The Mao Years: 1949-1977 - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

The Mao Years: 1949-1977

Communist ChinaSlide2

The

Good Years: 1949-1958

China Packet III, Assignment 1

Assignment 1Slide3

New Expectations

Once the Nationalists were defeated,

Chairman Mao Zedong and China’s Communists brought changes to every village. When dedicated Communist Party members arrived in a village to enact changes, he or she (usually) had the support of grateful peasants.

No other political parties or

challenges to Communist

power were allowed.Slide4

In the villages

Just like Qin

Shihuangdi 2,500 years before, Communists began by handing land to peasant families to farm for themselves.

Although Communists were, in theory, supposed to eliminate private property, Mao allowed this…for a few years…to quickly increase agricultural output and to gain the support of the peasants.

The hated landlords’ large estates were broken up, and a village’s peasants got to decide for themselves how to fairly divide up the land.

Peasants burning the

l

andlords’ documents

a

nd account sheets Slide5

The Landlords

The peasants of each village usually got to decide the fate of their former landlords, warlords, supporters of the Nationalists, and other “

class enemies

”.

Communist leaders organized the peasants to put their former oppressors on trial and collectively decide punishment.

Some were executed immediately, many were taken away for forced labor (as was anyone who had actively opposed

the Communists),

and others were

denounced

, then publically humiliated and reduced to the status of the lowliest peasant.Slide6

But wait…There’s more!

In addition to free land and the removal of the hated landlords, Communists brought schools, health clinics, and modern machinery to the villages.

The government took a quota of what a peasant grew. If the peasant was productive and grew more than the amount required, he or she could keep or sell the rest.

This productive system unfortunately lasted

less than a decade, as

Mao would soon take China down a new and destructive path…Slide7

The Cities

In the cities, where capitalists’ technical and management skills were needed, there were fewer mass arrests of “class enemies”.

Generally, the only ones punished were those who had actively supported the Nationalists or refused to accept the Communists’ demands and changes.Slide8

Women in Communist China

The Communists also promoted women’s rights and equality.

Foot binding was officially banned, education for girls increased greatly, women held high positions in the Communist Party, and women were allowed to initiate divorce.Slide9

IndustrializationWith a massive amount of aid from the Communist

Soviet Union

and plenty of cheap or prisoner labor, China sharply increased its output of steel, railroads, arms, chemicals, etc. Slide10

The Iron Rice Bowl

In addition to a salary, each factory or business provided an “

Iron Rice Bowl” to its employees.

From one’s workplace, perks such as cheap housing and food, free health care, recreation, and retirement were provided for a worker and his or her family for life. Slide11

The Korean War

In the mid-1950s, China was able to fight the United States to a draw in the

Korean War

over whether or not Korea would become Communist.

The war ended with a division of the country into North Korea (which

i

s Communist) and South Korea.

The loss of life was tremendous, but China’s Communists saw this as a huge victory because only under the Communists had China successfully stood up to the West. Slide12

Results

The Civil War was over,

Peasants were given land, More food was produced,The power of the warlords and landlords was eliminated,

The Soviet Union was happy to help develop and industrialize China’s economy,

Schools, hospitals, electrification, and public sanitation improved,

Fighting the USA to a stalemate in the Korean War helped China regain its confidence,

The “Iron Rice Bowl” made lives easier for the population,

The status of women improved greatly.

Despite

the killings, the labor camps filled with real or imagined enemies, and the lack of personal freedoms that the Chinese had never really had anyway, the first years of Communism in China were successful in many ways.Slide13

Conclusion

The Chinese generally supported their new government enthusiastically, and expected a bright future.

That is, unless Mao were to do something monumentally stupid….Slide14

The Great Leap Forward

1958-1961

China Packet iii

Assignment 2Slide15

Collectivization of Agriculture

Starting in 1953, China’s government took away peasants’ lands and merged them into state-owned collective farms in which the government decided what would be grown, took away the crops to be redistributed, and paid the peasants a salary and the “Iron Rice Bowl”. (Assignment 1)

The Communists hoped this would increase production, provide grain for industrial workers, and allow for a planned economy.

The government was successful in bringing electricity and mechanized farming to the countryside, so the peasants did not complain.Slide16

China and the Soviets Unfriend Each Other

By the early 1960s, China and their fellow Communists in the Soviet Union (Russia) disagreed on what was the “correct” form of Communism. Neither would admit another path to Communism could exist, so they broke off their friendship.

A

ll help from the Soviet Union to China stopped…

…and the two Communist countries became mortal enemies. Slide17

The Rationale

Fearful that despite its increased industrial output China was still lagging behind the Soviet Union and the Western countries, Mao vowed to catch up quickly by sacrificing everything to produce enough steel for China to…well…who knows?

Mao also believed that

Planned and “scientific”

f

arming by motivated, true-

b

eliever peasants would

increase China’s food supply.

He was wrong, as this “Great Leap Forward” quickly became a tragically ironic name.Slide18

Anatomy of a Disaster 1:

Backyard Furnaces

To create steel, Mao not only had China create huge steel mills, but each village commune was expected to construct “

backyard furnaces

” to make steel from metals in the village.

This was a tremendous waste of resources, as trees were cut down for fuel, peasants were expected to throw everything made of metal (including farm tools, doorknobs, and pots and pans) into the furnaces.

Most of the

steel produced in this

manner

w

as of such low quality that it was worthless. Slide19

Anatomy of a Disaster 2:

Society

Just as the communes were supposed to function as well-oiled machines, so were its people.

Individualism was strongly discouraged, as were traditional culture and the concept of the family.

Instead, “comrades” were expected to cook and eat together, dress alike, work as a group, rely on representatives

of the Communist

Party for all

decisions, and in

some places even

call each other by

numbers instead of names.Slide20

Anatomy of a Disaster 4:

Birds

Not exactly an ecological expert, Mao believed that birds—especially sparrows –hurt China’s farmers by eating grain seeds, so he ordered peasants to hunt down and kill all of the birds.

He did not realize that without birds to eat insects, crops would become infested with bugs that did far more damage to the harvests. This moronic decision was a major factor in the resulting famine.Slide21

Anatomy of a Disaster 5:

Public Works

Mao’s Communists—in true Legalist fashion—made many Chinese work almost as slave labor to build factories and railroads, and to dig irrigation canals.

Overworked and poorly-fed, being drafted into one of these work brigades was pretty much a death sentence. Slide22

Anatomy of a Disaster 6:

Lack of Expertise

With little expertise and with poor planning, many of these canals were useless and failed to bring about the planned dramatic increase in food production

.

Shoddy construction work led to future problems such as the 1950s-built dam which collapsed in 1975 drowning 250,000 people in their sleep.Slide23

Anatomy of a Disaster 7:

Experimentation

Mao was not much of a scientist, but readily believed seemingly anything that would provide China with a shortcut to greater agricultural output.

Bizarre experimental schemes such as planting seeds deeper and more closely together and overusing the most productive lands failed. Chinese farmers had no chance of reaching the rosy, unattainable (yet mandatory) targets decided in Beijing.Slide24

Anatomy of a Disaster 8:

Purges

When the failure of the Great Leap Forward was evident and it became clear China was about to face mass starvation, Mao blamed those carrying out his orders for the problems. Local officials who failed to meet their unreachable target outputs of grain, vegetables, meat and steel, or seemingly anyone who bought him any bad news were “

purged

” (removed) from the Communist Party and jailed, executed, or sent to labor camps.

Roughly 2.5 MILLION so-called enemies (including loyal Communists)

may have been killed by their own party, and

roughly an equal number committed suicide

during the catastrophe of

the Great Leap Forward. Slide25

Anatomy of a Disaster 9:

Falsification

Since anyone not meeting his or her impossible-to-meet quotas of grain or steel would be taken away never to be seen again, it became common practice for low-ranking government officials to simply lie and falsify documents showing how much had been produced.

This meant that food which was supposed to be sent to cities, the army, and factory workers never arrived (because it never existed), and the government believed it could sell its existing grain to other countries since the documents showed a surplus of grain.

Not good.Slide26

Results

Just to recap…

In the Great Leap Forward, peasants were commanded to surrender all individuality, make steel out of common household objects, cut down all the trees, dig canals, construct dams, kill animals vital to the ecosystem, smile and declare their undying devotion to Chairman Mao, obey whatever orders came from their Party leaders, ignore any signs of impending danger, withstand the loss of the strongest people to the army and factories, and work until they dropped…all to meet quotas that were absolutely impossible to reach. Slide27

The Famine

The results were unfortunately predictable.

From 1959-1960 somewhere between 20-40 million Chinese starved to death, making the Great Leap Forward the rival of World War II for the worst man-made disaster in human history.

It only ended when peasants were given control of their lives back as the government stopped making such impossible demands on them.

Mao was left in power to come up with something even more ridiculous.Slide28

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

1966-1976

Assignment 3Slide29

From Famine to Madness

Mao laid low for a few years after the famine, and even gave up many of his leadership responsibilities.

But when the Soviet leader (Khrushchev) was removed from power by his own Communist Party in 1964 for his failures and his “hare-brained schemes”, Mao likely feared the same outcome for himself and stormed back into the forefront.

Retaking full power in 1965 through yet another round of purges, he declared war…not on any country, but against Chinese society.

Tragic lunacy would once again seize China.Slide30

The “Four Olds”

Mao came

to believe that the failure of the Great Leap Forward was due to the people –including China’s Communist Party—not being sufficiently “revolutionary.”

Therefore, he declared that the Chinese people should declare war on the “Four Olds” and wipe out its society’s Old Habits, Old Culture,

Old Customs,

and Old Ideas. Slide31

The Cultural Revolution Begins

The expectation that Mao would be seen as a God-like figure and the violent attacks on the “four olds” and anyone seen as connected to them at the expense of development and progress became known as China’s

Cultural Revolution

.

It would last from 1961 until winding down in the 1970s, putting China even farther behind the other world powers.Slide32

The Red Guards

To carry out the destruction of the “Four Olds” and to find possible enemies of the state hanging onto these old ways, Chairman Mao instructed teenage students to form groups called

Red Guards

.

In their homemade uniforms, they were granted free travel throughout China and given the instructions “Be violent.”Slide33

The Little Red Book

The Red Guards—and all of China—carried a widely-circulated collection of Mao’s sayings called “

The Little Red Book

”. It gave new meaning to the phrase “required reading”, as anyone caught by the police or by the Red Guards without one, or without a portrait of Mao in their homes or workplace, were put under immediate suspicion and often punished.Slide34

The Targets

Roving bands of Red Guards (often from the families that had fared the worst and accomplished the least before the Communists took over) went around intimidating anyone who read pre-revolutionary books, wore fancy clothes, possessed anything foreign, were not deemed supportive enough of Mao, or in any way were seen as supporting any of the “Four Olds.” Slide35

The Extent of It

Click here

for a taste of what it was like during the height of the ridiculousness of the Cultural Revolution. A longer version is available for 24 Hours of Culture credit.

For nearly a decade, finding enemies became the primary task of China, while avoiding suspicion (by not succeeding or standing out in any way) became a life-or-death situation for the average person.

Parents became terrified of their children as kids were under tremendous peer pressure to break all Confucian traditions and

denounce

(speak against) their own family.

Schools and universities were closed for years so the youth could concentrate on the Cultural Revolution…not that there were many teachers or professors left following wave after wave of denouncements.Slide36

The Denounced

Those judged to be in opposition to the Cultural Revolution were either killed (with the family billed for the price of the bullet), sent to labor camps, publicly humiliated, or, for those in cities, “sent down” to live with and learn from the lowliest peasants—the equivalent of making students at Yale become better Americans by sending

them to trailer parks

in rural Kentucky.Slide37

How it ended

After 1970, with no more “enemies’ to find and Mao getting old, the excesses and violence of the Cultural Revolution faded away, and in some places the army was sent in to get rid of the most active and brutal Red Guard units.

As Americans landed on the moon and began the digital revolution, China was still celebrating the lowly peasant and refusing

to develop.

That would change in the 1990s.