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Maos consolidation of power - Coggle Diagram
Maos consolidation of power
The state of the country in 1949:
Some regions were not under CCP control, such as Xinjiang, Tibet and Guangdong.
China's war had lasted 12 years; the Japanese invaded in 1937 so their WWII started 2 years earlier.
The economy was devastated by WWII and civil was. Industrial output was
25% of what it had been before WWII
, food production was reckoned to be
30% lower than pre-war
.
Henan province had suffered a huge famine which claimed 2-3 million lives. War time requisitioning had put a huge toll on the peasants. The
hyperinflation rate stood at 1000% in 1949
.
Chiang Kai Shek also took the foreign currency reserves with him when he went to Taiwan.
Agriculture had no revolution whatsoever, it was not mechanised and war labour intensive using archaic methods, with
only 15% of Chinese land cultivable
.
There was an abundance of refugees, plus
20 million had died
in the combined era of WWII and the civil war.
Natural disasters were occupational hazards in China. Floods, earthquakes, droughts etc. Japanese bombing had been brutal.
The Russians were occupying Manchuria, as they had declared war on the Japanese shortly before they surrendered. Manchuria was most advanced in terms of industry , with iron and steel works there, but for the moment they were in soviet hands who would be slow to give them back.
Many of the educated elite, including bureaucrats, left with the Nationalists.Therefore, there were few people who knew how to run a country.
Structure of the PRC:
The communist government was made up of three strands:
The communist party at the centre.
The People's Liberation Army (PLA)
The State Bureacuracy (SB)
The Politburo was the most important structure within the party. Only the most important communist officials were a part of this,.
The SB was headed by Zhou Enlai, who held the post of prime minister and foreign minister until his death. It was the job of the SB to to actually administer communist policy, so this was the machinery of government, staffed with lots of officials and divided into different ministries.
The PLA were role models and were part of Mao's great propaganda experiment. They were to be carefully instructed in party policy and it would be their job to filter the message out as well as fight.
In
May 1953
, Mao sent a sharp memo to every department saying that no document or announcement whastoever can be made if Mao has not personally approved it.
The CCP called the new system of government 'Democratic Centralism': democracy at local levels, heard centrally nationally. The cadres helped monitor the Danwei (work units)and controlled permits for travel, marriage, access to housing and food.
Maoism and Mao Zedong thought:
For Mao, it was the peasants who would drive all aspects of the economy and hence he tries to get industry going in the countryside with every family having its blast furnace in the backyard.
Mao believed that China should be self-reliant and apart from some links with the USSR (1950 Treaty of Friendship), there was not much contact with the outside world.
Mao believed in mass campaigns and mass mobilisation. He believed anything could be achieved with hard work and self sacrifice. Ordinary people had to help with vast public work projects (e.g. building bridges, aqueducts and roads etc) like the
Henan Canal and the Yangtze River
.
Some historians believe Mao was not well educated and that this was a deficiency that he had all his life. This may be where his loathing of intellectuals came from. As a consequence, Mao leaned on this ideology heavily, and his dogmatic insistence on his ideology being accepted above all others is therefore possibly a cover for him having a weaker grasp of communist issues than others did.
Campaigns:
Three and Five Antis: (1951-52)
Tackled corruption
Tackled delay
Tackled waste in government
The campaign encouraged people to whistleblow on their colleagues and managers who were guilty of corruption or delay. 'Flies' was the label if you were a small time offender, 'tiger' if it was larger scale.
Bo Yibo was in charge of the 3 antis campaign in his region and was boasting that he found "100,000 tigers". Mao's instructions were vague which means people like Bo Yibo could do whatever they liked.
People did not necessarily dislike this as they felt that the communists were serious about cleaning up China and so they approved and felt this was a good sign that the communist party was self-regulating.
The 5 antis in 1952 included:
Bribery
Tax evasion
Theft of state property
Fraud
Economic espionage
This campaign was largely targeted at the bourgeoisie who either returned home from abroad or were used by the regime to get industry and business going after 1949.
Frank Dikotter says that approx. 1% were shot, 1% were sent to labour camps, 3% were fined, and many committed suicide.
There were so many suicides that nets were attached to high buildings and parks were patrolled to deter people form hanging themselves.
This class were heavily fined to fund the Korean War
Reunification campaigns:
Guangdong (Sept 1950-Jan 1951):
This had been the nationalist heartland suring the civil war, with its capital Guangzhou.
The Nationalists abandoned it after only 2 weeks after the official unveiling of the PRC in October 1949, but there were still nationalist forces elsewhere that continued to give the PLA headaches.
An estimated 28,000 people were killed there.
Xinjiang (Oct 1949):
A recent addition to China; had been conquered in the late 1880s. The Russians aslo had their eye on it as it bordered their territory. 80% of its population were ethically different to the Han Chinese and were called Uyghurs - the majority were muslims.
The PLA was sent into the capital as a show of force, and Uyghur leaders were offered key posts in the regional government in order to keep them satisfied. Peng Duhuai was sent in with
150,000 PLA troops to face 40,000 muslim cavalry
.
Large numbers of Han Chinese were brought in to work on construction projects but also to dilute the Uyghurs. Mao felt he needed Xinjiang firmly under his control to ensure that it remained a vital buffer zone against the west.
Tibet (Oct 1950-May 1951):
Mao wanted to have Tibet under his control for reasons of having a buffer state in the south west. The international community just looked the other way when Tibet was invaded by the PLA in October 1950.
It took 6 months to break Tibet, and then followed a campaign to eradicate traditional Tibetan culture, again with the Han Chinese being integrated.
In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled once and for all as he sensed that his days were numbered - leaving his deputy, the Panchen Lama, to face the opposition. The Dalai Lama had only been 15 when the PLA invaded and the Chinese convinced him to make visits to Beijing in 1954 and was given titles in the PRC.
As the Dalai Lama became more resistant to this and during the Tibetan uprising of 1959, he decided he could promote Tibet's cause better alive and in exile than at home.
To this day the Dalai Lama has not returned to Tibet. The Panchen Lama was put under house arrest in 1962 for 20 years because of his critcism of how Tibet had suffered disproportionately during the famine of the GLF.
Hundred Flowers Campaign (1957):
Mao, prompted by Zhou Enlai, asked officials and intellectuals for their comments on the progess of the communist revolution and government.
He said contradictions are inevitable and should be freely discussed in order to resolve the issues. Mao even said,
"If they have something to fart about, let them fart"
To begin with, criticism trickled in, as people felt reluctant to air their opinions too freely, but Mao insisted and ended up with a deluge of criticism.
This was terrifying for Mao. Many intellectuals had returned from abroad in 1949 as the CCP had invited them to return, anxious to have their skills and talents in the buliding of the new socialist state.
By 1957, Mao was somewhat cocooned in his world of adoration and infallibility and that he had simply not foreseen that there would be such a volume of complaint. It could have been
an exercise in liberalisation gone wrong
.
A cynical interpretation is that he did it solely to flush out the critics and deter others from opposing him. But, he also needed their support to win the economic argument (going on over the speed of the 2nd FYP) as well as gaining support after Khrushchev's secret speech in February 1956.
Anti-rightist campaign (1957-1959):
All officials were asked to make lists of the people they suspected of criticising Mao, even if they did not take part in the Hundred Flowers Campaign. A quota system was announced where officials had to find between
5-10% beneath them who were to be denounced
.
It is estimated that thousands committed suicide to avoid arrest and execution, and to save their families the shame of being related to an enemy of the state.
The book
Grass Soup
was written by a Chinese novelist who was imprisoned in the Lao Gai. He wrote
"Gradually only two things of any importance remained in my life, eating grass soup and breathing"
. This was used to criticise China and see the human suffering.
Terror, control and propaganda:
Lao-gai, or re-education centres, meant reform through labour. They were supposed to be about changing the way you thought rather than punishing, but it did both.
Soviet experts were drafted in to assist the Chinese in developing the Laogai. Forced labour was the main way these camps operated, and the forced labour generateda relatively significant profit for Chinese government.
They often had to do the most hazardous mass mobilisation tasks, like
clearing malaria infested swamps or tin and uranium mining
.
9 out of 10 inmates were political prisoners
. Thought reform was intense and consisted of endless struggle sessions. There was also no judicial process in sending people there.
So, people disappeared without a trace and people were released after 20 years long after their families had forgotten about them. Many sent there were never formally sentenced or were wrongfully accused.
Historians think as many as
25 million Chinese were sent there during the whole Mao era
. One inmate called it a
"carefully orchestrated Aushwitz of the mind"
However, the CCP did rid China of bandit gangs and crime gangs like the Triads who had plagued China for generations.
Propaganda:
Propaganda was a major job for people in Mao's China. As many as
1.5 million people worked in the propaganda industry
, creating big wall posters (Dazibao).
An average of
10% of each factory workforce was devoted to producing propaganda
associated with that company's targets and goals.
Even the
students in Beijing University in 1958 were tasked witth producing wall posters denouncing waste and intolerance
. This was done so zealously they ran out of wall space and had to hang them like washing on a line.
Committees were formed in the work place and also in the neighbourhoods to essentially identify, discourage and report troubling behaviour.
Troubling behaviour could consist of:
Having strange visitors in your house
Wearing old Chinese clothes
Being too clingy over family relations
Being ill during pregnancy
The Korean War:
Benefits:
Peng Duhuai realised that the Chinese army needed to modernise and become more technological if it were to compete against modern forces like the UN army.
A friendly buffer state had been established between itself and the capitalist South Korea would have been a cause for great concern for China as it might have provided the US with an opportunity to invade China and put the nationalists in charge.
Crystallised Mao's authority over the party. The appeal for national unity during a time of war meant that campaigns like 3 and 5 antis could be justified under patriotism.
The moral victory of making the US retreat was impressive for China. Chinese bravery and devestating ambushes on the UN were noticed and increased China's standing with the rest of the world.
Propaganda reached new heights with the introduction of the
Resist America Aid Korea
campaign. Students "voluntarily" took part in rallies which denounced America.
Mao used the war to draw greater distinctions between Chinese communism and Soviet communism; Chinese communism triumphed here.
Costs:
Approx. 400,000-800,000 Chinese deaths
South Korea was not brought into the communist fold. It became a showcase for American style democracy and capitalism.
The economic costs of the war was high, exacerbated by having to pay the soviets for their military assistance. The loans the Chinese now owed the soviets increased dramatically and this caused friction between Mao and Stalin.
55% of government spending was on the war in 1951
.
Ordinary people were expected to 'voluntarily' donate huge amounts of their salaries to the war effort.
The average seemed to be about 3 months salary
Taiwan was now completely outside the reach of Mao. It was now protected by the US's 7th fleet and also the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu.
US hostility towards China became even more pronounced and their exclusion from the UN continued (until 1972).
China had been deliberately used by Stalin. He manipulated Mao into joining the war because it suited his purpose of weakening both the USA and China.
Stalin telegram to the Czechs stated,
"China wiill be dragged into the struggle. Does it help us? Absolutely it does."
Limonski (Yellow-skinned cannon fodder) was a racist term used by the soviets.