R3.12 The People’s Republic of China (1949–2020)

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed by Mao Zedong in Beijing on 1 October 1949, after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) won the civil war against the Guomindang (Kuomintang). In seventy years it went from a poor, war-damaged peasant country to the world’s second-largest economy, under the same ruling party throughout, but through policies so different that the China of 1966 and the China of 2006 can look like two separate states.

The timeline of the People’s Republic divides its history into the Mao era, the reform era and the Xi era. The Mao era itself swung between periods of construction (1949–1957, 1962–1965) and periods of upheaval (the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution). The rise of the communists before 1949 is a regional study of its own; here the story begins with the new state.

Building the party-state, 1949–1954

China in 1949

The new state inherited a country exhausted by almost forty years of war: the warlord era, the war against Japan (1937–1945) and the civil war (1946–1949). Industry was small and concentrated in Manchuria and a few coastal cities, prices were rising out of control, and around 80 per cent of the population of about 540 million were peasants. The Guomindang government of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) had withdrawn to the island of Taiwan with about two million soldiers and civilians, and still claimed to be the government of all China.

The CCP had two great assets. It had a disciplined party of about 4.5 million members, hardened by the Long March and the Yan’an years, and an army that had just defeated the Guomindang. It also had wide support among peasants, who expected land, and among many patriotic students and intellectuals, who hoped that a strong government would end foreign humiliation and corruption.

“New Democracy” and the people’s democratic dictatorship

Mao did not announce an immediate move to socialism. The Common Programme, adopted in September 1949 by the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, served as a temporary constitution. It described a period of New Democracy in which four classes would work together under the leadership of the working class and the Communist Party: workers, peasants, the urban petty bourgeoisie (small traders and professionals) and the “national bourgeoisie” (Chinese capitalists who had not collaborated with Japan or the Guomindang). Eight small “democratic parties” were allowed to exist, and some non-communists held ministerial posts.

Mao had explained in advance what this coalition meant. In an essay published for the party’s twenty-eighth anniversary he answered critics who accused the communists of wanting a dictatorship.

Who are the people? At the present stage in China, they are the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. … Democracy is practised within the ranks of the people, who enjoy the rights of freedom of speech, assembly, association and so on. The right to vote belongs only to the people, not to the reactionaries. The combination of these two aspects, democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, is the people’s democratic dictatorship.

Mao Zedong, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship”, essay published on 30 June 1949 (Selected Works, vol. 4, official English translation). Mao wrote it three months before the PRC was founded, to reassure the classes the party needed while warning its enemies. The source shows that the party, not the law, would decide who belonged to “the people”. That definition could change, and in the campaigns of the 1950s landlords, then many capitalists, and in 1957 many intellectuals were moved from “the people” to the “reactionaries”.

The structures of power

Real power lay with the party. Mao was chairman of the CCP (a post he held from 1943 until his death), chairman of the new Central People’s Government and head of the military commission that controlled the army. Zhou Enlai, a skilful administrator and diplomat, was premier and foreign minister. Liu Shaoqi, the party’s leading organiser, and Zhu De, the army’s commander-in-chief, completed the inner leadership.

The diagram of the party-state shows the chain of command. For the first five years China was divided into six large regions run by military-administrative committees, most of them led by army commanders, because large areas of the south and west had only just been conquered. In 1954 the regions were abolished, and the first National People’s Congress adopted a state constitution on 20 September 1954. The constitution created the post of chairman of the People’s Republic (Mao) and a State Council (Zhou), and listed citizens’ rights, but it confirmed the leading role of the Communist Party.

At the base of the system, the party organised the population into units it could watch and mobilise. In the cities, most people belonged to a danwei (work unit), which provided jobs, housing, rations and permission to marry or travel. Street committees covered everyone else. From 1958 the hukou system of household registration tied every person to a place of residence, and mass organisations such as the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and the All-China Women’s Federation carried party policy to their members.

Control of the People’s Liberation Army

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) numbered about five million in 1950. It completed the conquest of the mainland, suppressed resistance in the south-west, and ran much of the country until civilian government was established. Every unit had a political commissar and a party committee, so that, in Mao’s phrase, the party commanded the gun. Mao himself never held a military rank after 1949, but his authority over the senior commanders, most of whom he had led since the 1930s, was the basis of his power.

The army also extended the state’s borders. In October 1950 the PLA defeated the Tibetan army at Chamdo, in eastern Tibet, and in May 1951 representatives of the Dalai Lama’s government signed the Seventeen-Point Agreement in Beijing. It recognised Chinese sovereignty over Tibet while promising that its political system and the Dalai Lama’s position would not be changed. The Chinese government presents the agreement as the “peaceful liberation” of Tibet; the Tibetan government in exile, which repudiated it in 1959, argues that it was signed under military pressure. Xinjiang, in the north-west, had already come under PLA control in late 1949.

The first purge: Gao Gang and Rao Shushi

The first open split in the leadership came in 1953–1954. Gao Gang, the party chief of Manchuria and head of the State Planning Commission, and Rao Shushi, head of the party’s organisation department, were accused of plotting to replace Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai as Mao’s deputies. Gao may have believed he had Mao’s encouragement. In February 1954 both were denounced at a party meeting; Gao killed himself in August 1954 and Rao spent the rest of his life in prison. The affair showed that Mao would protect the existing leadership team when he chose to, and that losing his favour could be fatal. It also ended the semi-independent regional power bases of the early years.

Mass campaigns and the consolidation of power, 1950–1957

The CCP governed through the mass campaign, a burst of mobilisation aimed at one goal or one enemy. A campaign was announced from Beijing, explained through newspapers, loudspeakers and meetings, and carried out by work teams of cadres who organised public meetings, denunciations and confessions. Each campaign drew ordinary people into the work of the state, made them commit themselves publicly, and taught everyone where the line between “people” and “enemies” lay. The vertical timeline of the campaigns shows how their targets changed.

Suppressing counter-revolutionaries, 1950–1953

The first target was anyone who might resist the new order: former Guomindang officials and soldiers, members of secret societies, bandits, religious sects and “local tyrants”. The Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries began in 1950 and became much harsher after China entered the Korean War in October 1950, when fear of a Guomindang return with American help was real. Mass trials were held in stadiums and executions were often public. Mao told party leaders in 1957 that about 700,000 people had been executed in 1950–1952; some historians put the total, including deaths in custody and in the land reform, at well over a million. Many more were sent to the laogai (“reform through labour”) camps.

The Three-Antis and Five-Antis, 1951–1952

The Three-Antis campaign (late 1951) was aimed at the party’s own officials and at the managers of state enterprises: it attacked corruption, waste and “bureaucratism”. Many former Guomindang officials kept on in government, and new cadres who had moved from the villages to the cities, were found guilty of taking bribes or misusing state funds.

The Five-Antis campaign (from January 1952) turned on the private business class, the “national bourgeoisie” that New Democracy had promised to protect. It targeted five “poisons”: bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts and stealing state economic information. Employees were encouraged to denounce their employers at mass meetings, and businesses were investigated and fined. Thousands of business owners killed themselves, especially in Shanghai. By the end of 1952 most private firms were weakened, in debt to the state or dependent on state contracts, which prepared the way for their takeover in 1955–1956.

Thought reform and the intellectuals

Intellectuals were not class enemies, but the party distrusted their liberal or Western education. From 1951 university teachers, writers and scientists took part in thought reform: study groups in which they read Marxist texts, wrote self-criticisms of their past ideas and were criticised by colleagues until their confessions were accepted. In 1952 the universities were reorganised on the Soviet model, and departments such as sociology were closed. In 1955 the writer Hu Feng, a Marxist critic who had asked for more freedom for writers, was denounced in a national campaign and imprisoned; the campaign widened into a search for “hidden counter-revolutionaries” in every work unit.

Why the campaigns consolidated power

By 1953 the campaigns had removed or frightened every group that could challenge the party: the landlords in the villages (through land reform, explained with the economic changes), the remnants of the Guomindang, the secret societies, the independent business class and the independent-minded intellectuals. Just as important, they had drawn hundreds of millions of people into public acts of support. Those who denounced a landlord or an employer were bound to the new order, since its fall would expose them to revenge.

The Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaign, 1956–1957

Why Mao invited criticism

In May 1956 Mao proposed a new policy for the arts and sciences, summed up in a classical phrase: “let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”. At first intellectuals, remembering Hu Feng, said little. Several developments in 1956 led Mao to push the policy further.

• The economy. The First Five-Year Plan needed engineers, scientists and teachers, and the party wanted their active cooperation, not fearful silence.

• Confidence. The “socialist transformation” of agriculture and business in 1955–1956 had gone faster than expected. Mao believed class enemies were now defeated and that the remaining problems were “contradictions among the people” that could be settled by discussion.

• Eastern Europe. Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of February 1956 denounced Stalin, and in October 1956 revolts broke out in Poland and Hungary. Mao argued that the Hungarian rising had happened because the Hungarian party had cut itself off from the people; open criticism would let China’s party correct its faults before discontent exploded.

• Bureaucracy. Mao disliked the arrogance and privileges of party officials and saw outside criticism as a way to discipline them, a theme that returned in the Cultural Revolution.

In a long speech on 27 February 1957, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”, Mao described letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend as the policy for promoting progress in the arts and sciences. In April the party launched a rectification campaign and asked non-party people to help by criticising it.

The criticism of May–June 1957

Between about 1 May and early June 1957 the criticism was far sharper than Mao expected. At Peking University students covered a “Democracy Wall” with posters. Leaders of the small democratic parties proposed that they share power. Critics attacked party officials’ privileges, the copying of Soviet methods, and the party’s monopoly of every post. The most famous speech came from the editor of the Guangming Daily, a newspaper for intellectuals.

Chu Anping, editor-in-chief of the Guangming Daily and a member of a small democratic party, spoke at a forum organised by the United Front Department on 1 June 1957; the speech is usually cited in English as “The Party Dominates the World”. He said that intellectuals had welcomed the party after 1949 but that relations between the party and the masses had deteriorated, and he blamed the habit of treating the country as the party’s possession (dang tianxia, “the world belongs to the party”), arguing that leading a nation is not the same as owning it. Chu spoke at a meeting the party itself had called to invite criticism, so he believed he had permission. His point went to the heart of the one-party state. Within weeks he was named one of the leading “rightists”; he disappeared in 1966 and is presumed to have died during the Cultural Revolution.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign

On 8 June 1957 the People’s Daily published an editorial that marked the end of the Hundred Flowers. The Anti-Rightist Campaign, organised by Deng Xiaoping as the party’s general secretary, labelled critics as “rightists”, enemies of socialism. Work units were given quotas of rightists to find. The official figure, published after 1978, is about 550,000 people; some historians believe the true number was considerably higher. Rightists lost their jobs, were sent to labour camps or the countryside, and passed on their label to their families. Nearly all of them were rehabilitated after 1978.

When the speech on contradictions was published in the People’s Daily on 19 June 1957, it had been revised. The published text added six criteria for telling “fragrant flowers” from “poisonous weeds”: words and actions had to help unite the people and benefit socialist transformation, and in particular strengthen the leadership of the Communist Party. The revised speech turned an invitation to speak into a set of limits that justified the punishment of those who had spoken.

A trap or a miscalculation?

Historians disagree about Mao’s intentions. In an editorial for the People’s Daily on 1 July 1957, Mao himself claimed that the party had let the “poisonous weeds” grow so that they could be identified and uprooted, and he called this an open strategy, not a plot. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Mao: The Unknown Story, 2005) take him at his word and argue that the campaign was a deliberate trap to expose critics. Roderick MacFarquhar (The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals, 1960, and The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 1, 1974) and Maurice Meisner argue that Mao genuinely wanted controlled criticism after the shock of Hungary, overestimated the intellectuals’ loyalty, and claimed afterwards that he had planned the outcome to save face.

The evidence for a miscalculation includes Mao’s repeated public pressure on intellectuals to speak, the opposition of other leaders such as Liu Shaoqi to the campaign, and the fact that the February speech was revised before publication. The evidence for a trap rests mainly on Mao’s own later statements, which were made when he needed to explain away a failure. Many historians conclude that Mao’s motives changed as events developed.

Land reform, collectivisation and the First Five-Year Plan, 1950–1957

The Land Reform Movement, 1950–1952

The Agrarian Reform Law of 30 June 1950 extended to the whole country the land reform the CCP had carried out in its northern base areas since the 1940s. Party work teams entered each village, classified every household as landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant, poor peasant or labourer, and organised the poor to “speak bitterness” against landlords at public meetings. The land, tools and animals of landlords were redistributed, so that roughly 300 million peasants received some land. Estimates of the landlords and others killed range from several hundred thousand to two million or more.

The movement had political purposes as much as economic ones. It destroyed the landlord-gentry class that had dominated rural China for centuries, replaced it with poor-peasant activists and party branches, and bound the beneficiaries to the party. Economically it gave most households a small plot of their own, and grain output rose by about 45 per cent between 1949 and 1952 as order returned, as the grain output chart shows.

From private plots to cooperatives, 1951–1956

Land reform created millions of small family farms, which the party saw as a stage, not a goal. Marxist theory held that small private farming would recreate rich and poor peasants, and the state needed a reliable grain surplus to feed the cities and pay for industry. In November 1953 it introduced the unified purchase and sale of grain: peasants had to sell their surplus grain to the state at fixed low prices, and private grain trade was banned.

Collectivisation came in stages. First, neighbouring households formed mutual aid teams that shared labour and animals. Next came elementary cooperatives, in which land was pooled but members were paid partly according to the land they had contributed. In July 1955, against the caution of other leaders, Mao demanded a “high tide” of cooperation and mocked officials who moved slowly as walking like a woman with bound feet. By the end of 1956 about 96 per cent of peasant households were in advanced cooperatives, collective farms of a whole village or more, in which members were paid only for their labour, through work points. In the same years nearly all private industry and commerce was converted into joint state–private enterprises, with former owners paid a small fixed interest. Mao called the whole process the socialist transformation.

The First Five-Year Plan, 1953–1957

The First Five-Year Plan followed the Soviet model: central planning, priority for heavy industry, and investment financed by holding down consumption, especially in the countryside. The USSR provided loans, blueprints and thousands of advisers for 156 major projects, among them the steelworks at Anshan and Wuhan, the First Automobile Works at Changchun, which produced its first trucks in 1956, and the bridge across the Yangtze at Wuhan (1957).

Data: State Statistical Bureau, official figures (rounded); the census of 1953 counted 583 million people.

By official figures industrial output grew by about 18 per cent a year, and even sceptical Western estimates accept very fast growth from a low base. The weakness of the plan was agriculture, which received little investment and grew by only about 4 per cent a year, barely ahead of population. With grain procurement already squeezing the villages and the cities growing, Mao concluded that the Soviet model was too slow and too dependent on experts and bureaucrats. This judgement led directly to the Great Leap Forward.

The Great Leap Forward, 1958–1962

Aims and ideas

The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s plan to industrialise China and reach communism by mass mobilisation instead of capital. Its slogan was “more, faster, better, more economical”. In November 1957, in Moscow, Mao announced that China would overtake Britain in steel output within fifteen years; by 1958 the timetable had shrunk to a few years. The Second Five-Year Plan (1958–1962) was overtaken by targets announced at party meetings and raised again and again.

The Leap rested on three ideas. Labour could replace capital: China’s hundreds of millions of under-employed peasants could build dams, irrigation works and small factories. Political enthusiasm, not experts, would drive production, so “red” mattered more than “expert”. And larger collective units would release productive energy. The anti-rightist purge of 1957 had silenced the economists and engineers who might have objected.

The communes, the steel campaign and the harvests

In the spring of 1958 cooperatives in Henan merged into the first people’s commune. In August 1958, at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, the leadership approved communes nationwide and doubled the steel target for 1958 to 10.7 million tonnes. Within months almost the whole rural population was organised into communes that ran farming, industry, militia, schools and local government, with communal mess halls in which food was free.

The steel campaign drew perhaps 90 million people into building and running small backyard furnaces. The official target was declared met, but much of the iron and steel was too brittle to use. Peasants were also taken from the fields for huge water-conservancy projects. At the same time, pseudo-scientific farming methods influenced by the ideas of the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, such as very close planting and very deep ploughing, lowered yields. The Four Pests campaign against rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows killed so many sparrows that insect plagues damaged crops.

Under pressure to show results, commune and county officials reported enormous harvests. The state based its grain procurement on these figures, so it took a much larger share of a smaller harvest. China continued to export grain and to repay its debts to the USSR. When food in the mess halls ran out in 1959, peasants could not leave because of the hukou system, and those who hid grain or complained were beaten or denied food.

Lushan and the second leap

In July 1959, at a party conference at Lushan, the defence minister Peng Dehuai sent Mao a private letter describing the waste and false reporting. Mao denounced Peng as the leader of an “anti-party clique”, replaced him with Lin Biao, and launched the Anti-Right Deviation Campaign against officials who had questioned the Leap. The conference turned a policy failure into a catastrophe: from 1959 no official dared to report shortages, and the Leap was pushed further in 1960. In April 1959, before Lushan, Mao had handed the post of head of state to Liu Shaoqi, though he remained party chairman.

The thematic study of authoritarian rule treats Peng’s challenge and the famine’s effect on daily life in depth; here the point is the economic consequence. Grain output fell from about 200 million tonnes in 1958 to about 144 million in 1960 (official figures), and industry collapsed when Soviet experts left in 1960.

The grain output chart shows the size of the collapse and how long recovery took. The famine of 1959–1961 was the deadliest in recorded history. In Xinyang prefecture in Henan, where officials claimed record harvests and pushed procurement hardest, perhaps a million people died in 1959–1960. Estimates of excess deaths range from about 15 million, in some Chinese demographic work, to 45 million, in Frank Dikötter’s study of party archives (Mao’s Great Famine, 2010); most scholarly estimates fall between about 30 and 40 million, including the journalist Yang Jisheng’s figure of about 36 million in Tombstone (2008). The range comes from different methods and assumptions about the normal death rate. The famine was worst in provinces such as Anhui, Henan, Sichuan and Gansu, where leaders pursued the Leap most zealously and procurement was heaviest.

Retreat and recovery, 1961–1965

By 1961 Mao accepted a retreat. At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in January–February 1962, the largest party meeting ever held, Liu Shaoqi told the delegates that the disaster had been mostly man-made, quoting peasants in his home province of Hunan who said it was three parts natural disaster and seven parts human error. Mao made a limited self-criticism. Liu, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and the planner Chen Yun then dismantled much of the Leap: the mess halls closed, communes were divided into smaller production teams that became the real units of farming, private plots and rural markets returned, and in some provinces households were allowed to farm land under contracts.

The economy recovered by 1965. Grain output returned to the 1957 level, industry grew again, and the new Daqing oilfield, discovered in 1959, made China self-sufficient in oil. Mao promoted Daqing and the Dazhai production brigade in Shanxi as models of self-reliance, but he saw the household contracts and markets as a return to capitalism. Deng was reported to have defended them with a Sichuan proverb about cats: it did not matter whether a cat was yellow or black as long as it caught mice. These differences fed directly into the Cultural Revolution.

From 1964, fearing war with the United States or the USSR, Mao also ordered the Third Front: the building of heavy industry, arms factories and railways deep in the interior, in provinces such as Sichuan and Guizhou. For about fifteen years it absorbed a large share of national investment. It gave the interior an industrial base, but many plants were placed in remote valleys for security and were inefficient.

Women, education, healthcare and religion under Mao

The CCP promised a social revolution as well as an economic one. Its record is mixed: in some areas, such as basic health and literacy, the gains were among the largest of any poor country in the twentieth century; in others, such as religion and higher education, the state destroyed more than it built. The table of social policies sets out the main measures, their achievements and their limits.

Women and the Marriage Law of 1950

The Marriage Law, which came into force on 1 May 1950, was one of the new state’s first laws. It banned arranged and forced marriages, concubinage, child betrothal and bride price, made monogamy compulsory, set minimum marriage ages, and gave women the right to divorce and to own and inherit property. In the early 1950s hundreds of thousands of divorces were granted, most of them at the request of women, and in 1953 the party ran a month-long campaign to publicise the law. Resistance in the villages, where marriage tied families and property together, was strong, and the campaign was scaled back to avoid alienating male peasants.

Women’s working lives changed more than their family lives. Women entered factories and offices in the cities, and during the Great Leap Forward they were mobilised in huge numbers for farm work while men went to the furnaces and dams; Mao’s saying that “women hold up half the sky” became an official slogan. During the Cultural Revolution the propaganda image of the “Iron Girls”, young women doing heavy labour equal to men, was promoted as a model. Yet women usually earned fewer work points than men for a day’s labour, kept responsibility for housework and children, and remained rare at the top of the party: Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, owed her power to her marriage.

Education

In 1949 perhaps four in five Chinese adults could not read. Winter schools and literacy classes for peasants and workers, the spread of primary schools to most villages, and the simplification of Chinese characters (a first list in 1956, extended to more than 2,000 characters by 1964) made literacy easier to acquire. The pinyin system of writing Chinese in the Latin alphabet, adopted in 1958, was used to teach pronunciation. By the census of 1982 adult illiteracy had fallen to about a third.

Secondary and higher education swung with politics. In the 1950s universities were reorganised on the Soviet model, with specialist institutes for engineering and science. The aim was graduates who were both “red and expert”, but in the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution political loyalty was placed above expertise. From 1966 universities stopped admitting students; when they reopened in 1970–1972 they took “worker-peasant-soldier students” chosen by recommendation, not examination. National entrance examinations returned only in 1977.

Healthcare

Public health was one of the regime’s clearest successes. Mass Patriotic Health Campaigns from 1952 mobilised the population to clean streets and wells, kill pests and get vaccinated. The campaign against schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease carried by snails in the waterways of the Yangtze region, involved draining and burying snail habitats by hand. From 1965 Mao ordered that resources be shifted from city hospitals to the countryside, and from 1968 the barefoot doctors, peasants with a few months of training, provided vaccinations, first aid and basic medicines in the villages, funded through the communes’ Cooperative Medical System. Life expectancy roughly doubled between 1949 and 1976 despite the famine.

Religion and Tibet

The party was atheist, but it did not try at first to abolish religion. It aimed to cut religious bodies off from foreign influence and bring them under state control. Foreign missionaries were expelled in the early 1950s. Protestants who accepted the new order joined the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating churches, launched in 1951 and formally organised in 1954), and the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (1957) broke with the Vatican. Buddhist and Islamic associations were founded in 1953. Believers who refused, such as the Protestant preacher Wang Mingdao and the Catholic bishop of Shanghai, Gong Pinmei, were imprisoned.

In Tibet, the reforms imposed in Tibetan areas of Sichuan and Qinghai in the mid-1950s led to armed revolt, which spread to Lhasa. In March 1959 the uprising in Lhasa was crushed, and the Dalai Lama fled to India with tens of thousands of followers. The Tibet Autonomous Region was formally created in 1965. During the Cultural Revolution most temples, churches and mosques across China were closed, damaged or destroyed, and religious practice survived only in private. Limited freedom of religion was restored after 1978, and a party directive of 1982 known as Document 19 set out a policy of tolerating registered religion under state supervision while discouraging belief among party members.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976

The Cultural Revolution was a movement launched by Mao in 1966 to purge the party of leaders he accused of “taking the capitalist road” and to renew the revolutionary spirit of the young. It turned into a decade of political violence, factional war and persecution that the party itself later judged the most severe setback since 1949. Its official name, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, reflected Mao’s claim that the struggle was over ideas and culture, the “superstructure” that he believed could restore capitalism even after the economy had become socialist.

Causes

The diagram of causes groups the explanations by timescale. Mao had long believed in continuous revolution: that class struggle continued under socialism, and that without new upheavals a privileged class of officials and experts would emerge. The Soviet example seemed to prove it. After Khrushchev denounced Stalin and called for peaceful coexistence with the West, Mao accused the Soviet leaders of revisionism, abandoning revolution for comfort and compromise, and he feared that Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were China’s Khrushchevs.

There was also a struggle for power. After the Great Leap, Mao withdrew to what he called the “second line”, leaving daily government to Liu and Deng. Their recovery policies worked, and their authority grew. Mao’s attempt to regain the initiative through the Socialist Education Movement (1962–1966), a campaign against corruption and “capitalist” tendencies in the countryside, was steered by Liu towards punishing local cadres, not the leadership. Meanwhile Lin Biao, Peng Dehuai’s successor as defence minister, turned the PLA into a school of Mao Zedong Thought. In 1964 the army published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, the Little Red Book, and the party urged the whole country to “learn from the PLA”. The army and the cult gave Mao a base outside the party machine.

The trigger came from culture. In November 1965 a Shanghai critic, Yao Wenyuan, attacked a historical play by Wu Han, a historian and deputy mayor of Beijing. The play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, told of an upright Ming official dismissed for criticising the emperor, and Yao, with Mao’s backing, claimed it was a disguised defence of Peng Dehuai. When the Beijing party leadership tried to keep the debate academic, Mao treated this as proof that the party was protecting his enemies.

Launching the movement, 1966

The May 16 Notification of 1966 dissolved the group that had handled the Wu Han affair and created a new Cultural Revolution Group, including Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, his former secretary Chen Boda, the security chief Kang Sheng and the Shanghai radical Zhang Chunqiao. On 25 May a philosophy lecturer at Peking University, Nie Yuanzi, put up a big-character poster attacking the university’s leaders, and Mao had it broadcast nationally. Students across the country formed Red Guard groups. In July, Mao swam in the Yangtze at Wuhan to show his vigour, and in August he wrote his own poster, “Bombard the Headquarters”, which effectively accused Liu Shaoqi and Deng of leading a bourgeois dictatorship. On 8 August the Central Committee adopted the movement’s programme.

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a comeback. … At present, our objective is to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” …

Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (the Sixteen Points), 8 August 1966 (Peking Review, 12 August 1966, official English translation). The document was the official programme of the movement, drafted under Mao’s direction and adopted by a Central Committee meeting that Red Guard representatives attended and that many members missed. Its targets were deliberately vague: it did not name the “persons in authority”, so students and workers had to decide for themselves whom to attack, which helps to explain why the violence spread so widely.

Red Guards and the “four olds”

Between August and November 1966 Mao reviewed eight huge rallies of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, attended by more than ten million young people who travelled free on the railways. Red Guards attacked the four olds (old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas): they renamed streets, smashed temples and statues, burned books and searched homes. Teachers, writers, officials and people with “bad” class labels were humiliated, beaten and paraded in dunce caps at struggle sessions. In Beijing alone about 1,800 people were killed in August and September 1966, a period remembered as “Red August”. Many victims, among them the writer Lao She, took their own lives.

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Seizures of power, factional war and the army, 1967–1968

In January 1967 rebel workers in Shanghai, led by Zhang Chunqiao and the young factory worker Wang Hongwen, overthrew the city’s party committee in the January Storm. Mao approved, and across China rebels seized power. The new authority in each province and workplace was a revolutionary committee, combining rebels, army officers and “revolutionary cadres”. The rebels soon split into rival factions, each claiming to be the true followers of Mao, and in 1967–1968 they fought each other with weapons seized from army depots. In the Wuhan incident of July 1967 a local army commander’s troops and their allies detained two envoys sent from Beijing, a sign that the army itself was divided.

Mao ordered the PLA to “support the left” and restore order, and by 1968 it had become the real government of much of China. In mid-1968 Mao told the Red Guard leaders that they had failed him. From December 1968 he sent millions of urban secondary-school students “up to the mountains and down to the villages” to learn from the peasants, a policy that removed the Red Guards from the cities; about 17 million young people had been sent down by 1980. The most deadly phase for ordinary people came after the Red Guards’ defeat, in the “cleansing of the class ranks” of 1968–1971, when revolutionary committees and army units hunted alleged traitors and spies.

Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao and the struggle for succession

The vertical timeline of the Cultural Revolution shows how it destroyed the leadership. Liu Shaoqi, head of state since 1959, was attacked at mass meetings, expelled from the party as a “traitor” in October 1968, and died in custody in Kaifeng in November 1969, denied medical treatment. Deng Xiaoping was sent to work in a tractor plant in Jiangxi. Peng Dehuai was beaten in custody and died in 1974. At the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969, Lin Biao was written into the party constitution as Mao’s successor, and the army dominated the new Central Committee.

Lin’s rise did not last. Mao grew suspicious of his ambitions, especially after Lin’s allies pressed in 1970 for the restoration of the post of head of state. On 13 September 1971 Lin, his wife and his son fled by air towards the Soviet Union, and their plane crashed in Mongolia, killing everyone on board. The official account says that Lin’s son had planned a coup and an attempt on Mao’s life, code-named “Project 571”; many details remain unclear because the archives are closed. The affair shocked the public: Mao’s chosen successor and “closest comrade in arms” was now a traitor.

The last years of Mao’s life were a contest between two groups. Zhou Enlai and the veteran cadres he protected tried to restore order and the economy, and in 1973 Deng was brought back, becoming first vice-premier in 1975. The radicals around Jiang Qing, later named the Gang of Four (with Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen), controlled propaganda and culture, and used campaigns such as “Criticise Lin, Criticise Confucius” (1973–1974) as veiled attacks on Zhou. When Zhou died in January 1976, crowds laid wreaths for him in Tiananmen Square at the Qingming festival in April; their removal led to the Tiananmen Incident of 5 April, which the radicals blamed on Deng, who was purged again. In July 1976 the Tangshan earthquake killed at least 240,000 people (official figure). Mao died on 9 September 1976.

The cult of personality

The cult of personality around Mao had roots in the Yan’an rectification of the early 1940s, when his writings became party doctrine, but it reached its peak in the Cultural Revolution. Over a billion copies of the Little Red Book were printed, and billions of Mao badges were produced. Red Guards and workers performed “loyalty dances”, began the day by asking Mao’s portrait for instructions, and shouted “Long live Chairman Mao”, literally “ten thousand years”, a phrase once used for emperors. Lin Biao, who had built the cult in the army, called Mao’s words “spiritual atom bombs”.

The poster of 1967 shows how the cult worked as a political weapon. By presenting Mao as the source of all correct ideas, it allowed young people to attack any official in his name, even the head of state, without the party’s permission. The cult therefore served a purpose beyond flattery: it let Mao go around the party machine and speak directly to the masses. After 1971 the cult was scaled back, partly because the army had been its main promoter.

The impact of the Cultural Revolution

• Human cost. Estimates of deaths range from about 500,000 to 2 million or more. Andrew Walder and Yang Su, using official county histories, estimated in 2003 that between about 750,000 and 1.5 million people were killed in rural China alone; tens of millions were persecuted, imprisoned, or sent to labour or the countryside.

• Politics. Most of the party leadership of 1966 was purged; the party organisation was paralysed until about 1969 and the army became the main governing body. Mao kept his position but lost his designated successors one after another.

• Education and culture. Schools closed for up to several years and universities for longer; a generation lost its education. Cultural life was reduced to Jiang Qing’s eight “model operas” and a few approved works; temples, archives and historic buildings were destroyed.

• Economy. Industrial output fell in 1967–1968 because of factional fighting, but grew again from 1969, and the economy as a whole grew modestly over the decade. Agriculture was less disrupted than industry.

• Society. Families were divided by denunciations, and trust between neighbours and colleagues was badly damaged. For the sent-down youth the experience was often bitter, but it also showed many of them the poverty of the countryside, which shaped the reformers of the 1980s.

Foreign policy under Mao, 1949–1976

Mao’s foreign policy had three constant aims: to secure China’s borders and its territory (including, in his view, Taiwan and Tibet), to end the century of humiliation by foreign powers and win recognition as a great power, and to support revolution abroad. How he balanced these aims changed dramatically, from alliance with the USSR in 1950 to near war with it in 1969 and a new relationship with the United States in 1972.

“Leaning to one side”: the Soviet alliance

In the same essay of June 1949, Mao declared that China would “lean to one side”, the side of socialism and the Soviet Union, since a third road between imperialism and socialism did not exist. In December 1949 he travelled to Moscow, his first journey abroad, and after two months of difficult talks with Stalin he signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance on 14 February 1950. The USSR promised military help if China were attacked by Japan or its allies and a loan of 300 million US dollars over five years. In return Stalin kept, for a time, Soviet rights over the port of Lüshun (Port Arthur) and the Manchurian railway, and won joint companies in Xinjiang. Mao resented the terms, which recalled the unequal treaties of the past.

The Korean War, 1950–1953

In June 1950 North Korea, with Stalin’s approval, invaded South Korea. After United Nations forces under the American general Douglas MacArthur landed at Inchon and crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea in early October, Mao persuaded a reluctant Politburo to intervene. His reasons included the fear of American troops on the Yalu River, on the border of Manchuria, China’s industrial heartland; obligations to the Korean communists, many of whom had fought in China’s civil war; the wish to prove China’s new standing; and the hope that the war would strengthen Soviet support. The commander was Peng Dehuai.

The Chinese People’s Volunteers, as the force was called to avoid a formal declaration of war, attacked from late October 1950 and drove UN forces back south of the 38th parallel. After 1951 the war became a stalemate, and the armistice of July 1953 left Korea divided near the pre-war line. About three million Chinese served in Korea in rotation. Chinese official figures give about 180,000 dead; some Western estimates are more than twice as high. One of the dead was Mao’s eldest son, Mao Anying. The course of the war as a regional conflict is a subject of its own; for China, its effects were these:

• Prestige. A new and poor state had fought the world’s strongest power to a standstill, which raised its standing in Asia and at home.

• Taiwan. In June 1950 the United States sent its Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, ending any chance of a communist invasion of Taiwan. China remained excluded from the UN, under a US trade embargo, and diplomatically isolated from the West for two decades.

• The Soviet relationship. China bought Soviet arms on credit and became dependent on Soviet aid, but resented that it had to pay for weapons used in a war fought partly in Soviet interests.

• At home. The “Resist America, Aid Korea” campaign mobilised the population and justified the suppression of counter-revolutionaries and the pressure on business owners.

Peaceful coexistence and the Taiwan Strait, 1953–1958

After Korea, Zhou Enlai led a more flexible diplomacy. At the Geneva Conference of 1954, China helped to negotiate the division of Vietnam. In the same year China and India agreed the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence: mutual respect for territory and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. At the Bandung Conference of Asian and African states in April 1955, Zhou won goodwill by stressing what the new nations had in common.

Over Taiwan, however, Mao used force. In 1954–1955 and again in August 1958 Chinese artillery shelled the Guomindang-held islands of Jinmen and Mazu close to the mainland. The first crisis led the United States to sign a mutual defence treaty with the Republic of China in December 1954, and American leaders spoke openly of using nuclear weapons. In both crises Mao pulled back short of invasion. The 1958 shelling, launched without consulting Moscow, alarmed Khrushchev.

The Sino-Soviet split

The Sino-Soviet split developed in stages from 1956 to 1969. Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of February 1956 denounced Stalin without consulting Beijing, and his policy of peaceful coexistence with the West clashed with Mao’s view that imperialism should be confronted. At a conference of communist parties in Moscow in November 1957, Mao called the United States a “paper tiger” and alarmed his hosts by suggesting that China could survive a nuclear war. Khrushchev’s visits to Beijing in 1958 and 1959 ended badly, and he criticised the communes.

The diagram of causes shows the strands that came together. In June 1959 the USSR withdrew its promise to give China a sample atomic bomb, and in the border clash between China and India later that year it stayed neutral, which Beijing saw as betrayal. In July 1960 Khrushchev withdrew about 1,390 Soviet experts, taking their blueprints with them, in the middle of the Great Leap crisis. At the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in October 1961, Zhou Enlai walked out after Khrushchev attacked Albania, China’s ally. From 1963 the two parties attacked each other in public letters, and China built its own nuclear weapons: an atomic bomb in October 1964 and a hydrogen bomb in June 1967.

Rivalry became military confrontation. China claimed that 19th-century treaties had taken about 1.5 million square kilometres of Chinese territory for Russia, and the USSR built up its forces along the border and in Mongolia. In March 1969 Chinese and Soviet troops fought on Zhenbao (Damansky) Island in the Ussuri River, with dozens killed on each side, followed by clashes on the Xinjiang border in August. For some weeks a Soviet strike on Chinese nuclear sites seemed possible, until Zhou and the Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin met at Beijing airport in September 1969.

China, the non-aligned movement and the Third World

China did not join the Non-Aligned Movement, founded at Belgrade in 1961, but it competed for the leadership of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa against both superpowers and against India. Zhou toured ten African countries in 1963–1964. China gave aid and arms to liberation movements and governments, most famously by building the TAZARA railway between Tanzania and Zambia (1970–1975) with an interest-free loan. In 1974 Mao set out his Three Worlds Theory: the first world was the two superpowers, the second their developed allies, and the third the developing countries, among which China counted itself. Deng Xiaoping presented the theory to the United Nations in April 1974. The Cultural Revolution damaged this diplomacy: in 1967 Red Guards burned the British mission in Beijing, and all but one of China’s ambassadors were recalled.

The Sino-Indian War, 1962

Relations with India, warm in the mid-1950s, broke down over the border and over Tibet. China built a road across Aksai Chin, a high plateau claimed by India, to link Xinjiang and Tibet, and India discovered it in 1957–1958. In the east, China rejected the McMahon Line, the border drawn by British India and Tibet at Simla in 1914, which it saw as an imperialist imposition. India gave asylum to the Dalai Lama in 1959, and from 1961 its “forward policy” set up military posts in disputed areas.

On 20 October 1962 the PLA attacked in both sectors and quickly defeated Indian forces. On 21 November China declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew in the east to behind the McMahon Line, while keeping Aksai Chin. India lost about 1,400 soldiers killed by its own official figures and China about 700. The victory secured China’s strategic road and showed its military strength; it also pushed India towards both superpowers, damaged China’s image among non-aligned states, and led China to a close partnership with India’s rival, Pakistan, with a border agreement in 1963. How the war looked from India, and its consequences there, belongs to the history of independent India.

Rapprochement with the United States

For twenty years Beijing and Washington had no diplomatic relations. The United States recognised the Republic of China on Taiwan, kept the PRC out of the UN, enforced a trade embargo and fought China’s ally in Vietnam. The two sides kept a thin line of contact through ambassadorial talks, in Geneva from 1955 and in Warsaw from 1958. By 1969 both had reasons to change course. Mao feared a Soviet attack more than an American one and wanted to end China’s isolation. President Richard Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger wanted Chinese help in ending the Vietnam War and a way to put pressure on Moscow.

Small signals came first. In April 1971 the American table-tennis team, at the world championships in Japan, was invited to visit China, an episode known as ping-pong diplomacy. In July 1971 Kissinger flew secretly to Beijing to arrange a presidential visit. On 25 October 1971 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 2758, giving China’s seat, including its permanent seat on the Security Council, to the PRC and expelling the representatives of Taiwan. Nixon visited China from 21 to 28 February 1972.

The visit ended with the Shanghai Communiqué, in which each side set out its own views, often in opposite terms, before stating what they agreed.

The U.S. side declared: The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.

Joint Communiqué of the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China (the Shanghai Communiqué), 28 February 1972. The wording was negotiated line by line by Kissinger and Zhou Enlai. The United States “acknowledges” the Chinese position without saying that it agrees, which allowed both governments to claim success and left Taiwan’s status open. The careful ambiguity shows the purpose of the document: to begin a strategic partnership against the USSR without settling the issue that divided the two states.

Japan recognised the PRC in September 1972, and many Western states followed. Full diplomatic relations with the United States came only in 1979, after Mao’s death. The opening was a major success for Mao’s China: it ended isolation, reduced the Soviet threat and won a seat among the great powers. But it also showed how far ideology now gave way to national interest, which shocked some of China’s allies, such as Albania and North Vietnam.

The table of foreign policy weighs the main episodes. By Mao’s death China was a nuclear power with a permanent seat on the Security Council and relations with most of the world, but it had fought or broken with both of its large neighbours, and its economy was still too weak to support great-power status.

The struggle for power after Mao, 1976–1981

Hua Guofeng and the fall of the Gang of Four

Mao’s chosen successor was Hua Guofeng, a little-known former party leader of Hunan who had become premier after Zhou’s death and first vice-chairman of the party in April 1976. According to Hua, Mao had written to him, “With you in charge, I’m at ease.” Hua had little support of his own. Less than a month after Mao’s death, on 6 October 1976, he struck first: with the backing of the veteran marshal Ye Jianying and of Wang Dongxing, head of the unit that guarded the leadership, he had the Gang of Four arrested at a meeting. Hua became chairman of the party and of its Military Commission as well as premier.

Hua’s legitimacy rested entirely on Mao, so he could not reject Mao’s legacy. A joint editorial of February 1977 set out what became known as the two whatevers: the party would firmly uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao had made and unswervingly follow whatever instructions he had given. Hua kept the cult alive, built Mao’s mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, and launched an over-ambitious Ten-Year Plan (1976–1985) based on imports of foreign plant, which soon ran into debt.

The return of Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping had been a party leader since the 1930s, general secretary from 1956 to 1966, purged twice and restored twice. Senior veterans, many of them victims of the Cultural Revolution, pressed for his return, and in July 1977 he was restored to his posts. Deng avoided attacking Hua head-on. Instead he attacked the principle behind the two whatevers: if Mao’s words were always right, Deng himself, purged by Mao in 1976, should not be in office.

In May 1978 the Guangming Daily published an article, “Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth”, prepared with the support of Hu Yaobang, a Deng ally who ran the Central Party School. It argued that ideas, including Mao’s, had to be tested against results. The article was a direct challenge to Hua, and the debate it started gave Deng’s supporters a way to criticise Mao-era policies while still claiming to follow Mao Zedong Thought.

The vertical timeline of 1976–1987 shows how the contest was settled. At the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in December 1978, the party declared that class struggle was over as its main task and that economic modernisation was now the priority. This is usually taken as the start of the reform era. Hua kept his titles for a while but lost his power: Zhao Ziyang, a reformer from Sichuan, replaced him as premier in 1980, and Hu Yaobang as party chairman in June 1981. Deng never held the top party or state post. He ruled as paramount leader through his prestige, his allies, and his chairmanship of the Central Military Commission (1981–1989).

Democracy Wall and the Four Cardinal Principles

In the winter of 1978–1979, on a stretch of wall in central Beijing, people put up posters criticising the Cultural Revolution and asking for justice for its victims. Deng at first tolerated this Democracy Wall, which helped him against Hua. The most radical poster, signed with his name and address by Wei Jingsheng, an electrician at the Beijing Zoo and a former Red Guard, argued that the Four Modernisations of agriculture, industry, defence and science would mean nothing without a fifth.

Wei Jingsheng, “The Fifth Modernization: Democracy”, wall poster, Beijing, 5 December 1978. Wei, a disillusioned former Red Guard, argued that without democracy, the fifth modernization, the other four could not be achieved and would bring ordinary people no benefit. He rejected rule by a saviour or a leader with personal ambitions, and in a later poster he warned that Deng could become a new dictator. He wrote in the party’s own language of modernisation, which is why the poster was a serious challenge to it. Wei was arrested in March 1979 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Deng drew the limits of reform in a speech on 30 March 1979. Modernisation, he said, required four basic principles to be upheld in thought and politics.

We must keep to the socialist road. We must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat. We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party. We must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

Deng Xiaoping, “Uphold the Four Basic Principles”, speech to a party conference on theory, 30 March 1979 (Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 2, official English translation). The speech was given the day after Wei’s arrest, and it explained the closing of Democracy Wall. Read beside Wei’s poster, it shows the bargain of the reform era: economic change was welcome, but the party’s monopoly of power was not open to debate. The vagueness of the principles let the party decide case by case what counted as an attack on them.

Judging Mao: the 1981 Resolution

The new leadership needed a verdict on Mao that would allow it to reverse his policies without undermining the party he had led. The Gang of Four were tried in 1980–1981 in a televised trial; Jiang Qing, who defended herself by saying she had been Mao’s dog and bit whomever he told her to bite, was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. In June 1981 the Central Committee adopted a long resolution on party history.

Comrade Mao Zedong was a great Marxist and a great proletarian revolutionary, strategist and theorist. It is true that he made gross mistakes during the “cultural revolution”, but, if we judge his activities as a whole, his contributions to the Chinese revolution far outweigh his mistakes. His merits are primary and his errors secondary.

Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, 27 June 1981, paragraph 27 (official English translation). The resolution was drafted over more than a year under Deng’s close supervision. It called the Cultural Revolution the cause of “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses” since 1949 and blamed Mao for launching it, but it blamed the Gang of Four and Lin Biao for its worst crimes and kept Mao Zedong Thought as party doctrine. The balance is often summed up informally, in a formula associated with Deng, as Mao being 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong. The verdict closed the debate on Mao inside China, which is why public discussion of the Great Leap famine and the Cultural Revolution remains limited there.

The 1982 constitution limited the president and premier to two five-year terms, the post of party chairman was abolished in favour of a general secretary (Hu Yaobang from 1982), and many elderly cadres were retired to an advisory commission. These changes aimed to prevent another Mao by making leadership collective and limited in time. Deng’s own informal power showed the limits of that aim.

Reform and opening: the Four Modernisations, 1978–1997

The Four Modernisations were the modernisation of agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology. Zhou Enlai had first proposed them in 1963 and repeated the aim in 1975; under Deng they became the programme of the whole party. What was new after 1978 was the method: Deng and his allies used markets, material incentives and foreign capital, which Mao had condemned as capitalist, while keeping state ownership of most large industry and the party’s monopoly of power. They called the result “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, a phrase Deng used in 1982.

Agriculture: from communes to family farms

The first and most successful reforms came in the countryside, and they began from below. In late 1978 the eighteen households of Xiaogang village in Anhui, one of the provinces worst hit by the famine, secretly divided their collective land into family plots and agreed to deliver the state’s quota, keeping the rest. Provincial leaders, among them Wan Li in Anhui and Zhao Ziyang in Sichuan, protected such experiments. Their harvests rose, and Beijing first tolerated and then spread the household responsibility system. By 1983 almost all of China’s farm households worked under it, and the communes were dissolved in 1983–1984, their government functions passing to townships.

The state also raised the prices it paid for grain by about 20 per cent in 1979 and allowed sales above the quota at market prices. Grain output rose from about 305 million tonnes in 1978 to about 407 million in 1984, and rural incomes more than doubled over the same years. Rural factories run by townships and villages, the township and village enterprises (TVEs), absorbed surplus labour and by the early 1990s produced a large share of China’s industrial output.

Industry, prices and the opening to the world

Industrial reform was slower and harder, because state-owned enterprises employed most urban workers and provided their housing, health care and pensions. Managers were given more freedom and allowed to keep some profits. From 1984–1985 a dual-track pricing system let enterprises sell output above the plan at market prices while plan goods kept fixed prices. Barry Naughton calls this “growing out of the plan”: the market sector expanded around the planned one instead of replacing it at once, as happened in Russia in 1992. But the gap between the two prices let officials with access to cheap plan goods resell them at market prices, a form of corruption known as guandao (“official profiteering”).

The opening to the world began with four Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in 1980: Shenzhen next to Hong Kong, Zhuhai next to Macau, and Shantou and Xiamen opposite Taiwan. In the zones foreign firms could invest with lower taxes and fewer controls, and Shenzhen grew from a small border town into a city of millions. In 1984 fourteen coastal cities were opened, Hainan Island became a province and SEZ in 1988, and the Pudong district of Shanghai was opened in 1990. Most early investment came from overseas Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which moved labour-intensive factories to the mainland.

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Problems of the 1980s

Reform brought growth of about 10 per cent a year in the 1980s, but also new problems. Inflation rose as prices were freed; when the leadership announced in 1988 that most price controls would be lifted, panic buying and runs on banks followed, and official inflation reached about 18 per cent for the year. Corruption grew with the dual-track system. Workers in state enterprises feared for their “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment, and students and intellectuals, whose salaries lagged behind the new private traders, resented the privileges of officials’ children.

Politically, reform swung between relaxation and tightening. Conservatives such as Chen Yun and the ideologist Deng Liqun attacked Western influences in the campaign against “spiritual pollution” (1983) and that against “bourgeois liberalisation” (1987). When students demonstrated for democracy in several cities in December 1986, Deng blamed Hu Yaobang for being too lenient, and Hu was forced to resign as general secretary in January 1987. Zhao Ziyang replaced him and proposed separating the party from the government at the 13th Party Congress in October 1987, but little was done before 1989.

Tiananmen Square, 1989

Causes

The diagram of causes shows how economic and political grievances met. Hu Yaobang, seen by students as a reformer who had been treated unjustly, died of a heart attack on 15 April 1989. Students gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn him, and the mourning turned into demands: for the leaders to reassess Hu, publish their incomes, allow a free press and talk to students as equals. On 26 April a People’s Daily editorial, based on Deng’s remarks, called the movement “turmoil” planned by a small number of people. The next day well over 100,000 students marched through Beijing in defiance.

Course of the protests

The vertical timeline of the protests shows how the movement grew as the leadership divided. On 13 May several hundred students began a hunger strike in the square, timed to coincide with the visit of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the first Sino-Soviet summit in thirty years. The summit, meant as a diplomatic triumph, took place amid crowds of up to a million people, many of them workers and Beijing residents, and the welcome ceremony had to be moved from the square.

In these bright and beautiful days of May, we are beginning a hunger strike. … Prices are soaring, official profiteering is rampant, power is concentrated in the hands of the few, …

Hunger strike declaration, Tiananmen Square, 13 May 1989 (translation from the Asia for Educators collection, Columbia University). The declaration was written to win public sympathy, so it uses patriotic and emotional language and lists grievances that workers and residents shared, such as rising prices and corruption, as much as the students’ own demand for dialogue. Its list is useful evidence that economic and political causes were bound together, and its demands were limited: an equal dialogue with the government and recognition that the movement was patriotic, not the overthrow of the party.

Workers formed independent organisations, such as the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation, which the government treated as a more serious threat than the student groups. The leadership was split. Zhao Ziyang wanted to withdraw the “turmoil” label and negotiate; the premier Li Peng and the party elders wanted firmness, and Deng sided with them. On 19 May Zhao visited the hunger strikers before dawn and told them, with tears, that he had come too late. He was never seen in public again. On 20 May martial law was declared in Beijing, but crowds of residents stopped army convoys entering the city. On 30 May art students raised a statue, the “Goddess of Democracy”, facing Mao’s portrait.

The crackdown of 3–4 June

On the night of 3–4 June troops from several armies forced their way into central Beijing with tanks and armoured vehicles. Most of the killing took place on the avenues leading to the square, especially in the west of the city at Muxidi, where soldiers fired on crowds who tried to block them. The students who remained in the square negotiated their departure early on 4 June. On 5 June a lone man stood in front of a column of tanks on Chang’an Avenue; the photographs of “Tank Man” became one of the best-known images of the twentieth century, though in China they are censored.

The number of dead is not known and remains politically sensitive. The government said soon afterwards that about 200–300 people had died, including several dozen soldiers. Other estimates range from several hundred to over a thousand civilians in Beijing; the Tiananmen Mothers, a group founded by Ding Zilin, whose son was killed, have documented the names of about 200 victims. A British diplomatic cable of June 1989, released in 2017, reported a claim of about 10,000 deaths, a figure most historians regard as far too high. Protests also took place in about 400 other cities, including Chengdu, where many were killed. Arrested workers were treated more harshly than students, and some were executed.

Consequences

• Leadership. Zhao was dismissed and kept under house arrest until his death in 2005. Jiang Zemin, party secretary of Shanghai, who had handled the protests there without bloodshed, became general secretary in June 1989.

• Political reform. The separation of party and state was abandoned. The party concluded that division at the top had nearly destroyed it, and the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe later in 1989 and of the USSR in 1991 confirmed that lesson for its leaders.

• Legitimacy. The party rested its claim to rule more heavily on economic growth and on nationalism. A patriotic education campaign from 1991 stressed China’s humiliation by foreign powers and the party’s role in national revival.

• Foreign relations. The United States and the European Community imposed sanctions, including an arms embargo that the EU still maintained in 2020, but most economic sanctions were lifted within a few years.

• Memory. Public discussion of June 1989 is banned in mainland China. Until 2020 the largest commemoration took place each year in Hong Kong.

For three years after 1989 conservatives slowed reform. In January–February 1992, at the age of 87 and holding no office, Deng made his Southern Tour to Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai, praising the SEZs and warning that those who opposed reform should step down. The tour relaunched reform. In October 1992 the 14th Party Congress declared that China’s aim was a socialist market economy, and growth reached about 14 per cent in 1992. The post-1989 settlement was now clear: rapid economic change, but no political liberalisation.

Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and the Three Represents, 1989–2012

Jiang Zemin in power

Jiang Zemin was general secretary from 1989 to 2002, state president from 1993 to 2003 and chairman of the Central Military Commission until 2004. He was not expected to last, but after Deng’s death in February 1997 he held all three top posts securely, and he handed them on in 2002–2004 without a purge. His premier from 1998, Zhu Rongji, drove the hardest economic reforms of the period: thousands of loss-making state enterprises were closed, merged or sold, and tens of millions of workers were laid off (xiagang, “stepped down from their posts”) between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, mostly in the old industrial north-east.

Jiang’s years also saw the return of Hong Kong from Britain on 1 July 1997 and of Macau from Portugal in December 1999, both under the formula of “one country, two systems”. They also saw new forms of repression. In April 1999 about 10,000 followers of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement based on breathing exercises and moral teachings, gathered silently outside the leadership compound at Zhongnanhai in Beijing. The government banned it in July 1999 as an “evil cult” and detained many thousands of its members; human rights groups have documented torture and deaths in custody, which the government denies.

The Theory of the Three Represents

Jiang’s contribution to party ideology was the Three Represents, first set out during a tour of Guangdong in February 2000 and written into the party constitution at the 16th Congress in November 2002. It stated that the party must always represent the development requirements of China’s advanced productive forces, the orientation of its advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people.

The theory had a practical purpose. By the late 1990s private business produced a growing share of China’s wealth, and private entrepreneurs were the most dynamic group in society. In a speech on 1 July 2001, the party’s eightieth anniversary, Jiang proposed that they be allowed to join the party, which had been forbidden since 1989. The Three Represents turned a party of workers and peasants into one that claimed to represent the whole nation, including capitalists, and brought the new business elite inside the system instead of leaving it as a possible source of opposition.

Hu Jintao and the “harmonious society”

Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang as general secretary in 2002 and president in 2003, the first transfer of power in the PRC planned years in advance and carried out on schedule. With the premier Wen Jiabao, Hu tried to address the costs of growth under the slogans of the “scientific outlook on development” and a “harmonious society”: the agricultural tax, paid by peasants for over two thousand years, was abolished from 2006, rural schooling was made free, and a rural health insurance scheme was introduced. The Beijing Olympics of 2008 showcased China’s rise.

Hu’s years also brought ethnic unrest. In March 2008 protests in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas turned violent and were suppressed; in July 2009 riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, between Uyghurs and Han Chinese killed nearly 200 people according to official figures. In 2012 the fall of Bo Xilai, the ambitious party secretary of Chongqing, whose wife was convicted of murdering a British businessman, exposed rivalry and corruption at the top just before the succession.

China’s emergence as an economic power

From the Asian financial crisis to the WTO

In the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998, when the currencies of Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea collapsed, China did not devalue the yuan. It won goodwill in the region and showed that its economy, protected by capital controls, could withstand outside shocks. Its next step was to bind itself to world trade rules. After fifteen years of negotiation, and a bilateral agreement with the United States in November 1999, China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) on 11 December 2001.

Membership required China to cut tariffs, open sectors such as banking and telecommunications to foreign firms, and protect intellectual property. Zhu Rongji and other reformers used these commitments to force change on reluctant state enterprises and ministries. In return, China gained secure access to foreign markets. The result was an export boom: China became “the world’s factory”, the largest exporter in the world in 2009, and the largest manufacturer by 2010.

The chart of Chinese and Japanese GDP shows how China’s growth accelerated after it joined the WTO. In 2010 China overtook Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. Its foreign exchange reserves, built up from trade surpluses, peaked at nearly 4 trillion US dollars in 2014. When the global financial crisis of 2008 cut demand for exports, the government launched a stimulus of 4 trillion yuan, mainly through state banks lending for infrastructure, including the world’s largest high-speed railway network.

Benefits and costs

Data: World Bank, World Development Indicators and Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China (2022); National Bureau of Statistics of China.

Historians and economists disagree about who deserves the credit. Ezra Vogel (Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, 2011) presents Deng as the architect of reform. Kate Xiao Zhou (How the Farmers Changed China, 1996) argues that peasants drove the early reforms by breaking the rules. Yasheng Huang (Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, 2008) argues that the private, rural entrepreneurship of the 1980s was reversed in the 1990s by a state-led, urban model that favoured state firms and foreign investors. Some scholars, such as Chris Bramall, add that the Mao era laid foundations, such as a literate and healthy workforce and an industrial base, without which the reform boom would have been slower.

The rural–urban divide and migration

The hukou system, created in 1958, divided Chinese into rural and urban residents with different rights to housing, schooling, health care and pensions. Reform loosened the rule that people must stay where they were registered, but did not abolish it. From the 1980s, hundreds of millions of rural people left the villages to work in the factories and building sites of the coast without changing their registration. These migrants form a floating population, and the National Bureau of Statistics counted about 290 million migrant workers in 2019.

Migrant workers built the export economy, but as non-residents they usually could not use urban schools or welfare, and they lived in dormitories or crowded rented rooms. Many left their children with grandparents in the villages: surveys in the 2010s counted roughly 60 million left-behind children. The death in police custody in 2003 of Sun Zhigang, a young graduate detained in Guangzhou because he was not carrying his papers, caused public outrage and led the government to abolish the system of “custody and repatriation” of migrants. Reforms announced in 2014 eased hukou rules in small and medium cities but not in the largest ones.

China’s urban population rose from about 18 per cent of the total in 1978 to about 60 per cent in 2019 (World Bank figures). Growth was concentrated on the coast, leaving the interior behind; the Western Development Strategy of 2000 directed investment to the western provinces, including Xinjiang and Tibet, partly to reduce this gap. In the countryside, local governments took farmland for development, often with little compensation, and land disputes were a main cause of the tens of thousands of “mass incidents” (protests) recorded each year by the 2000s. In 2011 the villagers of Wukan in Guangdong drove out their officials over land sales and were allowed to elect new leaders, though the experiment was later reversed.

Population control and the one-child policy

Mao had encouraged large families in the 1950s, arguing that people were China’s greatest asset, but by the 1970s the leadership feared that population growth would swallow the gains of development. A campaign under the slogan “later, longer, fewer” (later marriage, longer gaps between births, fewer children) began in the early 1970s and was strikingly effective.

The chart of China’s fertility rate shows that the number of births per woman more than halved during the 1970s, before the one-child policy began. In September 1980 an open letter from the Central Committee asked party and Youth League members to set an example by having only one child, and the limit was then applied to most couples. Susan Greenhalgh (Just One Child, 2008) has shown that the policy was shaped by missile scientists, led by Song Jian, who used projections to argue that only a one-child limit could keep the population near 1.2 billion by 2000.

The policy was enforced through fines, loss of jobs and benefits, and pressure from family-planning officials who had targets to meet. In the national campaign of 1983, official statistics recorded about 14 million abortions and roughly 20 million sterilisations, many of them coerced. There were exceptions: from 1984 rural couples whose first child was a girl could usually have a second (the “1.5-child policy”), and ethnic minorities were generally allowed more children. Enforcement varied widely by place and time.

The consequences were profound. The preference for sons, combined with sex-selective abortion once ultrasound scanning spread in the 1980s, raised the sex ratio at birth to about 117–118 boys per 100 girls in the censuses of 2000 and 2010, against a natural level of about 105. Millions of girls were abandoned, hidden from registration or adopted abroad, as Kay Ann Johnson documents in China’s Hidden Children (2016). Families became “4-2-1” families, with four grandparents, two parents and one child, and the population began to age quickly. The government allowed all couples two children from 1 January 2016, but births kept falling.

Demographers debate how much the policy itself achieved. Martin King Whyte, Wang Feng and Cai Yong (2015) argue that most of the fall in fertility came in the 1970s and would have continued with economic development, as it did in other East Asian societies, so the human cost of the one-child policy bought little. The Chinese government long claimed that the policy prevented about 400 million births, a figure these demographers reject.

The rise and early rule of Xi Jinping, 2012–2020

Rise to power

Xi Jinping was born in 1953, the son of Xi Zhongxun, a veteran revolutionary and vice-premier who was purged in 1962 and later helped to launch the Shenzhen SEZ. As the child of a senior leader, Xi is often called a princeling. During the Cultural Revolution his father was imprisoned and Xi was sent down to a village in Shaanxi, where he lived for about seven years. He then rose through provincial posts in Hebei, Fujian, Zhejiang and, briefly, Shanghai, and was chosen as Hu Jintao’s successor at the 17th Congress in 2007. He became general secretary and chairman of the Central Military Commission in November 2012, and state president in March 2013.

The Chinese Dream and the anti-corruption campaign

Within weeks of taking office Xi spoke of the Chinese Dream, the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, which would restore China to the wealth and power it had lost in the nineteenth century, with 2049, the centenary of the PRC, as the target date. The slogan joined the party’s legitimacy to national pride.

His first major policy was an anti-corruption campaign led by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection under Wang Qishan. It targeted both “tigers” (senior officials) and “flies” (low-level cadres). By the party’s own figures more than 1.5 million officials were disciplined in the first five years. The highest-ranking victim was Zhou Yongkang, the former head of the security apparatus and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2015. The campaign was popular, since corruption was a real grievance, but critics noted that it also removed Xi’s rivals and made officials afraid to act without central approval.

Centralisation and control

Xi reversed the move towards collective leadership of the Deng era. He chaired new “leading small groups” on reform, security, the economy and the internet, and in October 2016 the party named him its “core”. At the 19th Congress in October 2017 “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” was written into the party constitution, an honour given to a leader still in office only to Mao before him. In March 2018 the National People’s Congress removed the two-term limit on the presidency, allowing Xi to stay in office beyond 2023.

Ideological control tightened. A party circular of 2013 known as Document No. 9 warned against “Western constitutional democracy”, “universal values”, civil society and press freedom. In July 2015 more than 200 human rights lawyers and activists were detained in what became known as the “709 crackdown”. Internet censorship and surveillance were extended, and foreign-funded non-governmental organisations were placed under police supervision by a law of 2016. The military was reorganised in 2015–2016 to strengthen Xi’s command.

Xinjiang and Hong Kong

These policies were applied most severely in the frontier regions. In Xinjiang, after violent attacks blamed on Uyghur separatists in 2013–2014, the government launched a “strike hard” campaign. From about 2017 large numbers of Uyghurs and other Muslims were held in what the government calls “vocational education and training centres”. Researchers such as Adrian Zenz, using government documents, satellite images and leaked records, estimated that up to a million or more people had been detained, and in 2018 a UN human rights committee cited credible reports of a similar number. Testimony from former detainees and leaked documents describe political indoctrination, forced labour and coercive birth control. The Chinese government says the centres were voluntary schools that countered terrorism and extremism and that all trainees had “graduated” by 2019. A report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in August 2022 concluded that the detentions “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity”; China rejected the report.

In Hong Kong, the “one country, two systems” arrangement promised in 1984 guaranteed the territory a high degree of autonomy and its own legal system until 2047. Disputes over how the territory’s chief executive would be elected led to the Umbrella Movement occupation of 2014. In 2019 a proposed law allowing extradition to the mainland brought months of mass protests, some of them violent, and pro-democracy candidates won most seats in the district council elections of November 2019. On 30 June 2020 Beijing imposed a National Security Law that created crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces; most leading opposition figures were arrested or went into exile in the following months. The Chinese government presents the law as restoring order; critics argue that it ended the autonomy promised in 1984.

At the end of 2019 a new coronavirus was identified in Wuhan. Local officials at first silenced doctors who warned of it, and Wuhan was locked down from 23 January 2020. Strict quarantine kept recorded deaths in China low in 2020, which the government presented as proof of its system’s strength, while delays in reporting and restrictions on investigation damaged its relations with many states.

Elizabeth Economy (The Third Revolution, 2018) describes Xi’s rule as a “third revolution” after Mao’s and Deng’s: a return to personal power, ideological control and an assertive role abroad. Others, such as Bruce Dickson (The Party and the People, 2021), stress that surveys suggest much of the population supported the government in this period, because of rising living standards and national pride, so the regime rested on consent as well as control.

Foreign policy, 1976–2020

Deng’s foreign policy served his economic aims: China needed a peaceful environment, access to Western markets and technology, and secure borders. In the 1990s Deng summed up his approach in an often-quoted saying, usually translated as “hide your strength and bide your time”. From about 2008, and especially under Xi, China became more assertive as its power grew.

Relations with the United States

Full diplomatic relations with the United States began on 1 January 1979, when Washington broke relations with Taiwan and ended its defence treaty. Deng visited the United States weeks later, wearing a cowboy hat at a rodeo in Texas. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act in April 1979, which allowed unofficial relations and arms sales to Taiwan, and the issue of arms sales has troubled relations ever since; a third communiqué in August 1982 promised to reduce them gradually. In the 1980s the two states cooperated against the USSR, including in support of the Afghan resistance.

After Tiananmen relations cooled. Congress tied China’s trade privileges to human rights until President Bill Clinton separated the two issues in 1994. Crises followed: the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995–1996, NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on 7 May 1999, which killed three Chinese journalists and which the United States called an accident, and the collision of a US spy plane with a Chinese fighter near Hainan Island in April 2001. Yet economic ties deepened, and after the attacks of 11 September 2001 the two states cooperated against terrorism. In 2005 the US deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick called on China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system.

From 2011 the Obama administration announced a “pivot” or rebalance of US forces and diplomacy to Asia, which Beijing saw as containment. Under President Donald Trump, the United States imposed tariffs on Chinese goods from July 2018, and China retaliated in a trade war; restrictions on the telecommunications firm Huawei followed in 2019, and a “Phase One” trade deal in January 2020 brought only a pause. By 2020, after disputes over COVID-19, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, relations were at their lowest point since 1972.

Relations with the USSR and Russia

In the early 1980s Deng set three conditions for normal relations with Moscow, the “three obstacles”: Soviet troops on the Chinese border and in Mongolia, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and Soviet support for Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia. Mikhail Gorbachev began to remove them after his speech at Vladivostok in July 1986, and his visit to Beijing in May 1989, overshadowed by the protests, formally normalised relations.

After the USSR collapsed in 1991, China and Russia settled their long border dispute in stages, with final agreements in 2004. Russia became China’s main supplier of advanced weapons in the 1990s, the two states declared a “strategic partnership” in 1996, and they signed a Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation in July 2001. In June 2001 they founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation with four Central Asian states. After Western sanctions on Russia over Crimea in 2014, Moscow turned further east: a thirty-year gas deal was signed in 2014 and gas began to flow through the Power of Siberia pipeline in December 2019. By 2020 the relationship had reversed the balance of the 1950s, with China the stronger partner.

Regional relations

Vietnam. Relations with Vietnam, China’s ally in its wars against France and the United States, collapsed in the late 1970s over Vietnam’s alliance with the USSR, its treatment of its ethnic Chinese, and its invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, which overthrew China’s ally, the Khmer Rouge. On 17 February 1979 the PLA invaded northern Vietnam to “teach Vietnam a lesson”. It captured several provincial capitals and withdrew on 16 March. Chinese losses are estimated at between about 7,000 and over 20,000 dead, and Vietnamese losses were also heavy; the war exposed the weakness of the PLA and encouraged its modernisation. Border clashes continued through the 1980s, and relations were normalised only in 1991.

Japan. China and Japan signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship in August 1978, and Deng visited Japan in October, where he toured car and steel plants. Japanese loans and investment were important to the early reforms. From the 1980s, however, disputes over history, such as Japanese textbooks that played down wartime atrocities and visits by prime ministers to the Yasukuni Shrine, and over the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, especially after Japan bought three of them from a private owner in 2012, caused repeated crises and anti-Japanese protests in China.

The Korean peninsula and India. China established diplomatic relations with South Korea in August 1992, while remaining North Korea’s main ally and trading partner; it hosted the Six-Party Talks on North Korea’s nuclear programme from 2003 to 2009. With India, Rajiv Gandhi’s visit in 1988 began a thaw, and agreements in 1993 and 1996 kept peace on the disputed border, though standoffs continued, most seriously at Doklam in 2017. In June 2020 a clash in the Galwan Valley killed twenty Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese soldiers (China’s official figure), the first deadly fighting on that border since 1975.

Southeast Asia and the South China Sea. China built close economic ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), becoming a dialogue partner in 1996 and opening a free trade area in 2010. In the South China Sea, however, it claims most of the sea within a “nine-dash line” that overlaps the claims of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. After clashes with South Vietnam over the Paracel Islands (1974) and with Vietnam in the Spratly Islands (1988), and the occupation of Mischief Reef, claimed by the Philippines (1995), China built artificial islands with runways from about 2013. In July 2016 an arbitral tribunal under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, in a case brought by the Philippines, ruled that the nine-dash line had no legal basis; China rejected the ruling as invalid.

Taiwan and Hong Kong. Deng offered Taiwan reunification under “one country, two systems”, and in 1984 Britain and China agreed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, under which Hong Kong returned to China in 1997. Relations with Taiwan improved as trade and investment grew, and in 1992 officials of both sides met and later described the outcome as the “1992 Consensus”, that there is one China, interpreted differently by each side. As Taiwan democratised, Beijing tried to deter a move towards formal independence: it fired missiles near the island in 1995–1996, before its first direct presidential election, and passed an Anti-Secession Law in 2005 that authorised “non-peaceful means” in certain circumstances. Under the Kuomintang president Ma Ying-jeou ties grew closer, and Ma met Xi in Singapore in November 2015, but they worsened again after the Democratic Progressive Party won the presidency in 2016. The Chinese government regards Taiwan as part of China; the government in Taipei, and much of Taiwan’s population, reject rule from Beijing.

The Belt and Road Initiative

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy. In a speech at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, on 7 September 2013, he proposed a “Silk Road Economic Belt” of land routes across Central Asia to Europe; in Indonesia in October 2013 he proposed a “21st-Century Maritime Silk Road” through Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. The initiative funded ports, railways, roads, power stations and pipelines through Chinese state banks, a Silk Road Fund (2014) and the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (founded 2015), which many US allies joined despite American objections. Its largest single project was the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (2015), linking Xinjiang to the port of Gwadar. By 2020 the Chinese government said that about 140 countries had signed BRI cooperation documents.

The BRI had economic aims (export markets for Chinese construction firms and surplus steel and cement, new trade routes, development of the western provinces) and strategic ones (influence, secure energy supplies and routes that avoided the Strait of Malacca). Its effects are debated. In 2017 Sri Lanka, unable to service its debts, leased the Chinese-built port of Hambantota to a Chinese company for 99 years. The Indian analyst Brahma Chellaney (2017) called such cases “debt-trap diplomacy”, in which China lends to poor states in order to gain control of strategic assets. Deborah Brautigam and other researchers reply that most problem loans came from poor planning on both sides, that Hambantota’s lease was proposed by Sri Lanka to raise cash, and that China has usually renegotiated debts instead of seizing assets.

The table of foreign relations shows a clear pattern. China was most successful where its economic weight counted, in trade, investment and the BRI, and least successful where its claims touched its neighbours’ territory and security, where its rise pushed states such as Japan, India, Vietnam and the Philippines closer to the United States.

Perspectives and debates

How should the Mao era be judged?

Inside China the official verdict remains that of 1981: Mao’s merits were primary and his errors secondary. Outside China, interpretations have moved in waves as new sources became available. In the 1960s and 1970s many Western scholars, with little access to China, took the regime’s claims about social progress seriously. From the 1980s, Chinese memoirs, the party’s own admissions and later provincial archives revealed the scale of the famine and of political violence.

Chang and Halliday’s biography sold very widely but has been criticised by many specialists for selective use of sources, and it is best treated as one strongly argued view. Dikötter’s use of archives has been praised, while some demographers think his famine estimate is too high. The defenders of Mao’s record are criticised in turn for weighing literacy and life expectancy against tens of millions of deaths as though the two could simply be balanced. A strong answer recognises that each approach answers a different question: what Mao intended, what the system produced, and what it cost.

Why did the Sino-Soviet split happen?

Lorenz Lüthi (The Sino-Soviet Split, 2008), using Chinese and Russian archives, argues that ideological disagreement, especially over de-Stalinisation, peaceful coexistence and the Great Leap, drove the split, and that Mao used it for domestic purposes. Chen Jian (Mao’s China and the Cold War, 2001) also stresses Mao’s revolutionary nationalism and his need for external tension to mobilise the population at home. Realist scholars put more weight on conflicting national interests: nuclear weapons, Taiwan, the border, and China’s refusal to be a junior partner. Sergey Radchenko (Two Suns in the Heavens, 2009) adds the personal rivalry of leaders who each claimed to lead world communism.

The Cultural Revolution: power struggle or social conflict?

MacFarquhar and Schoenhals present the Cultural Revolution mainly as Mao’s struggle to destroy his rivals and secure his legacy. Social historians such as Anita Chan, and later Andrew Walder and Yiching Wu, show that the factions also reflected social grievances: students from “bad” class backgrounds against the children of cadres, temporary and contract workers against permanent ones. Walder (Fractured Rebellion, 2009) argues that factions formed less from social interests than from uncertain choices made in confusing circumstances. The approaches can be combined: Mao opened the door from above, and the conflicts that followed took local forms.

Who made the reform era?

Ezra Vogel’s biography of Deng (2011) presents him as the architect of modern China; critics argue that it is too generous on Tiananmen. Kate Xiao Zhou stresses peasants’ initiative, Barry Naughton (The Chinese Economy, 2007, 2nd ed. 2018) the gradual “growing out of the plan”, and Yasheng Huang the reversal of rural entrepreneurship in the 1990s. On 1989, The Tiananmen Papers (2001), edited by Andrew Nathan and Perry Link, claimed to publish leaked internal documents of the leadership; most scholars think they are largely genuine but cannot be fully verified. Louisa Lim’s The People’s Republic of Amnesia (2014) studies how memory of 1989 has been suppressed.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

The questions that follow are written in the style of IB Paper 3 and cover four of the six areas of the study; questions can be set on any of them.

Paper 3: the consolidation of power

Paper 3: Mao’s foreign policy

Paper 3: Tiananmen Square, 1989

The next essay is set out as a full plan, showing how to organise a 1,000–1,300-word answer.

Paper 3: the costs and benefits of transformation since 1978

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how the party-state, the PLA and the danwei and hukou systems gave the CCP control after 1949.

• To do:

  I can describe the Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries, the Three-Antis and Five-Antis and thought reform, and explain how they consolidated power.

• To do:

  I can explain why Mao launched the Hundred Flowers campaign and weigh the “trap” and “miscalculation” interpretations.

• To do:

  I can describe the Anti-Rightist Campaign and its consequences.

• To do:

  I can explain land reform, the stages of collectivisation and the results of the First Five-Year Plan.

• To do:

  I can explain the aims, policies and consequences of the Great Leap Forward, including the range of famine estimates and why they differ.

• To do:

  I can assess changes in the position of women, education, healthcare and religion under Mao.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes, course and impact of the Cultural Revolution and the role of the cult of personality.

• To do:

  I can explain China’s involvement in the Korean War, the Sino-Soviet split, the Sino-Indian War and the opening to the United States, and judge their successes and failures.

• To do:

  I can explain how Deng Xiaoping replaced Hua Guofeng, and the significance of the Third Plenum, Democracy Wall, the Four Cardinal Principles and the 1981 Resolution.

• To do:

  I can explain the reforms of the Four Modernisations: household responsibility, TVEs, dual-track prices and the Special Economic Zones.