China after WWII

The civil war that raged between the nationalists and the communists picked up again as soon as the Second World War ended. By 1949, Mao Zedong mobilized millions of peasants in the north who swept down and drove the nationalists out of power. The nationalist government fled to Taiwan and set up the Republic of China while Mao’s China became the People’s Republic of China. To this day, each claims to be the real China, although the People’s Republic of China was officially recognized in 1973 by the United Nations and the United States.

After seizing power in 1949, Mao set out reforming China with his version of the Soviet Five Year Plan. Productivity went up, especially in steel production. Then in the late 1950s Mao implemented his Great Leap Forward, a plant to create huge collective communes which would be truly class-free. Agricultural production dropped; communes could not meet the ridiculously high quotas and there was much corruption at the local level. It turned out to be a Great Leap Backward—an estimated 30 million peasants died of starvation.

The failure was in part due to the Soviet withdrawal of aid to China. The Soviets wanted to be the lead in world communism. Moreover, Mao was horrified by the De-Stalinization campaign brought about by Khrushchev.

Without Soviet military aid, Mao turned his attention to building up his military. Thus occupied, moderates began to reform the economy. A measure of capitalism was introduced and the gains were immediate. China created an atom bomb. Production increased.

But Mao was not impressed. Feeling the nation was straying from the pure communist path, Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966 in order to purge China of all Western intellectual influence to destroy the growing elite class that had followed the economic gains of recent years. Universities were shut down, lawyers, professors and intellectuals were sent to collective farms to get “cultural retraining.” Dissidents were rounded up and massacred. When universities reopened their curriculum included on communist studies.

The cultural revolution was a disaster too. When Mao finally died in 1976 Deng Xiaoping quickly changed the educational and economic policies of Mao. China adopted many aspects of free-market capitalism and has been one of the fastest growing economies in modern times. However, its government remains authoritarian. In 1989, as communism was disintegrating in Europe and Russia, 1 million students protested their government in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. It was ruthlessly put down; hundreds of students were gunned down. China continues to grow economically, but the prospect for political reform is unknown.

Changes to China’s society

Confician order in China	Communist society in China
Confucianism valued large families	It became one’s patriotic duty to have only 1 child.
Family farms	Collectivization of farms
Patriarchy	Women gained right to divorce, own property, equal pay, professional careers, foot-binding seen as barbaric