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Cover
Story 
| THE
PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA: An Overview On Oct. 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the  People's
Republic of China. The Red Army was renamed the People's Liberation
Army. During the early days of the People's Republic, the troops were
restrained, foreign-educated Chinese returned to help the country,
and most local administrators remained in office. The first Communist government, the People's Consultative Council, included non-Communists among its 662 members. However, in the top committee, 31 out of 56 seats were occupied by Communists, and the constitution of 1954 drastically curtailed the role of non-Communists. After 1954, more authority was concentrated in the central government under the State Council. Real power, however, lay with the Communist party, especially the Central Committee, then composed of 94 members. This committee held together the triad of power--army, government, and party. The inner circle of the Central Committee was the 19-member Political Bureau and its seven-member Standing Committee. Land reform. One of the first tasks of the Communist government was land reform, redistributing land from landlords to the peasants. The Agrarian Law of 1950 began the nationwide land reform, which was almost completed by the beginning of 1953. Social reform. Land reform erased the social distinction between landlord and peasant. The new marriage law of 1950 and the campaigns of the early 1950s removed distinctions within the family. Women were given full equality with men in matters of marriage, divorce, and property ownership. Children were encouraged to denounce parents if they failed to support the Communist line. Thought reform. Believing that the revolution could not be carried on without reform of people, the CCP launched a massive campaign to change China's entire psychology. The Four Olds campaign was launched to eradicate old ideas, habits, customs, and culture. The ``Three-Anti'' movement was directed at officials, with the aim of eliminating corruption, waste, and "bureaucratism." The ``Five-Anti'' campaign, directed at the remaining businessmen and bourgeoisie, opposed bribery, tax fraud, cheating, and stealing state property and economic information. For Chinese Christians, The ``Three-Selfs'' movement stressed self-government, self-support, and self-propagation, the object being to separate the churches in China from their parent denominations abroad. Leading churchmen were forced into denouncing religion as cultural imperialism. The idea of cultural imperialism was extended to art and literature, which henceforth were to serve the people, the class struggle, and the revolution. Economic planning. Along with the reforms of land tenure, society, family, and even thought, the CCP announced the first five-year plan in 1953 to speed up the socialization of China through a planned economy. The aim was to produce maximum returns from agriculture in order to pay for industrialization and Soviet aid. Land and farm implements were pooled into cooperatives and later into collective farms, which controlled the production, price, and distribution of products. By May 1956, 90 percent of the farmers were members of cooperatives. Similarly, 80 percent of heavy industry and 40 percent of light industry were in government hands by October 1952. The government also controlled all the railways and most steamship operations. To speed China's development even more, Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and others, after overcoming some opposition within the leadership, launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958. The Great Leap Forward The Great Leap Forward was designed to overcome the backwardness of China's economy, industry, and technology. It was to be achieved through use of the vast manpower and indomitable spirit of the Chinese. Steel production was to be increased by setting up small-scale "backyard furnaces," and agricultural output was to be raised by combining the collective farms into communes. About 26,000 communes were created by the Communist government, each composed of approximately 5,000 households. After a year, the leaders admitted that the success of the program had been exaggerated. The steel produced by the backyard furnaces was of low quality, and the quantity fell short of the projected goal. The people's reluctance to join communes was stronger than expected, and the size of the communes had to be reduced. Domestic life in homes, as well as private plots for family use, had to be restored. The effect of the Great Leap Forward on the people and the economy was devastating. Coupled with three straight years of poor harvests, it resulted in a severe food shortage and industrial decline. For the next several years, while lip service was paid to Mao's thought and to Great Leap-type activism, the real power was in more conservative hands. The Cultural Revolution The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a radical movement that closed schools, slowed production, and virtually severed China's relations with the outside world. It was proletarian because it was a revolution of the workers against party officials. It was cultural because it meant to alter the values of society in the Communist sense. It lasted for two years in its intense form, lingered on for another year and a half, and was not officially declared over until 1977. International Relations of the People's Republic The People's Republic has undergone several shifts in foreign policy since 1949. Initially, it was closely tied to the Soviet Union and firmly identified as a member of the socialist camp. Within a few years, however, the Sino-Soviet relationship had begun to deteriorate, due to differing national interests, dissimilar interpretations of Marxism, and Chinese resentment over heavy-handed Soviet attempts at control. By the mid-1960s China and the Soviet Union had become openly hostile toward each other. China was largely isolated from the rest of the world during the height of the Cultural Revolution, but when the upheavals subsided it began to take a more practical foreign policy line. Trade was opened up with a number of Western countries, China started to play an active role in international organizations, and diplomatic relations were established with countries willing to recognize the People's Republic as the government of China. Most dramatically, contacts were established with the United States, leading to full diplomatic recognition on Jan. 1, 1979. While China's political system changed little in the 1990s, its economy had become the fastest-growing in the world. Relations with the United States became unstable on two fronts. The Chinese government refused to allow the human rights concerns to become an issue in trade talks. Trade itself became a major issue, as exports to the United States exceeded imports. In addition, North Korea's probable possession of nuclear weapons posed an unsettling problem for China and the United States in the mid-1990s. |
