Mao

1
Maos China

• 1949-1976

2
China after 1911

• The Revolution of 1911 was intended to create a
  modern republican form of government in China.
• Instead, the country broke up into
  warlord-dominated regions with increasing poverty
  and violence.
• The Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party led the
  revolution, but controlled few areas.

3
Kuomintang Party

• Sun Yat-sen was the main leader of the 1911
  Revolution and the Nationalist Party (KMT).
• He died in 1925 and was succeeded as leader by
  Chiang Kai-shek.
• Chiang cooperated with the Communists for a time,
  but then massacred them in 1927.

4
Mao Zedongs Life

• Mao was born in 1896 as the son of an affluent
  peasant in Hunan province.
• After service in a provincial army in the 1911
  revolution, Mao attended a teachers college.
• He then attended Beijing University and worked in
  the library there.

5
(No Transcript)
6
Life, 2

• Mao was a leader of the Chinese Communist Party
  since its founding in 1921.
• While most Chinese Communists believed that urban
  workers were the group that would be the most
  important supporters of the revolution, Mao
  decided that peasants had more revolutionary
  potential.

7
Land Reform

• Mao discovered even in the 1920s that the
  Communists could win the support of the peasants
  by taking away land from the rich and sharing
  this with the poor.
• Mao learned how to get the vast majority of
  peasants on his side by concentrating the
  confiscations on a small minority of wealthy
  farmers.

8
(No Transcript)
9
Life, 3

• Mao led a Communist area in Jiangxi Province in
  1934, but attacks by the Kuomintang (Nationalist
  Party) government army forced them to undergo the
  Long March lasting over a year and covering
  3700 miles to a new, safer area to the north in
  Shanxi Province.

10
(No Transcript)
11
(No Transcript)
12
Yanan, 1935-1948

• For over a decade, Mao and the Chinese Communist
  leadership operated from Yanan in the north of
  China.
• Land reform was carried out in Yanan.
• During most of this time, the Communists were
  fighting against both the KMT and the Japanese.
• The Communists and the KMT competed in terms of
  which best represented the national interests of
  China against the Japanese.

13
(No Transcript)
14
(No Transcript)
15
Yanan, 2

• At the end of the Second World War, the Russians
  moved into Manchuria against the Japanese and
  were able to share some weapons with the Chinese
  Communists.
• Stalin urged Mao to ally with Chiang Kai-shek
  rather than to fight him.

16
Communist Victory, 1949

• Due to corruption and inefficiency among the KMT
  leadership, the Communists took power in mainland
  China in October, 1949.
• The KMT leaders retreated to the island of
  Taiwan.
• Now Mao was in charge of the whole country.

17
August, 1949
18
Trials of landlords

• During 1949-1951, the Communists held mass trials
  of landlords and KMT leaders all over the
  country.
• Peasants were urged to denounce crimes committed
  by the former rulers.
• This tied the peasants who participated to the
  regime because they were implicated in the deaths
  of the elite.

19
(No Transcript)
20
(No Transcript)
21
Accusing the landlord of abusing his tenants
22
Trials, 2

• Hundreds of thousands of members of the former
  elite were put to death in the mass trials of
  1949-1951.
• Their land was then distributed among the poorer
  peasants.
• This was the most important revolutionary act in
  the rural villages of China.

23
Industrialization

• Between 1949 and 1960, China followed the Russian
  strategy of industrialization.
• They built large factories in the cities.
• Many Russian engineers came to China to assist in
  this effort.
• Many of the largest factories in China today were
  built during this period.

24
(No Transcript)
25
(No Transcript)
26
Great Leap Forward, 1958-60

• In 1958, Mao decided that the Russian strategy of
  industrial development was not suitable for
  China.
• This urban, large-factory system was not having
  enough of an impact on the mass of the population
  in the countryside.
• Mao decided to opt for a unique Chinese method of
  industrialization.

27
Great Leap Forward, 2

• The most mocked aspect of the Great Leap Forward
  was the backyard steel furnaces.
• Mao thought that peasants could learn to make
  steel on a broadly decentralized basis.
• Most areas of China, however, lacked the ore and
  fuel for this.

28
(No Transcript)
29
Great Leap Forward, 3

• Millions of peasants were pulled away from their
  agricultural tasks in order to engage in
  industrialization or water conservancy projects.
• This lack of attention to the crops added to the
  problem of a serious drought and up to 30 million
  people died in China during this period.

30
Great Leap Forward, 4

• Small villages were done away with, and the
  peasants were moved to larger towns.
• Mao attempted to have the peasants live in
  dormitories with the separation of husbands and
  wives.
• Communal kitchens and nurseries were established.
• These measures failed.

31
(No Transcript)
32
(No Transcript)
33
Great Leap Forward, 5

• The Russians were insulted that the Chinese were
  no longer following their advice and pulled out
  their engineers.
• Many factories that were being built could not be
  finished because the Russians had the only plans
  and because the Russians were to provide the
  machinery.

34
Sino-Soviet Dispute, 1960

• From 1960 onward, China and Russia had a great
  ideological quarrel.
• Mao asserted that the world was in a
  revolutionary situation.
• Mao expected revolution to come from the poor
  peasants of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

35
Sino-Soviet Dispute, 2

• The Soviet Union was led in 1960 by Nikita
  Khrushchev and he insisted on the need for
  peaceful coexistence with the West.
• Khrushchev was against promoting revolution in
  Third World countries as China wished to do.

36
(No Transcript)
37
The Cultural Revolution

• Between 1961 and 1963, conditions were relatively
  quiet in China, but in 1964 Mao began pushing a
  new crusade to transform the culture to make the
  country more purely communist.
• Mao attacked traditional Confucian and Buddhist
  elements in Chinese culture.

38
(No Transcript)
39
(No Transcript)
40
Cultural Revolution, 2

• Any Communist leaders who were not strongly for
  equality were condemned in this movement.
• The Cultural Revolution started among students,
  but it began to affect other sectors of society.

41
(No Transcript)
42
Cultural Revolution, 3

• Eventually, the military stepped in and sent the
  students off to work as peasants.

43
Assessing Mao

• Most people both in China and the West consider
  that Maos leadership was atrocious
  particularly the Great Leap Forward and the
  Cultural Revolution.
• However, it is possible that the success of
  Chinese economic growth since Maos death in 1976
  owes much to these two movements.

44
Assessing Mao, 2

• In spite of the deaths during the Great Leap
  Forward and the social and economic disruption of
  the Cultural Revolution, the two movements helped
  to modernize China both in its rural economy and
  in its ideology.
• Both movements helped to give primacy to industry
  and technology.

45
Assessing Mao, 3

• Both movements asserted the power of the common
  people to make important social changes.
• The tradition of the Confucian mandarin
  bureaucrat was buried, and the new leadership of
  China had to justify their power on the basis of
  economic growth for the betterment of the people.

46
Assessing Mao, 4

• History often has tragic aspects.
• The deaths due to the famine associated with the
  Great Leap Forward (and the far smaller numbers
  of deaths in the Cultural Revolution) were tragic
  aspects of a broad national transformation.

47
Assessing Mao, 5

• Industrializing a huge, impoverished peasant
  society is a giant task that involves ideological
  mobilization as well as simply building factories
  and installing new machinery.
• China might not have been as advanced as it is
  today without the Great Leap Forward and the
  Cultural Revolution.

48
After Mao

• From 1975 to 1997, China was led by Deng Xiaoping
  who welcomed economic reforms in the direction of
  capitalism.
• Peasants were allowed to farm on their own and to
  leave the collective farms.
• Local governments were permitted to establish
  industrial companies that functioned like
  capitalist firms.

49
Deng Xiaoping
50
After Mao, 2

• Mao would be turning over in his grave at the
  foreign investment and the consumer culture that
  is spreading in China today.
• However, Maos efforts did create a strong,
  united Chinese state that after Maos death was
  able to make serious reforms to compete in a
  global economy.