Overview of the Early Years of the PRC

The CCP rode to power on a wave of popular support. Mao, the Supreme Ruler, was first in command with Liu Shaoqi, his deputy, and Zhou Enlai his Prime Minister (Premier) and head of government. Deng Xiaoping was already in the leadership mix as a junior minister who had also survived the Long March but his final ascendency would have to wait three more decades. The corrupt and virtually incompetent GMD had left China with much of its state treasure, leaving it bankrupt (and hoping to return to rule it again). The CCP wanted to remedy all of this as quickly as possible with much of the world seeming to want it to fail. They sought modernisation, strength and industrialisation.

They set to work in the country remedying vast inequalities between landlords and peasants and between men and women with much success from the beginning. Women had been regarded as chattels or slaves by their parents, then their spouses and finally their sons and this changed abruptly. Peasants gained equality (hundreds and thousands of the most despised landlords paid with their lives – in a short period, half of the then arable land in China was distributed directly to the poorest peasants) but soon surrendered it to the collective. Women too had some reversals in fortune. In the cities, workers ceased to be slaves of their bosses only to quickly become effectively the slaves of their workplaces. Everybody became slaves to development (except perhaps party bosses).

What was going on was that Mao began to seek only the advice of Moscow and Marx, virtually the only friends China seemed to have, and thus began to sacrifice the Yan’an spirit (for reasons I outlined in the last few posts). Who else could the Chinese trust (it seemed not even themselves)? Mao himself visited Moscow in 1950 (in his first trip ever outside China – he only ever took one other journey outside China in his eighty-two years before his death in 1976). In that trip he sealed a military and aid deal, though Mao and Stalin didn’t especially get on. He was playing the supplicating vassal in terms of the Chinese cultural tradition.

One further complication to the first years was the invasion of South Korea by the North Koreans and the subsequent Korean War. Once General Macarthur had become involved and began to insist into northern Korea, the US seemed to threaten to expand its efforts into northern China. Macarthur’s aim actually was apparently to provoke war with China and ultimately re-install the GMD on the mainland. The Chinese secretly added a quarter of a million Chinese to the forces opposed to Macarthur now in North Korea for a surprise attack. The US was, of course, forced into a retreat and ultimately a Korean armistice along the pre-war lines by this action. In the meantime, Mao had asked Chinese civilians for their financial support in the war effort and China had suffered around a million casualties all up but military success against a Superpower was a great fillip. Mao also used the situation as an excuse to clamp down on anti-revolutionary elements and encouraged informers. Thousands of people were denounced.

Mao’s China may have been a tough place to be for many but his doctor of the time, Li Zhisui, reported on Mao’s penchant for western dancing (which he organised for his associates and himself regularly) and other perks and peculiarities of being Mao. The peasants were performing their roles, however, and two thirds of them were already collectivised by the end of 1955. They were led to expect that the final abolition of private plots would improve their circumstances. Various grain and other production quotas proved a greater priority for Mao than ensuring the peasants were all adequately fed, however. Productivity had not in fact increased very much.

Artistic and other expression was strictly controlled from the beginning which made Mao’s apparently liberal call for ‘a hundred flowers to bloom’ in 1956 tempting for many formerly stifled artists and intellectuals. The outbursts of expression that followed the calls for them from the centre including Mao’s may have shocked Mao. Corruption and inefficiency had been major gripes in the period. Many criticisms of the party were tolerated but this proved a brief period of unfettered expression. Mao later claimed he had instituted the period simply to draw anti-revolutionary elements into the open so that he could punish them.

Punish many of those who had taken the CCP at its word the CCP duly did. Many were first denounced as class enemies from 1957 in the usual ‘struggle’ meetings. Ge Peiqi, an academic, was one well known example of a relatively mild criticism being radically dealt with. There were effectively ‘rightist’ quotas that had to be met in the crackdown period as leaders in workplaces that hadn’t denounced a sufficient number of ‘rightists’ were likely themselves to be denounced as ‘rightist’ by some radical or even an opportunist or perhaps a personal enemy. This new purge continued into 1958 and by the end of it nearly a million people had been denounced. The campaign had been partly motivated by anti-intellectualism per se.

On the international front Mao hosted Khrushchev in 1958 but failed to mention his intention to attack the GMD in Taiwan. Once he attacked and the US responded vigorously he backed down. In the following year he met Khrushchev again and in 1960 the Sino-Soviet split occurred. I’ll discuss much of this some more in later posts but suffice it to say Mao and the USSR never seemed to work as more than a short-term and pragmatic pseudo union of purpose. The USSR tended to seem to Mao as at least as imperialist as any other outside power. Also in 1959, Mao crushed a revolt in Tibet. The Chinese have always tended to regard Tibet as a rightful province of China but this strong action further harmed Mao’s international reputation.

Back at home, Mao, never satisfied with growth levels, prepared the ground for what he called the Great Leap Forward (GLF) in 1958. Everybody was asked to work day and night for the revolution and the slogan ‘catch the stars and moon’ was used to emphasise the need to work through the night to build China. The people were promised that they were a great people capable of the rapid growth Mao was calling for (and consequent rapid improvement in their conditions of living under Mao’s direction). Mao in turn was held in awe by his people as suggested by one anecdote of the time. It is said that he was in the country and happened to read aloud a sign that read “people’s communes are good”. This one action supposedly led to the immediate formation of many communes throughout the country as news of it travelled.

One of the more foolhardy but perhaps relatively benign projects of the period inspired by all this boosterism (aided by the stifling of any criticism wrought by the recent anti-rightist campaigns) was the attempt by cooperatives throughout the country to smelt new steel by melting down old scrap metal (that naturally turned out to be quite substandard steel). Such projects were seen as ‘real revolution’ and a thing of pride by the masses

There was worse to come. In the frantic process of attempting to increase yields, for example, many cooperatives planted crops too close together and over fertilized with the predictable end result of counterproductive waste.

Two features of the new China combined to create the calamity that was the Great Leap Forward: the competitive urge between collectives created by the boosterism and insufficient verification by the centre of truth telling in reporting of yields. The liars reported greater and greater yields and the centre relied upon those reports to squeeze further quotas. As a result there was soon mass starvation in parts of the countryside as the still actually quite inefficient farmers fed others as best they could (and better) before feeding themselves.

Mao first began to realise what was actually occurring on a visit to his home town of Shao Shan. Even so, he was still too ready to see any criticism of what had occurred even from personal friends as an act of treachery. His abject treatment of a long-time fellow Xiangtanese (Xiangtan being the Hunanese county they both hailed from) and formerly somewhat close friend as a result, Marshall Peng, after receiving his unpalatable advice is a case in point. Even someone as senior as Premier Zhou who sympathised with Peng’s view of the situation was not willing to speak out at the time for fear of the consequences of Mao’s wrath.