security forces: the struggle was decided by control of the instruments of force.

The victors kept the party-state while abandoning Mao’s campaigns. Deng returned in 1977, outmaneuvered Hua and launched reforms in December 1978. Peasants at Xiaogang in Anhui had already begun dividing collective land among households. By 1984 the communes, giant collective farms created in 1958 that ran whole districts like company towns, had disappeared. The sent-down youth—urban young people sent to villages after 1968 in a kind of labor conscription—returned home along the arrows reversing their earlier journeys.

In its 1981 Resolution the Party condemned the Cultural Revolution, praised Mao’s leadership before 1957 and treated the famine as one error among others. His portrait remained on the gate and his body in its mausoleum. The state Mao built had survived him, but its leaders had abandoned much of what he believed.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A succession Mao never settled. Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao had both been chosen as successors and then destroyed by Mao. In his final years he balanced radicals against veterans without allowing either camp to win. He selected Hua Guofeng in 1976 because Hua belonged to neither. But no institution had authority to choose between the factions after Mao died. With no established rule for passing power, control of the guards and army decided the succession.

Zhou Enlai’s death and popular anger. Zhou Enlai stood for moderation and competence to many Chinese. After his death in January 1976, radical attempts to restrict mourning angered millions. At Qingming in April, wreaths and poems in Tiananmen Square praised Zhou and Deng and attacked Jiang Qing. Mourning offered a form of political expression the system could not easily forbid, and the protest showed how many people blamed the radicals for a decade of chaos and wanted it to end.

Veterans who had survived the purges. The fall of Lin Biao brought officials purged in 1966–68 back to work, including Deng Xiaoping. Army elders such as Marshal Ye Jianying, sidelined since 1967, also regained influence. They distrusted the radicals and controlled much of the army, making them ready to act after Mao’s death. Deng had already demonstrated in 1975 what restoring order might mean in the railways, steel industry and army. These veterans made a different future possible.

Exhaustion after a decade of campaigns. By 1976 output was falling, universities barely functioned, and sent-down youth wanted to return home. A decade of campaigns had exhausted the people expected to sustain them; campaigns of the 1970s such as “Criticise Lin Biao, Criticise Confucius” drew little enthusiasm. Struggle meetings, the public denunciations used in every campaign, had become wearisome. Many Party officials had been both perpetrators and victims, and wanted security more than revolution. Post-Mao leaders had broad support for ending the campaigns.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The communes dismantled. At Xiaogang and elsewhere, secret contracts from 1978 returned responsibility for plots to individual households. The communes, Mao’s central rural institution, were abolished by 1984. Once households could keep what they grew above the quota, grain output rose sharply; rural incomes grew faster in the early 1980s than in any period under Mao. The Party had returned to household farming that Mao rejected in 1962. Reform began in the province where the famine had been worst.

Verdicts reversed. The new leadership reversed some verdicts against Mao’s victims. The “rightists” labeled in 1957 were rehabilitated from 1978; Liu Shaoqi was cleared posthumously in 1980. The Gang of Four were tried on television in 1980–81, and Jiang Qing’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Famine victims received no comparable public acknowledgment and the archives remain restricted. The state chose which victims it could afford to remember.

A generation comes home. At the end of 1977 close to nine million sent-down youth, urban young people sent to villages after 1968, remained in the countryside. Most returned between 1978 and 1980, but the cities lacked jobs for all of them. The state allowed small private shops and stalls, the first private enterprise since the 1950s. Others passed the university examination restored in 1977 and entered the professions. This generation supplied the reform era’s first private traders and first graduates.

Mao still on the gate. Mao remains prominent in places where the state honors him: his portrait hangs above Tiananmen, his face appears on every regular banknote issued since 1999, and his body lies in a mausoleum on the square. Millions visit his birthplace, Shaoshan, each year. This official remembrance is selective, and his legacy remains contested inside and outside China.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Should Mao’s rule be judged chiefly by what it built or by what it cost?

The achievements are substantial. Mao’s rule left a country unified after a century of division, heavy industry and nuclear weapons, widespread literacy, life expectancy raised by roughly twenty-five years, and a state strong enough to support growth after 1978. The cost was also immense. Campaigns and famine killed about 17 million to 50 million people, most in a famine caused by policy, and persecuted tens of millions more. Dikötter and Chang and Halliday put the cost first; Meisner and Short give achievements more weight. Walder’s account of the party-state and Drèze and Sen’s comparison with India direct attention to the system that produced both gains and deaths. That matters for the judgment. Neither achievement nor death can simply be offered as the price of the other. Many later achievements, from rural health to industry, were attained elsewhere without famine. The regime had real capacity, but lacked the accountability needed to correct its decisions. Power without correction magnified both success and error.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Each year before National Day on 1 October, the portrait above the Gate of Heavenly Peace is replaced with a freshly painted copy. It is about six metres high and weighs around one and a half tonnes; Ge Xiaoguang has painted the copies since 1977. In 1980 Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked Deng Xiaoping whether the portrait would remain, as reformers reconsidered Mao’s record. Deng said it would stay forever: Mao had founded the Party and state, and his mistakes did not cancel that.